The Sun's “Carrington Event” of 160 yrs ago would be devastating today | Hacker News Reader

The Sun's “Carrington Event” of 160 yrs ago would be devastating today

wattsupwiththat.com

12 pointsdublin8 comments

Just 160 years ago this month, after a period of unusually quiet sunspot activity (much as we are going through now), the largest solar flare of the industrial age lashed out at the Earth. It interfered with the still fairly small number of electrical systems and communications worldwide. A modern replay would be much more damaging...

I've read that some telegraph operators found they were able to operate the transceiver even when the power is disconnected, due to the induced current during the storm. Just imagine what would happen if the transceiver is made of solid-state semiconductor...

This site, wattsupwiththat.com, is a major source of climate denialism misinformation and manipulation. I don't recommend anyone use anything found on it for any purpose other than documenting denialism of global warm.ing

That seems a bit ad homenim. A Carrington-scale event would likely cripple any modern society. Your disliking part of their messaging doesn't mean they have no credibility.

A known liar making a truthful statement doesn't mean they have credibility.

In today's media environment it is a known attack to build credibility using small or occasional truths (or at least, not easily disproven statements) to then support a larger, more widely and thinly spread disinformation campaign.

Thus the warning.

It is a category error to think that we are operating in a Platonic environment of ideas, evaluating and discussing them independently. We are in a disinformation war environment with combatants who are skilled and motivated, and informed by at least 100 years of practice, and should operate accordingly.

Just because you don't like what they say does NOT make them wrong. WattsUpWithThat has been one of the few sites on the net to publicize the increasing amount of science that shows that the AGW effect is either exaggerated or not happening at all. In particular, WUWT has been instrumental (pun intended) in documenting how the siting, etc. of the original temperature data collection stations is blatantly biased, as well as how raw data is destroyed and replaced by "corrected" data showing cooler temperatures in the past. As I said, whether you agree with them or not, they have every right to publish their data and analysis. The science is far from "settled" to any balanced observer.

Here we see that there is indeed a subtextual reason for posting content from this site.

It's not about discussing the Carrington event, it's about promoting disinformation.

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