Cosmic Rays, especially X-Rays, The Solar System is Receiving Have been Increasing

originally posted by: alphabetaone

originally posted by: Bedlam
You also said, and continue to maintain, that x-rays ARE electrons, which is not true. You can get x-rays from other sources. Hell, you can even get them more than one way from electrons.

Not only did I not say that, I absolutely do not continue on maintaining it.

"Well, x-rays are nothing more than a directed stream of electrons."

But since we're on the subject, a simple yes or no question - can a stream of electrons striking an object (lets say a metallic object) cause x-rays from the resulting electromagnetic waves? (I would appreciate it if you simply answered yes or no)

No. It does not "cause x-rays from the resulting electromagnetic waves", which is a bit of nonsense.

You can get an electron to produce x-rays by accelerating it, or by causing it to make an appropriately large transition when it's in an atomic orbital. However, the resulting x-ray is not an electron.

You continue to confuse the producer with the product. A beam of light isn't a stream of tiny flashlights.

a reply to: Bedlam

What was that famous jam/preserve you once said was a family staple? Oh wait, we were talking 'mysterious source' of something causing something...at any rate, glad to see you come in here and clean up some of this mess. Funny how a "know-it-all" can totally derail a thread...particularly when they tell another to "turn the mirror inward". I think we call that irony? Hopefully you 'unconfused' the confused and this thread can get back to this 'mysterious source'. Good luck with it and always appreciate jam/preserve (think it was figs) tips.

So, which is it...

originally posted by: Bedlam

No. It does not

Or...

You can get an electron to produce x-rays

?

originally posted by: ElectricUniverse
Despite claims from some people that there is no evidence that the Earth is receiving more energy from either the Sun, or from other sources outside of the Earth which could explain why the Earth's climate is changing. In fact there is evidence that the Earth is receiving more energy, not only from the sun even at a time when it's activity is not as high. There is als an unknown source which is sending high energetic X-Rays to our Solar System. This increase in X-Rays and other cosmic rays can cause changes in the climate and can cause warming on Earth's atmosphere.

The claim that changes in cosmic rays can cause changes in the climate is unsupported, but there does appear to be a change in the cosmic rays.

The unit I understand for solar irradiance is watts per square meter.

Since the electrons you're discussing are not a form of EM radiation they can't be quantified directly in watts per square meter, but one might try to estimate based on the total number of electrons and the extra energy they carry some estimate of "effective watts" so we could put the additional energy in the larger perspective of the total solar irradiance. Have you tried to do that? Not only do I suspect that the energy differences we are talking about with cosmic rays pale in comparison to solar irradiance but there are a couple of research papers saying something along those lines:

influence of cosmic rays on the climate

Sloan & Wolfendale (2013) examined the influence of cosmic rays on the climate over the past billion years. They found that changes in the galactic cosmic ray intensity are too small to account for significant climate changes on Earth. This was also the conclusion of Feng & Bailer-Jones (2013).

I have much more confidence in the likelihood that those two papers have reached the correct conclusion about cosmic rays not significantly affecting climate than in your unsupported claim that "This increase in X-Rays and other cosmic rays can cause changes in the climate".

a reply to: alphabetaone
You're in way over your head trying to debate this with bedlam who knows the subject a lot better than you do, and you're not helping your understanding by ignoring the context of the distinctions he made which don't appear in your out-of-context snippets.

originally posted by: TheRedneck
a reply to: ElectricUniverse

*snip*

That is simply not true. You may be referring to the solar wind, which is made up of such components. Cosmic rays are simply ultra-high energy electromagnetic waves, so high in energy as to be interesting. Lower-energy Cosmic Rays can be produced by the sun as a component of the solar wind, but the higher-energy Cosmic Rays cannot.

Cosmic Rays are what I work on every day. It's my job to detect them.

TheRedneck

Eeek. Are you sure? Here:
en.wikipedia.org - Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray...

In astroparticle physics, an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) is a cosmic ray particle with a kinetic energy greater than 1×1018 eV, far beyond both the rest mass and energies typical of other cosmic ray particles.

It clearly says particle.

One possible source for them:

One suggested source of UHECR particles is their origination from neutron stars. In young neutron stars with spin periods of less than 10ms, the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) forces from the quasi-neutral fluid of superconducting protons and electrons existing in a neutron superfluid accelerate iron nuclei to UHECR velocities. The magnetic field produced by the neutron superfluid in rapidly rotating stars creates a magnetic field of 108–1011 tesla, at which point the neutron star is classified as a magnetar. This magnetic field is the strongest in the observed universe and creates the relativistic MHD wind believed to accelerate iron nuclei remaining from the supernova to the necessary energy.

a reply to: jonnywhite
Yes I was totally shocked by the Redneck's post, however the terminology is a little confusing, because "ray" seems to imply electromagnetic radiation, so it's a bit of a misnomer that "cosmic rays" actually refer to particles, but that's the misnomer we have. For example X-rays really are rays (a form of EM radiation), so the Redneck was completely correct about that part. We might not like the fact that we refer to particles as "cosmic rays" (I personally don't like it), but that's what we do, like it or not.

originally posted by: alphabetaone
So, which is it...

originally posted by: Bedlam

No. It does not

Or...

You can get an electron to produce x-rays

?

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Your statement "can a stream of electrons striking an object (lets say a metallic object) cause x-rays from the resulting electromagnetic waves?" doesn't make any sense. No, x-rays aren't caused from the resulting electromagnetic waves. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

Electrons do emit x-rays when they are accelerated or make transitions. However, the x-ray emitted is not an electron. You keep flogging that horse for some reason but it's not going to get up and whinny for you. You can also produce x-rays from nuclear fission or fusion, no electron needed.

a reply to: jonnywhite

Yes, I'm sure.

There are only two ways I can think of to explain the confusion. One I already mentioned... the solar wind, as an example, consists of both high-energy particles and Cosmic Rays. Colloquially, someone might be considering them together.

The other possibility is that someone doesn't understand the relationships between matter and energy at the quantum level. Cosmic Rays are so high in energy that they act in some ways as a particle... but they are not a particle. They are a wave. Of course, quantum mechanics shows that particles act as both under different conditions.

Not a very thorough explanation, but I don't think the actual math would be considered welcome in this forum, and would probably fill several pages to fully describe. End result: Cosmic rays are EM radiation of extremely high energy/frequency, high enough to exhibit unique properties. That's why we are studying them.

(Side note: I may be somewhat slow to respond or even fail to respond for the next while; personal situations dictate I am extremely busy right now.)

TheRedneck

originally posted by: TheRedneck
End result: Cosmic rays are EM radiation of extremely high energy/frequency, high enough to exhibit unique properties. That's why we are studying them.

I would ask you for a citation but since that's wrong I don't think you can provide one. The cosmic rays themselves are mostly protons at various energy levels, but there are also nuclei of heavier elements, and none of those are electromagnetic radiation.

You might be confusing cosmic ray with cosmic ray shower, referring to the interaction of cosmic rays with the Earth's atmosphere which creates a "shower" of secondary particles, some of which are photons, which are electromagnetic radiation, but that doesn't mean the cosmic rays themselves are EM radiation. We do detect some EM radiation on the ground as a result of cosmic rays, but that is not the cosmic rays being detected, it's the secondary effects. This simulation shows the shower of particles from a cosmic ray proton, so the proton is the cosmic ray; the EM radiation and other particles that result are not the cosmic ray, they are part of the resulting "shower".

astro.uchicago.edu...

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Wait, your supporting evidence comes from the skeptical science website? The same website which has made claims that solar activity stopped increasing in the 1980s when there is evidence which refutes this claim among many others they made/make?

In another thread I went point by point through many of the false claims being made by the "skepticalscience website" and showed evidence which debunks their claims.

Skepticalscience website is the same one that falsely published the "97% concensus" that John Cook doctored and which "populartechnology" debunked.

97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists' Papers, according to the scientists that published them

The 97% number is based on 36% of scientists who responded. So 97% of 36% of those papers that were used in the study claim that climate change is man-made... But Cook went on to claim that that makes it "97% of scientists agree with AGW"?...

That's just one of the many other lies posted at the blog "skepticalscience". Will look for the thread/post where I went step by step over several of the claims made by "skepticalscience" blog and showed evidence they were lying.

Here is a link to the skepticalscience claims which is based on nothing more than lies. Still trying to find the thread where i went through those claims they made and showed evidence which contradicts Cook's claims.

www.skepticalscience.com...

a reply to: ElectricUniverse
You didn't answer my question if you had tried to estimate the increased effective watts per square meter from the cosmic ray increase you're talking about so we can compare that with solar irradiance, or whatever other relevant measurements you think are involved, but your saying your cited change in cosmic rays can affect the climate significantly is unconvincing without any support. If you calculated the cosmic ray increase effect on the order of 0.00001% of the average solar irradiance, I could believe that, but I would also point out that other factors have a larger effect on climate so that doesn't seem like a significant amount.

If you don't like the skeptical science website, skip that and go directly to the papers cited, here:

www.sciencedirect.com...

The Galactic cosmic ray (GCR) intensity has been postulated by others to vary cyclically with a peak to valley ratio of ∼3:1, as the Solar System moves from the Spiral Arm to the Inter-Arm regions of the Galaxy. These intensities have been correlated with global temperatures and used to support the hypothesis of GCR induced climate change. In this paper we show that the model used to deduce such a large ratio of Arm to Interarm GCR intensity requires unlikely values of some of the GCR parameters, particularly the diffusion length in the interstellar medium, if as seems likely to be the case, the diffusion is homogeneous. Comparison is made with the existing gamma ray astronomy data and this also indicates that the ratio is not large. The variation in the intensity is probably of order 10–20% and should be no more than 30% as the Solar System moves between these two regions, unless the conventional parameters of the GCR are incorrect. In addition we show that the variation of the GCR intensity, as the trajectory of the Solar System oscillates about the Galactic Plane, is too small to account for the extinctions of species as has been postulated unless, again, conventional assumptions about the GCR parameters are not correct.

iopscience.iop.org...

The terrestrial fossil record shows a significant variation in the extinction and origination rates of species during the past half-billion years. Numerous studies have claimed an association between this variation and the motion of the Sun around the Galaxy, invoking the modulation of cosmic rays, gamma rays, and comet impact frequency as a cause of this biodiversity variation. However, some of these studies exhibit methodological problems, or were based on coarse assumptions (such as a strict periodicity of the solar orbit). Here we investigate this link in more detail, using a model of the Galaxy to reconstruct the solar orbit and thus a predictive model of the temporal variation of the extinction rate due to astronomical mechanisms. We compare these predictions as well as those of various reference models with paleontological data. Our approach involves Bayesian model comparison, which takes into account the uncertainties in the paleontological data as well as the distribution of solar orbits consistent with the uncertainties in the astronomical data. We find that various versions of the orbital model are not favored beyond simpler reference models. In particular, the distribution of mass extinction events can be explained just as well by a uniform random distribution as by any other model tested. Although our negative results on the orbital model are robust to changes in the Galaxy model, the Sun's coordinates, and the errors in the data, we also find that it would be very difficult to positively identify the orbital model even if it were the true one. (In contrast, we do find evidence against simpler periodic models.) Thus, while we cannot rule out there being some connection between solar motion and biodiversity variations on the Earth, we conclude that it is difficult to give convincing positive conclusions of such a connection using current data.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Funny, so you obviously want to ignore for example the fact that the sun itself is going through changes and these changes include an increase in soft x-ray emissions the sun is sending our way which wasn't expected.

March 24, 2015
NASA-Funded Mission Studies the Sun in Soft X-Rays

Each wavelength of light from the sun inherently carries information about the kind of process that emitted the light, so looking at soft X-rays provides a new way to figure out what is happening on our closest star. For example, the sun's atmosphere, the corona, is 1,000 times hotter than its surface, and scientists do not yet understand the details of why. The soft X-ray detector brought home data showing that a significant amount of soft X-rays – more than expected – were seen when there are even a small amount of magnetically complex sunspots. Identifying what process within these magnetically active regions contributes to the great increase in soft X-rays could hold clues for what's helping to heat the corona. A paper on these results appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on March 18, 2015.
...

www.nasa.gov...

You are also omitting the fact that Earth's magnetic field is getting weaker and weaker which would also contribute to the changes that occur on Earth's atmosphere.

Earth's Magnetic Field Is Weakening 10 Times Faster Now

These are factors which do contribute to the radiation budget the Earth is getting.

But to answer your question specifically about how much energy are we getting from this increase in cosmic rays/x-rays we are receiving from this unknown source?

According to NASA back in 2008 we were receiving from 300-800 billion electron volts from this unknown source.

Just one billion electron volts is equivalent to a trillion watts consumed in one hour. It is also the same as 100,000 BTUs.

So we "were" getting back in 2008 from 300 trillion watts to 800 trillion watts per hour. Or 300,000 BTUs - 800,000 BTUs, or 300 Trillion Joules to 800 Trillion Joules from this unknown source.

www.kylesconverter.com...

Then again, you also have to include the other changes Earth and the sun are going through which does affect Earth's atmosphere and hence it's climate.

BTW, here is confirmation that the amount of energy being sent our way by this unknown source has continued to increase in intensity.

Astrophysics
The Particle That Broke a Cosmic Speed Limit

Physicists are beginning to unravel the mysteries of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, particles accelerated by the most powerful forces in the universe.

...
Getting Hotter

In Utah, a three-hour drive from the site of the original Fly’s Eye, its latest descendant sprawls across the desert: a 762–square-kilometer grid of detectors called the Telescope Array. The experiment has been tracking the multi-billion-particle“air showers” produced by ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays since 2008. “We’ve been watching the hotspot increase in statistical significance for several years,” said Gordon Thomson, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah and spokesperson for the Telescope Array.

The hotspot of trans-GZK cosmic rays, which centers on the constellation Ursa Major, was initially too weak to be taken seriously. But in the past year, it has reached an estimated statistical significance of “four sigma,” giving it a 99.994 percent chance of being real. Thomson and his team must reach five-sigma certainty to definitively claim a discovery. (Thomson hopes this will happen in the group’s next data analysis, due out in June.) Already, theorists are treating the hotspot as an anchor for their ideas.

...

www.quantamagazine.org...

We know the overall direction where this energy is coming from, but we can't see anything there or how far it is. NASA believes whatever it is has to be within 3,000 light years from our sun. But anything that far away sending this amount of energy should be seen easily, yet we can't see it.

Gamma-ray bursts have been ruled out as a source of this energy.

An absence of neutrinos associated with cosmic-ray acceleration in c-ray bursts

Without neutrinos there can be no cosmic rays.

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

You've got a slip in there somewhere, a billion EV is not a lot. Certainly not a terawatt-hour. Maybe a millijoule. Not that I'm sure you're setting the calculation up right either.

originally posted by: ElectricUniverse
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Funny, so you obviously want to ignore for example the fact that the sun itself is going through changes and these changes include an increase in soft x-ray emissions the sun is sending our way which wasn't expected.

www.nasa.gov...

You are having reading comprehension problems, because that source doesn't mention any increase. It says they made measurements of soft x-rays during two measurements periods lasting about 6 minutes each, and found more soft-X-rays than expected. This doesn't infer any "increase", it just infers that our expectations were a bit lower than what was actually measured.

But I'm glad you brought up soft x-ray emissions so I can show you why I'm putting these things in perspective, not ignoring them. During a solar flare soft x-rays can increase by a factor of 100, so you might think that an increase of 10,000% might have a significant effect on the climate, but you would be wrong because you're not putting these things in perspective, so let me do that for you.

Here is some soft X-ray data which is already in the same watts per square meter units as solar irradiance (see the right-hand scale), so the comparison is a little easier than with particles like cosmic rays which aren't typically shown in these units:

New Solar Irradiance Measurements from the Miniature X-Ray Solar Spectrometer CubeSat
So eyeballing from that chart it looks like the GEOS XRS-B shows soft x-rays going from about .0000005 watts per square meter before the solar flare to 100 times that much or 0.00005 watts per square meter during the flare.

This is significant for things like some types of communications since X-rays can affect the ionosphere, but is it significant to Earth's climate? I say it's probably not because the average solar irradiance is about 1366 watts per square meter. You can see more details about those measurements here.

Take .0000005 and divide by 1366 and you get 0.00000000037 which is 0.000000037%
Take .00005 and divide by 1366 and you get 0.000000037 which is 0.0000037%

So the 100 fold increase in soft x-rays means the soft x-ray component of solar irradiance as measured by GEOS XRS-B has gone from about 0.000000037% to about 0.0000037% during this particular solar flare if solar irradiance was at a typical level during the event. Does this mean we should be concerned about such increases affecting climate? Even with the 100 fold increase there are probably much larger, more significant effects than something which constitutes only 0.0000037% of the energy from the sun striking Earth, and that's the peak amount.

This is the kind of comparison you're failing to consider not only for these soft x-rays, but also for the particles (cosmic rays), and it would be too generous to say you're making a mountain out of a mole hill, because 0.0000037% is not a molehill, it's not even an anthill. A lot of engineers would consider that approximately zero in their calculations depending on what they were trying to do, so unless there's an exceptionally unique property of soft x-rays which gives them a disproportionately large influence on climate versus other EM frequencies, I think you're barking up the wrong tree because 100 or even 1000 times something that's pretty close to zero still isn't much. The sun doesn't put out much X-ray radiation, soft or otherwise, as a proportion of the total solar output.

Just one billion electron volts is equivalent to a trillion watts consumed in one hour. It is also the same as 100,000 BTUs.

No it's not, and bedlam is correct as usual in pointing this out. It's apparent you have no idea how to do the calculation related to climate change since you can't even do this much simpler conversion.

originally posted by: Bedlam

You've got a slip in there somewhere, a billion EV is not a lot. Certainly not a terawatt-hour. Maybe a millijoule. Not that I'm sure you're setting the calculation up right either.

Yep, you are right. It was late and I simply copied what the link I provided said.

...
Billion Electron Volts to Gigawatt Hours

Electrical energy consumption rate equivalent to a billion watts consumed in one hour. 1 Gigawatt hour is equivalent to 3.6 terajoules or 3.6 x 1012 joules. 1 GWh = 3 600 000 000 000 J.

www.kylesconverter.com...

a reply to: Arbitrageur

...
During both flights, there were only a few complex active regions on the sun's surface – indeed, very few during the 2012 flight. Yet, in both flights the detector saw 1000 times more soft X-rays than had been seen by another experiment in 2009. Even a slight extra amount of solar activity in the form of these active regions, led to substantially more output in the soft X-ray wavelengths.
...

www.nasa.gov...

That's a 1,000 times increase.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
So eyeballing from that chart it looks like the GEOS XRS-B shows soft x-rays going from about .0000005 watts per square meter before the solar flare to 100 times that much or 0.00005 watts per square meter during the flare.

I think you are off in your measurements. It should be 0.0005 w/m and it would be a 1000 increase to 0.5w/m if that particular flare were to increase it's energy by 1,000.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
But I'm glad you brought up soft x-ray emissions so I can show you why I'm putting these things in perspective, not ignoring them. During a solar flare soft x-rays can increase by a factor of 100, so you might think that an increase of 10,000% might have a significant effect on the climate, but you would be wrong because you're not putting these things in perspective, so let me do that for you.
...

Earth's atmosphere has been weakening, and this energy the Earth is receiving has been increasing, it hasn't been constant. To make these claims that this increased energy would do nothing to Earth is false, again it isn't just the increase in high energetic x-rays from this unknown source, or just the soft x-ray increase from the sun. Not to mention, how does your calculation take into consideration the fact that Earth's magnetic field is weakening?

In 2014 the Earth's magnetic field weakened 10 times more than it had been since the 1990s. Less protection from Earth's magnetic field would mean that small changes in the amount of energy Earth receives will have a greater impact than less say if the same energy reached Earth before 2014, and the impact would be less if the Earth received this energy before the 1990s. But that's neither here or there since in the 1990s the Sun's magnetic storms, and magnetic field, and the Earth's magnetic field were much stronger than they are now.

a reply to: ElectricUniverse
Even an increase of 1000x only would bring the percentage of GOES XRS-B X-rays up to 0.000037% of total solar irradiance which is still an insignificant amount, so while the example I cited was only 100x there could be 1000x solar flare events for all I know, but no need to quibble because 0.000037% is still insignificant even if it's 1000x. Thanks for admitting your conversion error on the eV to watts but I've still seen no significant calculations for your particle claims.

Can changes in the Earth's magnetic field affect climate? Probably yes, but are those changes significant or swamped by other variables affecting climate? The biggest changes in the Earth's magnetic field occur during pole reversals, so one thing we could look for are climate changes related to pole reversals. Do we see anything significant there in the historical record? Look at the LR04 stack from Lisiecki & Raymo (2005), showing those climate versus pole reversals (black versus white bands) data for the past ~5 million years:

Climate versus Pole reversals

I don't see any significant correlation between pole reversals and climate, do you? Yet pole reversals are the most dramatic changes in the Earth's magnetic field. As you can see nobody denies there could be and probably is some correlation between the magnetic field and climate, the question is how significant is it relative to other factors which influence the climate? If you can't even see any correlation with pole reversals and the dramatic field changes they involve, then less dramatic field changes are even less likely to override other contributing climate factors (like Milankovitch cycles etc). As with the other facts you mentioned about cosmic rays and x-rays, it helps to put the magnetic field changes in perspective too.

By the way the last sentence in that image refers to the possibility that increased cosmic rays could have the opposite effect of what you claim...that they might result in increased cloud cover resulting in a cooling rather than a warming effect, so even if you got your conversion right, that doesn't mean it's a straightforward calculation, especially if the effect on climate is in the opposite direction of what you expected. Here's a link to the referenced paper if you want to read more about that:

Geomagnetic modulation of clouds effects in the Southern Hemisphere Magnetic Anomaly through lower atmosphere cosmic ray effects (pdf)

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

Even an increase of 1000x only would bring the percentage of GOES XRS-B X-rays up to 0.000037% of total solar irradiance which is still an insignificant amount, so while the example I cited was only 100x there could be 1000x solar flare events for all I know, but no need to quibble because 0.000037% is still insignificant even if it's 1000x. Thanks for admitting your conversion error on the eV to watts but I've still seen no significant calculations for your particle claims.
...

Again you are wrong. I even pointed to you, without explaining it to see if you would realize where you made the mistake.

You are still making the assumption that that flare event you pointed out was only giving out 0.0000005 w/m.

That event was an M5 class flare, and M class flares emit about > _ 10-5 to < 10-4 w/m. If that solar flare had emitted 0.0000005 w/m, like you claim it did, it would have been an A class flare, but that's not what it was. It was an M class flare.

www.spaceweatherlive.com...

That solar flare emitted 0.0005 w/m increasing that 1,000 times would make it about 0.5 w/m. Then again you are still not understanding that other changes have been occurring. Heat is not the only effect that occurs when Earth is receiving more energy from outside the solar system at a time when it's magnetic field is weaker than it has been for a very long time. Also, even small increases in the energy budget Earth receives now have a greater impact than if we received that energy back before 2014, and the impact would have been less if that same energy was received back in the 1990s.

The entire solar system is changing, including our sun. We are seeing other planets in our solar system have been undergoing climate change, in the form of warming nonetheless, at the same time Earth has also been experiencing warming.

CGMs have been wrong, even scientists like Mann are stumped at the slowdown in temperatures when CO2 levels have continued to increase yet we are not seeing the increase in temperatures that the AGW camp claimed would occur because of an increase in CO2.

Events like ENSO are getting stronger, and these events are solar driven. They are not CO2 driven. Global earthquake activity has been exponentially increasing as well, and so have underwater and land volcanic activity.

The only factor in common pointing to these changes, including the warming which has slowed down a bit , are the changes that are occurring throughout the entire solar system which also seem to be affecting our sun.