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• Cataclysms
• Conference

by Daniel Holdings

This is the second installment of a series of articles penned by Daniel in preparation for the 2020 True Legends Conference in Branson, Missouri.

“Save the whales!”

“Save the rainforest!”

“Recycle!”

“Reduce your carbon footprint!”

“Save the planet!”

At my age, I’ve heard just about every ecological slogan there is. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important to be good stewards of the things that God has given us. But I also just happen to be a realist when it comes to the affect that we can have on our planet’s future. As you will see, it’s far more likely that an outside force eminently more powerful than ourselves will determine earth’s, and man’s, fate.

Going Nuclear

Imagine for a moment that you’re out with your family, enjoying the day. In the middle of your innocent fun, there’s a flash in the distance and then you watch as a huge mushroom cloud blossoms on the horizon. A Thermal Nuclear Blast.

As a veteran of the Cold War in the 80’s, this is a sight that I’ve contemplated numerous times. Back then I was stationed at a Strategic Air Command (SAC) base in Montana and was one of the many men and women responsible for maintaining the nuclear missiles deployed throughout the state. In the course of my posting, I’d received several briefings about what to do in case the base or the missile silos came under nuclear attack. Despite the briefings, we all knew that there was no surviving a nuclear volley aimed in our direction.

With the ebbing of the Cold War and the “peace dividend” the public’s abject fear over the potential of nuclear war has diminished significantly over the decades. However, the recent pull out of both Russia and the U.S. from the 80’s INF Treaty has once again caused people some consternation about the potential of a nuclear war, and rightly so. A recent study by researchers at Princeton University has concluded that even in a “limited” tactical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia, 90 million Americans would be killed.

But you don’t need massive explosions or radioactive fallout to kill millions of people. Within the last few years a new threat has developed which uses the same kind technology as a nuclear explosion, without the initial devastation, and America is taking that threat very seriously.

Modern Destruction For A Modern Age

One of the byproducts of a thermal nuclear blast is something called an Electromagnetic Pulse or EMP. An EMP occurs when there’s a high frequency burst of electromagnetic energy caused by rapidly accelerated changed particles. This is exactly what happens as a result of nuclear blast in the atmosphere.

Mankind has found a way to harness the effects of an EMP without the devastation of a nuclear warhead. EMPs initially kill electronics and not people, but if an EMP were detonated over America, life as we know it would change forever.

An EMP would cause the collapse of the power grid, telecommunications, transportation, banking, finance and food and water systems across the entire continental United States. And assuming that the widespread damage could eventually be repaired, how long would those repairs take? This is an important question because, as an example, 85% of our electrical grid’s large power transformers are imported, custom made and can take up to two years to manufacture. That’s only one component of a fried electrical grid that would need to be replaced after an EMP.

Sounding The Alarm

A dire warning is contained in a recently declassified report from the U.S. Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. Stunningly the report claims that 9 out of 10 Americans would die within the year as a result of an EMP. That means that 90%, or roughly 294.5 million people, would be dead.

That’s a much greater death toll than the 90 million as result of a limited tactical nuclear exchange with Russia.

So serious is the concern over an EMP that on March 26, 2019, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to safeguard our country’s infrastructure from the ravages of an Electromagnetic Pulse. The reason given for such a measure are countries like North Korea, Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran or even terrorists potentially having the capability to detonate an EMP over America.

However, I’m a cynic and I hold to the axiom that whenever a politician’s or government official’s lips are moving, they’re lying. It’s not that I don’t believe an EMP could occur over American soil. Rather, I question the means by which an EMP might be delivered. The potential detonation of an EMP over the U.S. has been common knowledge for some time. So, why all the concern now?

Could it be that the EMP threat to America, and the world, is more real and more imminent than the public is being told? What if that threat isn’t from our would-be enemies after all, but from something much more powerful than they?

What if the real threat comes from our own sun?

The Violence of Del Sol

For the beachgoer enjoying a day tanning, or the individual lapping up sunbeams in the winter through a break in the clouds, it’s easy to forget that this source of warmth, light and life is a violent star far in the distance.

The sun is nuclear fusion on steroids. It’s an explosive ball of gas and plasma that is 91% hydrogen which burns at roughly 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. It’s monstrous at 109 times the diameter of our planet and it would take 1,300,000 earths to fill this gas giant.

To protect our planet from all of that violence, God in His creative wisdom surrounded the earth with a shield against Del Sol. We call this the “magnetosphere”. This is the portion of our atmosphere that is controlled by the earth’s magnetic field. If it were not for the magnetosphere, mankind could be wiped out by the sun’s solar winds.

But there’s even a more dangerous threat from the sun than just solar winds.

A “coronal mass ejection” or CME is a giant cloud of solar plasma that has been blown off of the sun in a random direction as a result of solar flares and filament eruptions. These fingers of death can be huge and travel roughly 1 million miles per hour. Unlike solar winds that are easily deflected by our magnetosphere, CMEs, depending on their strength, are not so easily dissuaded.

The Carrington Event

A direct hit by a CME to planet earth would act like an EMP weapon exploding in our atmosphere. Maybe that’s why the President is taking steps to safeguard our infrastructure. And yes, there is historical precedence for such concern over a CME hitting the earth.

In the early morning hours of September 1, 1859 our sun ripped off a CME directly at earth. Keep in mind that modern technology didn’t exist back then. The Industrial Revolution only started in 1800 and that was also the time when the first battery was invented. Steam railroads didn’t come about until 1803, with the steamboat following shortly thereafter in 1807. It wasn’t even until 1844 that the telegraph was invented.

There was no wired electricity, no light bulbs, no automobiles, no telephones, no televisions, no computer chips or computers, no internet or no electrical equipment of any kind. All of those things came after 1859 and because of this, the EMP effects of the Carrington Event were minimalistic on the civilization of that day. Nonetheless, the technology that was in place took an EMP beating.

On the evening of September 1st, that CME pounded the earth’s magnetosphere with the combined energy of 10 billion atomic bombs. Telegraph operators reported that sparks flew from their machines and many of those people were injured by shocks delivered from the devices. Still other witnesses described papers catching fire and some said that the machines could even be operated without being connected to their batteries because of the charge in the atmosphere.

Auroras lit up the night skies all over the world and were seen even as far south as Honolulu, Hawaii. A second solar storm from an additional CME hit the planet the next day on September 2nd with similar results. Telegraphs we’re rendered inoperable with many damaged beyond repair. Ice core samples show that the Carrington Event was the most powerful solar storm in 500 years. If the earth was hit by a CME of that magnitude today, the subsequent EMP would do trillions of dollars in damage and erase any technology in the areas that took a direct hit.

It’s not a question of “if” it will happen again - but when.

The next time our planet is hit by a CME of this strength or worse, the world will be devastated and in the following days, weeks and months, millions of people will die.

Dodging The Bullet

Since that solar storm of 1859 our world has had a few close calls.

In March of 1989, earth was again subjected to a CME beatdown by Del Sol. However, because the storm was nowhere near the strength of the Carrington Event, the effects on civilization were short lived. Auroras once again danced in the atmosphere all over the planet as a result of the flare and the power grid in Canada did briefly go down. Radio signals and satellite communications were also interrupted, but all of those systems could be repaired quickly, or the effects were temporary.

The 1989 storm was inconvenient, but a near miss of a CME in 2012 would have been apocalyptic. Two massive CMEs exploded off of the sun on July 23rd in that year and missed the earth by a mere 9 days. Had the earth been 9 days advanced in its rotation around the sun, that celestial sledgehammer would have knocked our modern world right back into 1800s. The 2012 solar storm was believed to be as strong if not stronger than the Carrington Event.

Yet, the strongest solar storm on record is referred to as the Halloween Storm of 2003. These eruptions from the sun were so massive that the solar instruments used to measure events like this registered a whopping X–28 on the storm scale. This measurement becomes even more impressive when you realize that the instruments cut out at level 28, which means that the CME was actually higher than the recorded value. How much higher is anyone’s guess.

If a storm like that hit planet earth with its associated EMP, the consequences are unimaginable.

The Next One

Could President Trump know something that we don’t? Is the talk about a potential EMP attack by one of our country’s enemies a ruse to cover up something much more devastating than a targeted EMP weapon over America? Is there imminent potential of a solar storm that would dwarf even the Carrington Event? Could a celestial foreign body traveling through our solar system cause the sun to rip off a deadly plasma spear in our direction and does the President know it’s coming?

There are many questions, but few answers.

One thing remains certain: Celestial catastrophes are part of our solar system’s history. Despite our best efforts to safeguard our planet, at some point the sun will release a Firestorm toward earth which will cause us to confront humanity’s fragility in light of God’s awesome creation.

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Daniel Holdings is an award-winning public speaker and former businessman turned author. The prolific one-time radio host and frequent guest shatters paradigms wherever he goes as he takes seldom heard facts and information and applies them to our modern life. His fictional series, The Cooper Chronicles, reads more like today's real-life news than simple thrillers. In his latest non-fiction work, Midnight Strikes-Judgment Unleashed, Daniel speaks on the record with Steve Quayle about a variety of current and critical topics that have placed mankind in imminent peril. Daniel is also one of the guest speakers at the 2020 True Legends Conference in Branson, Missouri. Daniel's books and information can be found on his website, cooperchronicles.net or danielholdings.com.