THere's no question solar incidents can wreak havoc, as in this example from the 19th century, but that does not mean they are responsible for the global warming trend.

"On Sept. 2, 1859, at the telegraph office at No. 31 State Street in Boston at 9:30 a.m., the operators' lines were overflowing with current, so they unplugged the batteries connected to their machines, and kept working using just the electricity coursing through the air.

In the wee hours of that night, the most brilliant auroras ever recorded had broken out across the skies of the Earth. People in Havana and Florida reported seeing them. The New York Times ran a 3,000 word feature recording the colorful event in purple prose.

"With this a beautiful tint of pink finally mingled. The clouds of this color were most abundant to the northeast and northwest of the zenith," the Times wrote. "There they shot across one another, intermingling and deepening until the sky was painfully lurid. There was no figure the imagination could not find portrayed by these instantaneous flashes."

As if what was happening in the heavens wasn't enough, the communications infrastructure just beginning to stretch along the eastern seaboard was going haywire from all the electromagnetism.

"We observed the influence upon the lines at the time of commencing business — 8 o'clock — and it continued so strong up to 9 1/2 as to prevent any business from being done, excepting by throwing off the batteries at each end of the line and working by the atmospheric current entirely!" the astonished telegraph operators of Boston wrote in a statement that appeared in The New York Times later that week.

The Boston operator told his Portland, Maine counterpart, "Mine is also disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?" Portland responded, "Better than with our batteries on," before finally concluding with Yankee pluck, "Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?"

In terms of the relationship between the Earth and its star, it is probably the weirdest 24-hours on record. People struggled to explain what had happened.

NASA's David Hathaway, a solar astronomer, said that people in the solar community were beginning to understand that there was a relationship between events on the sun and magnetism on Earth. But that knowledge was not widely disseminated."...

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