September 20, 2003: Extreme Weather - James McCanney

Art Bell returns to weekend broadcasting and explains how a call from KFI's Robin Bertolucci led to his comeback on the full network. He shares news about a magnetar burst from 45,000 light years away that overwhelmed solar X-ray levels, a star caught swallowing three planets, and a genetics professor at Oxford warning that the human Y chromosome is deteriorating toward eventual extinction in roughly 125,000 years.

Physicist James McCanney joins to present his theory that Earth's weather is primarily driven by electrical currents from the ionosphere rather than solar light heating the surface. He argues that jet streams are bands of ions and electrons powered by the outer magnetic field, and that hurricanes draw their enormous energy from vertical electrical batteries formed by solar wind interactions. McCanney contends that traditional meteorology cannot account for the energy contained in major storms through conventional thermodynamic calculations alone.

McCanney makes a striking claim that the 2003 Northeast blackout was caused by a Tesla coil experiment at an underground base near Kanata, Canada, which accidentally tunneled through the atmosphere to the ionosphere and dumped roughly 1,000 megawatts of uncontrolled power into the grid. He proposes that hurricanes could be weakened by deploying grounded tethered balloons or laser beams to drain their electrical energy before landfall.