A few days ago, I watched this short documentary, part of it covered Heliobiology, which the documentary said is an emerging field of science that began in Russia.
The Heliobiologists claimed that magnetic storms caused by solar flares cause all kinds of health problems in humans. Literally every health problem is named, from suicides, to heart attacks, to even terrorist attacks.
After Googling this and looking at some papers, I noticed a few things.
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The papers find correlations between magnetic storms and some kind of negative health effect, and go on to heavily imply or say that negative health effect is caused by the magnetic storms.
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Magnetism is always blamed as the factor causing these negative health effects (not radiation), but the papers don’t go into detail. I saw one saying that since blood is magnetic, magnetic storms can cause heart attacks by disrupting blood flow.
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Most of the papers I read on this mention “Schumann resonances”, and sometimes “pineal gland” crystals.
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Most of the papers are brand new, within the last few years.
This post is the first I’ve heard of this, and I’m confident in declaring it pseudoscientific bullshit.
I present to you: The Carrington Event. In 1859, the Earth was directly hit by a coronal mass ejection from the Sun. This caused the strongest geomagnetic storm in recorded history. Miners in the American rocky mountains woke up in the middle of the night because the Aurora Borealis was so bright they thought it was morning. Currents induced in telegraph wires caused sparks and fires. A telegraph line from Boston Massachusetts to Portland, Maine was able to operate for hours with no power connected at all; the geomagnetic storm induced enough current in the telegraph lines that the operators were able to pass traffic for hours without any batteries connected to the circuit at all.
There is no mention of people dying from unexplained heart attacks at the time. If solar or geomagnetic storms could magnetically disrupt blood flow, you’d think the largest geomagnetic storm we know of would have been associated with an uptick in recorded cases. But it isn’t.
THAT SAID. I do believe that solar flares, CMEs or other such events can and do have an effect on the health of organisms on Earth including humans. I spent most of my time in aviation meteorology class studying the troposphere so my understanding of the high atmosphere isn’t as strong, but…bombard the high atmosphere with particles from the sun, some chemistry can happen which disrupts the ozone layer, more UV light makes it to the surface, and we get more sun burns and skin cancers. However, as far as I can tell, Thomas Midgley Jr. had more of an effect on the ozone layer than any recorded solar flare has.