National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.
Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning” and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.
Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.
Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.
“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa’s Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.
“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”
Jimbo said June 17, 2010 at 5:03 am: “I can’t help being reminded about the Y2K issue.”
I kid you not, I was calling it “Y-2-Kook” in 1998 and 1999.
And I am in the computer industry.
I recall being interviewed about Y2K by the editor of a prominent computer trade journal, and he was rendered speechless when I guffawed “Y-2-Kook” to one of his questions. Which reminds me of how much angst and attention gets invested in even the most semi-plausible doom mongering.
8 years of Bush. If we had Algore, this all wouild never be possible. Had algore not invented the web, there would be no web to crash.
“There’s nothing we can do to make it untrue, so why cry
There’s nothing we can say to make it go away, so why cry
It may seem like a movie plot,
but when it comes to making havoc, the sun’s got
an unstoppable way that can ruin our day, so why cry”
h/t Mary Wells
Spector says:
June 17, 2010 at 4:56 am
‘Our current deep solar minimum closely resembles the deep solar minimum of 1856 which was followed by the Carrington Event of September 1859, the largest known solar flare to strike the earth in modern history which then gave some telegraph operators the shock of their lives.’
I’ve just consulted my 300-year diagram of international sunspot number to find that the 1856 minimum was neither deep nor long. Perhaps you could tell me where 1856 figures in the league table of minima both by length and depth?
Can’t the UN come up with something to tax us over? I’m relatively absolutely sort of sure this is an anthropogenic solar event! Maybe they can tax sunscreen… sunglasses… bikinis!
This isn’t Bull S##t, this is Whale Poop! This guy is off his meds!
David_WS says:
“Is there more than one NASA?”
There used to be. When I was a child just picking up snippets from the TV news I was very confused that a place in the Bahamas seemed to be sending up space rockets AND running Egypt at the same time.
Speculation is not science.
Picking the lowest period in solar activity in over 200 years to scare us all with a technology destroying CME is like the “global warming causes ice ages” silliness.
The likelihood of that kind of CME is always present in the big part of the solar cycle. And the likelihood of it heading directly for Earth is still quite small.
I agree with the commenters who suggest it is just a ploy for Federal dollars. They have to make sure they are not forgotten at a time when the last space shuttle has left the pad and very little remaining on the publicity horizon. If they are not able to thrill us with taking us forward with accomplishments to come, what else is left except scare tactics?
But my main point is speculation. Newton and Hooke would turn over in their graves at the things spouted by scientists these days.
If NASA really wants to put effort into anything, why not more effort in identifying near-earth-objects?
When I worked at NASA we stuck with real science. Now it seems that NASA has turned into Scary Movie.
And what if the earth runs into a Milky Way stray planet? Or what if earth got hit with a super nova gamma ray blast. NASA has some more scary movie scripts so they can write those stories..
The bad news is the ignorant people will buy it … yet hasn’t the problem been here all along. I smell propaganda coming our way.
RE: Gail Combs: (June 17, 2010 at 5:46 am) “Time to put a Faraday cage around all your electronics you can not live without. “
I believe the primary risk is the power grid with all those long wires to act as antennae to collect energy from an electro-magnetic solar super flare. Just imagine the repair job with every transformer and every power-meter fried. As Carrington Event solar flares seem to happen only about once every 500 years, we should have a one chance in 46 of that happening again during this 11-year solar cycle.
krazykiwi,
There are two sides to the cry wolf story:
The alarmist(s) who cry Wolf so much that nobody will listen to them.
vs.
The nobodies who won’t listen.
I get tired of the hysteria of the week* driven by alarmists, but IMO this one has teeth, the kind that bite (and a reasonably well documented modern era history to be researched)
* PCBs, Global cooling, global warming, land fill space, ozone holes, cell phone induced cancers, H1N1 (but not N5N1), peak oil (at least 5 iterations of this), Y2K, 2012 and on and on and on.
This probably could happen and even Arthur C. Clarke wrote abook about the possibilty of this occuring. However, there is no way to really predict this so in the meantime-eat drink and be merry.
Let get this straight about these nasty solar events being discussed:
1)They happen
2)We don’t know when they happen, meaning its pretty much a random event with respect to our current predictive powers
3)When they do happen, we don’t know the severity, as the severity of each event is also rather random.
So, until you can start predicting 2) and 3), should we really be getting scared about 1)?
I mean, you could say the same thing about earthquakes in Los Angeles. Everyone knows the effects of a big earthquake will be bad. I don’t see a stream of people leaving there with bags of dried beans draped over the hoods of their cars.
You know what … it might happen ….. but so what. If it does we will deal with it … just like an asteroid impact, bird flu, and in invasion of aliens.
This has become so tiresome.
The conspiracy theorist’s wilder and more eccentric fringe have been working this one for quite some time now.
If any readers want a good laugh, then head on over to project camelot. It will take some navigating to find (as their website navigation is utterly appalling) but there is an interview with a person who claims to have been working on an ultra top secret project for the Government in preparation for the coming solar storm caused apocalypse.
Whilst it is possible that an extreme solar storm *could* cause major damage to electrical and magnetic systems on earth, and it is sensible that precautions should be taken to be able to mitigate against the worst effects, I do not believe that an end of the world scenario is likely.
Gail Combs says:
June 17, 2010 at 5:21 am
#
pgosselin says:
That’s how it works, doesn’t it?
Bank crisis? Take it over.
GM crisis? Take it over.
CO2 crisis: Take over energy.
BP crisis? Take it over.
Health care crisis? Take it over.
___________________________________________________________
Gail,
Can they actually take over the Sun?? Will the fund raiser allow them to build and orbit the new “Sun taking-over Satellite”??
Maybe I’m confused and the “Sun taking-over Satellite” is actually a “Politician taking-over Satellite”.
I tend worry more about things like giant nuclear reactors in the sky than how much CO2 Al Gore’s farts produce. Have a feeling this is one of those things that you can only prepare for the worst and hope for the best, becuse it’s going to do what it’s going to do and we just have to deal with it. We’ll probably all get smoked by a Gamma Ray Burst we never see coming anyway.
Are navigational satellites shielded from these solar bursts? Are the aircraft that depend upon them shielded?
Whilst most things on earth could be protected from these events and if necessary, electrical grids shut off if we have enough notice of such a massive CME, it is the hundreds of thousands of air passengers in the sky and tonnes and tonnes of airborne freight that would be my biggest worry at the time of such an outage.
Whilst I have no doubt that there is a tiny risk of a MAJOR problem affecting businesses and society world wide, possibly with many deaths, I do not believe that it will be an end of the world kind of cataclysm.
Does anyone who has seriously researched this have any better idea what will happen to the air traffic in the event of a massive CME heading towards earth?
Really nice apocalyptic vision…one problem with it…the sun’s magnetic field, solar wind, sun spot and UV radiation output are falling off a cliff. That 2013 max was originally scheduled for 2012, except the sun refused to cooperate and went into a deep solar minimum, one, which for all we know, could last for decades.
So…after all that scary-talk, does this scientist understand why the sun went to sleep (when everyone expected it to be active). Does he know what will make the sun wake up? And what evidence does he have that the sun is emerging from its sleep. It’s 10.7cm radio emmissions are near historic lows, and the other day, it went spotless again (with weak solar wind and weak interplanetary magnetic field to boot!)
Check it all out at
http://www.spaceweather.com
…oh, and somebody pleeeZ put a sock in the mouth of this scare monger!
“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”
The lead time for large transformers is several years
And that’s now, not when everyone suddenly needs them.
I saw this story 3 days ago. I yawned about it then. Not worth another yawn now.
NASA is predicting solar cycle 24 to peak in May 2013, with a sunspot number of 90. Given the continued low solar activity (e.g. SSN, SFI, Ap), it is possible the sun might peak with only half the predicted sunspots, putting it earth on course to another Dalton-like minimum.
Also, according to David Archibald, there is a correlation between the length of a solar cycle and future temperatures. Longer cycles bring lower temperatures. Solar cycle 23 lasted 12.7 years, 1.7 years beyond the average length. Something to think about.
By the way, NASA does mention in the story below that “even a below-average cycle is capable of producing severe space weather. The great geomagnetic storm of 1859, for instance, occurred during a solar cycle of about the same size we’re predicting for 2013.”
Here is a link to the story:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/29may_noaaprediction/
A friend was very upset when Y2K came and went without problems. She expected at least a small disaster. While most of it was hysteria, there were a few holes, and they were plugged in time. (my microwave oven did not need a software update)
With a massive flare, the power grid would be vulnerable. Long wires, magnetic field induces large currents. All the circuit breakers trip. With the interlocked grid, it takes quite a while to reset and restart. OK, that could be ugly. Whacking my PC? NBLG. Not enough exposed wire. No induced current. As for the comment about GPS crashing 5 years ago – news to me. I’ve been GPSing my way around the USofA for many years, and never saw it. (Other than it telling me I was 200 feet below sea level when passing Rend Lake in downstate IL).
I worry more about a big hail storm. We’ve had a few of them so far this year. Pea sized is OK, much bigger and things break. That’s a real problem.
YOU can be the first to spot this solar storm! Don’t believe what the others tell you, be part of the REAL SCIENCE:
http://solarstormwatch.com/
a part of the zooniverse:
http://www.zooniverse.org/projects
As a school teacher, this means that a solar flair like that is a snow day. I’m devastated.