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.”
So let’s get them all in line
Katla (next volcano in Iceland) – next 12 months. result, cooling of northern hemisphere
No Arctic Ice – Next 3 -5 years. result, shipping becomes cheaper
Sun fries our electrics – 2013…ish. result, end of civilization as we know it.
After that it ain’t gonna matter any more.
Bang goes my retirement 😉
Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) are no laughing matter. The last really big one that hit the earth was in 1859 and people could see the aurora borealis in Florida. Telegraph lines melted.
Basically any long stretch of wire acts as an antenna collecting up a huge amount of electromagnetic energy. The effect of the 1859 event on today’s massive power grid would be an epic disaster of biblical proportion. Millons upon millions of transformers would fry. The electric grid would be completely shut down. It would take months just to restore the most critical power needs. Imagine the consequences of a few months of no electricity to run fuel pumps at gas stations, no electricity for refrigerators, no electricity for hospitals, no water coming out of your taps, sewers not working because lift stations are without power, no communcations, electronic banking and commerce shut down.
If we have a working satellite close to the sun watching for these we get, at best, a half hour warning to open as many circuit breakers as possible in the power grid to limit the damage. A half-hour in the bureaucratic quagmire overseeing all the disparate elements of the national power grid is probably pretty close to useless.
It’s not a matter of if a CME like the one in 1859 will strike again but rather a matter of when it will happen again. The best answer is anytime at all and it could be even bigger. There’s no long term prehistoric record of CMEs to establish any cyclical patterns or frequency or severity as they were rather uneventful except for pretty lights in the sky before there were millions of miles of copper wire strung about to collect up the energy.
Garry says:
June 17, 2010 at 5:55 am
I kid you not, I was calling it “Y-2-Kook” in 1998 and 1999.
And I am in the computer industry.
ditto. Everytime someone said “y2k bug” I snorted, but still continued to “cash in” on upgrades. Science is begining to remind me of the TV show “1000 ways to die”. I can sit here and brainstorm 1000 ways for the Earth to end, and start a new show.
Does anybody know what this flare would do to our endangered polar bears ?
Congress is proposing a sunlight tax to provide for a fund that will be used to repair the damage. Like social security, it will be put in a lockbox which consists of US gummitup bonds. These bonds will be stored in a special electronically operated safe so that the next time we have a Carrington flare, they will not be able to open the safe and use the bonds backed by “In Obama We Rust” toilet paper to rebuild the infrastructure. In the meantime, I will fire up my glow in the dark ancient tube ham radios and charge lots for anybody to talk to anything.
Dave Springer is correct.
My guess is that a big flare hitting Earth is unlikely on this solar cycle though. It’s more likely once the sun really ramps up a few cycles from now. Having said that, it could still happen anytime, and there is no proper contingency plan for it.
Just imagine: Those giant solar flares igniting all those damned “fossil fuels”, fires everywhere…..really fantastic!
BTW, have you seen the good side of the recent gulf oil spill? It is NOT a tragedy, chances are that you have found a really big oil deposit, perhaps bigger than Saudi Arabia and you could become totally energy independent !!! Bad news for Al Baby and Maurice Strong and all the Carbon gang.
If it should not have spilled off it would have made oil prices drop inmediately.
We all know that our usage of fossil fuels on Earth is causing all this Sun stuff. I think a giant tax on CO2 emissions just might help to mitigate the damage.
To those who say this is a real concern…
Of course it is. But exactly what can the average person actually do about it? Nothing! Except, perhaps, fret and worry… and watch as some more taxes are skimmed from them to go toward “infrastructure upgrades”, which somehow end up in someone’s pocket.
The problem with these kinds of stories is that they are purely designed to decrease the average person’s confidence in technology and modern life. Who benefits from that? It’s a grossly cynical way to manipulate the populace.
Also, regarding Y2K… I had a sweet job in 99 upgrading software for a chain of pharmacies. Apparently their original system was written in the 80s using compiled BASIC and it did fail on Jan 1, 2000. Unfortunately, they had LOST the source code! The short term fix was to set the date to 1900, the long term fix was to rewrite the thing in Windows, which required every one of their 500+ locations to buy new computers, install and license Windows, and convert their databases. One at a time. I made a LOT of money that year, laughing all the way.
Mankind has all its eggs in one basket. The earth basket. : )
Diversifying to multiple egg baskets has merits.
Star Trek where are you?
John
But what I want to know is: can “clean energy” and “cap and trade” still save us from this catastrophe?
Oh dear, oh my . . . please . . . everyone, give all your money to the scientists so they can save us from this doom just like they saved us from the Y2K bug.
sorry folks but this is a real problem. we actually do live in a dangerous universe. our sun now seems to be in some sort of minimum state where we may languish for weeks, months, years, and perhaps even decades. While flares are more common during active conditions, they can occur at any time. Coronal Mass Ejections do occur and, btw, we’ve actually had some mediocre solar flares recently.
The last really big CME was in the 19th century and that one melted telegraph lines, ruined equipment, started fires in telegraph offices and the like. Such an event occurring today would destroy satellites and potentially even melt transformers in electric grid, unless they were taken out of service during the event.
It’s not that severe a problem unless we get hit by something much larger than we’ve experienced in the past or we lose our solar monitoring ability to determine when a CME is coming our way. It’s also less likely to happen now than at most anytime since the last big one. However, the crucial difference is just how much dependence society now has on electrical and electronics.
As for contingency plans, I think they’re pretty much already around. Shutting down satellites and power grids in such a pending event will go a long way to minimize damage. We’ll know a day or two ahead of the arrival that a CME is headed our way and so anything normal in the way of our situation will permit action to be taken. Of course, government can restrict such actions on pretexts and make matters much worse.
Tallbloke, I’m not entirely sure that there is no proper contingency — I know that the military has been taking CME type events seriously (mostly due to EMP concerns). A lot of military systems are protected to some degee or another and I suspect certain civilian sytems -like airliners-are also. What I don’t know is whether this type of concern is taken into account when upgrading civilian power systems.
I’ll be okay under my tin foil hat and I’ve already started preparing the house by wrapping that in tin foil. It also has the added benefit of reflecting the sun therefore helping to cool the earth down. It’s a win win situation, apart from the fact that I’m roasting like a chicken!!!!!!
The dog won’t stay still long enough so he’s on his own.
re; Y2K scare
I was senior R&D engineer, BIOS programmer, at Dell in the 7 years leading up to Y2K. Fixes went into every BIOS and I’ve been a programmer or hardware engineer since the 1970’s and based on my knowledge didn’t think it would be a very significant event. The effect I was most interested in was the huge upward motion of sales and services in the computer industry. In the last 2-3 years before 1999 became 2000 I reckon’ about 5+ years of normal sales were packed into that timeframe and so was expecting a similarly sized downturn in sales in the few years following Y2K while the big spike in new computers aged into obsolescence enough to be taken out of service.
Be afraid be very afraid, the new alarmist mantra used to stampede us what ever.
The Carrington Flare Thursday, September 1, 1859 , super flare dangers have always been with us not only since AGW alarmism. We should be alarmed about no sun spots !!
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringtonflare/
Looking at this list (admittedly, not a guaranteed reliable source of data… just something found through Google), the 2/11/58 and 3/13/89 and 10/29/2003 storms are of interest. Earlier storms look like they may have been large, but with little chance of doing more than interfering with the broadcast of a baseball game, or the use of telegraph lines. Mostly, they made pretty lights in the sky.
I imagine that this will be a lot like Y2K, where the potential what if is avoided because companies were reasonably diligent about building their infrastructure. On the other hand, I’m a little shocked at how quickly hard drives fail these days… ten years ago, they built them to last. These days, to hit a competitive price point, they make them out of tissue paper, and one sneeze loses years of irreplaceable data. So who knows how well prepared things are…
So a huge solar storm will be very interesting, to see which companies, nations and industries planned well, which cut corners, whose infrastructure is robust and whose was an accident waiting to happen.
It would also be very interesting to see how we (as individuals, as people) cope with a disruption in the electronic cushions to which we’ve grown so accustomed. I’m not saying it’s likely to happen, just that it will be an interesting experiment with modern society and culture.
I wonder if this solar flare will occur on 12/21/2012, or if <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448011/"Knowing will be a popular movie On Demand as the likelihood of the storm approaches.
Thank you for that Info Gail! Kind of a relief, had a mental image of Hansen selling brownies in front of a Staturn V Rocket. Somewhat disturbing….
Our sunspot prediction paper said:
“Average space weather might be ‘‘milder’’ with decreased solar activity, but the extreme events that dominate technological effects are not expected to disappear. In fact, they may become more common. Two of the eight strongest storms in the last 150 years occurred during solar cycle 14 (Rmax = 64) [Cliver and Svalgaard, 2004], while three of the five largest 30 MeV solar energetic proton events since 1859 [McCracken et al., 2001] occurred during cycle 13 (Rmax = 88).”
Large events can [and will] certainly occur. On the other hand, NASA’s alarmism is not called for.
a few people have mentioned this, and it may be happen. it’s just that only a short while ago that NASA was selling the same exact story, only attributed to Cycle24, the biggest baddest solar cycle ever!
yep, they put a man on the moon with sliderules, but can’t seem to get anything right with the help of megaflop supercomputers. no wonder we laugh at their every wild prognostication.
r says:
June 17, 2010 at 5:08 am
What’s scary is not that there are alarmist predictions, we always have those…
What’s scary is that it is NASA that is making them.
We trust NASA only because of the successful Apollo missions. But those people are gone…
It’s the “Boy That Cried Wolf” fable all over. NASA has engaged in so much climate alarmism and budget grubbing P/R that it’s hard to take any new warning, even on other topics, seriously.
A Carrington event will happen again, but in 2013? They’ve revised their predictions for this solar cycle HOW many times? 13? More?
Ok so we’re going to freeze, burn or have our electronics turned off.
I’ll take the freezing. Ya just kinda go to sleep.
He said “large swathes of the world could go without power for several months”
Er maybe but the USA and europe certainly will go without power if they persist in building windmills and shutting down the fossil fuel based energy matrix and pricing energy out of the reach of the ordinary citizen. The effect of the wests energy policies coming into what may well be years of cold when energy demand would surge and at the same time closing down the only cost effective power supplier will do more damage and cost more lives than any solar storm we may experience.
Your Mr Obama and our Mr Cameron the ‘change you can(not) believe in’ duo are set to destroy the west with their ill thought out half baked crackpot ideas, no amount of shiny presentation will heat a poor persons house or power industry.
It looks like the typical width of a solar flare is on the order of 30 degrees and perhaps the peak force is as narrow as 20 degrees — my guess. So if the sun really does throw out a haymaker this time, it looks like the odds of it coming this way are on the order of one in 12 if they are confined to the plane of the ecliptic or about one in 60 if flares can emerge from any point on the solar surface with equal probability.
BTW I recall reading that there may be a new technique for obtaining an advanced warning of an emerging solar flare just before it takes off.