I’m having a free day today in Brisbane, after an intensive week of travel and presentations. I feel zorched, but I still hope to catch up on correspondences and posts. If you have not booked into the tour yet, there are two weeks left in the tour. Details here.
The other candidate for QOTW via NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze merited its own story here.
National Geographic used to be one of my favorite magazines and television programs. I don’t subscribe anymore and I can hardly bear to watch the TV programs because they have so much alarmism in them. I had an ad popup on my MSN messenger which spieled gloom and doom for us puny humans, so I decided to check it out. While it is certainly true that we could see another “Carrington Event” and given our dependence on i-everythings and satellites in orbit these days, such a disruption could be more globally problematic than in the past.
But the NatGeo quote describing the video made me chuckle, not for the visions of dead iPhones, but for doing the very thing we skeptics get accused of, confusing weather and climate.
Here’s the quote from National Geographic Videos:
Just as the sun allows our atmosphere to remain stable, so too can it destroy civilization.
Ummm, confusing weather with climate there guys? From day to night, the atmosphere is anything but stable. In fact it is quite dynamic. Just ask anyone in Kansas about right now.
Plus, cycle 24 so far doesn’t look like a barn burner. That’s not to say we can’t get a big flare/CME, but the likelihood is lower with a quieter sun.
Watch the video by clicking below:
One of the slides from David Archibald’s presentation during our joint tour suggests a weakening solar cycle 24 and 25. Globally, that could be far more troublesome than some dead iPhones and power outages.
We can do without iPhones, but hungry masses due to declining growing zones tend to get a bit more testy than texters gone wild.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
alcuin says:
June 20, 2010 at 7:32 pm
I can understand how a large power grid could would be affected by a geomagnetic storm, but not how a micro-sized device like an i-Phone would be, other than that the towers that relay its signals might be damaged by being connected to the power grid. Am I missing something or is the emphasis in these articles being misdirected?
_______________
Hi Alcuin, here’s some gathered info to you and others:
To my best understanding, terribly misdirected. Unless someone can provide further data on estimated magnetic field strengths and more importantly the rate of change of these fields to the contrary, any worries are unfounded and misplaced.
“anna v” is thinking correct on this matter, as it being a rather slow moving (>>1 second) flux events over Earth’s sphere of rather small magnetic intensity to generate electricity. There is simply not enough flux of adequate strength at pulse-like time interval (< 1 second) fluxes.
Be very careful not to be sucked into these scare stories without learning exactly what has happened in the past, 1859 and 1989 for instance, what and when there were dangers. Once again it was that the telegraph companies used the earth as a “ground” return. Telephone companies today might have the same problem without adequate capacitors to limit the d/c flow, but you would think they should have learned that lesson and corrected it long ago, most local telephone lines do not use the earth as a ground, they carry both wires. There are many articles mentioned in a previous article posted a couple of days ago that will help you get to the bottom of this scare.
I welcome any corrections or additions if anyone has some first-hand experience with a power company and knows the general equipment and it’s d/c capacities and if I portrayed this basically correct.
That is the way I understand it so far by piecing together from many sources and memory and it makes sense from what I’ve read in prior years of the grid. Some of the best were power companies documents on how to handle this very type of situation.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 21, 2010 at 12:07 am
tallbloke says:
June 20, 2010 at 11:44 pm
where he [Geoff Sharp] has been using a pixel counting method to give us a more realistic ‘laymans’ sunspot count than that coming from the speck counting going on at SIDC.
How do you know it is ‘more realistic’? By what measure or metric?
SIDC is not counting any different than everybody else. Everybody is undercounting the sunspot number. Everybody’s count is too low. Are you arguing that we should increase everybody’s count? to make it more realistic?
I’m saying that I think Geoff is correct when he says that we won’t get a count comparable to previous periods when solar activity was very low by counting tiny pores and specks as SIDC are currently doing. Whether the latest numbers should be lowered or the older numers raised is a question which should be better defined if you can push your geo-magnetic work back beyond the Dalton Minimum.
Is this feasible, or are the readings too uncertain in terms of the calibration of the instruments?
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 21, 2010 at 12:03 am
tallbloke says:
June 20, 2010 at 11:44 pm
while the sun is spinning down rather than up
The Sun doesn’t ‘spin up’ or ‘spin down’ like that.
You are of course entitled to your opinion. As am I. It was a vague term anyway, so its not worth arguing over. Looking at the longterm sunspot record, there have been periods when there have been a few low cycles, followed by a ramping up to a peak in activity, followed by a drop and some more low cycles. I found a puzzling and apparently unphysical coincidence between solar activity levels and the suns predictable motion in the second graph here:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/01/02/predicting-changes-in-solar-activity/
Which incidentally lends some support (if it has any meaning) to your contention that sunspot counts in the past may have been on the low side compared to more recent times. In my graph, I arbitrarily plotted the solar activity and motion so that it matched the earlier counts, but this is immaterial.
I stress that the graph is unphysical on our current understanding. It could only acquire meaning if the rate that the sun spins at and the rate the planets orbit at were influenced by an force external to the solar system which had been acting pretty steadily over an extremely long time.
About that possibility I as yet frame no hypotheses.
I sent an email to National Geographic while I was watching a program about “climate”. Several times when something negative was said about climate change they cut to a scene that showed water cooling towers with steam rolling out. They did their best to imply this was pollution or CO2 being emitted into the air.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 21, 2010 at 12:07 am
tallbloke says:
June 20, 2010 at 11:44 pm
where he [Geoff Sharp] has been using a pixel counting method to give us a more realistic ‘laymans’ sunspot count than that coming from the speck counting going on at SIDC.
How do you know it is ‘more realistic’? By what measure or metric?
A fuller discussion between Leif and Geoff is in progress from this post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/17/nasa-warns-solar-flares-from-huge-space-storm-will-cause-devastation/#comment-413495
As I understand things, the probability of a Carrington event in any one year is about 1:500, and perhaps higher when the solar cycle is low, as it is now – maybe 1:200. The chances of this seriosuly damaging the northern hemisphere electrical grids through induced currents in long power lines is as Leif supposes, one – ie a certainty. Transformers might be saved by being disconnected in advance, but the lines would be renedered inoperative and with the grid down, large scale repairs would be problematic. Civil order would be threatened within days – no water in the taps, no sewage pumps and no replenishment of supermarket food stocks. Starvation is a real threat.
Whats odd about this is that in similar scale threats – such a s a nuclear reactor meltdown, systems are engineered not to fail at 1:10,000 years or more!
Here ‘we’ have built a system that can be destroyed by a relatively common natural event. Is that hubris or what? Or plain ignorance? It has been amazing to watch the world begin to wake up to this reality.
And also to realise that the ‘science’ that built this fragile system still holds sway in the calculations of probability. Other sources of knowledge – from indigenous tribal shamans for example, have been warning about this for some time – but of course, they get dismissed as unscientific and primitive.
It is worth taking a few minutes and pausing – going deep into intuition territory, and ask, ‘do I sense something coming?’ – from that sixth sense that even simple animals can use in advance of earthquakes or tsunamis. All those shamans and yogis I know, as well as – deep breath – astrologers, are expecting something big this summer! Is it not odd that the media are now talking about Carrington events?
wayne says: (June 21, 2010 at 1:41 am) : To my best understanding…
Thanks, Wayne. A calming caution (I’ve had enough gee-whiz-golly-wow! to last me a long, long time).
Frank says:
June 20, 2010 at 7:42 pm
Bring it on!
In Portland, Oregon, we’ve had 4 sunny days since April 1. We’ve had record rainfall. We’ve had record high lows. I might as well live in Alaska or Scotland.
Bring on the next solar cycle! PLEASE!
Frank, sorry to hear you are having a poor Spring/Summer. But we in Scotland apart from an odd wet week in March and May, we have had dry weather and sunshine for many months now. May was still cold but there has been hardly any rain, and the rivers are all very low. I assume the AO is still predominently negative, which gives us the cold dry winters and warm dry summers. It is certainly nothing to do with CO2 induced climate change.
Peter Taylor says: (June 21, 2010 at 3:40 am) All those shamans and yogis I know, as well as – deep breath – astrologers, are expecting something big this summer!
Dunno if such expectations really count for much, Peter. Whenever life gets a bit slow we humans tend to look for some earth-shattering event which will justify our keeping on going. Either that or a feeling that this week we will definitely win the lottery. Something hard-wired into our brains, I suspect, to stop the tedium killing us. (Think of the old journo saying: If it bleeds it leads.)
OK, I perused http://www.leif.org/EOS/SSTA.pdf link provided by Leif.
Not very carefully, but looking specifically about damage with power on or off.
It seems that the problem is ground currents induced by the magnetic storm, that go through the grounding cables into the grid system, and any electrical system.
Power off is not considered. It is of course off in the “oil and gas pipelines” section, where corrosion is put forth as a danger.
GICs ( geomagnetic induced current) reaching 57 amps were measured in a Finnish natural gas pipeline in November 1998.
Well these are quite large pipes in crossection. In any case, corrosion is bad, but not trigger alarm bad. Extensive checks after a Carrington type event would catch these in time.
So from this write up, whence all the alarms must have come, there is no obvious reason why, if the grids go inert, (and all the large transformers etc), the rise in ground voltage ( which is the main reason things get cook while on line) should destroy this expensive equipment. Particularly when they are not underground. Optical lines as hardware should also be immune, but the electronics should be turned off.
The rational decision is to produce maps and time tables of areas in danger and turn off the circuits. Better have power outs for a day or three and all the hardware intact, than chance it and have big burn outs that need years to replace. Elementary.
@anthony
I dinged you guys several weeks ago for trying to downplay the BP oil leak. It was not only far worse than you thought it turned out to be worse than I thought and I had thought it would be ten times as bad as you did.
You’re now guilty of playing down a large CME and apparently have put in little due diligence before commenting on it. Ipods and personal electronics are not generally at risk. As others have pointed out it’s long conductors (miles) that collect up the energy as a magnetic field traverses them. The national power grid is at risk. Big time. A Carrington event today would be an epic catastrophe of biblical proportion. Worse, there’s no reason to think the Carrington event represents any sort of maximum intensity limit. Before there were millions of miles of metal wire and pipes strung about the world these CME’s had no more effect on humans than some pretty lights in the sky at night.
@anna
The 18 hour warning you mention is very misleading. There are two classes of CME’s one which produces a visible halo and one which does not. In the case of the halo we get up to a few days between the halo and when the particle storm arrives. Where there is no halo the ejection might or might not be spotted. The problem with both of these instant observations is that most of them don’t later result in a big particle storm intercepting the earth – they might miss the earth entirely or fizzle out along the way. An advance warning system based on those observations would soon become as dull and non-threatening as the dubious US color-coded terrorist threat level.
The reliable warning system we have is solar observation satellites positioned at the LaGrange point between the earth and sun which is a mere 1,500,000 kilometers from the earth. When a CME hits those satellites it will hit the earth 30-90 minutes later and we can judge its intensity. That’s not much time to react. Decision makers all over the world have to order their bits of the power grid shut down and then workers have to trip circuit breakers to protect big power transformers. That’s a pretty big decision and not a small amount of work.
Big power transformers like almost everyone has seen at various electrical power substations take a long time to build (1-2 years from order to delivery) and there is no stockpile of them. Imagine a million of them getting fried all at the same time. It would take weeks to months just to get critical power restored to hospitals, water pumps, sewer pumps, and gas station fuel pumps. In the meantime you’ll have no water, no sewer, no fuel for vehicles, no heating or air conditioning, no refrigeration, no telephones or other electronic communications. Distrubution of just about everything from food to water to goods and services will grind to a quick and almost immediate halt everywhere. The end-result is probably many millions of deaths in the United States. Nations where people don’t rely so much on a working electrical power grid will fare better.
This report may or may not have been mentioned above:
“Space Weather Events—Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts”.
You can download it free here:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12507
Also see:
“The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began”.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8370.html
Regards
Agust
dave Harrison says:{June 20, 2010 at 8:10 pm}
“I see that the World Cup is described as the coldest ever with practice pitches frozen too hard for training. Of course this is ‘weather’ and no indication of long-term climate, but can you imagine the headlines had it been the warmest World Cup ever?”
It is being played in the southern hemisphere where it is winter.
Caleb says:
June 20, 2010 at 6:41 pm
If the telegraph stations burst into flame back in 1850, how about today’s windmills? Can you imagine a range of hills at night, with long rows of flaming windmills?
It will not, however, cause my wood stove to burst into flame. My 1980 Econoline Van (with no computerized parts) will not be seriously effected, as long as it continues to sit in the back yard and annoy the neighbors. Also I have an old tube radio, which ought work fine after the super-solar-storm, especially if it isn’t plugged in and turned on, during the storm. My goats will likely continue to give milk, and my garden will continue to grow.
In other words, a super-solar-storm will turn me from an anachronism, into a person-ahead-of-the-curve, in the twinkling of an eye.
The reason the telegraph stations back then caught fire is because of the energy potential generated by the very long lengths of unshielded wire. The longer the length of wire exposed to a large electromagnetic effect, the more the induced current along its length.
And since wire also exhibits inductive reactance, there arrives a boost in voltage which very likely caused arcing between closely spaced conductors at the endpoint facility.
If the insulation material was primitive —paper and varnished woven cloth were used in the day— that merely increased the conflagration potential.
Your Ford van is made of metal, and the wiring for the most part isn’t exposed. BUT, the instrument panel —via the windows— and the running lights are, and they could well serve as a conduit to the rest of the vehicle’s electrical system if the flare is sufficiently powerful.
Further, should you touch the van —which is insulated via the tires— when the storm hits, you would likely get ‘bitten.’
For those people using fluorescent lights, there’s likely a real danger of those exploding from an over-voltage condition should those be turned on at the time.
If your tube radio set is plugged in at the time, it’s entirely possible that an electrical arc could jump the contacts of the power switch. But then, the house wiring would also be a liability as well, if the insulation breaks down.
Houses and abodes with underground power feeders will likely fair better, as long as the roof —and maybe the siding— are made of metal …
Dave Springer says:
June 21, 2010 at 4:49 am
Big power transformers like almost everyone has seen at various electrical power substations take a long time to build (1-2 years from order to delivery)
It’s worse than that. Nearly all big transformers are being built in the far east. They will be busy for years fixing their own systems if there is a big event. The west has no capability for large scale production at the moment.
u.k.(us) says:
June 20, 2010 at 5:19 pm
“Just as the sun allows our atmosphere to remain stable, so too can it destroy civilization.”
=============
Is this a threat ?
…But not through Solar Flares, but most probably through the next CANCUN CLIMATE FAIR (not flare) in november, as a consequence of that you will have to live like in the Dark Ages.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 20, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Caleb says:
June 20, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Also I have an old tube radio, which ought work fine after the super-solar-storm
But you may not anybody to listen to as the stations [with up-to-date equipment] will be disrupted and you [and they] may not have electricity…
Bummer. However I will have my wife to listen to. She can be electric without electricity.
I wonder if the airwaves would be utterly dead, or whether there are some back-up stations, perhaps created by the Army for after nuclear blasts.
Dave Springer says:
June 21, 2010 at 4:49 am
I think you are singing in tune in with the unnecessary alarmism about these putative CME events.
I have been following the CME events the past year or so over at http://solarcycle24.com and I can guarantee that the CMEs are registered and it is easy to calculate if they are pointing on earth. I have not seen such an alert during this time. A large CME would not go undetected, even by amateurs, and in addition there will be signals in the Xray and magnetic field that have travelled close to the speed of light, before the main body comes. ( read the link provided above).
When a CME hits those satellites it will hit the earth 30-90 minutes later and we can judge its intensity. That’s not much time to react. Decision makers all over the world have to order their bits of the power grid shut down and then workers have to trip circuit breakers to protect big power transformers. That’s a pretty big decision and not a small amount of work.
This 30 minute information would be the second level alarm. The first alarm would give ample time to have personnel ready in case it will be necessary to shut down everything . I am sure emergency planners can handle such scenaria with ease.
Big power transformers like almost everyone has seen at various electrical power substations take a long time to build (1-2 years from order to delivery) and there is no stockpile of them. Imagine a million of them getting fried all at the same time. It would take weeks to months just to get critical power restored to hospitals, water pumps, sewer pumps, and gas station fuel pumps.
Of course, of course the sky will surely fall, if we ignore the available technology that can easily help us to keep it in place.
899 says:
June 21, 2010 at 5:31 am
On the contrary
Houses and abodes with underground power feeders will likely fair better, as long as the roof —and maybe the siding— are made of metal …
The currents come from the grounding connections, because the currents are in the ground, so underground might be worse than surface lines. The telegraph and phone lines were under tension during the Carrington event, there is always current going on that is modulated by the signals.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/SSTA.pdf
Induce electric fields in the Earth create potential differences in voltage
between grounding points—which causes Geomagnetic Induced Currents (GICs) to flow through transformers,
power system lines, and grounding points.
Anyone watched the Russian produced “War and Peace” from the ’60’s recently? 10 hours of excruciating pain watching the EVIL Napoleon make war for no reason except his ego! However you also realize: WINTER WINTER WINTER…
And HARD, cold, LONG winters throughout Europe, in 1812..the middle of the Dalton minimum. Is Svensmark right?
Max
As potentially “annoying” as a Carrington event might be, I still would be more concerned with an impact by an asteroid which may have a slightly lower probability but definitely more serious devastating consequences.
The CME we could “harden” our systems against (perhaps) but the rapid sea-level rise (sorry, couldn’t resist…;-) of a impact generated tsunami not to mention the increase in atmospheric water vapor as well as particulates would be far more problematic.
Scanning the skies seems like a reasonable precaution and highly cost- effective as well.
@ur momisugly Leif Svalgaard
Regarding the “continuity” in sunspot activity measurement between old manual observations and current technologically adept ones, is this considered a “problem” by the scientific community?
If so, is there a current dialog on just how to go about normalizing the method?
Thanks.
“Just as the sun allows our atmosphere to remain stable, so too can it destroy civilization.”
I wonder what part oceans, biosphere, bacteria etc., have in allowing our atmosphere to remain stable or otherwise?
I found this measurement during an actual event:
http://www.ann-geophys.net/23/3089/2005/angeo-23-3089-2005.pdf
The volts are from 2 to mvolts, the magnetic fields are in nanotesla/s in the various plots.
OK, corrosion is insidious and might be accelerated by induced currents. But 57amps measured in the finnish line times 1 volt give an energy of 77 voltamps ( watts) for large pipes, so, I would think that the induced currents on the electricity transmission lines, would not be enough to melt them if they are not powered to become unbalanced and pushed into oscillations.
alcuin says:
June 20, 2010 at 7:32 pm
I can understand how a large power grid could would be affected by a geomagnetic storm, but not how a micro-sized device like an i-Phone would be, other than that the towers that relay its signals might be damaged by being connected to the power grid. Am I missing something or is the emphasis in these articles being misdirected?
What you’re missing is the fact that the energy in a flare is of such a broad electromagnetic spectrum that it could easily overwhelm the relatively weakly protected components in a cellphone. Certainly the design of modern communications devices is ‘robust’ enough to handle the more common electrical fields experienced daily.
But a solar flare is animal of a different color. That energy could be sufficient to easily overwhelm the device with the right level of exposure. The spacing of the elements in integrated circuits is so close that arcing would take place and essentially destroy them. Your wee timorous beastie would become past tense with a high enough blast of energy.
Those with the knowledge of proper handling of those components will know the term as ESD sensitive devices. ESD = Electrostatic Sensitive Device. It doesn’t take much of an electrical field to play havoc with them.