Lots of people talking about this article in the UK daily Mail:
A near miss for Earth: Solar flare that could have knocked out power, cars and phones came so close two weeks ago
- Earth has narrowly missed electromagnetic pulses caused by solar flares
- If they had hit, the pulses could have knocked out electrical equipment over continent-scale regions
An electromagnetic pulse that could have knocked electrical equipment over continent-scale regions barely missed Earth two weeks ago, it has been revealed.
Source: (h/t Jack Simmons)
But, not so fast…NASA’s Dr. Tony Phillips of Spaceweather.com writes:
Many readers are asking about a report in the Washington Examiner, which states that a Carrington-class solar storm narrowly missed Earth two weeks ago. There was no Carrington-class solar storm two weeks ago. On the contrary, solar activity was low throughout the month of July.
The report is erroneous.
The possibility of such a storm is, however, worth thinking about: A modern Carrington event would cause significant damage to our high-tech society.
There is even a recent SciFi movie revolving around the idea which seems to have gone straight to video:
DaveF says:
“….in the last fifty or sixty years our population has more than doubled, and there is no way we could all survive a compete breakdown of the electricity system even if we hadn’t thrown away the old tools and old skills. As you say, it’s worrying.”
Yet another reason to get the population down to a billion or so. Everything about a lower population is good and everything about a larger population is bad.
Rule number 1
Things will never be as bad as “they” say. Let’s not parrot our CAGW friends with doomsdays scenarios that we kinda want to fantasize over.
Look on the bright side, maybe our creditors will get hit and misplace that multi-trillion dollar IOU.
vukcevic says:
August 3, 2013 at 1:15 am
Increased intensity (Ap>15) and intensity of geomagnetic events would contribute to ‘global temperature’ rise
Vuk, that is blatant nonsense.and as I already pointed out, your graph is phony.
How large is space and time relative to this “Carrington Event”?
Can there be a CE directed away from Earth, has there been one recorded, are they randomly directed or is there a biased direction? How many have been directly (not by proxy) detected? The product of those probabilities in space and time is the likelihood – that I imagine follows Pareto Distribution. Read N. N. Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. There the suggestion is that humans estimate unique events poorly using frequentist statistics that result in intractably large and small numbers.
Page over the discussion is verging on “guns”. Calculate from first principles the probability of a random shot killing a person. It beggars the media reports of accidental.
Our only vital household service that is dependent on mains power is the deep well pump, and the largest body of freshwater is two miles away. Heat, light, and transportation can be diesel powered. Welsbach mantle lamps are wonderful.
Someone mentioned inducing significant current in an one millimeter conductor. Please calculate the electric field volts per meter required.
Joel Renfrew says:
“Yet another reason to get the population down to a billion or so. Everything about a lower population is good and everything about a larger population is bad.”
You go first.
I read that astronauts observe the upper layer of atmosphere puffing up like a marshmallow during a’ solar flare up’ ( NASA article)
Would this expanding air PV=nrT increase the temperature of that layer according to the ideal gas laws .or some change to the layer
The expanded layer you would think may affect the dynamics of atmospheric layers underneath
Is this the energy input Pamela G is asking for?
C02 cools the earth at the upper layers l believe. Maybe the marshmallow effect counters this?
or ??
“Gail Combs says:
August 3, 2013 at 5:49 am”
I did some work at a branch of a large bank in Australia. The work eventually took 4 attempts. Reason (Apparently): a power “disruption”. Source: unknown.
“dbstealey says:
August 3, 2013 at 6:57 am
Joel Renfrew says:”
Alarmists are never the first eh!
”
Hoser says:
August 3, 2013 at 12:55 am
”
Real SCADA systems have been designed to survive nearby lightning strikes. As such, they might well survive a CME. Note that programmable controllers with serial ports might have a lot to be desired in either case.
Ultimately though, the survival of modern society is far more fragile to being damaged than most of the equipment we risk losing to CME.
I’m not sure what the Daily Mail is up to here. The DM has something of an obsession with Carrington Events, publishing nine warnings of imminent catastrophe over the last four years. Why? Is this because the DM likes sensationalist stories, or are they trying to apply pressure on ministers to do something about our electrical supplies?? It could be either.
The latest Carrington Event story is by Ellie Zolfagretard, who published the story about the North pole turning into a lake. Although most of her stories are not that hysterical.
North Pole turning into a lake:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2377853/How-North-Pole-turning-lake-Webcam-captures-melting-ice-following-spell-warm-weather.html
.
List of Carrington Event stories in the Daily Mail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1165045/Solar-storm-cause-planetary-disaster-time-warn-scientists.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1171951/Meltdown-A-solar-superstorm-send-dark-ages–just-THREE-years.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1344702/Freak-space-storm-triggered-solar-changes-scupper-London-Olympics.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2109302/Cities-blacked-year–2-TRILLION-damage–1-8-chance-solar-megastorm-2014-experts-explore-worst-happen.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2104482/Terror-bomb-detonated-space-cripple-UK.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2108442/One-chance-solar-megaflare-causing-trillions-dollars-damage-years-scientists-warn.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2191936/Government-adviser-fight-save-Earth-devastating-solar-storms-expected-knock-National-Grid-2013.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2274605/Solar-superstorm-set-strike-Earth–30-MINUTE-warning.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2382527/A-near-miss-Earth-Devastating-electromagnetic-pulses-knocked-power-cars-phones-occured-weeks-ago.html
Thanks, Daily Mail, we get the picture, we are pretty naked to EMP events….
.
Any transmission engineers out there?
Can someone explain why it is so difficult to harden the grid from an EMP event? The power-lines themselves are quite robust, one would have thought. So if you put a Faraday Cage around the grid’s transformers, and put trip-circuit-breakers on either side of them (input and output), surely you could protect the transformers from damage. Would that not solve half the problem?
.
”
Joel Renfrew says:
“Yet another reason to get the population down to a billion or so. Everything about a lower population is good and everything about a larger population is bad.”
You go first.
”
There is nothing wrong with large populations. If the pressure gets too great, we expand and migrate. Once, it was to the new world – the americas. Things got better. The occultic whack jobs and malthusians seem to thing that 1 B is too many and the target should be 500 million. They should have all the credibility of a convicted mass murderer and any actions they attempt along those lines should be met with the full force of the law. At present, nature has made them a laughing stock because nature, not our limited perceptions needs no help in determining whether there are too many people around and nature takes care of things quite readily.
Land covers 30% of Earth’s surface and we’ve yet to occupy and make use of even that fraction. There are no 24hr full time operation cities. Only a small fraction of businesses like refineries operate 24 hrs per day. There are no cities under the sea or even in most of the land area. Never mind lunar colonies, martian colonies, asteroid mining, or L5 society style megasatellites.
A quick calculation yields the fact that Texas alone could house the world’s current population in suburban style average density.
Of course, socialism is unsustainable beyond subsistance level at any population density and probably is incapable of subsistance level – as was proven in some of the early English colonial experiments in the new world.
The Military Channel showed some EM-pulse testing. A modern car was placed under an EM-pulse apparatus to simulate a high-altitude nuke blast. The car stopped, but after a few minutes restarted OK. Several different car models reacted similarly. Of course they couldn’t simulate the effects on long stretches of AC-power grids — the real question.
Obviously, a car w/o an operating gas station in range won’t work for long.
***
vukcevic says:
August 3, 2013 at 1:15 am
***
Vuk, please stop the magnetic stuff. It’s tiring, repetitive & makes no sense. Magnetics have zero effect on a TSI/water-vapor-powered heat engine that is the earth’s climate, period.
Someone earlier asked if there was a list of major solar storms that had impacted Earth..
This covers Carrington event thru Halloween event. Includes the American response to the Easter Storm of 1921..
“Archive of the most severe solar storms”
http://www.solarstorms.org/SRefStorms.html
This is a growing collection of major space weather events in history. This page contains a brief paragraph of the main effects of each solar storm, and a link to an archive of articles written about each storm that you can find in a variety of newspapers and magazines during the time of the storm. These accounts are a rich source of information about how each storm affected various technologies, and captivated the general public. Currently [August 15 , 2005], the archive includes 306 articles.
…May 13, 1921 – The New York Railroad Storm – The prelude to this particular storm began with a major sunspot sighted on the limb of the sun vast enough to be seen with the naked eye through smoked glass. The spot was 94,000 miles long and 21,000 miles wide and by May 14th was near the center of the sun in prime location to unleash an earth-directed flare. The 3-degree magnetic bearing change among the five worst events recorded ended all communications traffic from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi. At 7:04 AM on May 15, the entire signal and switching system of the New York Central Railroad below 125th street was put out of operation, followed by a fire in the control tower at 57th Street and Park Avenue. No one had ever heard of such a thing having happened during the course of an auroral display. The cause of the outage was later ascribed to a ‘ground current’ that had invaded the electrical system. Railroad officials formally assigned blame for a fire destroyed the Central New England Railroad station, to the aurora. Telegraph Operator Hatch said that he was actually driven away from his telegraph instrument by a flame that enveloped his switchboard and ignited the entire building at a loss of $6,000. Over seas, in Sweden a telephone station was ‘burned out’, and the storm interfered with telephone, telegraph and cable traffic over most of Europe. Aurora were visible in the Eastern United States, with additional reports from Pasadena California where the aurora reached zenith. [Newspaper Archive] …
Dr. S. do most of the most severe solar storms originate in the solar hemisphere that is least active? For instance like now the S. Hemi has not been as active as the N. Hemi for SS 24?
Anyone else feeling some deja vu with this and Y2K?
There is one other question for today.
It is not my intention to start up the forbidden topic.
Dr. S., just was wondering how the Planetary Theorists justify or correlate, the hemispheric asymmetry of sunspots and the anti correlation with solar differential rotation over the known 60 – 90 year oscillation period?
Some of these comments….ugh.
Ok, you may save some of your electronics by disconnecting them and powering them down, but it’s a moot point if the grid goes down with significant damage. It is virtually certainty generating plants won’t be powered down for their protection.
The problem with protecting transformers is the shear number of them and the expense, and you still won’t know if it is sufficient protection.
While optical fiber (fibre for my non-US friends) has replaced a lot of copper telecommunications cables, it has also necessitated the deployment of a large amount of electronics, much of it in the field. While quite a lot is equipped with back- up batteries should commercial power fail, those batteries will only provide service for a few hours. The old central office powered copper plant would have been far more reliable for this type event.
Whether you car runs or not is not as big a question as to what you are going to do when you need to refuel. Gas stations don’t have battery back-up or hand pumps, and wouldn’t even be open. That brings up another issue: I was in a bakery last week which was open but not selling anything. Their data network (over the internet?) was down, leaving their cash registers inoperable. The business had no procedures in place for selling solely by cash and written receipts (and I fear some employees wouldn’t be able to calculate the total, add tax, and make change). In a widespread disaster the few stores that could remain open would soon sell out of everything. Commerce will simply not be functional after such an event.
Finally, for those of you who think the world’s population needs to be reduced anyway: whenever I hear complaints about over-population, what the speaker is usually saying is, “I want you to quit breeding so my descendants will have everything they want.” Why else be concerned about the future population? In this particular case, those least affected by this event would be those scratching out an independent existence in a third-world country. Perhaps the meek shall inherit the world afterall.
Infragard (https://www.infragard.net/), a government and private sector alliance to promote protection of critical information systems, stood up an EMP Special Interest Group (SIG) in 2011 (http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/infragard-launches-emp-sig). The EMP SIG focuses on threats that could cause nationwide long-term critical infrastructure collapse, including EMP and similarly dangerous hazards such as extreme space weather, coordinated physical attack, cyber attack or pandemics. The EMP SIG has produced programs in the last two years with NOAA, FEMA, and various NGOs — Google “infragard emp sig” for information on the group’s activities and efforts, many at the state and local level, working to raise public awareness. The Infragard EMP SIG offers individuals the opportunity to do something about mitigating the effects of EMP (from any source) and other threats, rather than just talking about the threats. Membership information here: https://www.infragard.org/l8uKWS2Olf0s559wXFeJJFQBs%2525252B2bvZv9P8y4vmuSUms%2525253D! . The requirement to provide information for a background screening by the FBI may discourage some people from joining on philosophical grounds.
I was reading a few days ago about some EMP tests on automotive computers. They continued to function quite nicely.
EMP has been known at least since the early ’60s. The US military was looking for EMP-hardened electrical equipment for that long. While I am no longer in that game I’m willing to bet that there is more EMP hardening than is generally claimed.
beng says:
August 3, 2013 at 8:04 am
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vukcevic says:
August 3, 2013 at 1:15 am
***
Vuk, please stop the magnetic stuff. It’s tiring, repetitive & makes no sense. Magnetics have zero effect on a TSI/water-vapor-powered heat engine that is the earth’s climate, period.
—
Vuks, beng might not know that these major storms coming in at very very high speeds and push the radiation belts in (breaches in the field) and there is a lot of particle precipitation at high altitudes and received and seen at lower latitudes. Hot stuff and ground currents to.
So don’t misunderstand..
beng says:
August 3, 2013 at 8:04 am
Vuk, please stop the magnetic stuff. It’s tiring, repetitive & makes no sense. Magnetics have zero effect on a TSI/water-vapor-powered heat engine that is the earth’s climate, period.
——————————————-
While I appreciate that beng is obviously a real expert who can say for absolutely-sure what is what (and what isn’t) “period”, I actually enjoy reading Mr. Vukevic’s comments on this blog. I don’t come here to get closed mind BS.
Where’s your treasure trove of personal, passionate, dedicated research, beng? Show us.
cba says:
>
> “There is nothing wrong with large populations. If the pressure
> gets too great, we expand and migrate.
Where to?
> The occultic whack jobs
> and malthusians seem to thing that 1 B is too many and the target
> should be 500 million.
Sounds good to me.
> They should have all the credibility of a convicted mass
> murderer and any actions they attempt along those lines should
> be met with the full force of the law.
Why do you think it is against the law to advocate a reduction of
the world’s population?
> There are no cities under the
> sea or even in most of the land area. Never mind lunar colonies,
> martian colonies, asteroid mining, or L5 society style
> megasatellites.
Even if we had the technology to dwell in those places, who in his
right mind would trade a life on a lovely planet like Earth, with
its oceans, trees, flowers, mountains, for a nightmarish life in a
cave on the moon or mars, or on an asteroid, or in an orbiting tin
can!?
It is hard to understand how you can think of such things as other
than nightmare choices.
> A quick calculation yields the fact that Texas
> alone could house the world’s current population in suburban style
> average density.
Wow, that is certainly something to wish for. Problem solved, right?
It is like saying 2+2 = 4 to say that a lower population is better
than a larger one. It might be difficult or impossible to attain
the lower population, but that is no reason to react to the idea
as if it is criminal or insane, and then to come out with the
really insane ideas of migrating to an asteroid or a tin can.
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 2, 2013 at 5:47 pm
Another strong storm hit in May 1921:
From http://www.tjugofyra7.se/msb/Arkiv/Avdelningar/Nyheter/Svar-solstorm-drabbade-Karlstad-1921/
2012-04-20
Telephone and telegraph were the only electronics of the day. Its easy to imagine a major disaster today including stopping all cars, shutting down communications, power, railways, ships, newspapers … well, everything. It seems we are well behind in technology for dealing with this. Would giant lightening rods do? I guess we could have heavy duty circuit breakers with huge gaps – maybe radio operated from the radio waves induced by the event? What have they got now if anything for such an event?
Seeing the word “nyheter” meaning news in Swedish (and Danish?) brought back a flood of nostalgia. In 1965, working at odd jobs to fund my ~ 4 year’s odyssey away from Canada going, I was shortlisted for a geologist’s job at Kiruna in Sweden, which eventually went to a Swede. In the meantime, I inherited one of two jobs from a colorful Ozzie who had, at long last, earned enough to get his passage back home – that of very early delivery of the three morning newspapers to high-rise apartments in Stockholm. The papers, Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish Daily Blades), Stockholms Tidningen (Stockholm’s Newspaper 1889–1966 and 1981–1984 no longer printed) and Dagens Nyheter (Daily News).
My Ozzie benefactor, advised that he had customers who complained a lot and that I would get pink complaint slips with my newspaper bundles at each high-rise – ignore these, he said, because you can’t read them anyway. Also, one in particular had a little dog that used to hear him coming and would run to the mail slot in the door and take the paper as soon as it was pushed through. Having had an unpleasant encounter with the customer one early morning he found a diabolical way to get even. When the dog was about to take the paper, he would give the paper a shove and the enraged dog would rip the paper to shreds each morning. I accompanied Ozzie on his last delivery day to learn the route and he explained the delicate timing needed to push the paper into the dog’s mouth, but this time, before we could get down the stairs to the next level, the customer came rushing out yelling and Ozzie pointed to me and said – “Get stuffed – this is my last day – here’s the new guy!” Well, being an animal lover, I didn’t do this, but the dog grabbed it each day and ripped it up anyway and I simply ran quicker than the Ozzie to the exit stairs and received my only complaint each day.
I very much support the defense of Vuk (comments above).
He admits he does not understand everything, but his amount of research is inspirational. He may be wrong 99 times, and then BINGO!
I also appreciate that he does not slam down others, even avoiding to slam down his attackers. Vuk is a gentleman and a scholar–a proper example for us all.