From PhysicsWorld blog: The cover feature of the August issue of Physics World, which is now out in print and digital formats, looks at the Sun – and in particular, at the consequences here on Earth of a “solar super-storm”. As I point out in the video [below], these violent events can disturb the Earth’s magnetic field – potentially inducing damaging electrical currents in power lines, knocking out satellites and disrupting telecommunications.
One particularly strong solar super-storm occured back in 1859 in what is known as the “Carrington event”, so named after the English astronomer who spotted a solar flare that accompanied it. The world in the mid-19th century was technologically a relatively unsophisticated place and the consequences were pretty benign. But should a storm of similiar strength occur today, the impact could be devastating to our way of life.
The feature has been written by Ashley Dale from the University of Bristol, who last year took part in a gathering of space experts to examine and report on the potential consequences of a solar super-storm here on Earth. I don’t want to cause alarm, but as Dale points out, the Earth is, on average, in the path of Carrington-level events every 150 years – which means we are five years overdue.
Reports:
SolarMAX_Executive summary Adobe Acrobat PDF
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SolarMAX_Final report.pdf Adobe Acrobat PDF
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“Björn from Sweden says:
August 1, 2014 at 8:31 pm
I dont know if I believe the hype around Carrington solar storms. Predictions of disasters usually are gravely exaggerated, remember the year 2000 computer crash, ozon death, silent spring, death from algea, death from asteroids, death from global warming etc etc.
I dont think it will be a huge problem, annoying yes, devastating no.”
One of the issues is that we suffer from “Wolf” syndrome…”Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!”, and our political leaders are basically lawyers, so there is NO leadership in that regard. So when something significant DOES happen…the result is that the common Jack/Jill figure out as best they can how to get by, and the politicians look for something they can point to in order to mollyfy their base and avoid any responsibility.
So yes, there have been many false claims/crisis over the years/decades that have numbed us all. But look what happened when Sandy hit the Northeast US. I love weather, I monitor weather on several websites all the time…drives my wife nuts, but you could see Sandy coming, and more importantly, the scale of Sandy, 4-5 days out. By and large, so-called leaders did nothing. No emergency generators deployed, no water, no first aid stations established…the list goes on. After it passed, there were tractor trailer-sized generators that had been placed in downtown as standby sources for the NY Marathon, along with tractor trailers filled with thousands of cases of drinking water. The Marathon was finally cancelled, days later than it should have been, and the big discussion was whether or not anyone had the authority to take control of those assets and move them to areas that needed them.
So the issues are two-fold. 1) Being able to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and 2) Being smart enough to take the proper actions to help prepare for an event. We are severely lacking in both of those areas.
I’m not a smart guy, but I buy insurance. Part of my disaster kit will include a Ham radio, along with standard shortwave/AM/FM radios. For areas that incur severe damage such as earthquakes, where power/communications, etc are severely impacted, Ham radio is usually one of the only means of communication into/out of the affected area. It’s old-fashioned, but I’m an old guy, so I’m comfortable with that. My Go Kit will also have 2-3 army surplus metal ammo cans to store cell/radios etc, and that addition is due to articles like this.
Will that be a total waste of time and money?
I really hope so.
Jim
Winston says:
August 1, 2014 at 1:37 pm
Don’t be alarmists! The study isn’t. More worrying than AGW, but not catastrophic. Even with the current state of the US and UK grids, the major vulnerability point, very large transformers that would take a year or more to replace due to long lead times, could be disconnected prior to the arrival of the approaching CME and, thereby, protected from damage.
=====
Fine, so we may still have some power available at wall sockets but the whole food, communications and feul distribution systems would be virtually non existant.
Under developed countries like in Africa will probably fair much better than Europe and US which be in total anachy.
Dr. Strangelove says:
August 2, 2014 at 2:13 am
The country is hit by 20 storms on average every year.
—
I’ve seen this repeated numerous times by people and it’s not the case, people seem to be confusing the number of typhoons that form east of the Philippines with the number that are hitting the Philippines – which is something else entirely. I’m guessing here for sake of argument but the number that crosses the Philippines each year ranges between 1 to 3. But if someone can show the tracks of roughly 20 typhoons crossing the country, each year, on average, I’d like to see it.
I’m also not too convinced or comforted by economic loss guesstimates in dollar terms being a sufficient measure of the level of hazards, suffering the losses a CME could produce. Frankly, that may be the least of our concerns, the loses may be literally incalculable. All we know is it will come, it remains to be seen what that means, but assumptions of it being ineffectual, or else calamitous are clearly COMPLETELY BASELESS OPINIONS either way.
2c
tonyb : “As a result the UK Govt set up an integrated Govt committee with funding. The Met office has been tasked with examining the forecasting of electro magnetic space events. ”
Why does that fill me with a sinking feeling?
Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Unmentionable
Take it from the Philippine weather bureau:
“At least 19 to 20 tropical cyclones enter the country every year, according to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA).”
http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2014/05/09/1321044/same-number-typhoons-seen-hit-phl-year
I’m not guessing. I visited Tacloban City before Typhoon Haiyan. I met people there whose homes were destroyed. Over a million houses were destroyed in several cities and towns.
A Carrington event is INEVITABLE. CMEs occur relatively regularly, so it is a cosmic sized Russian roulette. At some stage of the game, the Earth will be there at the same time as the CME. We cannot swerve. There will be about 15 minutes warning-if authorities choose to act. Satellites will be burned out, so there will be problems for several years with getting GPS satellites back in to orbit anyway. Long electrical wires will act as conductors and burn out transformers if not taken off line. The wires themselves may melt from the excess current. Either way, it will take at least 6 months to get back on stream. Meanwhile, how are we to support so many humans??? Transport of food from the countryside will be severely compromised. Food riots are inevitable.
I have calculated a Carrington event approximately every 150 years, which means we are slightly overdue. For someone with a few million spare dollars, a good investment could be a couple of such large transformers. WHEN the crunch comes, 1 billion is actually a bargain for such a transformer- in a decent sized city , the lost daily production is around 500 million per day, 2 days of the transformer cost. Thus, a billion for the $5 million transformer is actually a bargain. 200x return on investment! And a bargain to boot!
Anyone want to go in the investment pool? Have to be from Australia. Mind you, it could be interesting having international bidding on your transformers.
Greg
It filled me with a sinking feeling as well and I wrote it!
IF this became as big a thing as AGW in this country I feel reasonably certain that appropriate measures would be taken. As it is still very much a side show at present I doubt that the actions taken by the UK govt to date will be remotely effective.
tonyb
Your link says:
“At least 19 to 20 tropical cyclones ENTER THE COUNTRY every year, according to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA).”
I say:
Define ENTER
Define COUNTRY
You’ll find they mean this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ph_Territorial_Map.png
I said: “… but the number that CROSSES the Philippines each year ranges between 1 to 3. But if someone can show the TRACKS of roughly 20 typhoons crossing the country, EACH YEAR, on AVERAGE, I’d like to see it.
(sorry for the caps Dr, just emphasising)
I don’t doubt what you saw last year, but that’s beside the point, 19 to 20 cyclones may touch on parts of the Philippines extended territory but that is a very different thing to the implied insinuation that 19 to 10 Typhoons are making land fall or crossing the Philippines each year.
I would posit that no more than 5 of those storms that ENTER the COUNTRY are actually imparting actual typhoon effects to almost any of its inhabitants.
In other words, the 19 to 20 number is myth making and hype, although it may be technically or strictly a fact in the sense of the definitions and wording used (but I’m not convinced that’s the case either).
Be sceptical, these numbers are being pumped for a reason and that reason is to concoct baloney. If it is true, then as I said, I’d love to see the track maps for say the past 20 years, demonstrating it beyond dispute.
I’ll be surprised if I’m far from the truth in suggesting its between 1 and 3 actually making landfall or crossing the country with typoon effects. Mostly it will be near misses while transiting the EEZ.
Right?
Let me give you something much more serious to worry about, way beyond Global Warming or a Carrington Event.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28610112
If this spreads much faster or much further it could easily go “International” and the death toll could be enormous.
Number of people mentioned transformers. As a young student I remember seeing one of these monsters (it was made by Rade Koncar from Zagreb Yu, at the time one of the European largest trafo makers), if my memory serves me correctly:(x2x2) about 150 tones, 300kV, 600MVA . These things are not made overnight, and not exactly transported by your SUV.
Fear mongering, it would likely not even bother most of the earth, compare it to a meteor hit, why not start worrying about that??
Folks, it’s just not going to be the end of life as we know it. Just isn’t.
For those who think they will starve, store some food:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/food-storage-systems/
get a generator (a stupid one without electronics) and an old car with a large gas tank to hold the fuel (since usually your CCRs or insurance forbid more than 2 gallons in cans…)
Yes, I’ve got an old pre-electronics Diesel car and an older ‘points only’ gasoline car. Mostly because I like old cars, but also as I’m one of the folks who expect to rebuild things ‘after the fall’. (My ‘day job’ is in computer infrastructure / support and fixing what’s broken. My current contract is as Disaster Recovery Coordinator for a very large company… so ‘this is what I do’… ) But the reality is that it’s overkill.
As pointed out already, cars are natural Faraday cages. Lightning is way stronger. It’s mostly long wires that gets it ( on the order of 100’s of miles long…)
ONE example:
A major data center at a major company went down. Why? They had added a flag pole out front of the building. Turns out it was about 3 feet from the water main, and in sandy soil. Lightning hit the pole, flashed over to the pipe, whole building ground plane raised to lightning level of volts….
Well, this building is about a city block long, with separate power feeds at each end from different grid segments. ALL power went down. Despite redundant UPS / power conditioning equipment. Turns out that reverse volting large UPS gear with lighting in the ground plane Is A Very Bad Idea. About 4 hours later the building was back up and most computers were coming back on line. They just bypassed the UPS / entry point conditioning gear and ran on raw line power until the UPS (un interruptable power supply) company could ship spares. Almost NO computer damage.
Now this is way more power / volts / amps / everything than you will get with a Carrington event.
So what happened? The UPS sacrificed itself (involuntarily – i.e. not by design) and the computer gear in this entire building was without power, but NOT damaged. All the room power feeds through the UPS, and so both ground and power were at constant (low) volts to each other. Even as the ground plane went ‘way high’, so did the power feeds – so relative to each other their was little across the computer gear. The UPS had main ground / main power connections, so got fried.
IMHO, something very much like that will happen all over the planet. The entry point power conditioning equipment will get fried, and everything else will be fine. Even the Diesel generators.
There are a LOT of standby generators all over the planet. Most of them not plugged into anything or running at any given time. All hospitals in the USA, for example. They are NOT plugged into the power grid, but switch in when needed. Being isolated, they will survive. Might need to jumper past the cut in switch if it is electronic, but not a hard problem.
Similar things will be going on all over the place. A bunch of little PITAs for folks like me, but not the end of life as we know it. Your laptop will still work, as will your cell phone; and in about 4 hours the cell towers and phone company will be back up. Some long distance lines will be out and transformers fried, so interconnects will be lousy. Not efficient, and some regions / times may need to leave the AC off or run minimal loads for a while; but not too long. Most cars and trucks will be fine, and we can get fuel flowing again pretty quickly. The corn will still grow and cows will still give milk…
Prepare for it a little bit (like you would for an earthquake, hurricane, flood, whatever) but this is just not a special ‘end of life as we know it’ thing. Due to lightning preparations, most of the world is already able to handle this. Airplanes survive direct lighting strikes by design, for example. So put some food on the shelf, get a small generator and a fuel siphon, keep the car gassed up, and don’t worry about it.
Holy cow, there are cars on the road and I might get hit by a car, people often get killed by cars, better hide under my bed and not go out….
Lightning too…..
What a pile of crap
Is this the next Global Warming type money raising scheme? As most realize that the whole Global Warming scam is a scam, maybe there is some money to be raised on a Carrington event?
I find it hard to believe that it could get the traction, but it is likely only one of many things being tried. I cant imagine more than a few hundred million being spent on this, chicken feed compared to the billions wasted on GW.
The 150 years is an average, not a cycle. That means it may come at practically any time, including never.
Oh, and I probably ought to add that a Carrington Event IS far more a worry than AGW, that being due to AGW being a complete fantasy…
FWIW, for about $40 you can get a nice inverter that plugs into the car to make “wall power”. I usually travel with a 100 W unit for the laptop / phone charging and with a 300 W unit “in case of disaster”. That is plenty for lights and communications in case of earthquake / hurricane and such. All up, about a $80 ‘investment’ that means wherever I am, my car is a mobile ‘generator’ and I’m never without power. (Since I often work at sites without power and expect to be called in when power is out, this is a great convenience to me 😉 Put one in a tin cookie pan (eat the cookies first 😉 and it is EMP proof.
That’s just one small example of why we will not be without all power. Oh, and I also have a half dozen old computers in the garage at any one time (and a backup disk not plugged into my laptop) so if anything fried ALL my plugged in computers, I’d be running again in about 30 minutes on a slightly older box. There’s a lot of folks like me; so ‘after the fall’, a large core of folks will have power, communications (HAM packet radio if nothing else) and computes up and running. The rest is just a long series of repair / remediation steps. Oh, and I have a large can of coffee in ‘stores’ for the 18 hour days…
@A C Osborn:
That Ebola outbreak is a huge worry. It isn’t being controlled. They sent folks over to ‘help’, and their containment systems didn’t prevent them from getting sick, so now they are going to be bringing the virus to the USA and say “trust us, we can keep it contained”? How? By using the same protective clothing and measures that failed to keep them from getting sick in the first place? Speaking of madness….
The first rule of quarantine is to prevent exit from the quarantine area…
Hi E.M.
It’s good to have my apprehensions about the effect on IC’s shown to be uninformed., and wrong. Interestingly we took a lightning hit on our C-210 in flight. it made a very round 1/8 inch diameter hole in the wing, did some damage to the newer of the two navcoms but otherwise no problems that we were ever able to find. Newer navcom was a king KX-170 which had IC’s. Older one was solid state but with discrete components. I doubt if anything useful can be concluded from that.
personally, being an old fashioned rural sort..I keep no less than a 2 mth drygoods+cans on hand rainwater tanks give us rural folks a huge edge, and enough dry food etc for pets for a min of a month whats frozen can stay icy for some days and then be cooked over outdoor fires till its near dry if push comes to shove.always have large size antiseptic /bandages and whatever meds you require stockpiled. power goes out so do petrol bowsers, modern petrol doesnt store for very long but a 44gal drum is better than none..assuming anything with electronic ignit etc isnt fried.
I miss my 1964 car. basic and solid and no crappy hi tech stuff you cant fix.
Scott says:
August 2, 2014 at 4:55 am
Fear mongering, it would likely not even bother most of the earth, compare it to a meteor hit, why not start worrying about that??
–
One went into Russia last year and the locals made a fortune from it!
/footage Boris Yeltsin chicken-dancing
Read the below link — a 2012 flare barely missed us & could’ve resulted in a Carrington-type event if it would have occurred just a week earlier:
http://www.space.com/26669-huge-solar-storm-2012-destruction.html
All been discussed on this forum before.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/14/homeland-security-takes-on-the-carrington-event/
Spend a lazy hour or so and read this
http://www.breadandbutterscience.com/SSTA.pdf
All been investigated by the U.S. military years ago and recommendations made however possibly never followed up on or ongoing technology is outpacing the safeguards.
With this latest British report maybe the U.K. is far behind on appreciating the possible consequences.
E.M. Smith……….Large modern cities can only function on massive amounts of electrical power. The logistics of keeping the remnants of the city populations fed and calm plus quelling any possible civil uprising plus securing the borders from the anticipated onslaught of third world hordes will negate getting civilisation as we know it up and functioning in a matter of months.
An event such as a Carrington flare event will be a black swan to the worlds economies. The worldwide economic debacle alone will ensure T.E.OT.W.A.W.K.I
beng says:
August 2, 2014 at 5:40 am
From your very interesting link:
“… First, X-rays and ultraviolet radiation from the solar flare would have produced radio blackouts. …”
Nice! … I didn’t explicitly realize that was part of the package … but it feeds into the pdf report I linked above, which points out that a lot of our grid-switching apparatus is performed in the form of enormous numbers of remote-controlled SCADA devices (see page 15) and their particular vulnerabilities (besides this one) are also well worth reading about within that report. The catch is that many SCADA’s are secure radio-controlled or dial-up accessed, so if the human controllers suddenly enter a radio blackout, they then can’t switch the grid SCADAs to isolate the grid from its own induction, to escape the long-conductor length issue.
The report goes on to point-out that the technicians that used to go out and manually manipulate the SCADAs longer exist because the proliferation and deployment of cheap remote-control network access meant those workers became redundant.
So not only has the skill and knowledge base atrophied and shrunk, the technical manpower and vehicles to access them quickly no longer exists, to either go out and disconnect them, or else to repair or more likely replace them.
The report discusses SCADAs early simply because they are the cornerstone of virtually every utility that we use today, and E1, E2 or E3 events will fry most of them, and the grid with it. Much of their vulnerability stems from their RS232 ports, so it was always considered they were more vulnerable to an E1 and E2 pulse, and not so much the E3. But if a global radio blackout precedes the E3’s arrival the grid transmission infrastructure is a goner … like I said … nice.
This is the type of unintended-consequence that no one understands how it will all play out.
There will be many others, like the effects on electricity turbines and electronic valves, which are both another whole horror-story which a global radio comms black out will affect destructively as well.
(and I don’t know why everyone keeps talking-up faraday cages to the rescue when we’re not talking about E1 and E2 transient pulse events here)
OK. Questions: There was a Carrington event in the 19th Century. When was the last one before that and what is your proof that it occurred.?
If we don’t know the answer to the above question: How do we know whether we will see another similar event?
If, as some have claimed here, there have been other recent events, who measured them and what was their impact.?
Have satelites been tested against a C event if not why not? Is it because satelites don’t last very long and any infrequent event becomes irrelevent?
And, NASA are paid to predict and detect such events so that transformers can be taken off line. Are we saying that like climate science NASA can predict nothing but are good at manipulating past data to fit nothing.?
It looks like there was a Carrington-class event in 2012, but the solar storm missed us: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm/
Still, the odds of one hitting earth in the next ten years has been estimated to be 12%.
Good to be prepared. I don’t see it as fear-mongering. Just common sense.
High Treason says:
August 2, 2014 at 3:45 am
> Only if it’s a cyclic event.
I have calculated a Carrington event approximately every 150 years, which means we are slightly overdue.
“Overdue” means nothing to independent events. The probability remains 1 in 150 per year. In fact, one could argue that “overdue” implies the risk may be going down.
NASA has been hyping the next Carrington event just fine – they don’t need our help.