From the “a single Carrington event can ruin your whole day, er, life” department:
WASHINGTON — The Senate unanimously passed a bill May 2 intended to support space weather research and planning to protect critical infrastructure from solar storms.
The Senate passed, via unanimous consent, the Space Weather Research and Forecasting Act. The bill cleared the Senate Commerce Committee in January, which had approved a similar bill in 2016.
The bill is designed to outline roles and responsibilities for various U.S. government agencies to research, forecast and respond to space weather, which can affect communications, the power grid and other systems. It builds upon a national space weather strategy and action plan released by the Obama administration in October 2015.
The legislation directs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to develop options to replace solar imaging data provided by the aging Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, launched more than 20 years ago. NOAA is pursuing that through its Space Weather Follow-On program. That program received $5 million in the fiscal year 2017 omnibus spending bill released May 1, double the amount in NOAA’s original request.
“I am pleased the Senate approved this commonsense, bipartisan legislation that will help ensure federal agencies are able to protect against extreme space weather, and I urge the House of Representatives to swiftly approve this bill so we are well prepared to predict and avoid a possible worst case scenario space weather event,” Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), lead sponsor of the bill, said in a statement May 2.
“A large-scale space weather event could have a major impact on our economy and national security and interrupt the delivery of essential services,” said Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), a co-sponsor of the bill, in the statement. “We must prioritize research and development in our critical infrastructure and be prepared to respond to a potentially catastrophic event.
– See more at: http://spacenews.com/senate-passes-space-weather-bill/#sthash.oO8n2qXd.dpuf
Keep a close watch, lets make sure this important research isn’t hijacked by the climate alarmists.
Hopefully while they are watching the sun……they’ll look for asteroids! 8-/
It is received knowledge that a modern Carrington Event would destroy our infrastructure. I wonder how accurate that is. The storm disrupted telegraphs but didn’t destroy them. In fact, some operators discovered that they could disconnect their batteries and keep working. link
In the wake of the 2003 blackout, the grid has been improved. link On the other hand, all the stupid windmills probably make the grid less robust.
NOAA, now this is grant money well spent. Don’t waste it and don’t abuse it. Keep politics out of it.
I wonder who’ll be watching this hen house.
Monitoring space weather is all well and good but what about space climate?
The universe is cooling!!!
What else would you expect from an anti-science administration?
Oh, wait a minute.
I guess the March for Science REALLY WAS effective.
Never underestimate Bill Nye. /sarc
Large damages? It’s all models.
These alarmists.
Have they ever predicTed one of these things? If not its not science. Popper said so.
Don’t they know that life needs the sun. It’s all good.
Am I reading this correctly?
The alarmists have so much confidence in their ability to predict our own planets weather/climate, they are arrogant enough to take on the universal climate?
Words fail me……….Obama administration. WTF? Of course the man wasn’t born in Kenya, he was born on another planet!
Space weather forecast:
Sunny.
I can’t even get a sun burn where I live.
Just back up your digital treasures like your finacial data, photo’s, video’s contracts, your Bit Coin Wallet etc. on optical media like a DVD instread of a magnetic data carrier.
A Carrington Event or an EMP will wipe out your magnetic stored data from harddisks to thumb drives.
Think about it.
https://youtu.be/S0LzPaT8Dwo
A Damning Factoid,”The Senate passed, via unanimous consent, the Space Weather Research and Forecasting Act. The bill cleared the Senate Commerce Committee in January, which had approved a similar bill in 2016.”
So, this was blocked by Obama! Was it Tren[d]berth, Hansen, Holdren or Gore who advocated the delay of this legislation! For their own … benefit!
“Be Careful there Mr. Hunter!”
http://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/cf652791-a00c-4784-8072-d94091f3ffea
Telegraph operators deserve hazardous duty pay.
Who volunteers to be on the road with a lot of self-driving cars around if a Carrington Event occurs?
The Carrington event occurred when electricity was still a plaything. There is plenty of evidence of the damage a similar event could do today. The solar storm event in 1989 took out the electrical grid in Québec and left 9 million people in the dark for 9 hours. It was only about 25% as intense as the Carrington event. Still it blew out a couple of high pore transformers in New Jersey I think it was. Lloyds of London speculated a solar event of Carrington magnitude would leave large parts of North America without power for up to a year. No small thing. Far more important than the worst predictions of the Alarmist Climate Change Crowd.
Ole Kim Jung Un will be glad to give us a demonstration of the effects of EMP if we give him a little more time to work on his design. Clinton, Bush and Obama gave him all the time he wanted, and now he’s almost there.
Not much the Senate does unanimously is worth doing, but this is.
The Grid has been an evolving thing. In 1965, I had a paper route (delivering newspapers to the doorstep…) and on Tuesday, November 9, 1965 a little after 5PM was on top of a hill overlooking Hartford, CT when I witnessed a sweeping wave of blackness wash through the valley below. That turned out to be the start of the 65 Northeast Blackout, 30 million without power for 13 hours.
Supposedly caused by a relay tripping near Niagara Falls. I believe that was the first major incident of that type. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965.
The aircheck of Don Ingram at WABC AM radio is interesting hear.
http://www.musicradio77.com/images/ing11-9-65blackout.mp3
For a well researched fiction novel on the effect of an EMP attack on the the US, read One Second After.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After
Perhaps there is some benefit in having aluminium foil sarking in the roof and walls.
At least you are in a partial Faraday’s cage.It might protect some equipment.
Good first step to protect the US electricity grid? Decentralize control! Far harder to knock out a system with 100s of control points than one with just 3.
IIRC, a previous similar bill was passed years ago, but only after being gutted and then stuffed with riders for pork barrel projects and “high priority needs”.
As always, but makes me wonder why Obama gutted it to begin with? He, being a rational man, and deferring to experts, I would have thought this would have been up and running by now. Politics…
I find the skepticism about the potential danger of CMEs extremely disturbing. There have been numerous scientific reports about the continental and global dangers over the past few years. Granted, these have tended to play down the worst scenarios by avoiding mention of the gruesome consequences long-term. And apparently, there is some considerable variation in the time required to replace large transformers. The initial figures I read were on the scale of 3 years for one, and that these had to be custom-made for the location on the grid. Here I see postings citing three months to a year, presumably to replace dozens!
The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that a) there are no spares, and b) no one presently manufactures such transformers in North America. How one would build such transformers without any existing infrastructure and without a functional national electrical grid has never been addressed, nor the question of how long a wait one could expect standing in line behind more favoured jurisdictions, starting with the countries where such transformers are currently fabricated.
It’s been estimated that water-cooled nuclear reactors might be able to run for a month on back-up power (assuming that was still functional) while off the grid before meltdown. How many people in the downwind, downstream region would still be alive after that grace period is anybody’s guess. Some states used to require storage of potassium iodide crystals by all pharmacies in case of a nuclear incident. Now that we know of the much greater threat, and are determinedly paying it lip service, maybe they should be stocking suicide kits, just in case…
What most amazes me even more is that the dangers of EMP is being questioned here. I recall when this first became a public issue, at least among PC users. At the time, it was reported that shielding against EMP was so expensive that only one of the presidential planes had been retrofitted. I was involved with a civil defense group in Western Canada at the time, and living in a region downwind from the nuclear submarine base in Washington State, and wondered how one would be warned against wind-borne fallout from the coast if all electrical communication were disrupted.
When I contacted the regional RCMP headquarters, I was told they had no shielding for EMP and no plan. When I made my concerns public, the regional civil defense director gathered all the emergency personnel and volunteers of my town for a meeting in which he ridiculed the whole idea of EMP disruption of communications systems. He was a Search and Rescue guy, and didn’t want his SAR budget diminished by any other concerns.
At that time, you could find laptop PCs with a milspec rating for EMP shielding on the market. Last time I searched, about a year ago, I couldn’t find anything of the sort. It’s unlikely in the extreme that the US military has stopped researching the effects of EMP and methods of protecting against it. So they certainly must know more about it than they did in Reagan’s time. But they seem to have silenced all news reports on such developments.
Skeptics should direct their ire in that direction.