Slashdot Mirror
An Exercise To Model a "Solar Radiation Katrina"
Hugh Pickens writes in with an update on the warnings we discussed a year back about the dangers of a "solar Katrina." Now NPR is reporting on a tabletop exercise mounted in Boulder, Colorado by government workers attempting to model the effects of a worst-case solar electromagnetic storm. "...an exercise held in Boulder, Colorado, has investigated what might happen if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859 — a sort of solar Katrina — and researchers found that the impact is likely to be far worse than in previous solar storms because of our growing dependence on satellites and other electronic devices that are vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation. 'In many ways, the impact of a major solar storm resembles that of a hurricane or an earthquake,' says FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, except that a solar Katrina would cause damage in a much larger area — power could be knocked out almost simultaneously in countries from Sweden to Canada and the US. In the exercise, the first sign of trouble came when radiation began disrupting radio signals and GPS devices, says Tom Bogdan, who directs the Space Weather Prediction Center. Ten or 20 minutes later electrically charged particles 'basically took out' most of the commercial satellites that transmit telephone conversations, TV shows, and huge amounts of data we depend on in our daily lives. But the worst damage came nearly a day later, when the solar storm began to induce electrical currents in high voltage power lines strong enough to destroy transformers around the globe, leaving millions of people in northern latitudes without power."
Um, 100 million people without power for a few months is a much bigger deal than a few tens of thousands who chose to live below sea level, or chose to stop insuring their house when they no longer owed any payments on it.
The key problem about the flare is the rate of production of transformers -- it would be literally months before much of the northern part of the US and Canada got power back.
If that happens during the winter, you're talking a LOT of people freezing to death.
The "Katrina" metaphor is comparing the impact of the disasters on our society. A big solar storm could be much more widespread and damaging than previous blackouts, and end up killing quite a few people. Nobody's suggesting that it will literally cause floods and random physical destruction.
So if only a quarter of the planet is left powerless for weeks or months during the winter, this would somehow be less severe than a single city getting flooded?
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
There would be almost no impact. The solar Storm would affect long pieces of conductive material 20+ meters in length.
Asia and Africa lose electricity and there goes all those lovely cell phones, or any phones. Asian cities lose power to keep those sewage plants and water supplies running and disease starts taking hold in a big way. Asia loses electricity and you can't even use trains very effectively because you use electricity to control traffic, so food and medicine supplies are diminished.
Thinking this would only effect white people in Europe and the Americas is racist nonsense. Thinking that people in Asia and Africa don't depend on electricity and petroleum as much as Europeans and people in the Americas is potentially dangerous delusion.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
nobody is going to be rewinding transformers like macgyver. that's a serious buttload of skilled work, with equipment and supplies that is not easily at hand
furthermore, the canada disruption you are referring to is tiny in comparison to a carrington effect-level event. it won't be days at most, but weeks at a minimum. we simply haven't invested in the transformers protection or backup or the transformer repair skill/ capacity
and no one is saying people will just be sitting around twiddling their thumbs. in fact, some will be emphatically looting. and the police cruisers will soon run out of gas since most stations use electric gas pumps. nevermind that after the generators die in a few days/ hours, communications will be down across radio, television, and internet, so the police, and the population, will be left to guess what is going on and when everything will be back to normal. throw in a little hysteria, and you can imagine the results in major cities
people WILL freeze to death, simply because they will NOT just sit around, but panic and venture out in the cold out of complete ignorance and fright
do you consider me alarmist? out of intellectual honesty, i will say it is possible i am straying too far into alarmism in my comments
however, to whatever degree i am straying into alarmism, you are straying much further and much more dangerously into complacency on this issue, that is for sure. in other words, your complacency here is far more dangerous than my alarmism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you live in a colder climate, it might be better to just buy the generator. Burning those stock certificates will only keep you warm for a short while.