For those of us who have the time to spend thinking about what is going on in the world, contemplating the future can be terribly depressing. Earth’s climate seems to be using its increasing energy to make life miserable: melting ice, dryer droughts, hotter heatwaves, wetter floods, and fiercer winds. Surviving the COVID pandemic merely reminds us how much worse the next one might be. Our civilization is ever more rapidly polluting the planet with dangerous chemicals. We may some day eliminate the burning of fossil fuels, but it will be lot harder to stop using them to make chemicals like those in plastics that are growing in concentration everywhere, including within our own bodies. The geopolitical trends are scary. We appear to be experiencing a redo of the 1930s when fascism arose and tried to control the world. Fascism is on the rise again, but this time it appears much stronger. The United States which led us to victory previously now struggles with the rise of fascism in its own country.
Apparently, there are additional horrible things possible. Kathryn Schulze tells us in a New Yorker article, What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet, that wind, snow and rain are not the only components of storms that put us at risk. Now we must worry about solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
Our sun is an ongoing thermonuclear explosion. It rotates in space and possesses a magnetic field. Since it is a plasma without a rigid structure, its dynamics can produce unstable concentrations of energy that can initiate the ejection of radiation and plasma charged particles into space, and occasionally toward the Earth. The world first took notice of such an event in 1859. It became known as the Carrington Event.
“The first such storm to cause us trouble took place in 1859. In late August, the aurora borealis, which is normally visible only in polar latitudes, made a series of unusual appearances: in Havana, Panama, Rome, New York City. Then, in early September, the aurora returned with such brilliance that gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up at night and began making breakfast, and disoriented birds greeted the nonexistent morning.”
“This lovely if perplexing phenomenon had an unwelcome corollary: around the globe, telegraph systems went haywire. Many stopped working entirely, while others sent and received ‘fantastical and unreadable messages,’ as the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin put it. At some telegraph stations, operators found that they could disconnect their batteries and send messages via the ambient current, as if the Earth itself had become an instant-messaging system.”
“Owing to a lucky coincidence, all these anomalies were soon linked to their likely cause. At around noon on September 1st, the British astronomer Richard Carrington was outside sketching a group of sunspots when he saw a burst of light on the surface of the sun: the first known observation of a solar flare. When accounts of the low-latitude auroras started rolling in, along with reports that magnetometers—devices that measure fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field—had surged so high they maxed out their recording capabilities, scientists began to suspect that the strange things happening on Earth were related to the strange thing Carrington had seen on the sun.”
These events occurred at a time when our civilization was not critically susceptible to electromagnetic events imposed on the Earth by the sun. Subsequent events did occur over time, but none were as large as the Carrington Event. However, as civilization became more complex, it was recognized that the potential for massive damage was increasing. Eventually, scientists would put their knowledge in a form that would warn the world what could happen.
“…space weather remained a mostly marginal subject until 2008, when the National Academy of Sciences convened a group of experts to assess the nation’s capacity to endure its terrestrial effects. Later that year, the N.A.S. published a report on the findings, ‘Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts’.”
“The title was dry; the contents were not. The report noted that the Earth hadn’t experienced a Carrington-size storm during the space age, or, for that matter, during the age of widespread electrification, and that much of the country’s critical infrastructure seemed unlikely to withstand one. Extensive damage to satellites would compromise everything from communications to national security, while extensive damage to the power grid would compromise everything: health care, transportation, agriculture, emergency response, water and sanitation, the financial industry, the continuity of government.”
“The report estimated that recovery from a Carrington-class storm could take up to a decade and cost many trillions of dollars.”
That report got peoples’ attention. Studies were initiated and directives were issued requiring the entities most at risk to prepare to weather a significant solar storm. Any such preparations are complicated by the interactions of our electromagnetic systems, but progress is undoubtedly being made. Perhaps an analogy can be drawn with the frequent climate-change predictions dealing with the complex Earth system. Such modeling predicts what is going to happen, but it was far off in predicting how fast change would come. One might be suspicious that anyone can predict all the effects of a major solar storm. One might also be suspicious that anywhere near the money and effort required to protect our technology will be allocated.
Just one more thing to worry about.
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