Posted on 07/24/2014 10:11:00 AM PDT by BenLurkin
On July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere. These plasma clouds, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years.
“If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado tells NASA.
...
Analysts believe that a direct hit … could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps.
. . .
According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina. Multi-ton transformers damaged by such a storm might take years to repair.
CWG’s Steve Tracton put it this way in his frightening overview of the risks of a severe solar storm: “The consequences could be devastating for commerce, transportation, agriculture and food stocks, fuel and water supplies, human health and medical facilities, national security, and daily life in general.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
ping
Okay, and they still believe that “global warming” is man-made when the sun can put out coronal masses like this?
Mm-hm.
OK, so what does the professor suggest other than give him money to study the problem?
I don’t think I’ll wring my hands or worry too much about this.
Originally heard about this on Coast to Coast, it is deadly serious. If we had an event like what happened in the 1860’s it would seriously cripple us for many years.
The plain truth is that nobody knows how much or how little damage would be done. The scope of the effect is so broad and diffuse it is impossible to know which specific devices or components of the infrastructure would fail and which would not. This is the same problem as speculating about the effect of an EMP, even as the impact of a solar CME is distinctly different than that of an EMP. (primarily that a CME induces direct current in long wires and an EMP is a pulse with a very sharp rise time and induces a voltage spike that does the damage.)
There seems to be a common theme that revolves around disaster phenomena — interruption of water supply.
Stock up one gallon of water per person, per day — for however many days it will take for water service to be restored.
How many days is that? No way of knowing. Better to have water stored and not need it than to need water and not have it.
Someone need study the handcrafting of tools used prior to the industrial revolution. We will need those tools someday.
But it didn’t.
A Carrington event today would kill 50-90% of the population within a year...
>> If we had an event like what happened in the 1860’s it would seriously cripple us for many years. <<
More than that. All of us who don’t raise our own food would probably starve to death within a few months.
Yup.
"We all are gonna die! Or Maybe not!" Whatever.
Most people think we’d go back to the 19th century. Horses, buggies, real letters instead of email, that sort of thing.
But no one knows how to build a loom anymore. No one knows how to farm without tractors. We are not prepared to process food near where it is raised. The railroads??? Fuel problems, maintenance, etc...
We wouldn’t go back to the 19th century.
We’d go back to the 6th century!
Preppers’ PING!!
Hat tip to BenLurkin for the heads-up!
What people need to realize is that evolution happens ... It’s a fact of life that supersedes religious dogma.
“No one knows how to farm without tractors.”
There does not exist a “reservoir” of horses, esp. those of the “draft” breeds; IATW, ditto in re tillage, seeding and harvesting machinery suitable for live horse power.
As a child/youth, I worked on a number of Minn./Wis. farms, powered exclusively by horses for routine field operations.
it’s like trying to hit a fly on the far side of the moon with a spit ball
I have been assured by a number of knowledgeable FReepers that there is no such thing as EMP or CME its all just a gimmick to raise money for studies.
One told me if there was such a thing as EMP because the lightening is the same thing and it doesn’t knock all the power out.
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