Why Another Carrington-Class Event Should Scare You
A few days of solar fireworks were all it took to remind us of a basic truth: the universe is not a friendly place
During the recent severe solar storms, auroras spilled far beyond their usual Arctic haunts, glowing over much of Europe and the continental United States, with displays reported as far south as Florida and the U.S. Southwest.
Here in Colorado, the sky looked like it had been hacked… bands of red, purple, and green flickering overhead while most people scrolled past the headlines about “pretty northern lights.”
But behind that beauty is a blunt reality: we live on a small rock orbiting a variable star that occasionally hurls billion-ton clouds of plasma at us at a million kilometers per hour (that’s over 600,000 miles per hour).
We pour trillions into so-called ‘climate change’ while doing comparatively little to harden our societies against solar storms, super-eruptions, or asteroid impacts… events that will happen again, regardless of how many heat pumps we install.
This piece is about one of those real threats: solar storms.
Space Weather 101: What Is a Solar Storm?
The Sun is not a steady light bulb; it’s a magnetic, boiling, fusing monster.
Solar storms are bursts of energy and particles launched into space when the Sun’s magnetic field snaps and reconnects. The main players:
- Solar flares: Intense flashes of radiation, like X-rays and ultraviolet, that can disrupt radio communications almost instantly on the sunlit side of Earth.
- Coronal mass ejections (CMEs): Huge bubbles of magnetized plasma, billions of tons of charged particles, thrown into space at high speed. If one is aimed at Earth, it can slam into our magnetic field and trigger a geomagnetic storm.
- Solar energetic particles (SEPs): Very fast, high-energy particles that can damage satellites and pose a radiation risk to astronauts and high-altitude flights.
Solar activity follows an ~11-year cycle. We’re now still near the peak of Solar Cycle 25, which is why we’ve seen a cluster of strong storms and low-latitude auroras in 2024–2025.
Earth’s Magnetic Shield: Our Invisible Life Insurance
If not for Earth’s magnetic field, the May 2024 and 2025 storms would not have just meant pretty sky shows; they would have been a biological and technological catastrophe.
Earth’s field is generated by the geodynamo in the liquid outer core: convecting molten iron creates electric currents, which in turn generate a global magnetic field.
That field carves out a protective bubble in the solar wind called the magnetosphere, deflecting most charged particles around the planet and funneling some into the polar regions, where they ignite the aurora.
Where that natural shield is strong, life thrives. When it weakens, history gets interesting.
In my earlier piece “Pole Shifts and Climate Change: Why Geomagnetic Shifts Don’t Fit the Narrative,” I discussed the Laschamps Excursion ~42,000 years ago, when Earth’s magnetic field collapsed to less than ~six percent of its present strength, likely triggering ozone depletion, increased radiation, climate anomalies, and extinctions.
And it’s not just ancient history. Over the last ~200 years, Earth’s magnetic field has weakened by roughly nine percent, and the magnetic north pole has sped up, racing toward Siberia… changes scientists track closely because they may signal another excursion.
A new paper published this month in Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors uses 11 years of ESA’s Swarm satellite data to map these changes in unprecedented detail.
They show that the well-known South Atlantic Anomaly, a weak patch in the field over South America and the South Atlantic, has not only expanded eastward but has been weakening more rapidly since about 2020, creating a growing “soft spot” that exposes satellites to higher radiation.
At the same time, the field has strengthened over Siberia while another strong region over Canada has shrunk, helping drive the ongoing drift of the magnetic pole toward Siberia.
In other words, the core field is not slowly and politely changing; it’s evolving in complex, regionally sharp ways that our satellites are only now resolving. When you zoom out beyond the IPCC’s CO₂ tunnel vision, you see a planet whose magnetic shield is dynamic, patchy, and alarmingly fragile.
I’ve also written about longer-term natural cycles and abrupt climate shifts in “Earth’s Forgotten Pulse: The 4,000-Year Cycle That Could Change Everything,” where the point was simple: Earth’s system has powerful with recurring shocks baked in… most having nothing to do with CO₂.
Solar storms sit right in that category: real, recurring, and not something you can tax, regulate, or hashtag away.
The Carrington Event: A Preview of a Very Bad Day
To understand why the recent storms should be a wake-up call, we have to go back to 1859.
In early September of that year, British astronomer Richard Carrington observed an intense white-light flare on the Sun. About 17 hours later, a massive Coronal Mass Ejection slammed into Earth’s magnetosphere, triggering the largest geomagnetic storm in recorded history… the Carrington Event.
What happened?
- Auroras were seen near the tropics, not just the poles.
- Telegraph lines threw sparks; some caught fire.
- Operators could send messages with their batteries disconnected, using only the current induced by the storm in the wires.
In 1859, the world’s “grid” was a few telegraph networks. Today it’s a global web of high-voltage power lines, transformers, internet backbones, satellites, GPS, aviation, and just-in-time supply chains.
Yet we behave as if the only threat to “the climate” is a trace gas rising from 0.03 to 0.04 percent of the atmosphere.
How We Measure Solar Storms: The NOAA G-Scale
Space-weather scientists track geomagnetic activity using indices like Kp (a 0–9 scale of global magnetic disturbance). NOAA translates that into a user-friendly G-scale for geomagnetic storms:
Recent storms have hit the G4–G5 range, with auroras seen over huge swaths of the U.S. and Europe and documented disturbances to GPS-dependent equipment, including high-tech tractors in the American Midwest that temporarily went haywire.
These were, in a sense, “dress rehearsals.”
The Latest Storms: Beautiful… and a Warning
On November 11–13, 2025, a chain of powerful coronal mass ejections slammed into Earth’s magnetic field and triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm of 2025 so far. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center hoisted a G4 (Severe) storm watch, and by late on November 12 G4 levels were confirmed, with Kp values pushing into the 8+ range.
The result was a light show almost nobody alive has seen before. Auroras rippled over most of North America and Europe, with rare sightings reported from states like Texas, Florida, and California, and even into northern Mexico.
Here in Colorado, the sky over the plains and Front Range lit up in red and green curtains… so striking that NOAA used a shot from northeastern Colorado in their official G4 storm alert.
Despite the intensity, this storm was still a near miss in terms of damage. We saw HF radio blackouts, GPS glitches, and increased radiation exposure for satellites and high-altitude flights… but, so far, no major grid failures or long-duration blackouts have been confirmed.
In other words: spectacular auroras, relatively modest consequences. So far, we’ve been lucky. Lots of color, limited damage.
But the odds aren’t comforting. Multiple analyses suggest that the chance of a Carrington-class event in any given decade is not zero and not tiny. Classic work by Pete Riley and later summaries from the Royal Academy of Engineering argue that a Carrington-scale “superstorm” could have odds on the order of ~10–12 percent per century, or about one percent per decade, depending on assumptions.
And remember: solar storms are only one of the natural shocks Earth can see… alongside super-volcanoes, abrupt climate shifts, and asteroid impacts.
Yet our political class remains fixated almost exclusively on ‘greenhouse gases’, as if the planet warming by a degree or two over a century could cause our extinction… while the Sun keeps reminding us that it can flip the table in a single night.
See more here substack.com
Header image: Wikipedia