Why the Next Carrington Event Will Be Deadlier than Climate Change
So basically when it comes to what used quaintly to be called “the environment” there’s the dreaded climate change monster and then some other silly stuff like pollution.
And even sillier responses like banning plastic straws. But at the risk of being denialists, delayerists or distractionists or something, we do want to point to a giant solar flare. Specifically, the Epoch Times reports.
“The sun emitted a powerful solar flare on Oct. 3, according to NASA, prompting the Space Weather Prediction Center to issue a Geomagnetic Storm Watch due to the forecasted arrival of coronal mass ejections.”
Yeah yeah yeah back to that existential threat to life on Earth, CO2. But a few climate history geeks who remember the Carrington Event might spare a thought for other things.
When we say “who remember” we mean from a book or something, not personally, because the Carrington Event happened in 1859. Yes, kids, before the Internet.
Before the radio. Before even the plug-in telephone. But the telegraph had been invented some 15 years earlier, and many operators felt briefly like Hezbollah operatives as their devices sparked and sputtered and gave shocks.
It remains “the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history”, or so Wikipedia says. Though as always our first response is “How do you know?”
By what standard would you compare earlier ones, whose only real symptom would have been spectacular auroras borealis and australis? So spectacular, in fact, that there are accounts of gold miners in the Rockies getting up and starting to make breakfast believing it was the dawn.
So probably someone would have written it down if there’d been (a) a similar earlier event and (b) writing.
People have written down later ones, including several in the mid-20th century that did cause widespread radio disruption. But imagine something of this magnitude hitting today and pulverising the satellites and microchips on which we depend. Again citing Wikipedia:
“In June 2013, a joint venture from researchers at Lloyd’s of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in the US used data from the Carrington Event to estimate the cost of a similar event in the present to the US alone at US$600 billion to $2.6 trillion (equivalent to $774 billion to $3.35 trillion in 2023), which, at the time, equated to roughly 3.6 to 15.5 percent of annual GDP.”
Which sounds like a lot even given the margin of uncertainty.
This one isn’t in that class, fortunately. It is however an X9.0 flare, X being the strongest class and 9 meaning pretty strong within that class. But there was an X8.7 on May 14 and it didn’t burn the place down. Still, there are times when your Internet seems slow and it’s not just your provider. As the Epoch Times added:
“Radiation from the recent flare could lead to ‘strong degradation or signal loss in high-frequency (HF) communication bands over much of the sunlit side of Earth,’ according to the NOAA.”
And what if it were bigger, off the top of the scale like the Carrington, which by some estimates was an X15 and by others an X45?
So now consider this question: How much money, and time, has your government devoted to hardening critical infrastructure against such an event, including with “Faraday Cages” (try asking a politician what those even are) as opposed to the direct and indirect costs the politicians have imposed to save us from plant food and a projected minor increase in temperature?
For that matter, how much has it devoted to air pollution, water pollution, habitat loss and so on? Overfishing? Urban sprawl? Light pollution? Climate change has sucked far too much of the oxygen, or CO2, out of the room despite being a highly speculative problem with highly speculative potential impacts far down the road.
Solar flares, on the other hand, get here from the sun in a couple of days or, if it’s Carrington-like about three quarters of a day. Not much time to prepare, if you previously just dawdled and got distracted and banned “single-use” plastic grocery bags that people used to repurpose as trash bags so now they go buy single-use trash bags and you achieved nothing.
P.S. One more thing that jumps out like a solar flare is just how little we know about when, why or how the sun might suddenly unleash such a blast. So the science of solar climate is anything but settled… just like here on Earth.
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