I love Wired magazine - it's far and away the magazine that best mixes serious substance, great writing and straight-up fun into one package. Of course, this article in Wired isn't so much "fun" as it is downright frightening:
For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that's exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.
Entitled "Severe Space Weather Events - Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts," it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy that could disrupt Earth's magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United States "$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year," concluded the panel, and "full recovery could take 4 to 10 years." That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages.
Not surprisingly, the rest of the media has been far more interersted in covering Barack Obama's portuguese water dog and his hugely important decision to eat a hamburger than in bothering to do any examination of this situation. I say "not surprisingly" because this is par for the course. I'm guessing you hadn't seen this tiny classified-ad-sized story about a meteor that came with a few thousand miles of creating a nuclear-bomb-sized blast. I'm guessing that while you did know about Bo's jaunts on the White House lawn, you didn't see this report about NASA reseachers saying another meteor that could create a blast 100,000 times stronger than Hiroshima has a chance of hitting earth in 2036.
I mention all of this because it's not like public policy can't do anything about these potential sci-fi-meets-real-world scenarios. It can - especially in the case of solar flares:
Kappenman: What we're proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive resistors in the transformers' ground onnections. The addition of that little bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid.
Wired.com: How much would it cost?
Kappenman: We're still at the conceptual design phase, but we think it's do-able for $40,000 or less per resistor. That's less than what you pay for insurance for a transformer...If you're talking about the United States, there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for. The Electromagnetic Pulse Commission recommended it in a report they sent to Congress last year. We're talking about $150 million or so. It's pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
It is pretty small - but you get the sense from our wholly ridiculous and vacuous political/media debate, it's exactly those kind of commonsense and future-looking proposals we ignore.
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