Thursday, August 1, 2013

"Massive solar flare narrowly misses Earth, EMP disaster barely avoided,"

"The world escaped an EMP catastrophe," said Henry Cooper, who led strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union under President Reagan, and who now heads High Frontier, a group pushing for missile defense. "There had been a near miss about two weeks ago, a Carrington-class coronal mass ejection crossed the orbit of the Earth and basically just missed us," said Peter Vincent Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Threat Commission from 2001-2008. He was referring to the 1859 EMP named after astronomer Richard Carrington that melted telegraph lines in Europe and North America. "Basically this is a Russian roulette thing," added Pry. "We narrowly escape from a Carrington-class disaster."

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mike, I'd take this with a grain of salt.

My son the astronomer sees no evidence that anything on that scale happened recently. The data just doesn't show anything of the sort.

Keeping it "secret" or faking the data would be next to impossible since solar, magnetic, and radio propagation observations are generated by a lot of different countries and widely available to scientists as well as the public. Given the scale of the claimed event, we would have seen a lot of effects even if the main CME gas cloud missed us.

What they're advocating for is legit. The grid is hideously vulnerable to EMP or CME events, but as far as we can tell, this report amounts to exaggeration for effect rather than honest information.

FYI.

AJ said...

Hopefully the next one is a direct hit on the NSA datacenter in Utah.

Anonymous said...

A Carrington Event happening today is no laughing matter.

It might as well be mother nature hitting the ultimate "Restart" button on all of us worldwide.

Anonymous said...

Russian roulette thing! W-T-F!! (over).
And since WHEN is two weeks "a near miss"?
And from some of the more informed posts at the article, a solar flare is NOT the same as an EMP. A solar flare will induce over-voltages in power lines and fry anything plugged into it. An EMP will induce an over-voltage in the atmosphere and fry all electronics, plugged in or not.

SO, from this article, I learned two things:
#1 - (high pitched female voice in panic) "Oh noes, teh sky is falling! Save us, oh, save us, Big Brother."

#2 - (deeper masculine voice) "Don't worry, little serf. I'm from the Gubbment, and I'm here to help you. Just give me ALL your money."

B Woodman
III-per


Anonymous said...

This is gonna be a "sooner or later" event, regardless. But we Americans have the knowledge, technology and wealth to largely avoid its debilitating consequences. Do we have the will remains to be seen. >Jeff