Sunpocalypse 2013: “Nasa Warns Solar Flares From ‘Huge Space Storm’ Will Cause Devastation” – Daily Telegraph
18/06/2010
The Telegraph has conducted an interview with Dr Richard Fisher, who we mentioned back on the 6th in reference to his involvement with the Space Weather Enterprise Forum.
“Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.
“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa’s Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.”
…but not actual devastation per-se. In fact nowhere does Fisher suggest that the storms might cause devastation, only “potentially devastating problems for governments”; a distinction lost on the Telegraph in its pursuit of an attention grabbing headline.
Although disruption in 2013 is inevitable, there isn’t yet a solid consensus on, to quote Dr Fisher, “how bad it’s going to be”. It’ll certainly be interesting to watch not only how the impending problem is studied, but also how it is reported / sensationalised. Of course the Telegraph’s exaggeration pales to a shade of almost-credible against the Mail’s dire predictions. Michael Hanlon’s 2009 article shrieks: “MELTDOWN! A SOLAR SUPERSTORM COULD SEND US BACK INTO THE DARK AGES, AND ONE IS DUE IN JUST THREE YEARS”.
Fucking Hell! But it gets worse as: “Pillars of incandescent green writhe like gigantic serpents across the skies” and “The dead go unburied, the sick untreated”; according to Hanlon at least (more of Hanlon here). If this nightmare world is simply too awful to visualise, the Mail has provided this helpful picture:
The problems presented by the 2013 solar activity are not insurmountable, and events like the Space Weather Enterprise Forum are an encouraging sign that proactive steps can, and are, being taken. The sad irony is that bullshit reporting of the issue will exacerbate consumer and investor fears relating to the storm’s impact. As we have seen in the last few years, flawed, misconceived and distorted assessments of economic risk can also have a ‘devastating’ impact.
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