At CDN one of our many bugbears is geoengineering. It seems very odd to argue that because humans can break the planet by accident we can fix it on purpose. And we also don’t understand why the enthusiasts believe the weather in 1970, or 1870, or 1770 was just right or how they think they know. But we’re also exasperated by hypocrisy and double standards, so we want to give the knucklebone shampoo to our friends at the Wall Street Journal for their proposal to fix a very real danger, namely a solar storm capable of bringing down the interwebs, with elaborate geoengineering where we go into space to block the sun instead of going into the warehouse to protect our server.
The proposal, which comes from their modestly-named “The Future of Everything” newsletter and is written by, um, a reporter who “covers the music industry for The Wall Street Journal’s entertainment bureau in Los Angeles”, starts badly then goes downhill from there. The opener is:
“Scientists are cooking up a radical new plan to protect Earth from a dangerously stormy sun.”
Oh yes? Which sun would that be? Last we heard, admittedly being Earth-centric, there’s only one sun though there are many stars that some alien or another might call “the sun” in Alienese. And is it “dangerously stormy”?
Actually yes. Like most of nature, very broadly conceived, it’s a turbulent place prone to doing wacky scary stuff. Not a Disney movie. And not like the climate alarmists’ bizarre belief that the weather was always nice until Henry Ford invented the Model T, or Nicholas Otto created the four-stroke engine or whenever “pre-industrial times” ended. Solar storms are real and massive. And the last real doozy wreaked havoc even before the radio was invented. The 1859 “Carrington Event“ gave some telegraph operators electric shocks and let others send messages after disconnecting their batteries, and created such a glow in the sky that some people thought the sun was rising rather than raging.
If the same thing had happened in 1959 it might well have blown people’s TV sets across the living room and forced them to return to reading books, arguably a benefit. But it didn’t. And we really don’t know how common powerful “geomagnetic storms“ are or how irregular their periodicity.
As we have noted repeatedly, a key problem in determining whether some unusually intense flood, drought or other weather phenomenon was unusual is that the more irregular a phenomenon is, the longer a time series you need to know what counts as “regular” and we don’t have those for a great many things including geomagnetic storms. One was noted scientifically by Alexander von Humboldt in the early 19th century and, ominously, it lasted from May 1806 to June 1807. Rather a while to go without online banking, what?
Indeed, with our just-in-time brittle economy losing the internet for a week might well cause mass death. If you think supermarkets have backup plans to get food onto the shelf without email, online spreadsheets and so forth, you are living in some alien world that actually does have superior foresight. Here on Earth, not so much.
Which brings us back to the WSJ. The item says “In case of a once-in-a-century civilization-smashing solar storm heading toward the human planet” and yes, it would be civilization-smashing. Though they’re clearly not “once-in-a-century” because we haven’t had one since 1859. But the author is right to worry.
Just not this way:
“a trio of researchers have a proposal: Far out in space, a half-dozen school-bus-size satellites crack open and start dumping barium, lithium or sodium. Within minutes, sunlight transforms this material into an ionized gas shield that slows the oncoming massive blob of plasma.”
Or not. We don’t really know how school-bus-sized loads of some metallic element or another interact with poorly-understood geomagnetic storms even if gee-whiz prose by a music reporter makes it sound as if we do. And how much does it slow the blob, and for how long? If the dang thing goes on for a year, we’re going to need a lot of busses.
And money, since, as she notes, “it would likely cost tens of billions of dollars.” Likely? No, that’s the one certain thing in the story. And here’s the one certain thing about the whole idea: it’s completely wrong.
The vulnerability of modern electronics to intense radiation has actually been understood for quite a long time. One ugly nuclear-war scenario is that a hostile power detonates about half a dozen well-placed bombs high up above us, and the resulting “Electromagnetic Pulse” or “EMP” fries all our microchips so nothing works from our power plants to our cars to our own nuclear weapons. Pearl Harbor times ten and it works. So what have our governments done?
Nothing, of course. Not even bought a bus full of barium. But what they should be doing, and not only them, is shielding crucial control mechanisms in “Faraday cages”, known since Michael Faraday made one in 1836 so not exactly new-fangled like the barium satellite bus. They encase something sensitive in a conductive mesh which essentially divert the radiation around the protected target.
The point here isn’t just the specifics, though we’re more confident that they work than that ionized anti-plasma-blob space clouds do. It’s that they are ductile not brittle in the crucial engineering sense, because they are created and deployed in a decentralized way. Not for, say, the US nuclear missile arsenal, which surprisingly seems to have robust anti-EMP measures despite being a centralized government program though much of the US conventional arsenal and its logistical system is not. But what about the civilian infrastructure? (Especially since wherever aliens live, friendly or hostile, it’s not the sun, so we can’t shoot back at a geomagnetic storm.)
Here one tends to think of power plants, water pumping stations and so forth and yes, they’re absurdly vulnerable. But no modern automobile can function without its chips nor obviously, can your cellphone. How do you communicate in the event of another Carrington event? Prayer reaches God, but for the rest, if you even have a windup radio, will it still work?
If not, you have two choices. Wait for the magic space bus, or make sure your local authorities and you personally have something in place before the microwave starts to glow along with the sky.
Local adaptation is, we hasten to add, a general approach that is broadly advisable for all kinds of problems including environmental ones. The best way to protect a river is to give riparian landowners property rights over the water and a tort remedy against polluters, for instance. It’s not blanket national legislation by governments prone to bending rules for their big donors or key industries. And if rising temperatures are a problem, getting an AC unit beats the government trying to screen out the sun as has, again, been seriously suggested, almost certainly wouldn’t work, and would almost certainly bring disaster if it did.
seriously?!? We cannot worry about everything at once. I regard Islamism, illegal immigration and leftists as far more immediate threats to humanity than friggin solar storms or carbon dioxide! Please do not even start with the snicker, snicker imminent threat of halocarbons