The Gore-ian panic about "Climate Change" (as it's being called now, since it's obviously NOT warming) is ebbing a bit. Not enough at this point, but it's remarkable what a collapsing world economy and a growing mass of contrary evidence will do to an idea that was never based on a proper understanding of natural processes in the first place.
As we wait to see if the leftists and the UN can successfully destroy the First World production base and economies, here's a (real) potential catastrophe we could actually be starting to do something to prevent.
Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.
The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.
Coronal Mass Ejections are not the product of some politically motivated agitator's agenda, but they are (at least on our time scale) rare. The benchmark is the Carrington event of 1859 and anything that can cause auroras at the equator has to be bad news for our electronics.
Technology trap anyone? We're certainly in one; 6.7B people can't be supported by a pre-industrial base, something that the Luddites at the UN and places like the Suzuki Foundation may or may not be thinking about as they work toward dismantling the cultures and economies that have gotten us this far.
My point is that we are wasting a lot of time, effort and money to prevent something that likely is beyond our influence, let alone whether it is actually a bad thing. A lot of people who actually know what they're talking about think we need more CO2 in the atmosphere, but I'll leave that for the moment. There are things we need to worry about, that have concrete solutions to them. I will go on record as saying that it is far more likely that our civilization could be brought to collapse by a big-ass solar flare than by the effects of respiration.
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