Tinfoil hats for everyone
And I personally will be firing up the valve wireless to listen on longwave for when it's safe to take them off.
When it comes to catastrophic space weather, the UK is holding a cocktail umbrella
The UK's National Audit Office (NAO) has warned the country is underprepared for a severe space weather event. While the report commends the UK's forecasting abilities, even if overall resilience lags, it also highlights more that needs to be done in both areas to handle a severe space weather event. Recent solar storms have …
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Monday 23rd March 2026 08:26 GMT Pete 2
Standard response
> government has little idea of how to respond in the event of a major solar storm
1.) deny there is a problem
2.) admit there might be one, but say it won't affect the UK
3.) say that even if it does affect the UK, it won't cause any damage
4.) inform the country that while it will cause harm, it's too late to do anything
5.) praise the volunteers who get off their arses and assist in repairing the after-effects
6.) hold an inquiry and promise "lessons will be learned"
7.) 10 years later ... inquiry blames the previous government for not being prepared
8.) taxes go up to pay for wholly inadequate and inappropriate precautions for the next one
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Monday 23rd March 2026 10:11 GMT Like a badger
Re: Standard response
I think "solar flares threaten life as we know it" makes for great headlines and clickbait, the reality is that despite a handful of grid outages some decades back, grids all around the world have been impressively resilient when it comes to the recent solar events in 2024 and 2025, including the G5 event in November 2024. I'd suggest the UK government have a long list of far more pressing problems that deserve their attention.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:21 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Standard response
I'd suggest the UK government have a long list of far more pressing problems that deserve their attention.
But a Carrington repeat could be very disruptive, and very expensive. But it's also something government and industry have been working on, and planning for. Some years ago, I was invited to a CNI review about this stuff and the potential impact & responses on telecomms networks. Carrington had the stories about the impact on the telegraph system, we don't use those and don't have long wires. Well, with the exception of some order or locator wires. But they're usually earthed at regen sites, or subsea. Plus sometimes used by researchers because a lot of the terrestrial issues from big storms are geomagnetically iinduced currents, which scientists can use to learn more about the big dynamo we live on*.
But-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2024_solar_storms#Impact
Which was a big flare where we could observe the impacts. Plus lessons learned from previous CMEs, ie Quebec power didn't get knocked out this time. And power is probably the biggest risk, ie an X-class flare could potentially do damage over a larger area than Trump, Putin or Netanyahu can manage. Plus thanks to their antics and kinetic diplomacy, there are shortages and very long lead times for electricity grid components. But one of the biggest risks is to satellites and the GPS disruption reported. Those are known risks, and operators monitor the space weather centres for forecasts. Also a bit curious now if GPS disruption lead to NTP disruption given network clocks are often derived from GPS.
So it's kind of in-hand, providing we maintain the space weather forecasting services. Which doesn't necessarily mean the UK should invest in our own, although it's a fascinating subject. One curious aspect to the Carrington Event was this bit from Wiki-
Typical CMEs take several days to arrive at Earth, but it is believed that the relatively high speed of this CME was made possible by a prior CME, perhaps the cause of the large aurora event on 29 August that "cleared the way" of ambient solar wind plasma for the Carrington Event.
Which is.. not exactly a scientific explanation, but having chatted with some solar physicists, they don't really know. It's possible the previous CME left a charged path so the Carrington flare could jump faster. But main impact would be less warning time to duck. I mean prepare. There's also some other risks, ie a DEC engineer once showed me an electron microscope image of a crater in a dead Alpha CPU caused by a high energy cosmic 'ray' hitting it. Chips have shrunk a lot since then, so more transistors to potentially get blasted by a stray SEP (Solar Energetic Particle), which is another challenge people who want to build orbital datacentres will have to deal with.
*Sadly we don't have cables running through the SAA (South Atlantic Anomaly), which is a fascinating part of the world for both its geomagnetic and gravity effects. But mostly penguins and scientists living in it.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 12:19 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: While a repeat of the Carrington Event...
humanity could easily survive a repeat.
Likely true but also likely a pretty (in)decent proportion of that humanity might perish - specifically those living in developed nations depending on technology trashed by such an event for the the luxuries of potable water, food, heating, medicines and medical services, and cooling and heating; damaged supply chains and all the rest.
The NAO might have right idea: get a few cases of gin, crates of tonic and lots of cocktail umbrellas and watch the Sun go down on civilization from your deck chair.
Reminded me of the ill Morse quoting Housman to Lewis while quaffing an ale in a beer garden at the end of a day:
Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.
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