One topic I’m studying for my main client, the Open Philanthropy Project, is the risk of geomagnetic storms. I hadn’t heard of them either. Actually, they originate as solar storms, which hurl magnetically charged matter toward earth, jostling its magnetic field. Routine-sized storms cause the Auroras Borealis and Australis. Big ones happen roughly once a decade (1972, 1982, 1989, 2003, a near-miss in 2012…) and also mostly hit high latitudes. The worry: a really big one could send currents surging through long-distance power lines, frying hundreds of major transformers, knocking out power to continent-scale regions for months or even years, and causing an economic or humanitarian catastrophe.
My best assessment at this point is that if one extrapolates properly from the available modern data, the risk is much lower than the 12%-chance-per-decade cited by the Washington Post last summer. But that’s a preliminary judgment, and I’m not a seasoned expert. And even if the risk is only 1%, it almost certainly deserves more attention. More from me on that in time. (For a mathematician’s doubts about the 12% figure see Stephen Parrott.)
You can see “geomagnetic storms” beneath Cari Tuna’s elbow in this photo from a recent Post story about the Open Philanthropy Project: Continue reading “New package for extreme value analysis in Stata”
