Thanks to the new Sky drama Cobra, another potential planetary emergency may be about to join climate change at the top of the agenda. Cobra stands for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. It is the UK equivalent of the US government’s “situation room”, where the top brass gather to monitor and deal with crises.
The fictional crisis is a massive solar storm that frazzles the UK’s electric infrastructure. The prime minister must get the lights back on before social collapse, food shortages and anarchy threaten the population. The drama explores the consequences of having insufficient transformers in reserve to help restore electricity quickly. There’s also the added challenge of transporting the ones the UK does have to the right locations. So far, so helpful in ramping up the tensions on screen.
But according to national resilience experts, this scenario is entirely plausible. It may indeed be time to start worrying about the chances of a solar storm ejecting plasma from the sun.
The last time the US National Research Council looked at the issue in any depth was 2008. It concluded that the economic impact of a severe solar storm could exceed $2tn. That’s nearly 12 times the cost of Hurricane Katrina, which caused $161bn worth of damage and was the costliest natural disaster in US history.
Since then, our worldwide dependence on electronics and power grids has only increased. Decarbonisation is likely to heighten that dependency, as the world focuses on electrifying automobile fleets and even aeroplanes.
Meanwhile, weird things are happening to the planet’s geomagnetic field. It is weakening and in flux: this could heighten the frequency with which solar storms and solar flares occur; the magnetic field forms the planet’s natural defence against solar interference. The magnetic North pole is racing towards Siberia at an unprecedented rate. Scientists remain unsure as to whether the growth of the South Atlantic Anomaly, a radiation hotspot, is indicative of the first stages of a magnetic pole shift, which would expose us to higher levels of radiation.
Scientists agree the vulnerability mostly exists on two levels. The less serious scenario is the social fallout from having to shut down power systems in anticipation of flares detected by solar weather watchers. This remains the best way to protect all-important kit that might otherwise get fried. The problem is, it’s hard to predict how long such shutdowns might last. Even 24 hours without power can be enough to cause widespread disruption to society and the economy — and life-threatening shortages in some areas.
The Cobra drama explores the second, more serious scenario of what might happen if we fail to take precautionary measures and the nation’s extra high voltage transformers, huge in size, are irreparably burnt out by a solar event. It’s a real world threat because the warning times for solar events can be very short and we don’t have the spare parts at hand that are needed.
Experts from the UCL Institute for Strategy Resilience and Security told me that the TV series was right to point out that the real threat to human life would come from the breakdown in social networks and the tribal politics that would consequently emerge.
So what, if anything, can be done? Current efforts are focused on improving our solar weather forecasting capabilities, with a number of space projects dedicated to bringing in more detailed solar data. But true resilience is likely to come in maintaining good power reserves, be that in battery or other “potential energy” form. Society needs to be equipped with the knowledge to get by without power for extended periods of time. Think no-deal Brexit planning to the power of 1,000.
In the meantime, we can only hope such events remain infrequent. Worryingly, the last truly severe solar event, known as the Carrington Event — which saw the Aurora borealis appear as far south as Colombia — occurred in 1859. It caused havoc with the world’s fledgling telegraph systems even then. That may imply we’re more than overdue for another big storm.
