MASSIVE SOLAR STORM HYSTERIA

This is a favorite Coast to Coast AM story and today it made a local wingnut radio show, so I decided to do a little Googling and Voila! - it's not as bad as the merchants of fear say.

What If the Biggest Solar Storm on Record Happened Today?
Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News
Published March 2, 2011

"The sun has an activity cycle, much like hurricane season," Tom Bogdan, director of the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, said earlier this month at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

Even now, the center's Bogdan said, the most damaging emissions from big storms travel slowly enough to be detected by sun-watching satellites well before the particles strike Earth. "That gives us [about] 20 hours to determine what actions we need to take," Viereck said.

In a pinch, power companies could protect valuable transformers by taking them offline before the storm strikes. That would produce local blackouts, but they wouldn't last for long.

"The good news is that these storms tend to pass after a couple of hours," Bogdan added.