All of you have calculated your emissions and you have surely discovered the unexpectedly high impact of some of your behaviors (eating meat, flying to a sunny destination, etc.) on your total footprints.
Are there any behaviors that you are really willing to change or to improve for the sake of the environment? What challenges do you encounter or think you will encounter while trying to change these things? What help, support, and insights from others would make your life easier with these new behaviors?
Let's discuss these issues and make our pledges here!
Now It's Time for Action >
Will we survive the next solar storm
Solar storms are a variety of eruptions of mass and energy from the solar surface. Flares, prominence's, sunspots, coronal mass ejections are the common harbingers of solar activity, as are plagues and other related phenomena seen at other wavelengths. These solar storms have caused few problems in the past, but with our weakening magnetic field and our spotted atmosphere. Scientist predict that the next severe solar storm we have may be devastating, and its our fault to. Now that storm will come in five to fifty years, signs pointing to the latter, but will we be more prepared for this threat? Or will we just make the effect it will have on our society more explosive. These solar storms usually just cause small outages here and there, along with a beautiful aurora borealises all over the globe. When the next severe storm hits, its predicted to do much more. It' predicted to short out all electrical appliances around the globe. While this is a big deal now, it will be much worse in the years to come. As society tends to fall back on the luxuries of electronics, our lives are centered around them. But when the next storm hits, we will have nothing. No cars, no phones, no refrigerators, anything that runs on electricity in any form will stop working. While this event is far away, I hope we'll join together in time to stop a world wide blackout before it hits.
This is a very important topic that quite a lot of people are unaware of.
Not only will the next electromagnetic solar storm/flare knock out the majority of the electronics on earth, but the radiation in the form of gamma/x-rays will severely damage any humans exposed.
The most recent powerful solar storm occurred in 1859, where it merely caused the few electronics of the time (rudimentary telephone wires and such) to short out and not work. The aurora, which is normally only seen in the polar regions, could be seen close to the equator. Note that this happened around the time (A bit later, though) than the Industrial Revolution, where carbon emissions started to pick up.
Today, where we rely on electronics for nearly everything, the results would be catastrophic. The weaken of our magnetic poles and the degradation of our atmosphere is damaging our defenses against these storms, and leaving us more vulnerable than we were back in 1859. If we ever were to survive the upcoming, inevitable storm, then the world would probably never be the same.
References:
http://scien ce.howstuffworks.com/solar-flare-electronics1.htm (Coming solar flare)
http://www.space.com/7224-150-years-wor … storm.html (Solar Storm of 1859)
http://www.livescience.com/46694-magnet … akens.html
(Magnetic field weakening)