I read the link recently posted about the Solar flare. It is
pretty good, but we should be careful about dire warnings. We
have had bad Solar storms in the past and they did, in fact,
disrupt some power and telecommunications systems but it is more
likely to be annoying and frustrating than disastrous. Some
Solar storms disrupt the Earth's magnetic field and make it seem
to move around. The huge Solar storm in 1989 actually caused
magnetic compasses in the North Sea to be off by as much as 5
degrees which made Petrobium operations in the North Sea stop
for a while.

	What can happen when the magnetic field varies is that
long runs of wire such as telephone and electrical cables start
to behave like generators. One would see low DC voltages at high
currents begin to ebb and flow in the wires. It is possible to
reach several amps of what might look like DC on the wire. The
current would rise and fall and reverse polarity so you could
really call it an ultra-low-frequency alternating current.

	A really bad thing that would not immediately be
apparent is that electrical currents would also try to flow in
long pipelines under ground and water and those currents would cause
electrolysis of the metal which could eventually lead to early
failure.

	As for 2012, the only Solar disturbances we can predict
are the ones we just had. In other words, we can't predict
individual events ten minutes from now much less a year.

	As for those big currents in long wires, they are more
likely to occur in the far North and the far South as
geomagnetic disturbances cause more disruption in Polar regions
than they do in most of the world.

	The power systems that have been effected suffered
interesting failures such as tripped breakers and maybe even the
magnetic saturation of the iron cores in power transformers, but
they were able to restore power eventually.

	I am saying, annoying and possibly expensive, yes but
cataclysmic ending of civilization, not likely.

Martin