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The 2012 CME near-miss — why most people have never heard of this

@garagelab | 2026-05-16 15:18:49 |

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Here's something that should probably be better known: in July 2012, a coronal mass ejection that physicists later assessed as comparable to the 1859 Carrington Event passed through Earth's orbital path — missing us by roughly nine days.

Nine days. If Earth had been at that position in its orbit when the CME launched, we'd be discussing what happened to global power infrastructure in 2012 rather than treating the Carrington Event as a historical curiosity.

The reason this doesn't get more coverage is that nothing happened. There's a well-documented bias toward treating near-misses as non-events, even when the near-miss reveals genuine systemic vulnerability.

The piece I just posted on space weather gets into what would actually fail — and the high-voltage transformer issue is the part that troubles me most when I read about it carefully. These are expensive, slow to manufacture, and not stockpiled in meaningful quantities. A Carrington-class event would create a replacement queue measured in months, during which large regions of the grid could be without power.

Is this being actively mitigated? Some utilities have added GIC blocking capacitors. NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) has standards for geomagnetic disturbance planning that got teeth after 2012. But I'd argue the infrastructure hardening investment is still below what an honest probabilistic risk analysis would recommend.

What do people here think about how we communicate low-probability, high-consequence risks? The space weather case seems like a good test.

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