Jonathon Porrit, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.

Porritt’s call will come at this week’s annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron.

The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.

Porritt said: “Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure.

“Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”

Population growth is one of the most politically sensitive environmental problems. The issues it raises, including religion, culture and immigration policy, have proved too toxic for most green groups.

However, Porritt is winning scientific backing. Professor Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum, will use the OPT conference, to be held at the Royal Statistical Society, to warn that population growth could help derail attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Rapley, who formerly ran the British Antarctic Survey, said humanity was emitting the equivalent of 50 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.

“We have to cut this by 80%, and population growth is going to make that much harder,” he said.

Such views on population have split the green movement. George Monbiot, a prominent writer on green issues, has criticised population campaigners, arguing that “relentless” economic growth is a greater threat.

Many experts believe that, since Europeans and Americans have such a lopsided impact on the environment, the world would benefit more from reducing their populations than by making cuts in developing countries.

This is part of the thinking behind the OPT’s call for Britain to cut population to 30m — roughly what it was in late Victorian times.

Britain’s population is expected to grow from 61m now to 71m by 2031. Some politicians support a reduction.

Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, said: “You can’t have sustainability with an increase in population.”

The Tory leader, David Cameron, has also suggested Britain needs a “coherent strategy” on population growth.

- From Times on Line

Church attendance in the United States has hardly shifted since the economy went south, recent surveys show.

In the latest Gallup Poll findings, there have been no significant changes in the percentages of Americans who report attending church weekly or who say religion is important in their daily lives.

“It is not an unreasonable conjecture that the current recession would cause Americans to increasingly turn to religion as a surcease from their economic or personal sorrow. But that does not appear to be the case,” according to the Gallup report, released Monday.

In March 2009, 42 percent of Americans said they attend church, synagogue, or mosque weekly or almost every week, a drop from 46 percent last December and hardly a jump from 41 percent in March 2008.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life had similar findings.

A Pew Forum analysis of polls by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed earlier this month that there has been no increase in weekly worship service attendance despite the drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

According to Pew data, in January only 39 percent reported attending worship service at least weekly. In January 2007, when the Dow was nearly twice as high as it is now, the percentage of weekly attendants was exactly the same at 39 percent.

Although the recession has not evidently impacted church attendance, the Gallup organization was not quick to conclude that the slow economy did not affect the religiosity of Americans.

Americans could be praying more often or those who are already religious may be more intense in their religious commitment now, the Gallup report pointed out.

- From Prophecy News Watch

Hardline Saudi clerics have called on the government to ban women from appearing on television and to prohibit their images in print media, which they called a sign of growing “deviant thought.”

In a letter to new Information Minister Abdul Aziz al-Khoja that appeared on websites this week, the 35 Islamic clerics also condemned the increase of music and dancing on television, as well as images of women in popular newspapers and magazines that they labelled “obscene.”

“Our faith in you is great to carry out media reform, for we have seen how perversity is rooted in the ministry of information and culture, on television, radio, in the press, literary clubs, and book fairs,” the letter said.

It cited an alleged plan to “westernise” Saudi women by “reducing their rights to a question of removing veils, wearing makeup and mixing with men.”

It added that the ministry had permitted the import of “obscene newspapers and magazines that are filled with deviant thought and pictures of beautiful women on its covers and inside.”

“There should be no Saudi woman on television, in any case,” they said.

“There is no doubt that this is religiously impermissible.”

The clerics, including justice officials and academics from a conservative Islamic university, cited several cabinet-endorsed orders and policies from years past which they said supported their argument.

They appeared to be challenging a growing push for liberalisation of tough restrictions on women, including near-mandatory use of black, full-face veils, which are rooted in its ultra-conservative Wahhabi version of Islam.

Both Saudi television and print media increasingly feature women, while Arabic-language magazines showing women in Western garb and makeup are also widely sold in the country.

The letter came in the wake of an information ministry-sponsored book fair in Riyadh in early March at which religious conservatives complained that men and women were allowed to mix freely, and that some books on sale violated Islamic principles.

The book fair was marred by the muttawam, or Islamic morality police, harassing a woman author promoting her book and trying to prevent men from obtaining her autograph.

- From Prophecy News Watch

Tucked away in the southeastern corner of Virginia, the city of Virginia Beach is about the last place one would expect to find a bastion of passionate pro-Israel sentiment.

With its seemingly endless miles of sand, waves and sun, the sprawling resort town, known as the proud host of the annual East Coast Surfing Championships, seems more well-suited to fun and games than to waging a war of ideas on behalf of the Jewish state. Yet it is precisely in this most unexpected of locales that one of Israel’s staunchest allies and defenders can be found: Rev. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, or CBN.

On a visit to the network’s studios last week, I was moved by the level of heartfelt support for the Jewish state among the staff members. Nearly every one had been to Israel numerous times, and they described in great detail, and with genuine passion, their profound love for the country and its people.

Take, for example, CBN president and chief operating office Michael Little, who has been to Israel 47 times and is already making plans for his next visit. And then there is network CEO Gordon Robertson, who described with great feeling his views on the Jewish roots of Christianity, and how the Bible mandates that one must stand with Israel, come what may.

Prior to interviewing me about events in the Middle East for CBN’s daily news program, anchorwoman Wendy Griffith did something I never saw a journalist do before. She folded her hands together, bowed her head in prayer and humbly offered a solemn plea: “Bless Your people Israel and keep them safe,” she said.

Peering from behind a video camera, one of the cameramen in the studio then quoted verses from Isaiah about the return of the Jewish people to Zion. “I pray about this on a daily basis,” he said in earnest.

Where else can one find such a deeply-rooted love and concern for God’s chosen people? Of course, the fact that many US Christians support Israel is nothing new. Much has been written in recent years about the closer ties that have been forged between the two – a fact that has generated no small amount of controversy among certain more liberal sectors of US Jewry.

But after my visit to CBN, and based on previous encounters I have had with other pro-Israel evangelical Christians, I am more convinced than ever that the Jewish state needs to undertake a coordinated effort to nurture and broaden this special relationship.

The fact of the matter is that Bible-believing Christians, even more so than US Jews, may represent the best hope for ensuring that long-term American support for Israel remains strong. Like it or not, American Jewry is steadily on the decline, as the realities of mounting intermarriage and assimilation continue to devour untold numbers of young Jews, leaving the community’s future viability very much in doubt.

And as the US Jewish community grows smaller in size, its clout and influence will invariably diminish as well. That leaves the tens of millions of evangelical Christians in the US as the best possible vanguard to man the barricades on behalf of defending Israel in Washington.

ACCORDING TO THE Pew Center’s 2008 Religious Landscape Survey, 26.3 percent of American adults identify themselves as evangelical Christians, making them the largest religious grouping in the US. And a study conducted by Pew three years ago found overwhelming support for Israel among evangelicals, concluding that “seven-in-ten white evangelicals (69%) believe God gave Israel to the Jewish people, and a solid majority (59%) believes Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.” Naturally, these believers “are much more likely than others to sympathize with Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians,” said the report.

Indeed, the list of Christian personalities and organizations working on behalf of Israel in fields ranging from social welfare to public affairs is almost dizzying.

The Kansas-based Unity Coalition for Israel, for example, has built an enormous network, utilizing hundreds of organizations, to educate the American public about Israel.

Pastor John Hagee has turned Christians United for Israel into the largest Christian grassroots movement in the US, with state directors in all 50 states, and an annual Washington summit that brings out thousands of people from across the country to speak out on behalf of the Jewish state.

Veteran Christian broadcasters, such as Hal Lindsey, Janet Parshall and Earl Cox, reach tens of millions of viewers and listeners, explaining Israel’s case and defending her from the onslaught of the mainstream press.

And then there is the Rev. Robert Stearns, whose New York-based Eagles Wings has for the past seven years organized an annual “Day of Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem” each October. This year, organizers expect more than 200,000 churches in 175 countries to take part in praying for Israel and its welfare.

Locally, organizations such as the International Christian Embassy, Bridges for Peace and Christians for Israel provide aid to new immigrants, promote aliya and bring thousands of Christian pilgrims each year.

This plethora of activities underlines the extent to which evangelical Christians in the US, Europe and elsewhere can be counted on to back the Jewish state across a variety of spheres.

It is therefore essential that the country take additional steps to further strengthen this burgeoning alliance. This could include the appointment of a roving ambassador to the Christian world, tasked with responsibility for reinforcing Israel-Christian relations, and the convening of an annual summit of pro-Israel Christian leaders in Jerusalem under the auspices of the prime minister.

Rather than focusing solely on the solicitation of Christians’ dollars, the country should seek to cement their devotion by more actively reaching out and courting their support, prayers and cooperation.

With so many challenges facing the Jewish state, it is time we recognize a clear and cogent fact: There are large numbers of Christians around the world ready and willing to stand with us.

And, I might add, thank God for that.

- From Prophecy News Watch

Abortion clinics are to be allowed to advertise on television and radio for the first time.

Condom manufacturers will also be permitted to broadcast advertisements at any time of the day or night.

At present they are banned from advertising before the 9pm watershed except on Channel 4, where the cut-off is 7.30pm.

The proposals by the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP) will give Britain among the world’s most liberal broadcasting regimes on sexual health services.

The watchdog claims it is responding to Government calls for action to combat rising teenage pregnancy.

But its plans were furiously condemned last night by family campaigners and MPs.

They said television adverts for abortion clinics and condoms will lead to greater promiscuity among young people.

Dr Peter Saunders, of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said: ‘The problem is that the Government strategy on teenage pregnancy, based on condoms, the morning-after pill and abortion, has failed.

‘Allowing the advertising of abortion services is not dealing with the real problem. This is the approach of having the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to deal with the casualties.

‘The whole approach from Government and officialdom creates an atmosphere where it is seen as acceptable for teenagers to indulge in recreational sex without regard to the very serious consequences in terms of physical and emotional health.’

The Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP) and their sister organisation the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) are starting a 12-week public consultation into the proposals today.

But it is clear it hopes to implement the changes early next year to fall in line with the policy of the Government and its advisers.

Its spokesman Matt Wilson said advertising by abortion clinics would have to be ‘socially responsible’. However, it is not yet known how this would be enforced.

Advertising for condoms will not be allowed during breaks in programmes designed for children aged under ten.

Nadine Dorries, Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, said the lifting of advertising controls was ‘obscene’

He said the proposal to allow greater freedom to advertise condoms was taken in response to calls from the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV, a Government quango.

‘There is a concern about spiralling teenage pregnancy rates and sexually transmitted infections in the UK,’ he said.

‘The IAG group wrote to us to request a review of the scheduling restrictions on advertising condoms and we took their views into account.

‘We have taken advice from a wide range of organisations to draw up the proposals before going for public consultation.’

But Phyllis Bowman, of the anti-abortion Right to Life group, complained there are very strict rules preventing organisations like hers running their own campaigns.

‘These new rules look as if they have been drawn up by the pro-abortionists,’ she said.

‘These clinics should not be allowed to advertise on television. In my view the changes will lead to the promotion of abortions when there are better alternatives.’

The Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, Nadine Dorries, described the lifting of the advertising controls as ‘insane’.

Mrs Dorries, who is leading calls for a cut in the upper limit for so-called ‘social’ abortions from 24 weeks to 20, said: ‘The very last thing we want to see is advertisements for abortion services in the middle of a break for a programme like This Morning.’

However, the Brook Advisory Centres, which provide advice on a range of issues, including contraception and abortion, welcomed the changes to the rules.
Its head of communications, Jules Hillier, said: ‘I think it is a step forward for sexual health services to be able to advertise and clearly state what they do. It can be very confusing for a woman if she doesn’t know which organisation will refer her for an abortion.’

Labour has spent £300million on trying to reduce teenage pregnancy by handing out contraception and expanding sex education.

However, pregnancies among girls under the age of 16 have now reached their highest level in a decade, according to official figures released last month.

In 2007 there were 7,715 conceptions among girls between 13 and 15. Half of all pregnancies involving girls under 18 end in abortion.

From Prophecy News Watch

Is Satan a religious fable, or an actual being wreaking havoc in the world?

The question was debated yesterday by four unusual suspects – one megachurch pastor, one former television preacher branded by some as a heretic, the alternative medicine guru Deepak Chopra and the founder of Hookers for Jesus – in a taped debate that will air on Nightline March 26.

Mark Driscoll is the preaching pastor at the Seattle-area Mars Hill Church, a congregation that welcomes 7,500 people in attendance each week and that hosted the debate.

“The existence of God has been debated many times,” Driscoll wrote in an e-mail reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “But a discussion about the existence of Satan is far less common, which makes it a curious topic to debate.”

The Satan discussion will be the latest in a series of “Face Off” debates created by ABC TV’s late-night news program, Nightline, and will air March 26.

Driscoll is joined in arguing for the existence of Satan by Annie Lobert, a former Las Vegas escort who founded Hookers for Jesus, an organization that offers a Christian message and ministry to women in the sex trade.

Arguing against an actual evil-embodying being are Chopra and the Rev. Carlton Pearson, a formerly televised preacher on Trinity Broadcasting Network and author of “The Gospel of Inclusion,” a book outlining a doctrine of universal reconciliation to God that prompted the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops to brand him a heretic for denying traditional Christian understandings of heaven and hell.

James Goldston, the show’s executive producer, told the Seattle Times, “We went for the most interesting voices we could find.”

Driscoll told the paper that the curious lineup – a diverse group of people outside the world of theology’s hallowed halls – helps ensure that “this is not just an academic debate but also a practical discourse.”

Goldston told the Times that a debate about Satan is not just a theological curiosity for Christians.

“There’s always an interest in these topics,” Goldston said. “Every time we’ve done one, the response has been pretty dramatic.”

In fact, Goldston said, the very first “Face Off” segment from over two years ago – a debate on the existence of God – is still abcnews.com’s most-commented-upon story.

Driscoll believes that Satan is an actual spirit at work in the world for evil, identified clearly in the Bible and evidenced in the world around us.

“In my own pastoral experience,” Driscoll wrote in an e-mail, “I have witnessed such great evil and injustice so often that no answer but the existence of a real enemy to good and life makes any sense to me.”

Pearson does not believe Satan is an actual being and told the Times that belief in an actual devil “makes us helpless, paranoid and frightened.”

“I’ve heard: ‘The devil made me do it.’ Don’t put that on the devil,” Pearson said. “You made that stupid decision yourself. Let’s talk about why you made it.”

The debate is hosted by ABC anchor and correspondent Dan Harris, who told the Post-Intelligencer he welcomed the opportunity to hold the discussion in Seattle, rather than a remote corner of the Bible Belt.

“It’s good to do it in a non-obvious place,” Harris said. “It’s going to be harder for people to write it off. It’s going to be harder to dismiss it as the usual cliché dialogue.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. “We’re moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster,” says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see “When hell comes to Earth”). If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Worse than Katrina
The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: “two patches of intensely bright and white light” emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world’s telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.

Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, “we haven’t found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event”, says James Green, head of NASA’s planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859. “From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we’d want to survive.” However, the prognosis from the NAS analysis is that, thanks to our technological prowess, many of us may not.

There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.

The second problem is the grid’s interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. “It’s just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters,” says John Kappenman, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to the NAS committee that produced the report. “Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions.”

According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.

First to go – immediately for some people – is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly – delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites – but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.

72 hours of healthcare remaining
The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. “From the surveys I’ve done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more,” says Kappenman. “A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two.”

Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.

Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.

30 days of coal left
Nuclear power stations wouldn’t fare much better. They are programmed to shut down in the event of serious grid problems and are not allowed to restart until the power grid is up and running.

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply. “In the US alone there are a million people with diabetes,” Kappenman says. “Shut down production, distribution and storage and you put all those lives at risk in very short order.”

Help is not coming any time soon, either. If it is dark from the eastern seaboard to Chicago, some affected areas are hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away from anyone who might help. And those willing to help are likely to be ill-equipped to deal with the sheer scale of the disaster. “If a Carrington event happened now, it would be like a hurricane Katrina, but 10 times worse,” says Paul Kintner, a plasma physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

In reality, it would be much worse than that. Hurricane Katrina’s societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a “severe geomagnetic storm scenario” could be as high as $2 trillion. And that’s just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back.

4-10 years to recover
“I don’t think the NAS report is scaremongering,” says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency’s space weather team. Green agrees. “Scientists are conservative by nature and this group is really thoughtful,” he says. “This is a fair and balanced report.”

Such nightmare scenarios are not restricted to North America. High latitude nations such as Sweden and Norway have been aware for a while that, while regular views of the aurora are pretty, they are also reminders of an ever-present threat to their electricity grids. However, the trend towards installing extremely high voltage grids means that lower latitude countries are also at risk. For example, China is on the way to implementing a 1000-kilovolt electrical grid, twice the voltage of the US grid. This would be a superb conduit for space weather-induced disaster because the grid’s efficiency to act as an antenna rises as the voltage between the grid and the ground increases. “China is going to discover at some point that they have a problem,” Kappenman says.

Neither is Europe sufficiently prepared. Responsibility for dealing with space weather issues is “very fragmented” in Europe, says Hapgood.

Europe’s electricity grids, on the other hand, are highly interconnected and extremely vulnerable to cascading failures. In 2006, the routine switch-off of a small part of Germany’s grid – to let a ship pass safely under high-voltage cables – caused a cascade power failure across western Europe. In France alone, five million people were left without electricity for two hours. “These systems are so complicated we don’t fully understand the effects of twiddling at one place,” Hapgood says. “Most of the time it’s alright, but occasionally it will get you.”

The good news is that, given enough warning, the utility companies can take precautions, such as adjusting voltages and loads, and restricting transfers of energy so that sudden spikes in current don’t cause cascade failures. There is still more bad news, however. Our early warning system is becoming more unreliable by the day.

By far the most important indicator of incoming space weather is NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE). The probe, launched in 1997, has a solar orbit that keeps it directly between the sun and Earth. Its uninterrupted view of the sun means it gives us continuous reports on the direction and velocity of the solar wind and other streams of charged particles that flow past its sensors. ACE can provide between 15 and 45 minutes’ warning of any incoming geomagnetic storms. The power companies need about 15 minutes to prepare their systems for a critical event, so that would seem passable.

15 minutes’ warning
However, observations of the sun and magnetometer readings during the Carrington event shows that the coronal mass ejection was travelling so fast it took less than 15 minutes to get from where ACE is positioned to Earth. “It arrived faster than we can do anything,” Hapgood says.

There is another problem. ACE is 11 years old, and operating well beyond its planned lifespan. The onboard detectors are not as sensitive as they used to be, and there is no telling when they will finally give up the ghost. Furthermore, its sensors become saturated in the event of a really powerful solar flare. “It was built to look at average conditions rather than extremes,” Baker says.

He was part of a space weather commission that three years ago warned about the problems of relying on ACE. “It’s been on my mind for a long time,” he says. “To not have a spare, or a strategy to replace it if and when it should fail, is rather foolish.”

There is no replacement for ACE due any time soon. Other solar observation satellites, such as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) can provide some warning, but with less detailed information and – crucially – much later. “It’s quite hard to assess what the impact of losing ACE will be,” Hapgood says. “We will largely lose the early warning capability.”

The world will, most probably, yawn at the prospect of a devastating solar storm until it happens. Kintner says his students show a “deep indifference” when he lectures on the impact of space weather. But if policy-makers show a similar indifference in the face of the latest NAS report, it could cost tens of millions of lives, Kappenman reckons. “It could conceivably be the worst natural disaster possible,” he says.

The report outlines the worst case scenario for the US. The “perfect storm” is most likely on a spring or autumn night in a year of heightened solar activity – something like 2012. Around the equinoxes, the orientation of the Earth’s field to the sun makes us particularly vulnerable to a plasma strike.

What’s more, at these times of year, electricity demand is relatively low because no one needs too much heating or air conditioning. With only a handful of the US grid’s power stations running, the system relies on computer algorithms shunting large amounts of power around the grid and this leaves the network highly vulnerable to sudden spikes.

If ACE has failed by then, or a plasma ball flies at us too fast for any warning from ACE to reach us, the consequences could be staggering. “A really large storm could be a planetary disaster,” Kappenman says.

So what should be done? No one knows yet – the report is meant to spark that conversation. Baker is worried, though, that the odds are stacked against that conversation really getting started. As the NAS report notes, it is terribly difficult to inspire people to prepare for a potential crisis that has never happened before and may not happen for decades to come. “It takes a lot of effort to educate policy-makers, and that is especially true with these low-frequency events,” he says.

We should learn the lessons of hurricane Katrina, though, and realise that “unlikely” doesn’t mean “won’t happen”. Especially when the stakes are so high. The fact is, it could come in the next three or four years – and with devastating effects. “The Carrington event happened during a mediocre, ho-hum solar cycle,” Kintner says. “It came out of nowhere, so we just don’t know when something like that is going to happen again.”

Related editorial: We must heed the threat of solar storms

When hell comes to Earth
Severe space weather events often coincide with the appearance of sunspots, which are indicators of particularly intense magnetic fields at the sun’s surface.

The chaotic motion of charged particles in the upper atmosphere of the sun creates magnetic fields that writhe, twist and turn, and occasionally snap and reconfigure themselves in what is known as a “reconnection”. These reconnection events are violent, and can fling out billions of tonness of plasma in a “coronal mass ejection” (CME).

If flung towards the Earth, the plasma ball will accelerate as it travels through space and its intense magnetic field will soon interact with the planet’s magnetic field, the magnetosphere. Depending on the relative orientation of the two fields, several things can happen. If the fields are oriented in the same direction, they slip round one another. In the worst case scenario, though, when the field of a particularly energetic CME opposes the Earth’s field, things get much more dramatic. “The Earth can’t cope with the plasma,” says James Green, head of NASA’s planetary division. “The CME just opens up the magnetosphere like a can-opener, and matter squirts in.”

The sun’s activity waxes and wanes every 11 years or so, with the appearance of sunspots following the same cycle. This period isn’t consistent, however. Sometimes the interval between sunspot maxima is as short as nine years, other times as long as 14 years. At the moment the sun appears calm. “We’re in the equivalent of an idyllic summer’s day. The sun is quiet and benign, the quietest it has been for 100 years,” says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency’s space weather team, “but it could turn the other way.” The next solar maximum is expected in 2012.

- From Prophecy News Watch

The unmanned bombers that frequently cause unintended civilian casualties in Pakistan are a step toward an even more lethal generation of robotic hunters-killers that operate with limited, if any, human control.

The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons.

“The trend is clear: Warfare will continue and autonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in its conduct,” Ronald Arkin, a robotics expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, wrote in a study commissioned by the Army.

“The pressure of an increasing battlefield tempo is forcing autonomy further and further toward the point of robots making that final, lethal decision,” he predicted. “The time available to make the decision to shoot or not to shoot is becoming too short for remote humans to make intelligent informed decisions.”

Autonomous armed robotic systems probably will be operating by 2020, according to John Pike, an expert on defense and intelligence matters and the director of the security Web site GlobalSecurity.org in Washington.

This prospect alarms experts, who fear that machines will be unable to distinguish between legitimate targets and civilians in a war zone.

“We are sleepwalking into a brave new world where robots decide who, where and when to kill,” said Noel Sharkey, an expert on robotics and artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, England.

Human operators thousands of miles away in Nevada, using satellite communications, control the current generation of missile-firing robotic aircraft, known as Predators and Reapers. Armed ground robots, such as the Army’s Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, also require a human decision-maker before they shoot.

As of now, about 5,000 lethal and nonlethal robots are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Besides targeting Taliban and al Qaida leaders, they perform surveillance, disarm roadside bombs, ferry supplies and carry out other military tasks. So far, none of these machines is autonomous; all are under human control.

The Pentagon’s plans for its Future Combat System envision increasing levels of independence for its robots.

“Fully autonomous engagement without human intervention should also be considered, under user-defined conditions,” said a 2007 Army request for proposals to design future robots.

For example, the Pentagon says that air-to-air combat may happen too fast to allow a remote controller to fire an unmanned aircraft’s weapons.

“There is really no way that a system that is remotely controlled can effectively operate in an offensive or defensive air-combat environment,” Dyke Weatherington, the deputy director of the Pentagon’s unmanned aerial systems task force, told a news conference on Dec. 18, 2007. “The requirement for that is a fully autonomous system,” he said. “That will take many years to get to.”

Many Navy warships carry the autonomous, rapid-fire Phalanx system, which is designed to shoot down enemy missiles or aircraft that have penetrated outer defenses without waiting for a human decision-maker.

At Georgia Tech, Arkin is finishing a three-year Army contract to find ways to ensure that robots are used in appropriate ways. His idea is an “ethical governor” computer system that would require robots to obey the internationally recognized laws of war and the U.S. military’s rules of engagement.

“Robots must be constrained to adhere to the same laws as humans or they should not be permitted on the battlefield,” Arkin wrote.

For example, a robot’s computer “brain” would block it from aiming a missile at a hospital, church, cemetery or cultural landmark, even if enemy forces were clustered nearby. The presence of women or children also would spark a robotic no-no.

Arkin contends that a properly designed robot could behave with greater restraint than human soldiers in the heat of battle and cause fewer casualties.

“Robots can be built that do not exhibit fear, anger, frustration or revenge, and that ultimately behave in a more humane manner than even human beings in these harsh circumstances,” he wrote.

Sharkey, the British critic of autonomous armed robots, said that Arkin’s ethical governor was “a good idea in principle. Unfortunately, it’s doomed to failure at present because no robots or AI (artificial intelligence) systems could discriminate between a combatant and an innocent. That sensing ability just does not exist.”

Selmer Bringsjord, an artificial intelligence expert at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., is worried, too.

“I’m concerned. The stakes are very high,” Bringsjord said. “If we give robots the power to do nasty things, we have to use logic to teach them not to do unethical things. If we can’t figure this out, we shouldn’t build any of these robots.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

The Conficker Internet worm could strike at infected computers around the world on April 1, a security expert warned Monday.

Conficker is a sophisticated piece of malicious computer software, or malware, that installs itself on a Windows PC’s hard drive via specially written Web pages. It then conceals itself on a computer.

Graham Cluley of the British security firm Sophos confirmed that Conficker is programmed “to hunt for new instructions on April 1.”

However, he added, “This does not mean that anything is going to happen, or that the worm is actually going to do anything. Simply, it is scheduled to hunt a wider range of Web sites for instructions on that date.”

One strange thing about Conficker is that no one yet has any idea what it is programmed to do.

In February, Cluley told The Times: “It’s as if someone is assembling an army of computers around the world, but hasn’t yet decided where to point them.”

A worst-case scenario for April 1 would be for all the world’s millions of infected computers to receive simultaneous instructions to attack, or to flood the Internet with spam e-mail.

Ed Gibson, Microsoft’s chief security adviser for the U.K., was reluctant to make predictions about Conficker’s behavior.

“April 1 is a classic date for anything like this to go off,” he said. “But I really would hate to say that April 1 is going to be unlike any other day.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and other social networking websites could be monitored by the government in an attempt to tackle internet crime and terrorism.

The Home Office is considering plans to force such sites to hold data about their users’ movements to thwart criminals who use them to communicate.

The information would then be stored on a central database as part of the government’s proposed Intercept Modernisation Programme.

The proposal follows plans to retain information about all telephone calls, emails, and internet visits made by everyone in Britain through a multi-billion pound system.

A European Union statutory order, called the Data Retention Directive, already proposes that internet service providers in member states store communications and traffic data for one year.

However, Vernon Coaker, Minister of State for policing, crime and security, has told MPs that it does not go far enough.

Mr Coaker told a Commons Committee: “Social-networking sites, such as MySpace or Bebo, are not covered by the directive.

“That is one reason why the government are looking at what we should do about the Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP), because there are certain aspects of communications which are not covered by the directive.”

The news has outraged civil liberties groups who claim that the plans would excessively pry into the lives of law abiding citizens.

Around 25 million people in Britain – almost half the population – are thought to use social networking sites, with Facebook boasting 17 million British users.

Bebo, which is aimed predominantly at teenagers and young adults, is estimated to have a following of around 10 million Britons.

The disclosure of the plans was made during exchanges between Mr Coaker and Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Tom Brake.

Mr Coaker acknowledged the controversy surrounding the proposed database but confirmed that the plans “may include requiring the retention of data on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and all other similar sites”.

He added: “I accept this is an extremely difficult area. The interface between retaining data, private security and all such issues of privacy is extremely important.

“It is absolutely right to point out the difficulty of ensuring we maintain a capability and a capacity to deal with crime and issues of national security and where that butts up against issues of privacy.”

Isabella Sankey, policy director of the civil rights pressure group Liberty, said: “Even before you throw Facebook and other social networking sites into the mix, the proposed telecommunications databas is a terrifying prospect.

“It would allow the government to record every email, text message and phone call and would turn millions of innocent Britons into permanent suspects.”

The Home Office has defended the proposals, stressing that the government was not seeking the power to examine the content of messages sent via the sites.

A spokesman said: “The Government has no interest in the content of people’s social network sites and this is not going to be part of our forthcoming consultation.

“We have been clear that communications revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we collect communications data needs to change so that law enforcement agencies can maintain their ability to tackle terrorism and gather evidence.

“To ensure that we keep up with technological advances we intend to consult widely on proposals shortly. We have been very clear that there are no plans for a database containing the content of emails, texts, conversations or social networking sites.”

The IMP is a multi-billion pound project, which aims to build new databases capable of storing vast amounts of computer data as part of the fight against terrorism.

- From Prophecy News Watch