Let me offer a little more about the prospects for CME disasters.
From what I understand, an EMP (weaponized electromagnetic energy) is a high-frequency blast that threatens everything that conducts electricity. However, an EMP bomb is a single point, with a limited radius of effect. There’s some debate as to how fast the shockwave weakens the farther it travels. It could be the thing has only a short range before the power of the pulse dissipates. Still, it’s high damage as far as it can reach.
CMEs are massive and will overwhelm the whole earth, rushing past our earth’s magnetic field — a field that has been weakening over the past century. It’s currently weakest over South America, but is quickly spreading. It’s difficult to assess, and the graphical representations vary. (See here and here for examples; blue = bad in both pictures). A CME is a low frequency blast from the sun that is picked up mostly by long wires. We don’t know if the sun can do high-frequency, but it hasn’t done it where anybody has noticed so far.
So, as previously noted, it’s not so much a threat to the wires of the electric grid themselves, but the transformers connected to the wires. The wires will get hot. Transformers are more heat sensitive than wires. Furthermore, a lot depends on how the transformers are connected, in that hot wires sag and pull on the connections. If there is a buffered connection, it pulls on something else, something designed to take the stress. But when wires are directly hung on the transformer, sagging wires can pull the connectors off.
But beyond that, a CME is loaded with plasma and particles that affect all living things. There’s a lot of theory about these effects, but not much established fact. Furthermore, the high intensity magnetic disturbance are bound to affect us in ways that we cannot predict very well. Different creatures bear varying sensitivity to magnetic fields, notably migratory animals like birds and some sea creatures. We don’t yet know that much about latent sensitivities in other creatures; it may be impossible to know until it happens. But there’s every reason to believe almost everything has some sensitivity to magnetic disturbance at that level.
Because the earth has so much metal in the core, a magnetic disturbance is guaranteed to provoke earthquakes and volcanoes. It’s guaranteed to have weather effects, most notably in the form of lightning, in part for the same reason volcanoes have lightning strikes above them. Overcharging the earth’s magnetic field will bring clear-air lightning strikes, literally out of nowhere. Those strikes will affect lots of things, and it’s exceedingly difficult to estimate, because they’ll be of such a high magnitude.
Your standard CMEs are not much threat to small bits of conducting material, such as electronics and electrical appliances. They could threaten the electricity grid. It’s the big ones that cross some invisible threshold that should be a concern. Over that threshold are effects we cannot estimate; we know only what kind of things it might include. It’s not that I want to promote fear, but a sense of calculus about what we can do to carry on the divine mission. If you know what’s likely, you’ll be less surprised and less panicky.
When a big one comes, we will have some hours advanced notice, less than a day to prepare. If you keep track of the weather on the sun, you’ll get a better idea of such things. The sun is more volatile than ever, even while the earth’s protective shield is coming down. This was God’s plan in foreknowledge of the need for His wrath to fall and shake things up a bit. Who will cling to Him through the coming apocalypse?
How we respond is a major element in our witness.
