Solar storms spell trouble for GPS

Larry Dighera wrote:
http://www.newscientisttech.com/chan...e-for-gps.html
Solar storms spell trouble for GPS

SOLAR flares can drown out GPS signals with potentially serious
consequences for airlines, emergency services, and anyone relying on
satellite navigation.

The trouble with the Chicken Littles of the world is that they cry
"Wolf!" far too often (how is that for mixing allegories?). When I was
in college, the Club of Rome assured us we would be completely out of
resources by 1980. Earlier than that, we were going to have a complete
totalitarian takeover by 1984. The world was going to end with the Y2K
"bug" on Jan 1, 2000. And when that didn't happen, then it was going to
end on Jan 1, 2001. Every slot machine in Las Vegas was going to empty
itself at midnight on Dec 31, 1999 because it would suddenly indicate
that it had not paid since 1899 or something like that. The solar
flares were supposed to destroy all radio communications in the 1980s,
then the 1990s, then in 2000, now 2011. The peak activity cycle appears
to be constantly pushed back by these doomsayers.

Someday, of course, they will be right, and they will all get to say "I
told you so!" except we will all be dead because we stopped listening
to them. Someday the solar flares will shut down all the radios. And
all the airplanes will fall out of the sky and all the ships will hit
icebergs (if they have not all melted by then) and the earth's magnetic
field will flip--flop and the asteroid will hit and the giant
super-volcano will erupt and a tsunami 5 kilometers high will hit the
coast and California will fall into the sea and we will not be able to
do anything about it because we will have used all of our nuclear
weapons to knock ourselves back to the stone age and all the resources
will be gone and we will be reduced to driving horse and buggies but
the hoof and mouth will get the horses and we will have to support
ourselves by selling our kidneys but someone will already have stolen
one of them and, anyway we will all be living on rafts because the
icecaps will have melted and our rafts will be sliding around on the
global ice sheets caused by the icecaps melting.

Maybe I am just an old fool, but I suspect that if there is really a
problem that somebody else who has an actual engineering degree will
solve it and make a lot of money doing it. Or maybe somebody will just
convince all the politicians that there is a problem where there is not
one and we will just have our taxes doubled to pay for an unneeded
solution.