I continue to remain baffled about the anxieties over climate change since that is what climates do. Far more worrying to me than the hypothetical worries about global warming, far more immediate and far more dangerous to our way of life are solar superstorms.
This catastrophe is not some academic one-in-a-million chance scenario.
It is a very real threat which, according to a report in the latest issue of New Scientist, remains one of the most potent, yet least recognised, threats to the future of human civilisation.
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Daniel Baker, a space weather expert at the University of Colorado, prepared a report for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences last month, and the conclusions make grim reading.
'Every year, our human technology becomes more vulnerable,' he says.
A repeat of the 1859 Carrington event today would have far graver consequences than the frying of some telegraph wires.
The problem comes with our dependence on electricity and the way this electricity is generated and transmitted.
A huge solar storm would cause massive power surges, amounting to billions of unwanted watts surging through the grids.
Most critically, the transformers which convert the multi-thousand-volt current carried by the pylons into 240v domestic current would melt - thousands of them, in every country.
This would bring the world to its knees. With no electricity, we would not just be in the dark.
We are dependent, to a degree few of us perhaps appreciate, on a functioning grid for our survival. All our water and sewage plants run on electricity.
A couple of days after a solar superstorm, the taps would run dry.
Within a week, we would lose all heat and light as reserves ran out, the supermarket shelves would run empty and the complex supply and distribution networks upon which our society depends would have started to break down.
No telephones, no medicines, no manufacturing, no farming - and no food.
Global communications and travel would also collapse - a solar superstorm would probably destroy the network of GPS satellites upon which every airline depends.
So could this really happen? And why is 2012 a year to worry about? Well, we know that solar superstorm did happen, back in 1859.
And we know that 20 years ago a much smaller storm knocked out the power grid across much of eastern Canada, leaving nine million people without electricity.
We also know that the Sun's activity waxes and wanes in 11-year cycles.
Currently, the Sun is very quiet. But a solar maximum - a peak of activity - is predicted for 2012, and this is when a superstorm could strike, probably around either the spring or autumn equinox, when the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field to the Sun makes us very vulnerable.
The main point is that every solar maximum puts us more in danger as our growing population becomes ever more dependent on electricity.
I'm curious as to what the government is doing to harden the electrical infrastructure.
We learned earlier this month that the electricity grid in the U.S. has been penetrated by cyberspies.
The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.
The electrical grid is the soft underbelly of our economy. What is being done to harden it?