There are plenty of ways to mitigate this. Satellites are built with safeguards to prevent this exact problem. However, they aren't functional in 'protected' mode so you need to be very careful when you turn them off. i.e. you don't want to do it unless you absolutely positively have to do it.

With satellite's monitoring the Sun we can see when these things are coming hours ahead of time - they don't travel at light speed. That gives us plenty of warning to set things into protected mode.

Same goes for transformers on the electrical grid. If they aren't connected to the grid when this hits, they simply won't be affected. But obviously you won't have electricity while they're disconnected.

So the key thing here is having satellites in orbit around the Sun that watch and tell us when this is coming. Unfortunately we aren't replacing the sats that do this fast enough and we're going to have serious gaps in our coverage before too long.

the point isn't that they 'are', the point is that you claiming they 'are' doesn't mean they 'are'.

You then say that cities and infrastructure aren't mobile but that calling a human settlement 'fixed' is misleading. Unless you're living in a mobile home, your 'settlement' is quite fixed.

Moving 200 million people world wide isn't a small thing to consider. It will have massive costs and cause massive disruption...that can possibly be mitigated by changing our fuel sources and also removing CO2 from the atmosphere directly.

As a self professed 'eco-idiot' :) , molten salt thorium reactors do indeed hold promise. But like renewable energy 'storage' the tech isn't there right now to replace coal. It's a chemical engineering problem to make sure you can contain the highly corrosive salts for 20+ years without any maintenance. Not yet solved, but likely quite solvable.

But not there yet as I said.

Detroit is a ghost town because of the 'economic' and 'political' climate there, not the atmospheric 'climate'.

As for claims populations are moving south due to AC, any sources for that?

Economics of the 'cost' of coal are fine. The problem is there isn't anything else except nuclear to replace coal right now. Renewables are great, but storing the energy for later use is the current problem with them for a grid scale installation. Except nuclear.

As I've said many times, nuclear is necessary while we develop energy storage tech that makes renewables work, but simply replacing every coal plant with nuclear? I don't want that many potential disasters popping up everywhere. Maybe we don't have any choice...but that's a devil you know vs a devil you know choice :)

Yes, they've 'popped up'. That's not mobile though. Moving them would be mobile, but good luck 'moving' Miami or NYC...

West Virginia...or its cartoon incarnation Elbonia...

Yes it does. If you're working for the President or some such highly classified post, they are most definitely going to be looking at much of what you do outside of work. That's clearly giving up you're rights. They wouldn't be able to do so otherwise without a warrant. Or at least weren't able too prior to 'but Terrorism!' being justification for everything under the sun.

So you've waived them 'a little'? Protection from unreasonable searches is a civil right, but you've admitted you've waived them somewhat...

Also remember that the contractor charged with doing the background checks for clearances is currently being investigated for fraud on their order of hundreds of thousands of clearances..

It doesn't matter, your clearance requirements are in force in perpetuity. i.e. you can't disclose information or anything else after you quit.

as a holder of a SECRET clearance, I would disagree.

'unreasonable' is meaningless when national security is involved. I don't particularly like it, but civil rights go out the window when there's actual national security concerns. Now, whether there really are any justifying this is another question entirely :)

No they don't polygraph you all the time. There are 'SECRET' clearances, which I have, that are basically nothing more than a background check. No other checks are done at all that involve me. Never had a polygraph ever.

TOP SECRET might, but there is TOP SECRET w/Poly as a separate clearance so me thinks that might be the only one that gets it sometimes. This isn't '24'.

Never said that now did I.... Notice this other thing I said in the VERY NEXT SENTENCE.

moron.

If it's in your way to see stuff, it's a badly designed HUD. Fighter jet HUDs have TONS of information being presented.

Take an average person and have them try and use a fighter jet's HUD. They'll be overwhelmed and unable to function because they don't know how to use it. Google Glass won't be any different.