10? Certainly no more than 100.

Because the price of food would likely go up at least 50%

Something similar could conceivably happen if we had a big solar storm (a coronal mass ejection) and that triggered a grid outage and subsequent meltdowns. (due to loss of the ultimate heat sink)

There is a one in eight chance of that every decade. Maybe even more. (We just missed one in 2012)

I am not kidding.

What was that called back 150+ or so years ago.. The Carrington event or something?

The thing that amazed me about that was that there was so much electricity in the air that the Telegraph system kept working even when all the power was down...

At least I think I remember reading that.

A huge amount of energy is shot out from the sun and induces very high voltages in long wires. We now have two spacecraft at the two Lagrangian points (http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov) which can give us approximately 10-15 minutes warning of a CME heading in our direction. At least in theory. (still untested) Luckily now we are heading down in the sunspot cycle.

We need to get our **** together on this soon.

Because a worldwide emp would probably destroy civilization.

could sustain cooling without any power generation from the grid at all, for years.