Armageddon approaches

The Doomsday Clock returns. Used for years by scientists to terrify the uneducated masses about the threat of nuclear war, it is being recycled to try and achieve the same effect with global warming. Apparently we aren’t panicking enough although some apparently are. I have posted previously on the poor people of Tuvali who believe in the new Book of Revelations and supposedly are sufficiently moved to panic at the correct scale and head for higher land.

This ideology has the Pacific Islanders reading the new Book of Revelations and demanding migration rights to Australia and New Zealand because their low lying islands are going to be swamped. It says so in the New bible. It would also be pretty cool to live in Australia with it’s social security and all but the islands aren’t about to be swamped. Scientists and other interested parties are argueing over whether the rise is .07mm a year or 5mm a year and even then king tides, natural sand redistribution, native attempts at building on the shoreline and the effects of cyclones must be factored in.

Back to Stephen Hawkin

CLIMATE change is as great a threat to the world as terrorism and nuclear war, cosmologist and mathematician Stephen Hawking said yesterday as the “doomsday clock” – a countdown to Armageddon that was begun by scientists in 1947 – was moved forward two minutes to stand at five minutes to midnight. Professor Hawking, of the University of Cambridge, said the twin dangers of global warming and nuclear proliferation needed to be tackled urgently. “Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear weapons have been used in war, though the world has come uncomfortably close to disaster on more than one occasion,” he said. “But for good luck, we would all be dead.”

It wasn’t ‘good luck’ that saved us; more Kennedy’s resolve and Kruschov’s rare moment of clarity but I guess that’s not within Hawkin’s narrow field of expertise. Armageddon, The Apocalypse, over population, the second coming of Jesus, Nuclear Winter and Global Warming are all a form of recycled religion and should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism. I’ll believe us mere humans, present on this planet for a tiny period of it’s existance, have had the impact on her weather as is being suggested, a moment or two after someone speaks knowingly on long-period natural weather cycles. Or, prove to me that we are not enduring a slightly hotter period of a 10,000 year cycle that may or may not be caused by each planet’s proximity to it’s neighbour and the sun and her sunspot behaviour in some yet to be understood galaxy juggling. From MadSci Network

….there might be a connection between sunspots and climate on much longer time-scales. For example, from 1645 to 1715, the sunspot cycle turned off, and not one sunspot was visible during these years. During about the same time, the “Little Ice Age” happened, in which temperatures in Europe fell several degrees C. Again, correspondence doesn’t imply causation, but it’s something to think about.

If a scientist says ‘but it’s something to think about‘ he means he can’t disprove it; all of which goes to prove little other than we know too little. Time will tell but I have no immediate plans to sell out and move to the high country in some colder clime. UPDATE: In comments, Harry Buttle links to an article headed “The Sun Moves Climate Change“. An interesting read for those who are not yet signed up members of the Global Warming Church of the Latter Day Alarmists and are still open minded enough to read other potential gospels.