Disasters?

Did you hear or read the latest scare story from the scientists? This week a prestigious group from England came out with a report that says the oceans will be fished out within 50 years and there will be no fish left – totally destroying the oceans. Last week another prestigious group from England came out with a report describing the costs of global warming which basically said we will be totally broke by 2100, living on a dry planet.

At my advanced age I have two advantages over you younger folk. First and most obvious is that I won’t be around to experience all these disasters. Second, and maybe more reassuring to you, I’ve heard it all before. I was in college when I was exposed to my first “world ending” prediction from groups of prestigious scientists – the earth was entering a period of global cooling and we were at the front end of another ice age. There were many articles with maps showing how the glaciers would come down from Canada all the way into the plains. The northern part of the country would be under hundreds of feet of ice. Much of the water in the ocean would be caught up in icebergs so that the water level would dramatically drop. In Florida the coast line would move 100 miles out from where it was and it would snow every winter. That really bothered me because at the time we lived right on the beach and I just couldn’t imagine that instead I’d be 100 miles from the beach and it would be too cold to swim in anyway. I just bet that if any of them are alive, those same prestigious scientists are on the global warming side. I like global warming way better than ice ages.

The next disaster predicted by a group of prestigious scientists was that the population of the earth was growing so fast that within 50 years – so that would be now – there woudl be worldwide famine. It was technically impossible to grow enough food to feed the masses – there simply wasn’t enough land. India and China would suffer first but eventually we would all simply run out of resources. The big movement was called ZPG for Zero Population Growth. I can remember my cousin Joan coming to my dorm to warn me to take it seriously. She was a med student so she knew much more about it than I did and she was concerned that I just wasn’t worried enough. I guess we know now that she took it very seriously since neither she nor anyone in that family had any kids. How interesting to find that not only is there no worldwide famine – but India and China are both now exporting food and one of the large worldwide economic issues of the day is the protection of farmers from cheaper imports. All over the world land is being taken out of agriculture because there’s too much food available.

Later in the 60’s we worried about “nuclear winter”. This group of prestigious scientists said we were certain to have a nuclear accident or event that would trigger chain reactions and massive explosions. So big, in fact, that a cloud of dirt and dust would completely cover the earth and block out the sun. The temperatures would drop and we would all be dead in short order – either from a lack of sun or radioactive fallout. I was never sure which would happen first.

At some point in the 70’s we (earthlings) were being barraged by ion blasts or something from explosions on the sun. It seems that the sun is just a continous series of hydrogen bomb kind of explosions which generated something called solar flares that reach out jillions of miles from the surface of the sun. These ions would totally wipe out the electrical systems around the world so there would be no power, no radio, no TV. I think it was also predicted to reverse the magnetic field of the earth so I guess compasses would all work backwards. And that was about the time we learned that there are huge asteroids drifting around out in space that would some day crash into earth, totally destroying it.

And didn’t we have Avian Flu last year. Remember this was to be a globe cleaning pandemic that would kill jillions of people. There wasn’t enough antibiotic on earth to stop it. Every newscast had reports of dead ducks in Taiwan or a dead goose turning up in Holland. Plenty of maps showing the migratory patterns of birds and how the flu would travel around the world. First we’d lose all the birds in the world and then the virus would learn to transfer from birds to people. What I wonder is how this could go from something that was going to impact the globe and basically deplete the population of the earth to a non event and there be no follow up news about what a bunch of crap it was. I wonder where these jillions of doses of antibiotic are??

I guess the thing that never ceases to amaze me is how all these dire predictions just sort of drift off into oblivion and the prestigious scientists just keep coming up with more dire, world ending predictions. Now they have large supercomputers to support their nonsense and wall to wall media to spread it. The scariest thing to me is the possibility that Nancy Pelosi could become Speaker of the House – that’s third in line for the presidency. Now that’s scary.