You may know the factoid that New York City and Rome sit at approximately the same latitude (40° N for New York, 41° N for Rome), yet Rome’s climate is warm year-round, while New York’s is temperate, and that this is the effect of the Gulf Stream, which is the primary engine that keeps Europe from turning into one big glacier. You may also know that one of the favorite doomsday bugaboos of panic-mongers everywhere is that the Gulf Stream is in danger of simply stopping at any moment, plunging the world into calamity. There was even a cheesy disaster movie about this scenario a few years ago.
Now, according to this BBC story, scientists have collected enough data to determine that there’s no apparent slowing down of the Gulf Stream whatsoever. Data collected over the last decade or so shows only minor seasonal variations and not any pattern of significant slowdown of the current, but scientists are a bit surprised at just how much variability they do see.
But don’t despair, there’s still that giant rock shear tidal wave that is sure to kill us all any day now.
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So, apparently tomorrow is the End Of The World.
I heard about it from P.Z. Myers, who is always on top of stuff like this.
You might remember the last time I posted about these guys, and since then they’ve been wrong on at least three subsequent occasions, so you may or may not want to actually panic.
(Oh, okay, you got me. This whole post is just an excuse to use this picture of Karina Smirnoff naked. But, hey, pretty hot, right?)
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One more doomsday fetish down the drain, I see. Of course we’ve still got killer asteroids, bird flu, monster tsunamis, and a fourth judge on American Idol still waiting to destroy the world, so don’t give up the ship yet you fear-mongers.
The gang at Neatorama have wasted no time in cashing in on someone else’s success (a.k.a The American Way) by ginning up this “I Survived The LHC” logo and putting it on a t-shirt. It can be all yours for a mere $9.95 (plus shipping and handling). I’m a bit disappointed that the back doesn’t say “And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt”, but chiggers can’t be boozers after all. I have to admit that I’m sorely tempted to buy one, except that they come from CafePress.com, who use inferior t-shirts.
What they’ll do with this huge thing a couple of years from now, I can’t quite figure out yet. Are they going to put it up for sale on Craig’s List? Try to sell it on eBay like Sarah Palin tried with the governor’s jet? Put it out on the curb for “large item pickup” day and hope someone drives by and takes it before the garbage men show up? Do they even HAVE large item pickup day in Switzerland?
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AAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! We’re all gonna die!!!!!
The planet Mercury is going to smash into Earth and kill us all!! It’s hopeless!! We’re DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!!!!
Well, someday. Maybe. If the gravitational field of Jupiter is just right. You know, in theory anyway.
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If you were a customer of Bear Stearns, you’re probably a lot poorer today that you were yesterday. Many in the investment community have chosen this sudden and dramatic reversal of fortunes to decide that WE’RE ALL DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!!!!!
I have it on good authority that by sometime tomorrow the dollar will be as worthless as the Weimar Deutschmark, and we’ll all need wheelbarrows full of cash to buy the merest item of food on the barren shelves of our looter-riddled grocery stores, provided that there’s a single drop of petroleum left to deliver the food from the few stalks of corn not given over to making ethanol. The suburbs will turn into overgrown fields populated by roving gangs of dispossessed foreclosed homeowners, demolishing their shoddily-made McMansions and warring with one another for working vehicles in a Mad Max-like post-holocaust realm of savages. Who needs the fucking bird flu?!?!?
Sounds like it’s going to be a really long week if all that happens by Tuesday.
But, you can prepare for the end of civilization RIGHT NOW by getting your all-purpose emergency kit ready. That ought to last you through the first wave of societal collapse, at which point you’ll also want to make sure that you’ve prepped your “go bag” for spending the rest of your worthless hardscrabble existence living in abandoned woodchuck burrows that you have to defend with pointy sticks and dirt clods from the ravaging legions of starvation-crazed soccer moms who attack you day and night. Oh, and here’s Mike Huckabee’s recipe for making fried squirrel in your popcorn maker so tonight you can enjoy the last hot meal you’re ever going to eat.
Look at it this way: between the monster floods that will destroy every city in the world when the glaciers all melt this summer, the buildup of toxins in everyone’s bloodstreams from all the residual pharmaceuticals in the drinking water, and the new Paris Hilton “reality” TV series, you really didn’t have anything to live for anyway.
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Remember H5N1? You know, the bird flu that was going to wipe out civilization three years ago? How the dead were going to be stacked like firewood in the streets? How the Western World was totally unprepared for the utter devastation that would be caused when 90% of us died from it in a matter of days? How we needed to DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW, which the Bush Administration interpreted to mean stock up on a flu vaccine made by a company Donald Rumsfeld owned stock in, so at least ONE Republican would be sure to profit while all the rest of them were keeling over? OH THE HUMANITY!!!
Well, there are a LOT of dead birds…millions of them in fact. Wild birds killed by the flu throughout Asia and Europe, then millions more poultry livestock deliberately slaughtered in Southeast Asia, where the virus first emerged. But there really aren’t many dead people. The much-ballyhooed bird-to-human transmission of the disease simply hasn’t occurred.
There have been a total of about 340 human cases (and 212 deaths) since the virus first emerged, almost all of them limited to the parts of Southeast Asia where the poultry have been most affected and the people live among the livestock. Only one human-to-human transmission has been documented between a father and son with close contact to the birds. Now, the head of the World Organization For Animal Health has gone on record saying “oopsie”. The H5N1 virus is “extremely stable” and shows very little likelihood of interspecies transmission.
The panicmongers haven’t been too quick to pick this up, having moved on to other things that will surely cause the collapse of human civilization any second now. We still have the mortgage crisis, after all. (Just don’t tell them that the “vast number of foreclosures” is really only about 4% of American homeowners) And the rising sea levels. And killer meteorites. Something is BOUND to pay off.
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Well, Mars-shattering, actually. CNN reports that NASA has determined that there is a small asteroid headed towards Mars which, at the moment, has a 1-in-75 chance of hitting the planet. Those are pretty good odds for an asteroid collision. They also say that the current path would put the point of impact not too far from the current position of one of the two Martian rovers still scurrying around on the surface of the planet. They haven’t quite admitted it, but they are actually pissing their pants with excitement about the opportunity to observe a significant asteroid impact from space AND the surface. As the asteroid gets closer, they expect that the chance of impact will decrease substantially, but they’re hoping for it anyway.
Earlier this week, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories published the results of a study that used a supercomputer to develop a new model of the circumstances of the impact of the Tunguska asteroid in Siberia in the early 20th century. Their conclusion is that the asteroid was much smaller than was earlier believed, and the force of the explosion thus smaller than originally thought, but that the likelihood of collisions with smaller objects is statistically more likely — in other words, one big asteroid probably won’t kill us all, but the chance of being hit by smaller ones is a lot higher and they are still BAD NEWS. Be sure to look at the linked videos at the bottom of that Sandia Labs link, they’re very cool.
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Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
