WE ARE DOOMED - ODDS BETTER THAN 50%

SCIENCE NEWS

Scientist Warns of Looming Disaster

Warns Mass Extinction is in the cards during 2007 or maybe earlier

By Scott Upchuk — Arts, Entertainment and Disaster Correspondent

VANCOUVER, 17 November 2006. Dr David Suzuki, Chief Scientist at LDI (The Looming Disasters Institute) based at the University of British Columbia, warns that a 60-KM wide, trillion-ton Space Rock is likely to smash into Earth during the remaining months of 2006 or early 2007. He notes that the hurtling comet, dubbed Nemesis by astronomers may just miss Earth but on the other hand may hit us dead on. He notes that pollution on earth caused by smokers, car drivers, and heavy equipment operators are adding to the problem.

Brian Wales (pictured), a recently retired maker of bathtub gin and grape jelly wines in the Dominican Republic and now a street dweller in downtown Vancouver, was asked how he felt about the looming catastrophe. Mr. Wales, who lives outdoors 24/7, of course, is vitally concerned about the environment. He was incoherant with barely subdued rage and his frustration was evident as he sank back with a strangled groan on a soiled pile of Vancouver Sun newspapers, his just finished bottle of Oaken Whiskey Pantherpiss rolling away from his outstretched arm.

The space rock, shown in a NASA photo taken with the Hubble Space Telescope is spherical, which is an unusual shape for an asteroid. "Asteroids and other space debris are usually pockmarked and dumbbell-shaped," says Dr. Suzuki.

"It's shaped just like a cannon ball and the worrisome thing is, if you examine it carefully, the "pock-marks" appears to make a face on the side of the meteorite that is facing Earth." Dr. Suzuki refused to draw any inferences but noted that the 'face', which of course could just be an unusual artifact of nature, appears to be "looking straight at us and with a determined half smile seems to be anticipating its collision with Earth. That is bad enough, and I hate to say, 'I told you so,' but it is only one more in a long string of environmental disasters that I've warned about. The rock is likely smiling because it knows it will end forever the disastrous effect pollution has on the environment."

Dr. Suzuki, has made his career predicting imminent flood, fire, fear and famine because of global warming. He says, "If the asteroid doesn't hit us we're still in deadly danger because owing to our belching exhausts and reckless pollution-spewing life styles, global warming means Antarctica's ice is melting. "Sea levels are rising everywhere and will soon drown us all," he said (see next story). Dr. Suzuki ended our interview on a sour note: "A lot of people dismiss me and my predictions of disaster claiming that I am a one-issue scientist. Well, they'll be singing a different tune when all of my predictions come true."

Asked how it was that he and Al Gore had predicted in 2005 that the 2006 hurricane season would be the "worst ever because of the warming seas". It was, in fact, one of the mildest on record because not one hurricane landed on the US coast during the season. Dr. Susuki had a quick and neat explanation. "It's the exception that proves the rule," he said.

Other scientists confirm that the odds are highly in favour of Nemesis hitting Earth sometime during the latter two months of this year. Scientists elsewhere in the world are carefully re-checking their own calculations as some of them keep getting anomalous results. "It's important that we don't screw up," said Dr. Fred Hoyle, Head of the Space Debris Tracking Lab at Princeton University. "The world has a lot riding on this."

The problem seems to be a flaw in the huge number-crunching computers that do the zillions of calculations needed to track orbits of meteorites, space debris, lost rockets, moons, and planets in outer space. NASA's giant calculators assigned to the task appears to have a number of faulty chips that frequently lose key bits. This is a flaw that is very hard to track down. In these giant computers there are a gazillion operating chips each of which is so tiny a dozen of them could fit in a teaspoon.

Nevertheless, the lab is working flat out, including weekends and even national holidays, and Dr. Hoyle hopes that his team will find the missing data and that he will have something to report, possibly as early as Christmas. The work is important because under the worst-case scenario, everyone on earth will die. (See related story below)

With files from November issue of Scientific Astronomy magazine.

Sea Levels Rising

NEW YORK, 15 Nov. 2006. Scientists are forecasting that sea levels will rise by 10 ft. per year unless people leave their automobiles at home and stop burning fossil fuels. In a speech to the Audubon's General Meeting today, Dr. David Suzuki, the renowned environmentalist, said, "We don't have a minute to lose. People living in seaside condominiums will be able to step onto their decks and dive right into the ocean. This could happen as early as Christmas this year or at least be Easter next year."

These fears are echoed by critics of globalization and of huge corporations that are only concerned about their obscene profits. For instance, a recent book Globalization Means We're Doomed by Maude Barlow and Maurice Strong, well-known Canadian shit disturbers, predicts that coastal cities will disappear under the waves and continents will shrink leaving too little land mass for the earth's 6 billion souls. "And what are we going to do, when the world's population hits 9 billion in 2015?" asked Mr. Strong. "

This dismal view of overcrowding is pooh-pooed by another book that claims that all of the people on earth—all six billion of us—could fit into a landmass no bigger than Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada

The book, Let's Move 'Em There, by Tom Creighton, says that things in Cape Breton could be a bit crowded and that the logistics problems could be a bit daunting, nevertheless, the idea should be looked at. "Everyone would have at least a cubic metre of living space," he said. Also a lot of problems such as the Sidney Tar Ponds cleanup would likely get solved during the move. "At least one person in the billions of people moving to the island would surely know what to do about it."