What disasters could destroy Earth in under a couple of years?

or was it 8???

 

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Ohh sorry i meant to check that and give the answer, i do apologise

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I think the "Second Coming" may qualify as a global exinction or near global exinction event don't you think???

Yob Atta

 

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Given that the diameter of our planetary system (not including the Oort Cloud!) is infinitesimal compared to the average spacing between stars, the odds are against any other star ever having passed close enough to affect the orbits of the planets significantly - even over 5 billion years.

If wandering planets and brown dwarfs are as common as many astronomers think - dozens or even hundreds per cubic light year - then a few of those must have swung close by since the Solar System formed. But clearly, none massive enough to have dramatic effects.

 

NEMSIS??? Oooooh I'm sooooooo scared.

Even if this bullshit is true (it's not btw) and it's consequences wiped out the dinosaurs - so what?

If we suffered global extinctions 65m years ago, and then 39m years ago and then 13m years ago....

guess what? We needn't fret for another 13m years.

So I think we can safely write that catastrophe off, don't you? I mean, if we're still around in 13m years time - we'll be able to stop an asteroid with the power of thought!

Trust me, global warming and the Bush administration are much more of a threat than any of the hare-brained scenarios you lot seem to be focusing on.

 

Curious how every discussion nowadays tends to end at the global warming hoax, the satanic (GH) gasses and the Weather of Mass Destruction.

 

Every discussion ends up back to global warming or weather related disasters ... its unavoidable. The only reason for that is it's happening now ... not later. If it were an asteroid on a trajectory course to impact the planet in the next year, then it would be this that everyone would talk about and somehow blame Bush for not setting up an Asteriod defense system sooner.

People don't really care what may happen in the future ... if it's happening now and they can see the results for themselves, then this is where most discussion will fall into.

Granted, the science behind GW is still up to debate as I personally think the GW effect is due to an overall increase in water vapour content in the atmosphere and not CO2. But that's just what I think.

 

Okay Global warming again then,

Science? It used to be science. A hypothesis awaiting predictions to be furfilled. Something sort of like this:

http://www.junkscience.com/images/robinson.gif

So when the world did not warm 10 degrees, 5 degrees, 2 degrees, 1 degree in ten years, the incorrectness of the hypothesis should have been acknowledged and we would have discarted it, going back to business as usual. So when this was declined, global warming ceased to be science.

But global warming is a splendid tool for politicians to gain trustworthiness, convince the left wing of your integrity and fight the evil deeds of greedy humans and strengthen your power. So come on and pay more taxes and help save the world. That's why global warming flourishes, a very powerfull political tool, as Tony Blair is well aware of:

http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6333.asp

Read between the lines? Brittish leadership. That's the issue. Not global warming. So after a similar brilliant speech over half a century ago, the spokesman yelled: "wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?" In this case Tony Blair could have asked: "Do you want to pay maximum taxes now?" -needed to fight the evil opponent.

Interesting thought indeed. Although in the overall picture, water vapour content of the atmosphere is mainly governed by air temperature. And as the weather ballloons and satellites prove, the atmospheric temperatures have not increased at all.

However, locally humans produce a lot of artificial water vapour around their cities locally. perhaps an important rcause for the clearly provable "urban heat island" effect.

 

The urban heat island effect, I would think, is more due to direct heating of the air by fires, radiators, vehicle engines, industrial machinery and, ultimately, human metabolism. There are plenty of heat sources in your average city...

Going back to the title of this thread: I can't see global warming as likely to exterminate mankind, let alone all life on Earth, and certainly not within 2 years! Many parts of the World will actually become more fertile and habitable with an average temperature rise as a few degrees: the Artic permafrost could thaw and allow tundra to become cultivatable. Changing rainfall patterns could make the Sahara or Saudi Arabia green; tropical forests (or what's left of them) could spread further from the equator. With more CO2 in the atmosphere, plants everywhere could actually photosynthesise and grow a little faster. Oceanic biomass and fish stocks might be boosted, as long as the sea temperature didn't rise too much.

 

Nice scenario

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I say.

Granted, however there is wet greenhouse gas fairy tale of Venus.

Some alarmist have projected that on Earth: it gets warmer, so more water vapour in the air which is a strong greenhouse gas. So it gets even warmer and hence more water vapour, etc until the oceans boil and Earth ends up like Venus.

Coming to think of it, the greatest of all crackpots, Tom Chalko is going to have the Earth exploding as a result of Greenhouse gas warming:

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:m:

 

He's basically stolen my crackpot idea from earlier on this thread!

Which was quite thoroughly debunked, of course.

Can anyone come up with a believable mechanism by which a terrestrial planet could, literally, explode? Like the fictional planet Krypton?

 

Keeping thinking, but I'm not in favour of exploding worlds.

BTW, all, don't worry about Chalko's scenario.. It's debunked easily:

1: There is no significant global warming, only cycles that reinforce each other somethimes
2: The present scholar paradigm is that the possible main source of radiogenic heating of the core could be 40K decay (potassium). That's no nuclear fuel by any means.
3: Only enriched urianium (>7% U235? or something I think) can explode. Natural uranium is less than 1% U235. Even if there were enormous amounts of fissionable elements in the core, it would need to be in a enriched -not natural- isotope ratio.
4: If the inner core was to melt due to some spectaculair increase of temperatures, the heat convection current activity would far outweight gravity (which is zero at the centre of the Earth) and the continuous stirring would preclude any possibility of attaining critical masses of fissionalble atoms.

There has been a thread about this long ago I see:

http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=6429&page=1&pp=20

 

How about something more...earthly?

The prions that cause mad cow disease have mutated and are infecting record numbers of animals and humans. The whole thing becomes and epidemic and the people of the world are turned into neurotic, salivating idiots. Those unaffected are forced to make a last ditch effort to leave the world behind before they too get infected.

Or maybe researchers in an underground cloning operation have perfected the art, and decided to use their talents to create the "perfect race" and enslave the population of the rest of the world.

 

Why mad cow disease? How about a new and 100% contagious form of ebola, or malaria, or even influenza - like the superflu in Steven King's The Stand. It wouldn't require quite such a drastic mutation to turn one of those existing viruses into a Doomsday bug.

Plague always seemed like a tidy way to eliminate civilisation without destroying the biosphere, and convenient to use in fiction. I think Steven King was the first to consider the omnipresent piles of rotting corpses...

 

mad cow disease was the only prion caused disease i could think of

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nothing like the smell of decaying flesh in the morning, right?

 

I'll be sure and leave that day blank on my calendar..........

Yob Atta

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