Better Angels

Staying Cool: Bjørn Lomborg On 29 Things We Should Worry About Before Global Warming

We have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.

-- Al Gore

Yes, global warming is real. It's often vastly exaggerated, which is why we need smarter solutions. Let's pick those smarter solutions on [priority] #14 rather than #30. Let's pick them smart, rather than stupidly. And then also let's remember that there are many other problems in this world that we can fix so much cheaper and do so much more good.

So if this is really a question about saying let's do good in the world, well, then let's do real good and not just make ourselves feel good about what we do.

-- Bjørn Lomborg

I've mentioned Bjørn Lomborg before -- I find him to be the most clear-thinking, easily understandable and rational thinker on the subject of global warming and environmentalism I have encountered. In particular, he is extremely rare in being someone who simultaneously believes we are experiencing human-caused warming and that we should look to make reasonable cost-effective efforts to improve the world (and some of the best things we could do to improve the world, believe it or not, might not be "fighting" global warming...). People accuse him of not presenting real science; not only do I think that charge is false, but much more importantly, Lomborg exposes the fact that almost no one else is presenting real economics and rational choices.

I should mention, as is the case with most people whose views I put forward around here, I don't agree with Lomborg on everything. He's very far left politically compared to me, putting much more faith in socialism (or things that sound like socialism) as an answer to achieving equality within a society. But he puts his politics aside when looking to solve problems; he's more interested in measurable reality than ideology. This is an admirable trait that I would like to claim I share, but which I fail to achieve all too often.

Lomborg recently did a presentation for and an interview with Reason about his most recent book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. He's always a good speaker, but I found his presentation to be perhaps one of his better summaries of his book and his general philosophy, so here it is:

And here are excepts from the interview, done by Ronald Bailey. These only scratch the surface; definitely read the interview itself (especially if you want to get a sense of his politics, and some of the history of him being accused of "scientific dishonesty").

reason: How did you come up with the idea of the Copenhagen Consensus?

Bjørn Lomborg: It really started with my discussion of global warming. The advantages of doing the Kyoto Protocol are fairly small, but the cost of doing Kyoto for just one year is about what it would cost to give clean drinking water and sanitation to everyone.

We did some searches. I was sure somebody had done global priority setting before. We do it implicitly by the way we spend money, but apparently nobody's ever thought about it formally.

...About half the proposals are kind of obvious. Yes, it's good to do malaria. Yes, it's good to do HIV/AIDS. But I think most of them are impressive because we don't usually think of them. One of the great examples from this session is heart medicine for the Third World. When we think about the Third World, we think about malnourished black children with incredibly distended bellies who we see with flies all over them. We think about malaria and AIDS, those kinds of problems. Those are important, but the death toll from malaria, TB, and HIV, even in the most stricken countries, is still less than the death toll from heart disease. And we have very cheap aspirins, statins, for dealing with heart disease that work very well. Spending $200 million a year could probably save about 300,000 people dying each year in the developing world, causing a benefit of $25 for every dollar spent.

Now, that's not a sexy proposal. It's not one that you usually hear, but isn't it something we ought to hear? The Copenhagen Consensus is not just about what's fashionable. It's not just about what looks good on TV. It's also about making sure we reveal lots of hidden, reclusive, not very publicized issues that we should also be listening to. Perhaps it's about being a little more rational.

reason: Are there any things you've changed your mind about since you wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist?

Lomborg: I think the main point of that book was to challenge our notion that everything is going down the drain, and I don't see any reason to revise that. We are in general moving in the right direction, and it's important to say mankind solves a lot of problems. We also create new problems in the process of solving old problems, but typically they're smaller than the old ones we fix, which is why we move ahead on virtually all material indicators. My second point with the book was to say this means we need to start prioritizing; we need to be smart about the kinds of problems that we worry about.

People in the U.S. will worry about pesticides, which kill probably about 20 people a year, but care very little about particulate air pollution, which kills 110,000 people in the U.S. every year. We could probably do something dramatic about particulates at a much lower cost than the pesticides. It's much more about getting those orders of magnitude right, and that's, of course, what the Copenhagen Consensus is about.

reason: Has the Copenhagen Consensus had an effect on public policy? I know the Danish prime minister mentioned that his government shifted development aid to AIDS medicines in developing countries.

Lomborg: I was told by some of the people at the [U.S.] National Security Council that one of the reasons why President Bush gave $1.2 billion to malaria was because of the Copenhagen Consensus result.

Of course, it's always going to be very hard to say what specific outcome was caused by this list. I would argue that the much stronger benefit of the Copenhagen Consensus is that it pushes policy makers and philanthropists way before anything is ever decided. When the first committee meets in the bowels of a big organization to talk about what should be our next big push, somebody's going to have more likelihood of saying, "Why are we talking about No. 17 instead of No. 3 on the list of Copenhagen Consensus priorities?"

I just realized that Bjørn and I have something in common...somewhere around twenty years ago I started thinking of doing a book called "What Really Matters?" that would prioritize the things we should actually be worried about rather than the silly things we fool ourselves into worrying about.

I guess the minor difference between Bjørn and I is that he actually did it...

Are We Killing Ourselves To Death? A Brief History of Historical and Modern Violence as discussed by Steven Pinker

"I can't really remember when I last had any hope. And I certainly can't remember when anyone else did, either."

-- Theo Faron, protagonist of Children of Men (P.D. James)

It is a time of war and rumors of war. The 20th century was the deadliest in human history, as we converted our supposedly wonderful technology into machines of murder and slaughtered each other on a scale never before known in history. It is an era of shame. The masses of humanity call out for us to return to a simpler time where perhaps we didn't have television and computers, but at least we lived with simple peace and common humanity and brotherhood.

We are killing ourselves to death.

So it seems. So goes the zeitgeist many of us grew up with. A gnawing sense of just how evil modern society is, and how corrupted we are for being a part of it. We've become a ruthless world, barely worth living in, as perhaps best expressed in the brilliant book-turned-movie Children of Men:

This is the way we feel. This is the way we want to feel, and perhaps the way we are programmed to feel. There is a visceral pleasure in saying, "I won't bring a child into this awful world."

This may be the reality we create in our minds and our media and our fiction, but it is largely a reality of our own construction, not reflective of what is actually happening out there, especially in relation to any time in the past. In reality, so many things in the world are better than ever before for more people than ever before. It's an encouraging and, really, irrefutable message, but one that, oddly, we tend not to want to hear, and to outright reject. Yet we need to understand what is actually getting better if we are to improve those things still wrong with the world.

I've covered some of this in talking about the question of how to handle global warming. Over time I'll delve into other factors that fall into this. Today, watching a video of a talk by Steven Pinker from a few years ago, I was struck by a chart he showed which I'll get to in a bit. First, here is his overall shocking, and perhaps unacceptable, thesis:

"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth."

-- Steven Pinker, "A History of Violence"

An insane and irresponsible statement, clearly, particularly in a time of the Iraq war and genocides like Rwanda and Darfur, and a few decades after the holocaust and the horrors of starvation in Stalin's Soviet Union. Or is it? Here is Pinker discussing the subject in a 2007 talk at TED:

To give context for the idea that violence has decreased significantly and for his assertion that primitive societies do not hold some moral high ground when it comes to man's treatment of man, Pinker created this chart based on data gathered by Lawrence Keeley, author of War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage:

The chart shows the percentage of males killed by violence in various societies around the world. This is just a partial picture and can't be trusted on its own to represent the state of the world; yet what I found striking is that the statistic for the U.S. and Europe combined includes the first and second world wars.

Consider the implications of that. As Pinker says, if men in the U.S. and Europe were killing each other at the rate seen in non-state societies, instead of 100 million people killed in recent history, we'd have something approaching two billion.

So much for the noble savage, and the peaceful harmony of a simpler time.

Perhaps technological and other forms of human progress having something going for them after all.

In his article for the New Republic, Pinker provides further detail:

Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution--all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage--the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions--pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood"). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

...The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

...Several historians have suggested that there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars across the centuries to the present, but, as political scientist James Payne has noted, this may show only that "the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks."

...The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply--for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.

On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.

These are shocking, heartening statements and statistics. They do not deny flaws in the world or in humans, but they show that not only are we capable of making things better, we have done a remarkable job of making things better. I recommend reading the entire article for more interesting insights and a discussion of why people find these statements hard to believe.

And many do want to reject any story of good news and the improving state of mankind both because they don't believe it and because believing it might lead to complacency and a passive acceptance of man's cruelty to man.

But we cannot progress by ignoring reality. We cannot choose smartly where to apply our resources by ignoring the data.

The world has gotten better, and we can make it better still. But only if we open our eyes to reality, even the reality of good news.

Volkswagon-sized asteroid collides with the atmosphere

I've posted multiple times about the dangers of asteroid collision:

• The end of the world as we know it

• A really cool way to save the planet

• More about rocks in space

So I was delighted to see that scientists predicted an asteroid collision accurately enough that it could be filmed happening. From Star Bulletin:

The successful prediction of a harmless asteroid impact over northern Africa yesterday bodes well for a Maui-based system in development to warn against potentially hazardous space rocks, a University of Hawaii astronomer contends.

While boulders of various sizes routinely hit the Earth's atmosphere, this was the first time that astronomers saw one coming and accurately predicted the time and place of impact, UH astronomer David Tholen said yesterday.

The impact occurred at 4:46 p.m. Hawaii time Monday over northern Sudan. A colleague compared the asteroid, called 2008 TC3, to the size of a Volkswagen, he said...

"These things happen every month or two and most of the time just go unnoticed, except people on the ground who see the fireball," Tholen said. "This time, astronomers saw it first and could predict the fireball. It was unique."

Read the whole thing for more info. Meantime, this provides for some fun eye candy...first, the trajectory the asteroid took:

Video of the asteroid as it approached the planet:

Another, possibly more close up view (clearer, at least!) of the asteroid approaching:

And finally, the money shot, the collision itself (don't blink!):

At least that is presented as the collision...some comments on the YouTube page seem to think it's another situation and I haven't found verification either way -- if you know more, please let me know.

In any case, hopefully this is a sign that we're getting more likely to detect and be able to handle larger asteroid impacts. I love living in a time and a culture when we can do this stuff.

Should I panic now or later?

I remember when the crisis was the Japanese "coopetition" machine buying up all our golf courses and movie studios. I even remember when all that "strange weather" we always seem to be having was because of "El Niño" (that was after it was due to "global cooling", for those keeping track).

Now it's "Peak oil".

Once again, we're all gonna die. Pretty soon now. Or in 20 years. Hardly ever longer than 20 years before we're all gonna die.

So it's refreshing to come across an article, even if it's a couple of years old now, that discusses the whole peak oil thing in some depth and gives some interesting insight. Check it out:

Peak Oil Panic
Is the planet running out of gas? If it is, what should the Bush administration do about it?

"And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn't it?"
-- Al Gore

Global warming, climate change, catastrophe of heretofore unknown proportions, that's what we're heading for, I hear.

This is a tough one for me. As a rule, I like to base my reactions to the big questions of the day on what I can see around me. I can look around and see the results of capitalism, (relatively) free trade, and a tolerant society. Even on subjects as complicated as evolution, I can put together the pieces:

random mutation + persistence of mutated traits through inheritance (DNA as a mechanism) = natural selection

Check. My struggling brain can put together the pieces and analyze the results, no problem.

When it comes to global warming, what the hell do I know?

If person A tells me, "We're in for disastrous global cooling, just look at these figures!", well, okay, looks plausible to me. Then person B tell me, "This chart of the last 1000 years shows that we're warming through the roof!", well, okay, looks plausible to me.

The numbers, they sure is pretty.

These arguments, where we're sometimes talking a degree or two over years or decades, in the context of a global history of naturally occurring climate change, don't result in something I can wrap my head around.

This means I am stuck trusting someone. Which means someone who, while I can't understand how they are deriving particular conclusions, I can understand their general approach to solving problems.

And here is where I get into trouble. Because, see, the people I most often trust when it comes to skeptical questions like alternative medicine, Bigfoot, and little green men, well, near as I can tell, when it comes to the climate change thing they just don't apply the same sort of critical thinking to the subject. They appeal to me to trust the "consensus" and they often pillory people who I do trust on the subject while simultaneously stating they don't actually know what those people believe. Yeah, Steven Novella of the otherwise incredibly excellent Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, I'm talking to you, Mr. "I haven't read Bjorn Lomborg's work but I believe he's wrong"...

Really, he's wrong when he says things like:

Q: Does Lomborg deny man-made global warming exists?

A: No. In Cool It he writes: "global warming is real and man-made. It will have a serious impact on humans and the environment toward the end of this century" (p8).

Q: But he used to deny it, didn't he?

A: No. In both his first Danish book in 1998 and the English version of The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001, Bjorn Lomborg stressed that man-made global warming exists. The introduction to a section on climate change in The Skeptical Environmentalist clearly states, "This chapter accepts the reality of man-made global warming" (p259).

Just what is it in what he hasn't read here that Mr. Novella disagrees with?

Further, people like James Randi express their support for the whole global warming thing, and one of the guys on his (unpaid) staff calls Al Gore's statement's "rock solid science" in a podcast interview...but then I look at what Al Gore is saying, and he's saying populist unscientific pap like the quote at the beginning of this post, and I instinctively recoil.

What's a good skeptic to do?

I find I can do nothing but continue to look for those who take a skeptical, critical thinking approach to the subject and thereby sway me with their arguments. To date, Bjorn Lomborg does that as well as anyone I've found. I would summarize what I've learned from him as:

• Global warming exists.
• Man-made global warming exists.
• The impact of global warming is nowhere near as catastrophic as extremists would have you believe.
• Whatever resources we decide to devote to the issue of global warming must be done in a context of all the other things we might due to improve the plight of humanity.

Simple as that. Doesn't seem too evil, does it?

Much more important than the question of global warming is Bjorn's approach to how the world should solve the biggest problems we face. Here is Bjorn discussing how to determine just what we should be trying to fix in this world:

He also edited a book on the subject of what we should be trying to fix today. Check it out. Feel free to disagree, but I hope you'll do so after you know what the guy actually believes and what things he feels need to be fixed first in this world.

After posting about how we landed a spacecraft on the asteroid Eros, I realized that I had actually been thinking about another craft intercepting an object in space...a comet, in fact. This was the Deep Impact mission, designed to discover how comets are formed and what they are made of.

So when I said that the Eros landing was one of the most amazing things this species has done, I was not quite accurate...this tops it:

The video shows an external view of a probe crashing into the comet, then the view from the probe itself as it closed in and impacted, and finally the comet moving off into the sunset...

While this mission wasn't apparently designed to test how we might deflect such an object from colliding with Earth, it does prove that, with sufficient notice, we could get a payload to even as elusive an object as a comet and nudge it or nuke it.

We live in incredible times.

The comment thread for my last post brought up the point that there's nothing we can do about asteroids, so why worry about it?

The cool thing is, we actually can do something about that, and this is a good chance to post more videos. First up, just because it's interesting, here's another impact captured on video...this time it was our moon. Hmm, don't see a good version to link from YouTube, so check out the NASA page containing the video. This one wouldn't have been a threat on Earth, since the meteor wasn't large enough to get through our atmosphere.

In 2001 we actually landed a spacecraft on the asteroid Eros, proving we do have the ability to intercept Near Earth Objects given enough notice. Here is an animation representing the touchdown on the asteroid and ending with the actual photos from the ship as it landed:

That is just one of the most amazing things our species has ever done.

The PERMANENT website has this interesting discussion of the history of impacts, the efforts underway to prevent such an impact, and the possible ways we might do so.  These include:

• Blowing it up by nuclear bomb
• Nudging it by nuclear bomb
• Nudging it by kinetic impact
• Thrusting the object

Check out that page for much more detail.

I say: "Bomb an asteroid, save a planet!"

A while back I was having one of those discussions about what we should do about global warming. One of those conversations where I half-remember various sources I've read and sputter on in an unconvincing manner and manage to offend whoever I'm talking to without enlightening anyone.

I do that a lot.

Anyway, in this particular conversation, I said I wasn't very worried about global warming. Whatever comes up there, we'll deal with, and over time we'll have better ways to deal with it.

What I'm worried about, I said, is a comet or meteor or something smacking into the world and wiping us all out. That's a tough one to deal with.

The person I was talking to, like any reasonable person would I suppose, turned to me and said derisively, "That's science fiction!"

Okay, I can empathize with the reaction. Here we are talking about global warming, a phenomenon that is clearly going to wreak havoc on all of us in just a few years if we don't do something damnit, and suddenly I'm going on about stuff you might see in Star Trek. I might as well be coming from another planet, so to speak.

Well, actually... Unlike the vagaries of where exactly the weather will go in the future, we know comet and asteroid impacts can happen and have happened, and have in fact wiped things out on the planet one or more times. But I think what surprised me most about that reaction, on reflection, and what I didn't think to bring up at the time, is that not only is this not science fiction, we just saw it happen, in 1994, to Jupiter...

This left some Earth-sized spots clearly visible on the planet for a while, and would have been quite devastating if it had happened to us (again). There's more about this collision, of course, on Wikipedia. And if you want to scare yourself once in a while, see what's up at NASA's Near Earth Object Program, or read up on the Tunguska event and the history of impact events.

So, yeah, I know it's science fiction, but when it comes to the end of the world as we know it, my bet is on these invaders from outer space...

Is it getting warm in here?

"And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn't it?"
-- Al Gore

Global warming, climate change, catastrophe of heretofore unknown proportions, that's what we're heading for, I hear.

This is a tough one for me. As a rule, I like to base my reactions to the big questions of the day on what I can see around me. I can look around and see the results of capitalism, (relatively) free trade, and a tolerant society. Even on subjects as complicated as evolution, I can put together the pieces:

random mutation + persistence of mutated traits through inheritance (DNA as a mechanism) = natural selection

Check. My struggling brain can put together the pieces and analyze the results, no problem.

When it comes to global warming, what the hell do I know?

If person A tells me, "We're in for disastrous global cooling, just look at these figures!", well, okay, looks plausible to me. Then person B tell me, "This chart of the last 1000 years shows that we're warming through the roof!", well, okay, looks plausible to me.

The numbers, they sure is pretty.

These arguments, where we're sometimes talking a degree or two over years or decades, in the context of a global history of naturally occurring climate change, don't result in something I can wrap my head around.

This means I am stuck trusting someone. Which means someone who, while I can't understand how they are deriving particular conclusions, I can understand their general approach to solving problems.

And here is where I get into trouble. Because, see, the people I most often trust when it comes to skeptical questions like alternative medicine, Bigfoot, and little green men, well, near as I can tell, when it comes to the climate change thing they just don't apply the same sort of critical thinking to the subject. They appeal to me to trust the "consensus" and they often pillory people who I do trust on the subject while simultaneously stating they don't actually know what those people believe. Yeah, Steven Novella of the otherwise incredibly excellent Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, I'm talking to you, Mr. "I haven't read Bjorn Lomborg's work but I believe he's wrong"...

Really, he's wrong when he says things like:

Q: Does Lomborg deny man-made global warming exists?

A: No. In Cool It he writes: "global warming is real and man-made. It will have a serious impact on humans and the environment toward the end of this century" (p8).

Q: But he used to deny it, didn't he?

A: No. In both his first Danish book in 1998 and the English version of The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001, Bjorn Lomborg stressed that man-made global warming exists. The introduction to a section on climate change in The Skeptical Environmentalist clearly states, "This chapter accepts the reality of man-made global warming" (p259).

Just what is it in what he hasn't read here that Mr. Novella disagrees with?

Further, people like James Randi express their support for the whole global warming thing, and one of the guys on his (unpaid) staff calls Al Gore's statement's "rock solid science" in a podcast interview...but then I look at what Al Gore is saying, and he's saying populist unscientific pap like the quote at the beginning of this post, and I instinctively recoil.

What's a good skeptic to do?

I find I can do nothing but continue to look for those who take a skeptical, critical thinking approach to the subject and thereby sway me with their arguments. To date, Bjorn Lomborg does that as well as anyone I've found. I would summarize what I've learned from him as:

• Global warming exists.
• Man-made global warming exists.
• The impact of global warming is nowhere near as catastrophic as extremists would have you believe.
• Whatever resources we decide to devote to the issue of global warming must be done in a context of all the other things we might due to improve the plight of humanity.

Simple as that. Doesn't seem too evil, does it?

Much more important than the question of global warming is Bjorn's approach to how the world should solve the biggest problems we face. Here is Bjorn discussing how to determine just what we should be trying to fix in this world:

He also edited a book on the subject of what we should be trying to fix today. Check it out. Feel free to disagree, but I hope you'll do so after you know what the guy actually believes and what things he feels need to be fixed first in this world.

More about rocks in space

After posting about how we landed a spacecraft on the asteroid Eros, I realized that I had actually been thinking about another craft intercepting an object in space...a comet, in fact. This was the Deep Impact mission, designed to discover how comets are formed and what they are made of.

So when I said that the Eros landing was one of the most amazing things this species has done, I was not quite accurate...this tops it:

The video shows an external view of a probe crashing into the comet, then the view from the probe itself as it closed in and impacted, and finally the comet moving off into the sunset...

While this mission wasn't apparently designed to test how we might deflect such an object from colliding with Earth, it does prove that, with sufficient notice, we could get a payload to even as elusive an object as a comet and nudge it or nuke it.

We live in incredible times.

A really cool way to save the planet

The comment thread for my last post brought up the point that there's nothing we can do about asteroids, so why worry about it?

The cool thing is, we actually can do something about that, and this is a good chance to post more videos. First up, just because it's interesting, here's another impact captured on video...this time it was our moon. Hmm, don't see a good version to link from YouTube, so check out the NASA page containing the video. This one wouldn't have been a threat on Earth, since the meteor wasn't large enough to get through our atmosphere.

In 2001 we actually landed a spacecraft on the asteroid Eros, proving we do have the ability to intercept Near Earth Objects given enough notice. Here is an animation representing the touchdown on the asteroid and ending with the actual photos from the ship as it landed:

That is just one of the most amazing things our species has ever done.

The PERMANENT website has this interesting discussion of the history of impacts, the efforts underway to prevent such an impact, and the possible ways we might do so.  These include:

• Blowing it up by nuclear bomb
• Nudging it by nuclear bomb
• Nudging it by kinetic impact
• Thrusting the object

Check out that page for much more detail.

I say: "Bomb an asteroid, save a planet!"

The end of the world as we know it

A while back I was having one of those discussions about what we should do about global warming. One of those conversations where I half-remember various sources I've read and sputter on in an unconvincing manner and manage to offend whoever I'm talking to without enlightening anyone.

I do that a lot.

Anyway, in this particular conversation, I said I wasn't very worried about global warming. Whatever comes up there, we'll deal with, and over time we'll have better ways to deal with it.

What I'm worried about, I said, is a comet or meteor or something smacking into the world and wiping us all out. That's a tough one to deal with.

The person I was talking to, like any reasonable person would I suppose, turned to me and said derisively, "That's science fiction!"

Okay, I can empathize with the reaction. Here we are talking about global warming, a phenomenon that is clearly going to wreak havoc on all of us in just a few years if we don't do something damnit, and suddenly I'm going on about stuff you might see in Star Trek. I might as well be coming from another planet, so to speak.

Well, actually... Unlike the vagaries of where exactly the weather will go in the future, we know comet and asteroid impacts can happen and have happened, and have in fact wiped things out on the planet one or more times. But I think what surprised me most about that reaction, on reflection, and what I didn't think to bring up at the time, is that not only is this not science fiction, we just saw it happen, in 1994, to Jupiter...

This left some Earth-sized spots clearly visible on the planet for a while, and would have been quite devastating if it had happened to us (again). There's more about this collision, of course, on Wikipedia. And if you want to scare yourself once in a while, see what's up at NASA's Near Earth Object Program, or read up on the Tunguska event and the history of impact events.

So, yeah, I know it's science fiction, but when it comes to the end of the world as we know it, my bet is on these invaders from outer space...