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Under the gun : Comments
By Julian Cribb, published 9/6/2009While we continue to dawdle on greenhouse mitigation policy we seem blithely unaware there is a gun pointed at our heads. The clathrate gun.
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I am, for one.
"And why?"
Because this looks exactly like all the hysterical claims that have been made in the past -- overpopulation, running out of food, nuclear winter, global cooling, the ozone hole, greenhouse gases, acid rain, the Y2K bug, CJD, CRD, bird flu, swine flu, etc, etc, etc, and global warming itself... all of which turned out to be cynical attempts to panic the populace in order to a) sell more newspapers and b) put more power into the hands of self-appointed 'saviours'.
"Yet if there was even one chance in a thousand of the gun firing, should we ignore it?"
One chance in a thousand is about the risk you take of being hit by a car during the next month. Does that mean you should spend the next month indoors? However, as a 'science communicator' should know, pinning a number on the 'probability' of a unique event is mathematically bogus.
Ho hum. Nothing to see here. Wake me up when the clathrates call.