Are the doomsayers off base — or is the sky really falling?

By Robert S. Boyd
Knight Ridder Newspapers

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WASHINGTON — "Our Final Hour," "The End of the World," "Catastrophe," "Imagining the Unthinkable."

These aren't the ravings of wild-eyed prophets proclaiming the imminent arrival of doomsday. Rather, they're titles in a recent spate of scientific books and reports calling attention to various perils facing our planet.

In the book "Catastrophe," Richard Posner, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago, wrote: "The number of extreme catastrophes that have a more than negligible probability of occurring in this century is alarmingly great and their variety startling."

In his 2003 book "Our Final Hour," British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees declared: "I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century."

"Imagining the Unthinkable," a worst-case study requested by the Pentagon last year, warns that a sudden climate shift "could potentially destabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles and even war."

Some of these scary scenarios are plausible, perhaps inevitable, within the lifetimes of our children or grandchildren. Others are too improbable or remote in time to lose sleep about.

Some potential calamities discussed in the scientific literature threaten one city or region — others, the whole world or universe.

Among the more likely hazards are biological or nuclear terrorism, rising sea levels that flood coastlines, the loss of many of the world's forests and living species, and a smallpox or flu pandemic.

As many as 100 million people could die in a "worst case" outbreak of Asian bird flu, an official of the World Health Organization warned Monday.

Far down the probability scale — but not ruled out — are a temperature plunge that could turn oceans into ice, a killer asteroid smashing into Earth, and a takeover by superintelligent robots.
 
Two years ago, the prestigious National Academy of Sciences formed the Committee on Abrupt Climate Change. It reported that rapid rises or falls in temperature — by as much as 28 degrees — have occurred repeatedly, sometimes within a single decade. A recurrence is "not only possible but likely in the future," the report said.

David King, chief scientific adviser to the British government, has called global warming "more serious even than the threat of terrorism."

Of course, people have been predicting disasters since the dawn of civilization. Most have been false alarms.

In his book, published this fall, Posner scoffed at "scientific doomsters" who make horrifying forecasts that turn out to be false alarms. In 1970, for example, Paul Ehrlich, a prominent biologist, predicted that food and water would have to be rationed by 1980 and that 65 million Americans might starve to death in the 1980s. Neither happened.

Similarly, unfulfilled fears of widespread computer breakdowns marked the approach of the year 2000, the dreaded "Y2K."

"After enough false prophecies of doom, people stop paying attention," Posner said. Exaggerated predictions produce a disbelief about genuine risks, he warned.

At a conference on "Doomsday Science" in Goettingen, Germany, this fall, scholars reviewed the long line of apocalyptic books, art, philosophy and religion.

"There are real dangers and profound fears," said Mark Walker, one of the conference speakers and a historian of the nuclear age at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. "Unfortunately, we don't seem to be scared of the things that are really dangerous, such as a lethal virus or global warming."

Margaret Kosal, a researcher at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, says "the biggest catastrophes — 100 million people or more being drastically affected in a short period — will be completely unintended and unforeseen."

Perhaps the strangest — and most horrifying — of the doomsday scenarios in recent scientific literature is a new form of matter known as a quark-gluon plasma. It's already been and will again be the subject of experiments in high-energy physics laboratories.

Collisions of these subatomic particles might create extremely dense objects called "strangelets," which would have the fearsome ability to keep growing until all matter was consumed.

As Rees described it, "That would be a cosmic calamity, not just a terrestrial one."