Something to Worry About Today

Okay, this is it. 2012. Time to become a prophet.

Just a few reasons to believe the end of everything will happen this year:

• The Mayan calendar ticks away till December 21^st, then stops for the first time in 5,125 years.
• An ancient prediction says that the world will end during the reign of the 112^th pope.  The present one is the 11^th, and he’s in his eighties.
• The Earth’s magnetic field is dangerously weak, maybe presaging a pole reversal.
• The Sun’s surface will erupt in unusually violent storms beginning near the end of the year.
• Volcanoes, mega-storms and earthquakes from space are likely, scientists say.

So, depending on whether you quote vanished Amerindians, St Malachi or NASA, you are eligible for a robe and placard that says The End is Nigh.

Or maybe just, “We’re toast.”

Something to Worry About Today

          The tundra is on fire. And we’re next, say the scientists.

          In 2007, lightning struck the Arctic tundra at a place called Anaktuvuk, setting it ablaze.  This was formerly impossible, because the mixed lichen and very hardy plants were always too moist to burn. But global warming has helped dry out the frozen landscape, leaving us perilously close to a thaw that will send enough greenhouse gases to heat up the world to terminal levels.

          Beneath the permafrost in the polar wastes are enormous deposits of methane and other forms of carbon. If the melt continues, the accumulated gases may drive up Earth’s temperatures at an unsustainable (and unstoppable) level.

          The fire at Anaktuvuk released more carbon in a single go than is emitted in two years by a city the size of Miami.

         So, please: no more jokes about flatulent cows. 

Something to Worry About Today

The looming problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has doctors worried.

Until recently, we relied on medical researchers to stay one step ahead of mankind’s oldest enemy, but now we hear we’re losing the fight. The miracle drugs that allowed us to scoff at maladies that killed our ancestors by the million are losing effectiveness as the microbes mutate and get stronger. One cause in particular seems difficult to tackle.

Germs get horny too.

According to bacteriologist Hugh Pennington, germs can reproduce without climbing all over each other like randy teenagers, but they do it anyway. As they do, they spread an enzyme that can make penicillin-related compounds useless.

The problem is so serious that in places like Scandinavia and Holland, doctors assume that patients transferred from British hospitals already carry the MRSA bacterium. As the enzyme, NDM-1, spreads, formerly curable infections with such germs as E-coli become all but untreatable.

Promiscuity in people is a hard enough nut to crack, as population planners and AIDS prevention professionals know. But you can’t get microbes to take cold showers.

Something to Worry About Today

 

Aliens are here, an international conference said last week, and they want your gold.

Ace doom spotter BKG tells us that a meeting called the UFO Science and Consciousness Conference, appropriately held in gold-rich Johannesburg, has concluded that extraterrestrial visitors came to Earth 300,000 years ago and have returned periodically ever since. Their purpose? Why, collecting gold of course.

Their strategy was to alter bits of their DNA, thereby creating humanity, and to use us as miners for the precious metal. In explanation, conference organizer Michael Tellinger said, “We are all obsessed with gold.”

So if you get tempted to hock the family jewels this recession, look carefully at the guy behind the counter.

           

Something to Worry About Today

Warm weather ahead? Yippee!  

There are some people around who look forward to global warming, who just can’t wait for balmy days on the Costa del Solihull.  And come to think of it, isn’t a bit of warm weather healthier, anyway?  Fewer colds and flu in winter? No problem, right?

Until you get malaria.

Scientists warn that even a small rise in average temperatures in Europe and North America could bring about new waves of deadly insect-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and encephalitis. To further complicate things, ticks and sand flies that carry maladies like Lyme disease and black fever would find our environment pleasant. Already, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Turkey have become danger areas for malaria.

When our book went to press in June, 2011, conventional wisdom had it that an average temperature rise of .8 degrees was the total rise since 1950.  Recently, the Berkeley Earth Temperatures programme upped the total to .911 C. At that rate, we would begin to see diseases against which we have no natural defences very soon.

Forget about new sun suits.  Buy mosquito nets instead.