This is hilarious. I have a close family member who is VERY much tuned into global apocalyptic theories. Every negative event in the world is yet another sign (Ah-ha, see!) that civilization is on the verge of collapse.

I can tell you that the Peak-oil Doomsday movement is still alive and well, even if the man-made global warming movement is waning. With gas prices approaching $4.00 again, I will be subjected to many more months of "See, see! This is the big one, Elizabeth!"

You state: "All the eco-apocalyptics need is some semi-plausible way to allege human causation ..."

Not necessarily true. All they need is some semi-plausible way to create a condition where human action would prevent the catastrophe because, after all, it is power and wealth redistribution which is the key to the enterprise, not the catastrophe.

That's a good point. All they need is an impending catastrophe in order to peddle their big guvmint solution to it.

God runs the world and expects us to behave properly, not to worry ourselves silly over aspects of nature we can't control.

Luddites, Unite!!

"The trouble with the magnetic reversal = disaster thesis is that it happens all the time, roughly 4-5 times every million years or so."

Well, the trouble with that thinking is that the Earth has been covered by water roughly 20,000 times, and covered by ice thousands of times. That's oodles of climate change, huh? Even before one human being ever existed. But that didn't stop socialists from claiming that we're altering the climate.

So, the last thing we can expect is for actual science to get in the way of progressives making Malthusian predictions on the future of humanity.

That's what progressives do - they ruminate on all the possible ways a species they hate will destroy itself and its environment, because they cannot fathom that a species as stupid and god-awful as we supposedly are could do anything otherwise.

Malthusian thinking - that human existence will end in man-made catastrophe - is the bedrock of progressivism.

Here's a Malthusian prediction of my own: the pseudo-intellectuals who call themselves "progressive" will continue to make increasingly outlandish, baseless claims about the destruction of our environment and what we are doing to contribute to the destruction, and will do so with even more hysteria than heretofore witnessed.

It won't be long before Al Gore starts selling "magnetic reversal credits" to prevent this clearly conservative conspiracy to move the North Pole to the South and South Pole to the North. Don't be surprised if the progressives start saying the Dinosaurs weren't killed off by a massive meteor, but the magnetic pole shift caused them to lose their way to their feeding grounds!

Actually, the pole shift already featured prominently in a disaster movie: "2012" I will be unsurprised to hear that most of you did not see it. There are many blog sites devoted to pointing out that the movie was pushing several different new apocalypse theories.

Maybe it's just me, but outside of "The China Syndrome" there seems to be a correlation between Hollywood disaster movie/parodies and the effect of an issue in the popular culture. *They are inversely proportional.* 2012 hysteria pretty much has subsided since the Cusack film. "The Day After Tomorrow" pretty much killed Global Warming as a political issue. "The Day After" (Jason Robards) was a non-event in the nuclear freeze movement. "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" equally put people at ease about the asteroid threat.

If the director of "The China Syndrome" had actually let the reactor melt down and destroy most of California, and cast Chartleton Heston as a city firefighter dealing with the fallout, we'd probably have 50 more reactors in the U.S. today. Chernobyl notwithstanding.

But, given the relative ease with which snake oil salemen like Al Gore can quicky declare a "scientific concensus" and an "end of the debate" while simultaneously convincing a segment of the population that the only way to change the weather is to pay more taxes...we are doomed to dance this dance forever.

Actually, according to the most compelling and sober research on magenetic field reversals (which are indeed a regular affair in the Earths geological history, akin to a very slowed down version of a liquid magnetic dynamo using mercury... which works well to simulate it by the way), the event itself, might create some interesting phenomena, but will not be ANYTHING even REMOTELY like a "game over" scenario.

In fact, and this is very important to note, the past dates of reversals can be quite accurately tracked using magnetic imprints in sedimentary rock samples, and for all of them, going back many millions of years, not one... not even ONE, is correlated with even a minor extinction event.

Why the fuss then?

The magneticc field itself is also not going to "disappear". How the hell would it do that? It may indeed weaken as the stable dipole becomes a fractured multipole, and the more chaotic that is the more strange and diffuse the magnetic field may get... but is someone going to stop the Earth from spinning, or the mantle from rotating around the solid core? Because that's the only thing that would make the field "stop". If the field typically weakens enough to permit radiation to reach the ground, the fossil history would be littered with extinction events at those times. As noted... it is not, period.

So... its all absurd.

Also worth noting is that the magnetic field strength is presently much much higher than at any point in the past several million years. It has been declining since we started recording it, yes... but from a very strong point.

This really seems like the kind of stuff that comes from, not a sober scientific analysis, but from a very human reaction to jumping up and yelling that the sky is falling, when one observes something happening... that hasn't happened before.

Annoying, and more akin to Hayek's "Scientism" than the idealized Science that (for gently prodded example) Derbyshire seems to believe in by default...with something like an almost (Ahem) religious fervor.

;-)

KM