Oh London Independent, don’t ever lose your sense of the apocalypse.
Matt Drudge links to a new Independent article titled, “Watch out for the hot flushes (a few billion years away): Earth enters its mid-life crisis — The far-future Earth will be very hostile to life, says expert:”
Don’t be surprised if the Earth buys a Ferrari, dons a leather jacket and starts bulk buying ‘Just for Men’ in the next few years as according to scientists our planet as entered middle age.
Astrobiologists from Scotland’s St Andrew’s University have predicted a death date for the Earth, which is 4.54 billion-years-old, as 2000002013, making our home a relative 50 in human years.
According to leading scientist Jack O’Malley-James, life on Earth will perish in more than a billion years when a warming sun boils oceans and forces out CO2, damning plants and subsequently animals.
Most life will have died by the planet reaches 70s (or 6.5 billion-years-old), he says, with any microorganisms confined to pools of residual water.
“The far-future Earth will be very hostile to life,” Mr O’Malley-James said. “It will be restricted to pockets of liquid water, perhaps at cooler higher altitudes or in caves.
Of course, it was only about a decade that the left-leaning Independent was forecasting that Earth would be getting very hostile to life much more quickly than “experts” are currently predicting. “Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past,” the Independent warned its readers in March of 2000:
Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.
Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.
The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall in much of lowland Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east. It is the continuation of a trend that has been increasingly visible in the past 15 years: in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. London’s last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.
Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community. Average temperatures in Britain were nearly 0.6°C higher in the Nineties than in 1960-90, and it is estimated that they will increase by 0.2C every decade over the coming century. Eight of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the Nineties.
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
The winter of 2010 must have come as quite a shock then.
In any case, I blame the rapaciousness of the Amazonian Football League.
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