Why should we waste our time with an imaginary climate crisis when there are real powerful threats in our real world.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Why are we wasting resources on the imaginary climate crisis, when there are real threats to address?

That was fucking loud, our whole house shook. Someone posted this on a local page, maybe a meteorite? 🤷🏻‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/FakoRqxL7d

— 𝗥𝗘𝗕𝗭 (@onlyrebz) October 18, 2023

The Melbourne meteor, if it was a meteor, wasn’t as big as the Chelyabinsk blast of 2013, but it was powerful enough to make people wonder what just happened, over a large area.

What can I say? It’s only a matter of time until one of these space objects seriously damages a city or worse.

Some scientists believe Tall el-Hammam, an important city state in the Bronze age, was wiped out by a Tunguska scale blast in the year 1650BCE. Tall el-Hammam was near the biblical city of Jericho.

And of course, we have the Tunguska blast of 1908 itself, estimated yield of 12 megatons, as proof dangerous space objects are still out there.

There are other mysterious devastations through history, some of which might have been meteoric. Some researchers claim the Manuika crater in New Zealand is evidence of a 15th century comet strike and regional mega-tsunami, though this claim is controversial.

There is a risk an unexpected meteor might be mistaken for a nuclear attack. The East Mediterranean Event of 2002 could have started a nuclear war, had it exploded further East over India or Pakistan. 2002 was a time of heightened tension in the region.

Space defence is an issue we could actually try to address. A better space watch would reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises. Even a little more warning could save lives, and there are technologies we could explore, such as Project Orion (if detected late), or NASA’s hypervelocity interceptor (if detected early), which might allow us to prevent substantial collisions with Earth.

But our politicians are too busy frittering uncounted trillions of dollars on climate unicorn projects to bother with real problems.

Meteors are a classic low probability high impact event. the odds of serious damage on any given year might be very low, but if we don’t do something to address the threat, it is inevitable that sooner or later something really bad will happen.