Doomsday Scenarios: Prophesy vs Science

You no doubt have heard of various 2012 "end of the world" doomsday scenarios that have been depicted in Hollywood films, on TV, in tabloid news magazines, and of course, online. These are all baseless and without any scientific merit. Since there are several “End of the World” claims circulating online, let's take a look at the top four scenarios.

Asteroid Impact

This is a common disaster scenario seen in many films and there are claims that an asteroid impact will strike the Earth in December 2012 and will cause mass extinction. This is completely false. Now, the Earth has been hit by asteroids before, and in fact, we believe a large impact is responsible for eliminating the dinosaurs millions of years ago. So this may happen in the future again, and from the geological record it seems as if every few hundred thousand years asteroids more than a kilometer across have impacted and caused global disasters. So it is important to survey the sky and to see if we can find such Earth-bound impactors well before they reach us! Indeed such work is the primary reason why this Dec 2012 impact hoax is not credible! Large asteroid surveys by NASA, for example, have not found any large asteroid/comet that is on a collision course with Earth in the foreseeable future. We face much greater threats in our daily lives from auto accidents, disease and other natural disasters than the threat from an asteroid impact.

Mayan Calendar

A popular end-of-the world claim is this notion that the Mayans predicted the world would end on December 21, 2012 since their calendar ends on that day. This too is nonsense. The basis for this claim comes from the fact that the Mayan "long count" calendar completes a cycle on December 20, 2012. Hence, this must necessarily imply that the world ceases to exist on December 21, right? I like to point out to people who ask me about this claim, the modern calendar ends on December 31 every year, yet every year, January 1 still always follows! Like modern day people, Mayans would likely celebrate the end of one cycle and prepare for the start of a new one. Just because their calendar ends, it does not mean they are predicting the End of the World!

Solar Storms

Another fanciful way some have envisioned the apocalypse to arrive is via a massive solar flare or solar “storm.” And like other astronomical end-of-the-world scenarios, there is a kernel of truth to this story, but little else to support the claim. Our Sun is the reason why we have life on our planet. It provides us with the necessary warmth and light for life to flourish on our planet. Now, our Sun does indeed go through a solar activity cycle in which the number of sunspots peak and then decrease with time. It turns out that massive solar flares are correlated with the increase in sunspots and can produce large quantities of charged particles (i.e., electrons, protons) directed toward Earth. Fortunately, our planet produces a magnetic field that protects us from these energetic, charged particles. It deflects these charged particles to the polar regions of our planet where we observe their interaction with the Earth's atmosphere as beautiful auroral displays that sometimes can reach as far south as Virginia during an intense storm!

Some solar physicists have suggested that this current solar cycle may be more energetic than the last, and we are indeed on our way to another solar maximum during 2012. This is the kernel of truth referred to in most doomsday claims. The problem with this doomsday scenario is that even a massive solar storm would have little impact to life on the surface of the planet. Unprotected astronauts and satellites would be impacted by large solar storms though. Science Operations Teams of the Chandra X-ray Observatory (Chandra, like the Hubble Space Telescope, is a NASA “Great Observatory”) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,had to suspend science observations when a large solar storm erupted because of the potential damage to their detectors. Similarly, on March 13, 1989, a large solar storm did cause six million people in the province of Quebec to go without power when the solar storm caused a surge in current. Therefore, if a large solar storm was aimed directly at us, it could cause secondary problems like blackouts, damage to satellites and to unprotected astronauts, but it would not destroy the Earth! Because of the concern to satellite damage and the possibility of blackouts, several NASA missions like the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) monitor solar "weather" and can provide us with up to an hour notice on the approach of a large solar storm. Now, five billion years in the future, when the Sun runs out of nuclear fuel and swells into a red giant, that will indeed be a bad time for life on Earth! But we have a long time to pass before we worry about that problem!

Changing Magnetic Fields

Another popular doomsday scenario suggests that on December 21, 2012, the core of our planet will re-orient in such a way that it will cause a change in our protective magnetic field. Such nonsense was the theme behind the popular Hollywood blockbuster called The Core (2003), which starred Hillary Swank and Aaron Eckhart. The generalized scenario suggests that not only will we see the rapid reduction in magnetic field strength, but we'll see the magnetic poles rapidly reverse polarity (i.e, the north magnetic pole will be located over the South Pole and vice versa). The consequence to us on the surface of the planet, according to this nonsense, is that we'll be exposed to large amounts of radiation from the Sun (see above!) and from "cosmic rays" that come from interstellar space! Some end-of-the-world claims even further predict that because of this change in the Earth's magnetic field, communication and military satellites will drop from orbit; and that without GPS, airliners will fall out of the sky! The kernel of scientific truth in this doomsday scenario is that the Earth's magnetic field is changing! Scientists with the Geological Society of Canada head to the Canadian arctic every few years to monitor the location of the north magnetic pole. Currently, it is located in northern Canada about 600 km from Resolute Bay (population 300). Since 1831, we've been monitoring its changing location. During this time period, the location of the North Pole has been shifting north as fast as 60 kilometers per year. Scientists have been monitoring the location of the South Pole for the last 100 years and it has been moving toward Australia at the rate of 10-15 kilometers per year. And, apparently, the strength of the global magnetic field has weakened 10 percent since the 19th century. But is the Earth's magnetic field collapsing? NO! In fact, as incredible as these changes sound, this is mild compared to what Earth's magnetic field has done in the past. For instance, the magnetic poles completely flip! We know this because geologists have found evidence for these reversals in the magnetism of ancient rocks. But these flips are unpredictable! The last one was 780,000 years ago. Will there be another one? We don't know. As for the 10 percent decline, the magnetic field strength is constantly changing. The latest supercomputer model of the Earth's interior, where the magnetic field comes from, suggests that the magnetic field increases and decreases, poles drift, and sometimes they flip altogether. These reversals take a few thousand years to complete and is therefore not "instantaneous." Moreover, during this time, the magnetic field does not disappear, it simply becomes incredibly complicated and it still protects us from solar storms and radiation from space. This geomagnetic reversal is not connected to the Sun's solar cycle and does not occur with any kind of "clockwork regularity." We are not "due" a magnetic flip as we cannot predict when the next one is going to occur! So there is absolutely no scientific evidence to suggest that this is going to happen in December 2012!

I could go on and on as there is just so much 2012 end-of-the-world nonsense. All of it is without any scientific evidence whatsoever; it is all bunk and scare-mongering! Our Earth has been here for 4.5 billion years and will continue to be here until our Sun reaches the end of its hydrogen fuel supply in the core in another 4.5 billion years. If you are truly worried about the Earth’s fate come this December, let me encourage you to donate your unneeded financial resources to the upkeep of this blog as you won’t need it in 2013!

For a more scientific view on this subject go here.

Two Term Presidents: Is Obama Facing the 'Curse of the Second Term?'

Story By Walter Shapiro

Why Obama is surely facing a second term riddled with scandal and upheaval

Now that the last election of his political career is behind him,President Barack Obama can concentrate on braking to avoid the fiscal cliff, re-staffing much of his administration and pausing to reflect on his long-term governing agenda. Then, of course, there is the still-sputtering economy, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the aftermath of the stunning resignation of David Petraeus and enough other crises to justify a sign over the Oval Office reading, “Stress for Success.” 

But the re-elected president should be worrying about something else as well: the Second-Term Curse. 

Dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 failure to bring the United States into the League of Nations, second presidential terms have almost always been disappointing and sad. There have been successes: Ronald Reagan passing tax reform in 1986 and Bill Clinton balancing the budget. But far more common are thwarted ambitions, scandal and a slow slide towards political irrelevance. 

“This time it’s different” would be the likely response from Obama’s true believers. And these acolytes could be correct since historical patterns are merely suggestive rather than Marxist Iron Laws. But still it is likely that sometime before Moving Van Day in 2017, Obama will be embarrassed by at least one of these four factors:

Hubris: For decades, the dictionary definition was Franklin Roosevelt’s ill-fated 1937 effort to pack the Supreme Court to eliminate an anti-New Deal majority. Having just carried 46 states in an electoral landslide, FDR blithely assumed that anything he proposed would be rubber-stamped by a Congress so Democratic that all 16 Senate Republicans could probably have crammed into a Capitol Hill phone booth. 

Wrong. With scant warning two weeks after his second inauguration, Roosevelt announced his plan to expand the Supreme Court. The reaction even among many partisan Democrats was that this was an unwarranted power grab. After failing to win a majority of the overwhelmingly Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee, the court-packing plan died on the Senate floor. 

There is a potent contemporary example of a president misreading his re-election mandate. George W. Bush told Republican leaders in early 2005 that the partial privatization of Social Security was at the top of his legislative agenda, even though the president had only flicked at the issue during the 2004 campaign. 

With the conspicuous exception of Paul Ryan and a few others, congressional Republicans recoiled at the electoral consequences. Democrats were apoplectic on policy grounds. The Social Security plan was never even voted on in Congress. In his mostly unrevealing autobiography, “Decision Points,” Bush himself concedes, “If I had it to do over again, I would have pushed for immigration reform rather than Social Security as the first major initiative of my second term.” 

While Obama’s vague re-election pronouncements worked tactically, they provided him with a limited policy mandate beyond educational programs and resisting extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. As a result, an ambitious response to global warming (an issue too hot for Obama the candidate) could prove to be this president’s version of Social Security privatization. 

Personnel: Having already churned through three White House chiefs of staff (plus an interim appointee), Obama is no stranger to ever-changing office name plates. The end of the presidential term is the moment to recast the Cabinet as familiar figures like an exhausted Hillary Clinton gleefully try a life without 3 a.m. phone calls.

Finding competent replacements is a challenge for any re-elected president, and it is especially acute for Obama, whose pre-presidential network was mostly Chicago-based. Slowly, the familiar faces like David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs and maybe someday Valerie Jarrett fade away. Tim Geithner, probably the major Cabinet figure whom Obama closely bonded with, is rumored to be moving on. 

It is understandable: Life along the corridors of power is debilitating. The allure of a normal life, the lucrative private-sector offers and the understandable human urge to step outside the president’s shadow will make White House going-away-parties a second-term staple. For those few who remain through all eight years, on-the-job burnout is an occupational hazard worthy of OSHA.

Probably every president late in his second term has looked around at the White House staff or his Cabinet and asked himself, “Who are those guys?”

Scandal: One of the saddest press conference statements by a second-term president was Dwight Eisenhower’s 1958 defense of his beleaguered chief of staff, Sherman Adams: “I admire his abilities. I respect him because of personal and official integrity. I need him.” Within days Adams, who had accepted a vicuna coat and other gifts from a New England industrialist, was cleaning out the desk in his West Wing office. 

No modern president has been immune from scandal in his second term. Unless history has failed us completely, the sagas of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton do not require elaboration. 

Harry Truman, that beloved historical figure of average-guy rectitude, left the White House in 1953 with a record-low approval rating of just 22 percent because of influence-peddling scandals, as well as the Korean War. George W. Bush came close to hitting 25 percent approval in the waning days of his presidency partly because of an aura of incompetence dating back to the heck-of-a-job-Browniefederal response to Hurricane Katrina.

Given Obama’s heavy reliance on drone attacks, perhaps the most relevant cautionary lesson comes from a beloved second-term president. It was stubborn resistance to congressional oversight and impatience with the stodgy norms of national-security decision-making that led to Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Iran-contra scandal. 

For those who do not remember it, it is hard to write with a straight face about a rogue operation being run out of the White House basement to swap arms to Iran for the release of hostages in Lebanon. And part of the money from Iran went to fund the Nicaraguan contras even though Congress had cut off funding to the right-wing foes of President Daniel Ortega. Throw in a national security adviser arriving in Tehran with a cake shaped like a key, swashbuckling Marine Colonel Oliver North and his blonde White House secretary, Fawn Hall, who helped him shred documents.

With quarter-century hindsight, it sounds like what you would get if the Marx Brothers made a foreign-policy movie. But, in reality, the Iran-contra scandal almost destroyed Reagan’s second term.

The Petraeus love triangle (or was it a rhombus?) is a reminder that a president cannot know everything about his appointees. It also underscores the dangers inherent in erecting marble statues for esteemed public officials prematurely. Other Obama picks for the Cabinet or the White House staff are likely to flame-out over the next four years, although probably with less tabloid trauma. That is the nature of the game in Washington – and why second terms, in particular, can be so cruel. 

Timetable: With the exception of an impeached Bill Clinton, every modern president has lost congressional seats in the sixth year of his presidential term. Unlike many seemingly immutable political rules, this one makes sense intuitively. After six years of anyone in the White House (even FDR or Reagan), the act begins to grow stale and voters crave a different kind of change. 

What this means is that Obama probably has until the summer of 2014 to operate with maximum political leverage. After the 2014 congressional elections, he may begin to experience the first debilitating signs of lame-duckism. By the summer of 2015, Americans may find the early skirmishing for the presidential nomination more riveting than the seventh year of the Obama presidency.  

This is the moment when a president begins to realize that he is not irreplaceable—a transition thatBill Clinton is still grappling with. 

Obama may react to the predictable challenges of the next four years with equanimity. But for many a president, the high water mark of the second term is the moment they put their left hand on the Bible and swear to preserve and protect the Constitution.  

NASCAR: After Wreck Clint Boyer's Crew Waylays Jeff Gordon

There is no other way to say it, no better way to describe what took place two laps from the finish Sunday at Phoenix International Raceway.

Jeff Gordon was mugged, plain and simple.

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The offenders weren't some scraggly thieves looking for Johnson's wallet for a quick cash score.

Rather, the offenders were nothing short of the kind of hooligans you'd find in the most egregious soccer matches in either Europe or South America.

Those offenders were disguised as members of the No. 15 Michael Waltrip Racing team, but in reality, they were nothing more than out and outright thugs.

Sure, 30 or 40 years ago, when drivers had a dust-up on the race track, they'd more often than not settle their differences man-to-man and fist-to-fist behind the nearest hauler. Who can forget the infield skirmish between Donny Allison and Cale Yarborough in the 1979 Daytona 500?

But this is modern day NASCAR. We've come a long way—or at least I'd like to hope we have—than from things like the Allison-Yarborough throwdown in the infield of Daytona International Speedway 33 years ago.

What Will be the Federal Response be to Colorado's New Marijuana Laws?

 Should marijuana be treated like alcohol? Or should it remain in the same legal category as heroin and the most dangerous drugs? Votes this week by Colorado and Washington to allow adult marijuana possession have prompted what could be a turning point in the nation's conflicted and confusing war on drugs.

Colorado's governor and attorney general spoke by phone Friday with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, with no signal whether theU.S. Justice Department would sue to block the marijuana measures. Both states are holding off on plans to regulate and tax the drug while waiting to see whether the Justice Department would assert federal authority over drug law.

Meanwhile, prosecutors in Washington's largest counties dropped all pending misdemeanor cases of marijuana possession Friday in response to that state's vote to legalize the drug.

The Obama administration has largely turned a blind eye to the 17 states that currently flout federal drug law by allowing people with certain medical conditions to use pot, something that is banned under federal law.

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