On May 18, 1910, Halley's Comet transited the Sun's disk, and the Earth actually passed through its tail. At the time, the comet's tail was thought to contain poisonous-levels of cyanogen and gas. The popular media picked up this fact and wove sensational tales of mass cyanide poisoning engulfing the planet. In reality, of course, the gas is so diffuse that the world suffered no ill-effects from the passage through the tail.We have also “survived”: — "The Population Bomb" (although the author's 1968 prediction that hundreds of millions of deaths in the 1980s due to famine didn't come true, he DID sell 2 million books — cha-ching!)
— Global Cooling (popularized by Newsweek's 1975 “The Cooling World” article, although the world's polar bear population has increased five-fold since then, the new Ice Age seems to have been grossly overestimated ... OR was it just simply delayed until now, hmmmm?!)
— Killer Bees (remember in the 1978 movie “The Swarm” when the nuclear power plant exploded near Houston after bees invaded the control room? LOL)
— The Jupiter Effect (March 1982 passed with no massive gravitational shift on earth causing massive tectonic shifts, although Michael Jackson rocked the world with “Thriller”)
— Y2K (Even Dick Clark flinched a little bit when that ball dropped at midnight)
— Swine Flu (So ... Obama didn't actually need that Squalene-fortified H1N1 vaccination, after all?)
— etc
Some things never change ... Scientists give the reporters the headlines they want. Reporters give the scientists the attention they crave. 
|