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Chicken Little on a Surfboard
Scientists say grinding geologic circumstances similar to those in Sumatra also exist just off the Pacific Northwest coast. They are a loaded gun that could trigger a tsunami that could hit Northern California, Washington, Oregon and British Columbia in minutes — too fast for the nation's deep-sea tsunami warning system to help.
In its own way, this is very much like stating "holy crap! There's a really dangerous volcano located next to a US city! Run for your lives!!! Look, you're much more likely to get run over by Buffy the Cellphone Slayer and her Impressively Robust Four Ton SUV than you are to be washed out to sea by some surfer dude's wet dream. Quit watching the doomsday video and start driving safer. It'll do you a helluva lot more good.
I don't know. I guess growing up living in the shadow of nuclear holocaust has made me a little blase about environmental armageddon. Am I the only 30-something who's completely unimpressed by predictions of doom which nobody has even the slightest chance of controlling?
I'm unimpressed too, but mostly because the environmentalists that had me so panicked as a kid have been shown to be so completely, utterly, grotesquely wrong about everything they predicted. I have a very impressive book on my shelf, written by Nobel Prize winning scientists, in language simple enough for children to understand, that explained how, even if we didn't all die in a nuclear war, we would turn the entire world into an uninhabitable toxic mess by the year 2000, even if we started cleaning it up immediately, which the evil Ronald Reagan refused to let us do. The only thing that's changed is the date of Armageddon; it's always 20-30 years in the future, so a new generation of kids can be convinced the world is going to end.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian on December 31, 2004 12:38 PM