I can see the headline now. "Climate Researchers trying to scare people about Global Warming accidentally leak virus" followed by "Millions dead of Mystery Illness".
Trying to prove there is great danger has It's risks, eh?
To give Saint Greta some credit, 5 years is an eternity to a young person. And I'd bet a early bird special steak dinner, predictions on this site, about several subjects, not just the CCP plague and distrust of science because of politically motivated lies, are now proven true.
Unless, of course, the crazy people release a deadly plague at a Trump rally to discredit him and murder half a planet. Which, I argue, validates some prediction! But eliminates the ability to pay up.
I've been watching a few shows ( on Joe Rogan, if you're curious ) where catastrophist writers talk about evidence of a mega disaster called the Younger Dryas.
I'm a catastrophist, myself, as opposed to the view that things have always been this way. There's plenty of evidence at least some of the great extinction events were cosmic impacts. There's zero, in fact NEGATIVE evidence that rocks quit hitting the planet long ago. 1908 is only long ago to the ignorant or limited thinking of "in my experience", and LAST MONTH a meteor airburst happened over the English Channel. ( assuming it wasn't a failed hypersonic missile aimed at Cardiff, or... )
So I'm open to impact theories. I try not to assume rocks from space are responsible for every lost civilization. Smallpox is, for example, a better theory for the Amazon rainforest cities failing.
But there's decent evidence that a native city state in Missouri was wiped out by an impact or megaton range airburst, and not too long before the establishment of the British colonies.
I don't buy all the ideas the writers are pushing, but the ruins in Turkey older than expected, and the continuing finds of human habitation in the Americas, each older than the last, keep pushing the boundaries the Establishment set when I was a kid.
Ironically, the space shuttle was supposed to be the system that would make human access to space safe and routine. It was almost the opposite. To get it funded, the original plan was compromised to save money and gain support. For example, as proposed to Congress, the shuttle system consisted of two totally reusable flyback systems that would take off vertically and land on runways, ready to fly again. As political sausage-making took over, however, this approach was replaced by the massive hydrogen and oxygen tanks and solid rocket boosters we are familiar with today.
Btw, read Pasedena Phil's comment in the above article. I won't quote him.
I will mock him.
Nobody is really concerned about a mega disaster millions of years from now. It's the mega disaster in our lifetime we care about.
I've complained about the distrust the Global Warming Cultists and now the Branch Covidian Cultists have promoted against actual science, which means actual disaster predictions will be ignored.
There's also the time provincial Establishment view that "now is how it's always been, and always shall be". A fundamentally wrong assumption.
The assumption is that all those periodic and randomly timed, disasters of the past are over & done with. Ignoring both the concept of periodic and random. If it didn't happen in their tiny lives, it never will.
I've lived through dozens of "storm of the century" events. There's some convenient amnesia/ dishonesty involved , eh?
Both Asteroid strikes and supervolcano extinction level events are periodic. I personally doubt one will happen in my brief lifetime, it's just a tiny slice of time and the odds are good.
But there have been multi kiloton range airbursts, just in the last decade.
Certainly not an extinction event, except for those too close. And statistics say such minor bangs will mostly happen over oceans or lightly inhabited wilderness. But statistics also mean it's inevitable over a densely populated area.
Feel free to pray it happens to someplace else than your home. D.C. or Pyongyang, perhaps.
Depending on the estimates, we are due, or overdue, for a Big Problem. Comet, volcano, plague?
I joke about Covid-23, but with "gain of function" research proving to kill millions when carelessly handled, and community colleges having gene sequence technology, the probability of something that makes the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic look mild is approaching One.
We'll see in the next few years if the worst "paranoid conspiracy theories" come true about ( pick one ) and in retrospect, maybe the "flouride in the water supply mind control conspiracy" were right all along, based on rising insanity rates...
( although I would place my money on antisocial media manipulation and mass hysteria... )
Religious cults based upon lies, by liars who know they lie. ( or they wouldn't buy beach front mansions )
A typical complaint against The Church in the past was that Bishops and Cardinals were corrupt because their very fingers were dripping with gold. Ultra luxury living while the peasants starved in hovels. Silk sheets, & marble, not straw pads and wattle.
Today the Prophets of The Global Warming Cult fly private jets to exclusive resorts to preach about Your Sins as prostitutes flock to their luxury hotels. Then after praising each other and condemning you heretical scum, fly back to their mansions to have their servants ( illegal immigrants they can under pay & exploit, in many cases ) pack their bags for the yacht, order the caviar and waygu steaks topped off, so they can relax in the Islands with their peers.
Oh, the gold dripping from fingers and silk sheets are still a thing.