The Wild Imaginings of the "Global Warming" Crowd

If you want to understand how hysteria can lead to the craziest behaviour conceivable, here is the latest ravings from the "global warming" crowd. In an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists

Rising greenhouse emissions may tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report for Nasa

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by scientists at Nasa and Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.

First of all, SETI has been scanning the universe for 50 years with radio telescopes and has uncover no evidence of extraterrestrial life. To say that "scientists" are debating that "global warming" will tip of aliens who will invade and kill us as a pest species is hysterically funny it is so wacko. There is no ET out there. There is no "global warming" discernible from space. And given the laws of physics there will never be a way to travel from star system to star system for any purpose because it is just too damn expensive in energy. At most a civilization can send out a few ounces of "message" on a plaque in a Pioneer satellite. They are not coming as an avenging death mob to punish us for crimes against the temperature gods. This is just nutty ravings of a lunatic fringe, the "global warming" fringe!

The above is hard to swallow, but this "science" was published in Acta Astronautica, 2011, 68(11-12): 2114-2129 as "Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis". (Access a copy of the paper here.) Now that is truly bizarre and nutty. There is no science here. I can see publishing this paper in a fanzine for a science fiction group, but not in a serious journal for science. You might as well publish papers on the "spiritual 'field force effect' of Voodoo incantations on farm workers in Haiti".

What is truly funny is that it is the nutty "global warming" crowd that wants to paint those who are skeptical about this "warming" as the lunatics. But the above should make it clear that the global warming crowd are the unserious, embrace-any-crazy-theory crowd.