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Last fall, David Suzuki, the high priest of Canadian enviro-alarmism, used an eco-conference to predict the likelihood of another Japanese earthquake comparable in size to the March 2011 monster Tohoku quake at “over 95% … in the next three years.”
True to his all-scaremongering, all-the-time form, Suzuki predicted that when a second catastrophic seismic event occurred, the remaining fuel rods at the Fukushima power plant would unleash a nuclear disaster that would mean “bye bye Japan” and would force an evacuation of the entire North American west coast.
This is about as crazy as the hoaxes circulating around the Internet claiming that a giant squid, driven eastward by radiation emanating from Japan, had beached itself at Santa Monica, Calif., or that 98% of the Pacific’s sea bottom is strewn with irradiated fish. (In fact, less than 5% of the Pacific’s floor has even been mapped, so knowing what is on 98% of it is impossible.)
This week, Suzuki told the Vancouver Province that he had stirred up his Japanese quake scenario “off-the-cuff” and he now regretted being so bombastic.
When Suzuki makes similarly outrageous claims about impending environmental catastrophes, his predictions are typically met with assuring nods from climate scientists. But that’s because climate science is a very new discipline, whose precepts and theories are just emerging, and most of its practitioners are as alarmist as Suzuki — or at least partly so.
Not prone to hysteria
Unfortunately for the Grand Guru of Green, nuclear physics and geology are older sciences. And far fewer of the academics who specialize in them are prone to hysteria and end-time theorizing.
Many respected physicists and seismologists immediately dismissed Suzuki’s cataclysmic imaginings.
The Huffington Post Canada, for instance, pointed out that as many as 20,000 people were killed by the tsunami generated by the 9.0 earthquake three years ago, but not one death by radiation has been recorded due to the destroyed nuclear plant. The online news site quoted University of British Columbia particle physicist David Measday saying, “I’m sorry, but that is ridiculous. It’s totally impossible! I can’t believe he would say that. When he’s in his own field, he’s usually reasonable. But this is just crazy.”
For the rest of this column, click here: http://www.torontosun.com/2014/01/21/an-admission-of-bombast