Robert Inventor

I’m continuing to get scared PM's and posts to our Doomsday Debunked Facebook group about the lunar eclipse on 31st January. There is nothing at all to worry about. You’ve had lunar eclipses like this many times in your life and never noticed. Now it appears in Facebook Trending with comments - and many people, children and adults, get scared of it, with panic attacks. Some of the PM's and comments I get are verging on suicide about this.For a shorter version of this, see my Short summary - why the super blue blood moon on Jan 31 can’t harm us

North Korea is going to send a team to the Winter Olympics in South Korea. The news is looking promising with a significant thawing of relations between the two Koreas in advance of the Winter Olympics. High level talks have begun already between North and South Korea. with the main focus on preprations for the Olympics. The US is behind it too. President Donald Trump said “If something good can happen and come out of those talks it would be a great thing for all of humanity. That would be a great thing for the world. Very important.”

This is awful. A science writer and video producer who decided Christmas Eve is just the right time to publish a video claiming FALSELY that a small nuclear exchange of 100 nuclear weapons would destroy all world agriculture for decades. This is based on an old paper from 1983 which was treated with skepticism at the time and now is known to be incorrect, combined with more recent research from 2014 that is disputed because of it preloads the model with high levels of soot in the stratosphere, levels which most modern studies do not support.He claims that 2 months after the exchange, the average global surface temperature would be -25°C.

Once more many people are getting scared as a result of the recent North Korea test which puts the whole of the US in range.  The headlines say it puts all of US in range. You have to read carefully to discover it was probably a lightweight mock warhead. The way over hyped news stories about North Korea scare vulnerable young children and adults. So I write this to help put it in perspective. Also to explain why there is no way North Korea want to attack the US with a nuclear weapon. Nor does the US have any military options involving an invasion of North Korea, and both sides know that.

I have had lots of questions about this today because of a poorly researched Daily Star sensationalist article based on a many years out of date NASA press release. As usual with Google News this nonsense has gone right to the top of its search results. They really do need to fix this! Anyway I am writing this in the hope that it gets into Google News and helps some of the people getting scared by this story. So far I can't see any debunking articles there and the Science 2.0 articles do often get placed high in Google News.Phil Plait of "Bad Astronomer" fame has a few choice words about this "tabloid fish-wrapper" - in case you don't get it, newspapers are often used to wrap fish and chips - he's suggesting that's all it is good for.

This is another silly story that is scaring people including very young children and giving them panic attacks. The claim is a fantasy story that a 'black star' (??) at the far side of the sun is going to somehow send powerful earthquakes to Earth on Sunday 19th November from a distance of over150 million miles. There is no truth to this, it's just a made up fantasy like a script for a bad movie. Not even a pseudo science explanation of how it is supposed to do it.  We are getting so many comments, posts and PM's about it in our Doomsday / Nibiru support groups on Facebook, and so far there are no news stories debunking the story properly. 

This is a story that's running at the moment - hugely sensationalized and made as pessimistic and gloomy as could be. in many of the papers, especially the sensationalist press, it's presented as a "Doomsday prediction". It's nothing of the sort.The number of scientists, 15,000 is correct, and that they were warning about climate change and other issues is correct, so the snesationalist press got that much right. However, they don't say the world will be destroyed.

The letter actually says there is much we are doing right, but that there is much more we have to do to see ourselves through to 2100 and beyond. Their message is that we have to continue what we are doing, and do more, in order to avoid widespread misery in the future.

This is yet another example of how outrageously bad Google News is when it comes to astronomy. I get asked this rather often, whether Earth is endangered by some distant planet or galaxy or black hole, by children or adults who have read stories in the sensationalist press that appear in Google News. This is a particularly outrageous one so I thought it would help highlight the issue to write a post about it here. To anyone scared by the story who is reading this - short summary, this planet is far away, orbiting a distant star and is not the slightest risk to Earth.

Stephen Hawking tends to exaggerate, using hyperbole - exaggerations for emotional effect. In this talk he takes our exponential population growth and extrapolates it forwards to 2600 and predicts that human beings will cover the globe shoulder to shoulder and that our electricity consumption will turn the surface of Earth red hot through the waste heat. Stephen Hawking hasn't taken account of the fact that our exponential growth has stopped. The same number of children were born in 2005 as in 2017 and our population is currently growing due to increasing lifespans, not through exponential growth. The middle of the range estimate is for it to level off at around 11 billion by 2100.. This story is scaring people and that's my motive for debunking it here. 

This is a speech Stephen Hawking gave at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon on Monday. It’s actually an upbeat and optimistic speech, but one particular phrase from the speech is scaring many people. Stephen Hawking has a love of the dramatic, and he often way overstates things - it's what they call hyperbole, overstating things for emotional effect. I'm also surprised that amongst all the news articles running stories about it, I haven't found a single one that is skeptical of his beliefs or even suggests there could be other views on the matter. As he stated it, 

To see the problem try a google news search for Planet X - and see if you find anything there about the genuine astronomical search for planets beyond Neptune. It's filled with stories saying that the nonsense planet Nibiru is about to fly past Earth or hit us (what professor Brian Cox once called the imaginary bullshit planet Nibiru).

I've been writing Doomsday Debunking articles for a couple of years now. The amount of fake news about the end of the world on the web is incredible. What makes it worse is that stories that say the world is about to end get widely shared, linked to, read over and over, and rise right to the top of Google and Apple news. If you are intrigued by a news story about the search for "planet X" by astronomers, say, and go to Google News, the top result is usually one or other article from the Daily Express who regularly publish fake news saying that an extra planet is about to hit Earth or fly past Earth in the next week or month.This is followed by pages and pages of search results consisting almost entirely of "news" in a similar vein.