Young Australian Skeptics

In advance I apologise for the rant you are about to read, so why not kick it off with a bang:

Wow! Peter Geryl is crazy!

Okay, obvious responses aside, after watching the first few minutes of the Bullshit! Episode on 2012 I saw that there was this guy, who staunchly believes that the world will end when the last day of the Mayan long count calendar ticks over. “Holy crap!”, I hear you say, “what’s going to happen to us?”. Well this crackpot thinks that a massive solar flare will occur, causing our magnetic fields to reverse in “1 to 3 days at a maximum”. Wow, Mr Geryl, what will happen?

Well, according to this crackpot (please excuse the ad hominem) no computers will work, and if that wasn’t bad enough, major earthquakes “bigger than the Richter Scale”, which is extremely difficult (given the Richter Scale is a set of logarithmic numbers from 0 to ∞) and hurricanes, tornadoes; a complete tidal wave over the Earth and most people pretty much dying of some calamity or other.

Well, something strikes me as fundamentally wrong, and let me explain this in what length I can muster.

Firstly, Solar Flares. These events, whilst relatively common are not all together that damaging to the Earth. Solar flares are effectively a whole bunch of charged particles colliding with the Earth, and are the cause of the Aurora. These events might affect communications for a short while, but observations of these events show that they last a few seconds at most. This is hardly likely to cause the global catastrophe which Geryl is pointing to. Even if solar flares in 2012 last, say, 1000 times longer than the normal timescale of solar flares, this would equate to a communications blackout of little more than an hour. I’m sure business can do without instant communication for an hour, and that the US military has contingencies for these events.

Oh, but what about the magnetic field, I hear some people say. Well, as a geologist, I can assure you that a change in our poles is not something that is uncommon on Earth. I’m sorry, but I think a little science is needed here. The magnetic poles of the planet are derived from two convection currents within the outer core of the Earth. The outer core is molten metal, which carries a charge, and if you move a charge, that creates an electromagnetic field. Throughout our history, these currents have shifted, combined and divided to create several different magnetic poles on the Earth. Anybody who has taken a decent navigation course known that you need to adjust a compass a little to be able to tell where north really is. The amount you have to change you compass varies depending on the difference between when the map was made, and when you decide to use it. This, strangely, is caused by the wander in the magnetic pole. Your compass is a magnet, and will point towards Magnetic North, not True North, so you need to correct for this to make sure you don’t get lost.

But, why does Earth have a Magnetic North? This is simply because our poles are shifting. The two currents within the outer core of the Earth are not lined up with the way the globe spins. Okay, now for the tricky part. How do we know there are two different currents with the Earth’s outer core? Here is where science fascinates us. We can measure two different magnetic north poles on the Earth. One of these is in Siberia, the other in Canada. We can create these two poles, with similar south poles, by generating different convection currents within the outer core of the Earth, and this is thought to be the signature of a classic magnetic pole reversal.

So, are these doomsayers right, is this caused by solar flares? Well, no, even the most violent solar flares, the coronal mass ejections, simply create large aurora, and mess with our satellites. These don’t even affect the crust of the Earth, let alone the core at a depth of nearly 3000km! To put it bluntly, the sun has had 4.65 billion years to throw it worst at us (and the worst happens very early) and we’re still here. Methinks we’re going to be here in 2013.

So, what does this mean for the 2012 hypothesis, and Mr Geryl? Well, his ideas of hurricanes, major earthquakes and the disruption of computers are clearly not going to happen. Polar shifts don’t affect tectonics, and what happens to our satellites is not going to affect the weather. Sure we might see some funky lights in Tasmania, but that might be it. The end of the Mayan calendar is like the end of our own, all we need to do is go out and buy a new one. If there is a conspiracy, it’s the calendar writers, damn bastards always make us but the same thing year in, year out.

What really gets my goat about this whole thing is the absolute disregard for science in these theories. I can see it time and time again, from creation to homeopathy and from 2012 apocalypse believers to psychics. All in all, they simply deny that the universe we live in can be bound by the laws we discover. Some of these people decide to challenge us scientists, free-​​thinkers and atheists on our grounds and say that yes; there is evidence for god, fairies and ghosts and why don’t you just accept it. Simply, they don’t understand how science works. We look at EVIDENCE and come to CONCLUSIONS. Unlike a lot of pseudo-​​scientists and simple frauds, so we do NOT look at conclusions and go and find evidence to support it. This doesn’t seem too hard to understand doesn’t it?

Well, next time you are asked this question, as you have heard before, simply say “Let’s test it. If what you say is true, it should work more than it doesn’t, otherwise it doesn’t work.” And when they question you about all this, please repeat that old Dawkins quote: “Have you ever wondered how we know the thing that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are really far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun? The answer to these questions is ‘evidence.’”

Tags: 2012, Crazy People

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Andrew Langendam, Paranormal, Pseudoscience, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.