A Guide to the End of the World by Bill McGuire, Oxford University Press, 拢11.99, ISBN 0192802976
NOT so long ago, scientists were purveyors of a bright, shining vision of the future, populated by cheery folk who travelled to work on jet-packs, took holidays on the Moon and lived till they were 150.
Not any more. Now when scientists pop up in the media, all too often it鈥檚 to tell us that our future is anything but bright and shining. Global warming, meteor impacts, mega-tsunamis, mud slides鈥攖he roll-call of apocalypses they wheel out seems limitless鈥攁long with the shelf space devoted to them.
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For some time we鈥檝e needed a systematic, cool-headed appraisal of all the dreadful fates that supposedly await us. And who better to do it than Bill McGuire, professor of geohazards at University College, London? Well, pretty much anybody, really. Having endured 170-plus pages of his overblown prose, I find it hard to believe anyone could have written a more hysterical account of our planet鈥檚 future.
It starts well enough, with a foreword that carefully defines just what is meant by the end of the world. McGuire identifies no fewer than four definitions, ranging from the wholesale destruction of the Earth and every human on it, to the mere end of the world as we know it.
Few doomsters bother with these distinctions, yet they are worth making. For as McGuire points out, the human race has survived a host of global catastrophes, from ice ages to cosmic impacts. And in a rare moment of level-headedness, even he concedes that unless we鈥檙e hit by a meteor of the size that did for the dinosaurs, we humans can survive whatever nature throws at us鈥攁lbeit not without major upheaval.
But having got that vaguely encouraging sentiment out of the way, McGuire unleashes the nightmare of his prose style on the unsuspecting reader. Imagine the overwrought opening of a tabloid feature on, say, an earthquake that left thousands dead. Now imagine that introduction going on for 40 000 words. That鈥檚 McGuire鈥檚 writing style: not so much breathless as terminally anoxic.
The tone is set in the first chapter which introduces the menaces that stalk the human race. It reads like the cuttings job from hell, with one lurid tale of devastation after another. People don鈥檛 merely die in McGuire鈥檚 disasters: when a quake struck the Peruvian Andes in 1970, for instance, a mountain peak fell on the towns below, 鈥渨iping out 18,000 people in just four minutes and erasing all signs of their existence from the face of the Earth鈥�. And on he goes, through chapters on global warming, ice ages and climatic flips, volcanic catastrophes, super-quakes, giant tsunamis and of course cosmic impacts鈥攑ausing only for some finger-wagging at those who dare question the scientific party line on various issues.
That said, each chapter does cover the current state of knowledge with impressive thoroughness, often backed by striking facts and figures, such as floods being today鈥檚 most serious hazard, annually affecting 100 million people, and the Kobe earthquake of 1995 being the most costly natural disaster of all time. McGuire also includes predictions of future calamities, such as Britain being plunged into a new ice age by global warming, through its paradoxical effects on warm Atlantic currents.
I suspect that this tour d鈥檋orreur will have its own paradoxical effect. Readers won鈥檛 clamour for action, but shrug their shoulders in resignation. For even if the US declared next week that it was adopting a Stone Age economy to halt global warming, it鈥檚 clear we鈥檒l still succumb to other threats we鈥檙e powerless to do anything about such as a huge volcanic eruption that blots out sunlight for months.