When I was talking to my parents on the phone last night, my father told me about a guest op-ed in the Press and Sun-Bulletin that might be of interest to some ScienceBlogs readers and bloggers:
As if there aren’t enough problems in the world, we are now on the verge of a phenomenon that will dwarf the projected scenarios of global warming. The cause is the alarming and accelerating loss of Earth’s weight and mass by the burning of fossil fuels.
Every year that goes by, millions of tons of coal and millions of barrels of oil are burned. Nothing is left but ashes, soot, and gases, and there is nothing to replace it. Once burned, it’s gone forever.
So, you see, the gravitational force between the Sun and the Earth will weaken, Earth’s orbit will expand, and we’ll usher in a new age of global cooling. As the title of the piece says, “Better start to panic”…
(If you note the posting date and the last paragraph, you’ll see that this is an April Fool’s Day joke. I bet it’s too subtle for the vast majority of the paper’s reader, though– while it’s a brilliant bit of deadpan silliness, it’s just not far enough away from stuff that really turns up on the Internet…)
this is similar to the classic JIR piece “National Geographic: The Doomsday Machine”, where the author “proves” that the combined weight of all the accumulated issues of National Geographic (because NG magazines are never thrown out, but hoarded in attics and basements and flea markets) will cause the crust beneath North America to buckle and deform, leading to massive earthquakes and the end of the world as we know it.
http://www.jir.com/geographic.html