Did I dream it?

In the 1960s, I think, (it was black and white!) there was a wonderful tv series in which all the world's astrophysicists cooked up the idea that the Earth was about to be destroyed by a comet or asteroid or some such thing. The whole story was a complete invention, just nonsense (though no doubt one day the Earth is likely to have a devastating collision with some space junk of one kind or another).

The reason they tried to frighten the world like that was they wanted the politicians to work together as a team and stop fighting each other. They saw it as a single stroke to end war, famine and all the other horsemen of the apocalypse.

It was all very noble and it was gripping tv.

A few years earlier than that (1906 to be precise) H G Wells published a book called In The Days Of The Comet. The theme of this was that a collision with a comet causes the Earth's atmosphere to change and everyone on the planet suddenly becomes a better person. The shades are lifted from their eyes and they give up exploiting and killing each other, turning to socialism. Yep HG was a socialist.

Sometimes I wonder if the change in the atmosphere HG was talking about, had anything to do with the level of CO2.