Oh, lordy, bring me my salts. I do feel the vapours coming on. You could have knocked the Tusk over with a feather at the Apple Store yesterday when my phone linked to the The Bos in the Washington Post, presenting at 2018 AGU, and pimping to the world: The Taurids are a threat! The Taurids are a threat!
…the Moon will be new on July 3 and will not interfere significantly with such observations. Moreover, the possibility of enhanced daylight fireballs and significant airbursts should be anticipated during that time.
~Boslough and Brown, December 14, 2018, AGU
I recall on a faintly moonlit, starry night, over craft beer in a field outside Flagstaff in 2008, screwing up my courage to ask The Bos what he thought of Bill Napier’s work indicating the Taurids were our principle threat from space. He shrugged from the door of an RV and said, “Huh?” So I dropped it. The next morning he began the premature burial of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis at the Pecos Conference.
Usually, when people have a profound planetary threat self-reveled, as Boslough clearly has, there is some moral impulse to “Repent.” I don’t know if The Bos at AGUDC last week had a sandwich board slung around his neck saying, “Sorry I ignored the Brits for my entire career, and implied their co-authors are criminal frauds.” But I think probably not.
As has been repeated on this blog, the Tusk aspires to reveal the past — not warn of the future. What I mean by this is that I think the best contribution of data that can be made in support of “planetary protection” (sheesh, I cringe just to use that cheap term) is knowing for damn certain the nature and frequency of impacts occurring in the human past.
That’s why the #1 priority here is not pleading to fund exotic governmental space craft to mitigate or define the future threat, or even Bos’ worthy but late-coming plea to take a peek at the Taurids on a dark night.
The Tusk is more like, “Could the National Science Foundation please make a single $250k grant to take a look at some Clovis age dirt with the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis in mind?”
From a cost benefit standpoint, funding the proper investigation of archaeological soils for impact proxies is a relative winner and the very best first step. It is an ingenious interdisciplinary “hack” devised by Allen West, against whom The Bos’ has fervently stirred suspicions of fraud and misconduct for nearly a decade.
That’s the same Allen West who publishes suspicious papers with world expert on the Taurid meteor stream and comets, Dr. Bill Napier. Both Allen West and Bill Napier — not to mention the Tusk, and 60 qualified co-authors around the world — believe the Taurid meteor stream is the best candidate for having destroyed our world ~12,874 years ago. We even put it in writing in some of the planet’s premier science journals.
Here is Napier’s contribution to a paper the Bos trashed just this year. Here is Napier directly responding to The Bos on the Tusk. Here is Boslough’s attempt to refute Napier (and the Tusk for that matter) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the failure of his refutation.
Just for fun, here is Boslough’s previous work mentioning the Taurids. And here is Bill Napier’s.
Who would you want hear from over cocktails on the subject of the Taurid stream? The gentleman hosting the party for fifty years, or the dude that just snuck in the backdoor an hour late with a six pack?
As I said, this is all a bit daunting for the Tusk. What public accounting can be expected of The Bos’ profoundly anti-science behavior, when open-minded professional reporters at the Washing Post like Joel Achenbach fall for his stunt, unaware of his anti-science background? And give him uncritical coverage with regard to a subject The Bos long trashed?
I guess I will just do my best, from my pajamas of course. I have already begun assembling a summary of Bosloughthian hypocrisy with regard to threats from comets, and other proof he is only now beginning to milk a subject he long dismissed and damaged.
“The YDB impact hypothesis of Firestone et al. (2007) is so extremely improbable it can be considered statistically impossible in addition to being physically impossible. Comets make up only about 1% of the population of Earth-crossing objects. Broken comets are a vanishingly small fraction, and only exist as Earth-sized clusters for a very short period of time.”
~The Bos, Geol. Soc. America annual meeting (21-23 Nov 2010), Denver.
The Bos in Wapo, Christmas Day, 2018
Tusk in the Wall Street Journal December 25, 2015