The Cosmic Winter

The Cosmic Winter gives us a quick glimpse back and history and a comparison across the various scientific fields yielding a thesis that is so stunning and real that it shakes the reader to the core. He covers a lot of history and myth, which may bore the more hardcore scientist or casual reader, but it is necessary to comprehend all that follows. It also makes for a great review of some ancient history that I had otherwise been only marginally exposed to. After covering the history and mythology he moves forward and gives us hard data, tons of it, regarding actual impact events. He brings three forth that have happened in the last thousand years that demonstrate these cosmic missiles can have the destructive equivalent of a multi-megaton nuclear explosion. He then moves back in time and gives us more history, that of actual impacts and the records left by ancient societies. When you add up all the research done, all the data in this book, it's hypothesis becomes almost undeniable. It's amazing that so much evidence can be gathered and yet the mainstream scientific community is still in doubt, still perpetuating a theory that has been disproved over and over. It's almost as if we're still in the age of Gallileo, and decrying the planet as round and revolving around the sun is treason against god and humanity! Seriously, if you want a solid education on the phenomenon and realistic ideas based on solid facts check out this book. It rocked, no pun intended.

"The Cosmic Winter" is the one of the most important works by Clube and Napier, close to as being an expansion of their first book, The Cosmic Serpent. In "The Cosmic Winter," with 280 pages and seventeen chapters, the authors bring forth the role of impact events in creating the cosmic "winters" and the further discussion of the mythological sky gods as evidence of comets in our prehistory era and a look at cometary events towards the present era. As one first read the beginning of this book in a prologue chapter, there will be an experience of a fictional encounter between the Earth and a cometary bombardment and how the United States government would react. Then, the authors pointed out that "a great illusion of cosmic security thus envelopes mankind, one that the 'establishment' of Church, State and Academe do nothing to disturb. Persistence in such an illusion will do nothing to alleviate the next Dark Age when it arrives" (p 12-3). There's nothing further from the truth! There are three parts of this book, with first part being concerned with the mythologies as the history of comets, such as "sky gods" were being comets in disguises. And, they were seen by ancient human beings in our prehistory periods and they may have misinterpreted these comets as "gods." Towards the end of this first part, the authors stated that "swarms of asteroids periodically exist in Earth-crossing orbits and that these are responsible for producing an erratic sequence of cosmic winters, sudden coolings of the globe" (p. 127), which is important to keep in mind. The Part Two reveals the essential scientific knowledge about the comets and how they can be the cause of "terrestrial" catastrophe as well a look at the periodic meteoroid streams (where Earth passes through late June and Early November annually). The authors further their discussion on Comet Encke, the Tunguska event of 1908, ancient comets as depicted in Chinese records (e.g., symbols), and more on historical comets in our prehistory yet they were being ignored. The authors also mentioned that "our distant ancestors...have been telling us in simple language that celestial catastrophe has struck, probably more than once, but the message has been lost through the ravages of time" (p. 192). The final part of this book brings more focus on the scientific evidence of the cosmic events, such as geological, sea-level variations, fossil, ice cores, iridium, Earth's magnetic field, and the cratering record. And, the final chapter brings home a point of how serious a cosmic impact hazard really is and how likely that our civilization would be "plunged into a New Dark Age." Will the human race become extinct? This book became very difficult to obtain and one has to wonder why there are such a shortage of copies of this most important work, and it is a must read for everyone. The authors ended "The Cosmic Winter" with one very simple yet most critical line: "There is a need for this book."

Victor Clube's book, "The Cosmic Winter," is a book of inestimable importance to everyone on this planet. I strongly urge readers to write to the publisher and request a new printing since it is obvious that few people can afford the high prices for the few copies left in circulation. It is also obvious that those people who do have copies, aren't letting them out of their hands which should suggest to the reader how good and important this book is. I first became aware of this book when a friend sent me a copy of a paper addressed to the European Office of Aerospace Research and development, dated June 4, 1996, entitled: The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets by S.V.M. Clube. (For the uninitiated, Clube was an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford). In this short (4 pages) letter and summary statement, Clube writes: "Asteroids which pass close to the Earth have been fully recognized by mankind for only about 20 years. Previously, the idea that substantial unobserved objects might be close enough to be a potential hazard to the Earth was treated with as much derision as the unobserved aether. Scientists of course are in business to establish broad principles (eg relativity) and the Earth's supposedly uneventful, uniformitarian environment was already very much in place. The result was that scientists who paid more than lip service to objects close enough to encounter the Earth did so in an atmosphere of barely disguised contempt. Even now, it is difficult for laymen to appreciate the enormity of the intellectual blow with which most of the Body Scientific has recently been struck and from which it is now seeking to recover." I stopped right there and asked myself: Hmmm... just what intellectual blow is he talking about here? After a bit of thought, it occurred to me that he must be talking about the Comet Shoemaker-Levy fragment impacts on Jupiter which produced a huge amount of excitement at the time which was just two years before the date of this letter. To return to Clube's report, he continues: "The present report, then, is concerned with those other celestial bodies recorded by mankind since the dawn of civilization which either miss or impinge upon the Earth and which have also been despised. Now known respectively as comets (>1 kilometre in size) and meteoroids (<10>" <br /> <br />That he immediately switched from asteroids to comets seems to confirm my speculation that he was talking about Shoemaker-Levy. But it gets more interesting: <br /> <br /> "Confronted on many occasions in the past by the prospect of world-end, national elites have often found themselves having to suppress public panic - only to discover, too late, that the usual means of control commonly fail. Thus an institutionalized science is expected to withhold knowledge of the threat; a self-regulated press is expected to make light of any disaster; while an institutionalized religion is expected to oppose predestination and to secure

This is a book written by astrophysicists for laymen. It is important for one reason: it offers compelling evidence that the sky is not harmless as one might think. On the contrary, there are multiple comet swarms, which are huge concentration of comets, wandering in the space. The Earth has had frequent encounters with them in the past and another is probably due in the near future. The book starts with a graphic description of a fictional encounter between the Earth and a comet swarm. A 20 megaton comet impacts Nevada. Mistaking it with a nuclear strike from the Soviet Union, the US launches multiple nuclear missiles in retaliation. In the mean time, another hundred-megaton impact hits Belgium, wiping out the country and devastating much of Europe. A shower of smaller comet debris also peppers much of the Earth. When the Earth finally emerges from the swarm, much of its surface is in ruin. After ensuring that your attention is sufficiently captured by this story, the authors go about presenting the evidence for their case. In part I, they gather various clues from myths and legends around the world that point to catasphophes in the past. What is interesting here is that they show that the Gods from the myths were probably not products of fiction but comets during a very active periods. They did move around in the sky and interfere in worldly affairs through their deadly bombardments. That said, part II is where the meat of the book is. Here, the authors summarize the current scientific knowledge about comets and present it in a very accessible way. Of particular significance is information about the Taurid meteor stream, whose path the Earth crosses at the end of June and early November each year. This meteor stream is responsible for the Tunguska impact at the beginning of the last century, the Bruno crater on the moon (whose impact energy is on the order of 100,000 megatons) and numerous other impacts in the past. Finally, a risk assessment wraps up the book. For from being negligible, it is calculated that the probability of an impact in as short a period as a human lifetime is at a few percent. What's worse, they tend to be concentrated into brief periods with multiple impacts, whose result is likely to be another Dark Age. After reading this book, one cannot help but wonder why such information is not more widely known, and what effect public awareness of this might have on the current status quo. Wouldn't it stop the bogus "war on terror"? Wouldn't it make people immediately demand something be done to mitigate the threat? Such contemplations, with all their implications, make it all the more important that this book be read by as many people as possible.