A Website For People Who Want To Believe The End Is Nigh

Ok, so my wife and I were looking at the website of Anthony Watts, who has become fairly prominent of late in the community of Anthropogenic Global Warming skeptics. He put up a post recently about the current eruption of the Chaiten volcano in southern Chile. It appears to be a pretty good-sized eruption, roughly the scale of Mount St. Helens, give or take. The question that he and his commenters were exploring was, what will all those new aerosol particles in the atmosphere do to the climate? So they're discussing whether enough junk is being put in the atmosphere to make a difference; and whether the volcano is too far south for the dust and gasses to have a direct impact on the Northern Hemisphere; and just how big this eruption is likely to get, and a whole lot of other related stuff.

Well, one of the commenters pointed to an online resource that my wife found, well... interesting. Commenter TinyCO2 posted at 10:29:27:

A good site for world hazard information is the RSOE Havaria information service. Shows everything from bird flu outbreaks to unusual snow storms.

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index.php?lang=eng

Well, when we got to this comment, my wife started giggling, and then the giggles didn't go away, they just started possessing her body. I looked at her funny, and she explained: "Imagine the thinking of the kinds of people that get hooked on a site like this."

And then I started thinking about it, and I started giggling, too. Here's my mental image:

Click.

Click click....

Aiiiiieeeeee!

(pause...)

Click click click (refresh)

(pause...)

Aiiiiieeeeee!

(Repeat until normal people come to take him away from the computer.)

I mean, seriously! Go take a look at this site, and tell me if that doesn't impart the sense of "We're all going to die!" and "Boy, I bet it sure sucks to be them right about now." The thing is a map of the world, with little icons all over it that you can mouse over, telling you what's making life unpleasant for everyone right now. Did you know, as of this writing, that there was just some kind of explosion on the coast of China? Or that there's a serious epidemic going on in Madagascar? Or that there are a whole bunch of volcanoes up and down the Pacific coasts of North and South America that are going off as I sit here and write this? Or that there was just a vehicular accident near Central Park in New York City? How can you be so calm? How can you laugh at a time like this? This is serious, I tell you.

I'd think of packing up and moving to Antarctica, but that's not entirely safe either: it appears that Mt. Erebus has just blown its top, too.

We're doomed, I tell you.

...

Now, I noticed a fact about this site which may be apropos of absolutely nothing, or may be the key to understanding the whole thing: This site has a Hungarian URL, and is available in both English and Magyar versions.

Hmmm. Hungarians have always been seen by the rest of Europe as being a little unusual, a little exotic. Maybe those Hungarians really do know something that the rest of us don't....