Bolt's lack of research exposed yet again

If the rest of the Australian mainstream media and blogosphere made as many factual errors as journalist Andrew Bolt there would barely be a handful of people left in this country who were using the Internet to read news and current affairs.

Crikey's Pure Poison outed Bolt for his latest blunder in The Herald-Sun on 31 August 2010 set out here:

Something a little more likely and potentially a lot more devastating for the global warming alarmists to fret over:

An asteroid more than a mile wide is heading for earth, posing the greatest threat yet by an object approaching the planet, scientists have warned.

The asteroid – called 2002 NT7 – was spotted only three weeks ago, but could strike on 1 February 2019, the US space agency Nasa said…

Gerrit Verschuur, an astrophysicist and radio astronomer at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, said the impact would create a fireball so intense it would kill anyone who could see it, after which material thrown into the air would shower half the world with flaming debris. "It would be as if the sky itself had caught fire," he said.

The heat would set fire to forests and cities, after which dust would fill the atmosphere, obscuring the sun for a month. That in turn would kill plants and animals, so that only creatures that lived underground would have a strong chance of survival.

Same apocalyptic scenario as the global warmists' own, but missing that vital ingredient for a new mass faith - a narrative of human sin and the punishment to come.

(Thanks to reader Warwick.)

Now a sensible person would have looked at that link to Newshoggers and double checked with NASA and its Near Earth Object Program, but not Mr. Bolt - that would have spoiled his dig at climate change science.

For those who are interested in seeing how few objects pose a real risk there is NASA's Sentry Risk Table . As I write there is only one risk impact on a scale of 0 to 10 that is presently indicated as meriting "careful monitoring" and, it is not Bolt's asteroid of doom (discovered in 2002) and it is not due until sometime between 2048 and 2057.

In fact the asteroid Bolt mentions seems to have been removed from the Sentry Risk Table sometime between mid-2002 and 2004 because the risk was so low as to be negligible over the next one hundred years.