Is science more risky than global warming?

Maybe, maybe not:

The Large Hadron Collider (think London's Circle Line underground tunnel with some chilly magnets) at Cern, Switzerland will be operational later this year. The plan is to accelerate subatomic particles to near light speed and bounce them off each other in a search for, among other things, the Higgs particle and Hawking radiation. The Higgs particle is the physicist's missing link - it would explain mass, startlingly - and confirmation of Hawking radiation would mean a pretty quick trip to Stockholm courtesy of the Nobel Institute for the wheelchair bound thinker.

Of course a Black Swan event as a result of this experiment might be, shall we say, troubling. But most of the potential catastrophe scenarios have been hammered out already. In particular scientists have examined the possibilities of localised black holes, magnetic monopoles and/or the creation of as yet unseen particles called strangelets. The physicists are convinced of the absence of risk, and I certainly don't doubt them. Nonetheless it is entertaining to listen to the prognostications of the doomsday advocates.

The risk of the creation of a mini black hole somehow expanding to consume the lot of us is standard science fiction fare, and I can't get too excited either about a magnet with North only. A strangelet is a more peculiar beast altogether. Certain physicists kooks postulate that if one of these dark matter particles is created by a near relativistic collision of other nuclear particles, it will infect anything it contacts and convert it too into strangelets. The ensuing chain reaction turns our planet to strange custard in short order. Not good, by all accounts. To think I was worried about putting the recycling out for collection.

There must be a good futures contract for this accelerator thingy ... In other news, the broken-watch hurricane forecasters are back it:

Meterologists at Colorado State University expect the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season to be an unusually active one.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The team made a similar forecast for the 2007 season, just as they had in 2006. But both of those dire predictions turned out to be high of the mark — 2006 and 2007 turned out to be relatively quiet, and the U.S. was spared landfall by a major hurricane for two years in a row.

DISCLOSURE: I am short 2008.GLOBAL.TEMP.TOP5