If we continue our present growth path, we are facing extinction - not in millions of years, or even millennia, but by the end of this century, wrote Peter Barrett, director of New Zealand's Atlantic Research Center and a prominent and respected scientist, in notes handed out prior to his acceptance of the Royal Society's Marsden Medal, according to the New Zealand Herald.

When he actually delivered the speech, Barrett changed extinction to the end of civilization as we know it.

That's a relief - a return to hunting-gathering instead of oblivion.

Barrett's reason for the dire warning was global warming. He noted that smaller climatic changes than the one the Earth now is undergoing have destroyed civilizations in the past.

Other climate scientists quickly distanced themselves from Barrett's assessment, assuring the media that civilization probably is safe for the nonce.

Barrett is not alone in this latest round of apocalypticism, however.

If the world greatly expands coal-fired energy generation, with its accompanying carbon-dioxide emissions, you can kiss the planet good-bye. Those are the words of Gus Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and an environmental adviser to presidents Clinton and Carter.

Speth, speaking to a Louisville, Ky., audience - as reported by Courier-Journal writer James Bruggers - did not put a timetable on his farewell, but a kiss usually doesn't take very long.

Despite its relatively short history, environmentalism has developed a reputation for doomsday thinking. The tradition got its biggest boost from the 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome's ominously titled project on the predicament of mankind.

The Limits to Growth warned that if the world did not change its consumptive ways, the planet would reach its resource limits within a century. It was greeted with derision by the same sort of people who now deride warnings about the impact of climate change.

These semi-hysterical declarations from conservationists attract a lot of scorn from skeptics, but it is a little difficult to see why. If you assemble the data, environmentalists are a distant third on Cassandra's list of extinction mongers.

Leading the pack are certain factional members of Christianity, who almost since the beginning of the faith have taken selected contemporary events as signs of the Last Days approaching.

In his book The Reformation, Oxford University historian Diarmaid MacCulloch writes of the 16th and 17th centuries, Large numbers of Europeans were convinced in varying ways and with varying degrees of fervor that the momentous events through which they were living signified that the visible world was about to end.

Christian apocalyptic thinkers - after a number of embarrassing imprecisions - have mostly stopped providing a date certain for Judgment Day.

Lest anyone think this attitude remains buried in the murky past, however, MacCulloch reminds us, In the 1980s the United States experienced the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who believed in the Bible's prediction of an imminent arrival of the apocalyptic time as firmly as any of the Protestant savants of Interregnum England or the 17th century princes of Transylvania.

Such dire predictions rarely elicit a reaction from skeptics because they are unscientific.

Other counselors of catastrophe include those who monitor the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists now stands at seven minutes before midnight.

This latest brief interval was established in 2002 because, according to the Bulletin: Little progress is made on global nuclear disarmament. The United States rejects a series of arms control treaties and announces it will withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Terrorists seek to acquire and use nuclear and biological weapons.

There they go, frightening people when a simple perusal of the facts will show no one has used a nuclear weapon in anger in nearly 60 years.

Critics seldom lampoon these predictions perhaps because nuclear physics is such a complex subject. It is easy enough to look foolish discussing something you do understand, never mind something you don't.

Every year, I participate in another clock-setting exercise, the Questionnaire on Environmental Problems and the Survival of Mankind. The Asahi Glass Foundation asks about 800 potential respondents, To what extent do you feel that the current deterioration of the global environment has created a crisis that will affect the continuance of the human race?

We respondents are encouraged to give a clock time between noon and midnight to indicate whether we are barely, slightly, fairly or extremely concerned about humanity's long-term prospects.

The survey is not a random statistical one, but is targeted to people around the globe who boast acronyms beside their names - GO, NGO, UNEP, UNCSD and lots of others - along with assorted journalists, myself included.

Asahi's environmental catastrophe clock in 2004 is set at 9:08 p.m., which puts the Asahi respondents in the southern hemisphere of extremely concerned - somewhere around Patagonia, say.

In a back-of-the-envelope, per-minute-to-midnight calculation, this makes the Asahi environmental respondents 24.6 times more optimistic about mankind's future than the atomic scientists - although it probably is unscientific to compare these two clocks because their methodologies differ.

Asahi surveys people who are actually on the ground - present company excepted - dealing with global environmental problems of energy, wildlife, waste and water from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Their responses indicate that perhaps Barrett's stark comments deserve another hearing.

Survey says: More than 85 percent of respondents ... indicated that they would feel either 'Apprehensive' or 'Extremely Apprehensive' about future prospects for the environment in the absence of an international strategy to contend with global warming.

So, if you're going to walk around feeling extremely apprehensive, based on the data and past experience, warming is what you might want to feel most apprehensive about. Meanwhile, have another turkey sandwich.

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