THERE IS A SURE-FIRE WAY to make the news these days: Just issue a press release beginning with the words, "New scientific study shows," and have it assert a conclusion that the MSM fervently want to believe--especially if the resulting story would serve to debunk or refute a Bush administration policy. Slam-dunk! Your press release will become news!

You are skeptical, you say? But what other explanation is there for the decision by CBS and MSNBC to post on their websites a ridiculous story about a new scientific "finding" that global warming is causing an increase in the world's earthquakes--an item that was even linked for a time on the Drudge Report.

Now I am not a scientist, but the idea that a few alleged degrees of warming--with none apparently in the last decade--could cause an increase in earthquakes seemed pure quackery to me. So, I decided to perform Google and Yahoo searches of the "scientist" who had issued the finding, one Thomas Chalko, MSc, Ph.D. In less than five minutes I found that Chalko was perhaps the last person who should be quoted on the purported impact of allegedly man-caused global warming.

Chalko is best described as a pseudo-scientist--at least when it comes to the fields of global warming and earthquakes about which he was quoted by CBS and MSNBC as an authority. He is not a meteorologist. Nor is he a geophysicist or seismologist. His website reveals that he is into "self

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Chalko's "aural" workshop promises to explain "how to see your own aura," and "the meaning of the aura and its colors." Chalko also writes in the online NU Journal of Discovery--which he founded and for which he appears to be the only writer--that global warming could cause the earth to explode:

If the [earth's] under-cooled solid core reactor [due to global warming] continues to accumulate heat, despite the above described cooling mechanisms, conditions for its meltdown may occur. The meltdown will begin in the center of the planetary core reactor. Since the core is eccentric and spins, the molten part will be subject to centrifugal forces that will eventually segregate and stratify various radioactive isotopes present in the core according to their density. If the molten area of the core becomes large enough, one of the isotopes may reach the critical mass. In such a case, the geothermic energy that was scheduled to be released over billions of years will be released in a fraction of a second and the planet will explode.

One doesn't have to be a scientist to know this is beyond nutty.