Yesterday was May 5th, and if you weren’t wearing a giant sombrero and drinking foolish amounts of tequila, you might have recalled that it was the eighth anniversary of the earth’s evasion of a massive doomsday disaster. What cataclysm is this, you ask? It’s none other than the sudden drastic shift of the earth’s ice caps from their position at the top of the globe to the equator! Madness!
This was all outlined in Richard Noone’s book, Ice: The Ultimate Disaster. According to Noone, a massive planetary/lunar alignment on 5/5/2000 was supposed to yank the earth’s ice caps from their lofty positions and shove them down to the equator, creating massive global upheaval, killing most of earth’s life and greatly upsetting all the shoggoths that live in Antarctica. And, oh yeah, a new Ice Age.
Ice: The Ultimate Disaster was first self-published in the early 80s and updated in 1995. The book first captured my imagination when I saw it in a Illuminet Press catalog I somehow managed to get while I was in high school. I never got to read Ice (it was on the list of titles I wanted to order from Illuminet, but wasn’t able to–due in part to lack of money, but also because my parents were wary of just about every book in the catalog. But I guess Okbomb! and the Principia Discorida are not necessarily books you want your 14-year-old son reading), but it’s remained ingrained in my memory since then.
Obviously, Noone’s predictions, based on dodgy archeology and the usual stuff about Freemasons, the Illuminati and so on, didn’t come true, since you’re reading this and perhaps still nursing a Cinco de Mayo hangover. Like all the y2k fears and paranoia that were rampant around that time, Ice is an embarrassing sort of artifact–one that got embarrassing fairly quickly, as this piece from James Randi shows. But it also calls back to a more innocent time when fears of a global ice age were getting a little more press than the slightly more worrisome global warming thing.
