Ah, my predictions were wrong. The next big natural disaster that is going to kill us all wasn't the nanobot army - it's global darkening.

Here's a quote.

"Global Darkening [wikipedia.org] is actually a moderate problem, though it's actually caused by particulate pollutants in the atmosphere, not sunspots. The amount of light energy reaching the Earth over the last hundred years has been dropping slowly, until recently, when it started going up again -- as dirty pollution has been regulated and replaced with "cleaner" CO2 pollution.

Okay, so let's break this down.

Global darkening is happening because of pollution. We are doing better on pollution now, apparently, so the global darkening problem is going away. Alright, that sounds good for us so far, right?

Remember, global darkening = pollution.

The next part says that global darkening is counteracting the effects of global warming, and that when the sun goes into its next cycle, global warming is going to hit us a lot harder. A lot harder than 2 degrees per hundred years or whatever they've been able to measure.

So, wait - what causes global warming?

Pollution.

So pollution is causing global darkening which is cooling the earth down, and its causing global warming which is heating the earth up. And if the sun gets hotter, then the earth will get hotter too, only it won't be the hotter sun's fault, it will be the fault of global darkening/warming which is caused by pollution.

The bottom line is, less pollution is going to make the earth get really hot and more pollution is going to also make the world get really hot.

We have here a classic lose, lose situation (those are ugly).

Let's look at this from a scientific perspective.

We have these facts:
1. The sun is in a cooling phase right now (no sun spots)
2. The sun is going to eventually be in a warming phase (sunspots)
3. The earth seems like it might be getting warmer
4. I need grant money

Conclusion: Humans are at fault, and nothing they can do will fix it. Anything positive is part of a natural cycle, anything negative is caused by humans. Also, if humans stop doing whatever it is they are doing that is making things worse, it will only get worse. Because that makes sense (so long as we use lots of words and have fancy powerpoint presentations). But by giving me grant money to do more research, you will be responsible for saving the world that can't actually be saved unless all humans die/I become president.