So it has come to this. New translations of the quatrains of Nostradamus fill our bookshelves and catastrophic predictions of the future proliferate. Countless disaster movies bear witness to the fantasy and drown it with special effects. Songs, paintings and novels present a variety of utopian and dystopian scenarios for the future. The perennially recurring issue of how the world will end has no alternative but to fall short of completion. After all, should anyone survive the apocalypse there will be no biros. The world will end, but I when I imagine the apocalypse I can’t help but think of all the food spoiling in my fridge.

On Tuesday I was reminded of the immortal words of Billy Bob Thornton in Armageddon, “It's what we call a Global Killer....the end of mankind. Half the world will be incinerated by the heat blast.....the rest will freeze to death in a nuclear winter. Basically, the worst part of the Bible!” Nice. So an asteroid 600m long did zoom past the earth on Tuesday, apparently the closest asteroid approach for 2,000 years. Asteroid 2007 TU24 was expected to pass 538,000 kilometres away (not a kerjillion-million, as I had hoped).

It is possible that an asteroid (more specifically its impact) wiped out the dinosaurs and many other creatures in the Cretaceous period. Today hundreds, perhaps even thousands of asteroids intersect the Earth’s orbit. Some have struck the Earth in the past, leaving large craters in their wake. Others have come very close, like this recent instance. Current astronomical research suggests there is a 1 in 5000 chance that there will be extinction due to an asteroid colliding with the Earth before the end of this century. This could wipe out humankind, or at least civilisation as we know it.

News coverage of Tuesday’s "doomsday" asteroid offers a telling insight into tensions surrounding the reportage of many modern dangers. The media puts Earth on a "hit list" with dangerous asteroids and comets being nature's own terrorism from the sky. We are told this week, that the threat is real, we require a homeland defence plan for planet Earth, to guard us from these celestial pilgrims. And time is running out.

Just like this astronomical terrorism, the subject ‘real’ terrorism has inspired voluminous literature in recent weeks. We have been trained to believe that terrorism is everywhere, there is a global perfusion of terrorism, which naturally accompanies any system of supremacy, as though it was it’s shadow. We are told that terrorism is the discernible split that pits the exploited and the undeveloped against the wealthy. The powers that be direct us to the revenant of America (which is only the epicentre and not the sole embodiment of “globalisation”) and the revenant of Islam, which is terrorism itself (not). These misperceptions are predicated on the notion of Good and Evil existing in the world – a fraudulent concept that posits some sort of dialectical moral equilibrium at play in our Universe. The truth is that terrorism is an activity that has characterised modern society since its inception, there is nothing new to it and its threat to humankind is exaggerated. The 9/11 attacks (I’ve gone and said it) – and the prospect of sustained conflict with a diffuse, unfamiliar enemy – has created fury, anxiety and grief. Today we can clearly notice interplay between our emotions and our capacity for risk assessment. Simply put, we are upset therefore we are scared. Terrorism wont, directly at least, lead to our downfall. Let’s move on.

Our next possible threat to life as we know it is something that western politicians queue up to applause and economists reference with admiration. China’s bursting economy is shattering the planet, and turning into the greatest environmental threat the world as ever faced. Well, so they say.

China is now by far the world's biggest driver of rainforest destruction. It's population will grow from 1.3 billion to 1.45 billion in 26 years - when per capita income will be equal to that of the US today. By 2025, China will overtake the US as the top emitter of the greenhouse gases causing global warming. By 2031, China would have 1.1 billion cars if it matches current US trends - bigger than the current world fleet of 800 million. I am actually fine with that last fact though, cause who doesn’t want to buy a car from Chang’an Automobile?

Having stressed the threat from China I can’t help but feel like I am becoming your quintessential climate change zealot. Global warming seems to be the latest weapon in the arsenal of environmental ideologues who warn that the earth and humankind are doomed. People understand the threat of asteroids – something may hit us and blow us up. People overstate the threat of terrorism – someone may hit us and blow us up. But people do not accept what they believe is global warming’s alarmism. The truth is that the words ‘climate change’ have lost their power – like an “I love you” or “I’ll call you back”, they are platitudinous rather than real, and they need a makeover. The rise of global warming conspiracy theories which claim that the hypothesis is a fraud, perpetuated for financial and ideological reasons is clearly an irreverent attack on those ‘scientists’ who proffer “global warning theory”. Personally I am not keen to buy into Goresque climate change views, even though I have no problem accepting them intellectually. But it seems that we are faced with a series of long alarmist scares, with everything from the wildfires in California and the recent floods in Mozambique being blamed on global warming. I don’t feel an immanent apocalyptic threat from climate change, but I do live on top of a hill.

Perhaps it all has something to do with the deaths offered by our examples. The threat of terrorism is multifaceted but in all likelihood would involve some sort of explosion, skin burning off and other gross things involving pain. The same can be said for an asteroid hitting the earth. Maybe we sit back and accept global warming because it relates to the planet first and humankind second. When we imagine the destructive power of terrorism, an asteroid plummeting to earth or even nuclear war we can create a post-apocalyptic fiction in our minds: New York becomes a lake/poisonous swampland, domesticated animals run wild and the odd random lion appears. Then in you step, leading a few (good-looking) survivors to a quasi-medieval, almost romantic way of life. There is hope. Global warming, if accepted as a theory and left unresolved, leads to the ultimate destruction of our planet. There is not a semblance of optimism, but our planet has been destroyed, not humankind, so its okay. In expectation of terrorist disaster, one can prepare to mitigate the consequences. If a global-warming based apocalypse is at hand, one can only repent. We are already walking along the pathway to self-destruction, an achievement that will not need the assistance of an aberrant asteroid. The end.