Sky is Falling, Say Boffins

Climatologists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim in their latest report that the sky is falling and everyone should run for cover before it comes crashing down.

This latest shock news comes hard on the heels of a warning from the same august body that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, based on an email interview with Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain, published in New Scientist back in 1999.

However, this time the Nobel Prize-winning authors assert that they have "got it dead right this time", quoting from the highly respected scientific journal the Oxford Storybook, in a peer-reviewed article published by Ian Beck and colleagues titled "Chicken Licken".

In this nightmare scenario, Professor Beck describes in graphic detail with illustrations and everything how the Earth's atmosphere will suffer catastrophic collapse, bringing clouds, planes, weather balloons and birds down with it. Property damage alone is estimated to run into trillions of dollars. Smaller species of wildlife are expected to be wiped out in a mass extinction. Or eaten by wily foxes.

Critics are already describing the latest revelations as "alarmist", "wildly inaccurate", "hare-brained" and "can I have some of what he's smoking?"