EP recently posted more nonsense about the NEO impact hazard over on Benny Peisner's Cambridge Conference board.

This was relayed to Alex's Planetary Science board by one of the members:
Link Here

Here is my considered response to EP's stupidity and misinformation:

DAZED AND CONFUSED: IN SEARCH OF US POLICIES FOR DEALING WITH THE
IMPACT HAZARD http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/ce021102.html By E.P. Grondine <epgrondine@h...
> Hello Benny - Last Monday I braved both the crazed drivers of interstate highway
> 95 as well as possible terrorist attack to attend the NASA budget briefing
> held in the auditorium at NASA Headquaters in Washington, DC. What possible motivation could there > have been for me to so selflessly undertake
> such a dangerous voyage? As Conference participants are well aware, the NASA NEO budget is so
> small that it is never mentioned as a line item in the documents which
> NASA hands out at the budget briefings, and thus the only way to find out what
> NASA's NEO budget is, is to make the trip into town. And since I myself am
> equipped with certain skills developed during many years of squireling out
> some of the most concealed information of the space programs of the former
> Soviet Union and China, I suppose that in some ways I am uniquely suited to
> the task of finding out exactly what NASA's NEO budget is. Throw in the
> large numbers of people killed in recent times by the impact of small
> asteroids and comets, and thus Duty calls...

When EP says "recent" here, he seems to be using it in a sense rather different from the rest of the world. For you and me, "recent" is a few months ago, when we consider current events, or possibly the last decade when we look back over a lifetime. September 11th last year is still "recent" but WWII is not. The Tunguska event is not "recent".

When Geologists talk about "Recent" they mean the Holocene - the last 10,000 years since the ice sheets melted, but EP is clearly not using the word this way. He seems to imply some huge danger that has just happened and will repeat.

This is a Lie.

Repeating a Lie does not make it a Truth. Nobody in the entire world has been killed or injured by any impact since Tunguska.

Yes, there is a statistical probability that some people will die at some unknown point in the future.

There is a far more certain risk that thousands of US citizens will be shot to death by hand guns next year, and the year after, and every year from now on. Does EP suggest that someone take action to restrict access to firearms in the USA?

What about Automobile accidents?

But perhaps we should focus on rare major events that have the ability to change global climate, displace entire nations, and destroy cities.

There is essentially a certainty that there will be another Ice Age in the next few thousand years, unless we stop it by encouraging global warming. The ice sheets will destroy many major cities in Europe and the USA. Billions of people will starve due to climatic change. Whole nations will be eliminated or displaced to fight for new living space elsewhere. But is anyone working to stop the next Ice
Age?

(answer, not deliberately, but as a side effect of our industrialised civilisation we are doing this, and the downside of global sea level rise due to melting the remaining ice sheets is far less costly than the downside of a new Ice Age)