One of the peculiarities of this age of environmental apocalypse is how little we are willing to check the facts surrounding stories about science and technology.

As a result, the good news is that we've all had a few chuckles, like when major TV networks unflinchingly reported on the pregnant man in the Philippines, or when sheep in South America, supposedly blinded by ultraviolet radiation from the ozone hole, were found to be suffering from pinkeye. The bad news is that environmental reporting has become so bad that no one takes it seriously anymore.

When each passing fancy is played as curtains, and yet the world goes on, people eventually catch on that something must be wrong with the Armageddon story. Churches used to do a pretty good job at telling us the end was near, but when they couldn't produce it, we switched to environmentalists for gloom and doom. The title of Sen. Al Gore's bestseller, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, says volumes about this shift of believers. Ditto for his recent meeting with religious leaders, imploring them to preach about the "new relationship" (whatever that means) between man and the planet.

But after about a hundred years or so of this (very) trying rhetoric, folks are beginning to figure it out. One might call it "apocalypse fatigue," recognizing that the best bet is to go short on apocalypse futures. After all, we're here, not dead from global warming, global cooling, acid rain, deforestation, too much salt in our diet, too little, or oat bran colic. Further, if an apocalypse is real, who's going to be around to collect bets?

The latest alarming report, with profoundly little fact checking, came from Reuters on Oct. 13. Here's the core:

"On Oct. 4, when the ozone layer was critically thin and the sky clear, UV radiation reaching Puntas Arenas (Chile) increased 200 percent over August levels, said Professor Claudio Cassicia of the University of Magallanes."

Earlier reports quoted Argentine government authorities as advising citizens against sunbathing between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Perhaps Rueters should have checked Paul Lydolph's The Climate of the Earth, a standard college text, to see how much radiation normally falls on the latitude of Puntas Arenas, or 55 de- grees south. In August, as the Southern Hemisphere is just emerging from the depths of winter, the normal amount of radiation hitting the surface is approximately 4 Megajoules per day. To give an idea of how little this is, given today's energy conversion efficiencies, a solar panel of several square feet would be required to harness enough energy to light a room in the incandescent manner to which we have become accustomed.

The reason is that at the tip of South America the sun is very low on the horizon during winter. As it climbs in the sky, reaching halfway up at noon during mid-October, more radiation rains down. According to Lydolph, the average radiation then hitting the surface is 10 Megajoules per day, or 250 percent of the average August value. This is more than the alarming increase cited by Reuters.

An additional complicating factor is that the tip of South America is one of the cloudiest land areas on the planet, so that the amount of radiation that normally arrives is very small. One would think that sunbathing—now proscribed by the Argentine government—would've at best a very sporadic activity.

In fact, it's darned near suicidal: The mean high temperature in October at Puntas Arenas usually recorded around 4 p.m. is 51 degrees Fahrenheit. Willy Rudloff in World Climates, writes that the regional climate is "dry and sunny often only for a few hours." Further, the tip of South America is one of the windiest mid-latitude places around, owing to its proximity to the Southern Ocean, where westerly winds howl circumferentially around the planet, unimpeded by any land or transverse mountain range. The latitude band of Puntas Arenas is known to mariners as the "Frantic Fifties."

The October temperature average during the prescribed tanning hours (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) is ap- proximately 46 degrees Fahrenheit. Given average winds of 15 mph (a very conservative estimate for daytime in this region), the normal wind-chill temperature is therefore 26 degrees. Any sunbather is likely to freeze to death before getting sunburn, ozone depletion or not. Seen a sunburned Eskimo recently?

It's hard to believe that the Argentine government doesn't know the mean temperature and wind-chill temperatures of Patagonia, how cloudy and windy it is, or how little ultraviolet radiation, on the average, is incident upon the, surface. It's also hard to believe that they don't know that the people of the United States (if we believe the polls) are about to elect an administration committed to income transfers—from us, to them—in the name of the environment.