I doubt the "thoroughly researched science" behind this book - particularly as it refers to the WMDs of Iraq as fact. I suspect it was thoroughly researched in the politically biased newspapers and possibly Wikipedia. For example, his theory of a nuclear waste shipment being derailed and leading to radioactive poisoning is ridiculous. Those containers are designed to withstand much more than the knockabout he's suggesting.
Though titled as "End of the World scenarios", this is very much from a single American point of view, referring to 'our homeland' which is not applicable for us in the UK, or indeed anyone else in the world. In fact this book is so unbalanced as to be laughable. A whole chapter is spent discussing the threat of WMDs, how they've been used before etc, yet no mention is made of the bombing of Hiroshima. Why? because it makes the US look bad.
The most worrying thing about this book is that people will be taken in by the pseudoscience. He states the dinosuars "were annihilated by an asteroid", when in fact it's proven they died out over millions of years. Quick ecologically but not sudden. The author continually over-estimates the speed at which geological events happen. He also blatantly misleads his audience. In the course of putting the destruction of the Minoans into a modern perspective he ends up using it as proof that all life would be wiped out. Yes, only becuase he exaggerated all the destruction to highlight the importance of the Minoans.
Throughout, Richard Moran always fails to take one thing into consideration. Human ingenuity. To him it would be catastrophic for all ports to be flooded. To me it would be an opportunity for aircraft. People wouldn't just sit by and starve or freeze.
The final straw however, is when he asks us to consider what would happen if scientists extracted blood from an extinct species, such as the dinosaur, (yes, just like they did in Jurassic Park) and discovered the animal had a hitherto unknown deadly disease.