Harold Camping, the impressario and not-so-great predictor of FamilyRadio.com, famously promised that May 21st, 2011 would be the day the world ended in the Rapture.

That didn’t work out so well. We’re all still here, including some people who — let’s be honest — are definitely not getting spirited up to heaven.

So now he’s got a new prediction: it’s actually going to be October 21st, 2011, which buys us all some more time. And for that, I’m grateful. I’ve gotta be honest: I just wasn’t ready for it all to end last Saturday. For one thing, I’ve got stuff at the cleaners, and there are about three movies on my Netflix queue.

He explains it all, of course. From CNN.com:

In his first radio broadcast since his doomsday prediction failed to pan out in a spectacularly public fashion, the California preacher insisted his was an error of interpretation, not fact. What’s more, he has another calculation for the day the world will end – October 21, 2011. Camping had kept a low-profile since Saturday, the day he had forecast for the return of Jesus Christ to Earth. He and his devoted followers have been warning for months that on May 21, a select 2% to 3% of the world’s population would be taken to heaven. Those left behind would face months of tribulation before perishing in the Earth’s destruction, which Camping said would happen on October 21.

And this time, we’re on our own:

“We’re not going to be passing out tracts,” Camping said. “We’re not going to put up any more billboards. We’re not going to be advertising in any way. The world has been warned. We did our little share and the media picked it up. But now the world has been told, it’s under judgment.”

What is it about the Apocalypse that’s so irresistible to would-be Nostradami? Why the obsession with the end of the world?

It’s easy to make fun of Harold Camping, but he’s a lot more entertaining than this ridiculous gasbag:

“The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.”

He also said this:

“It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

All in all, I prefer the Camping version of the end of the world. There’s more reliable science in it.