Or, climate change and the Necronomicon.

A new study by scientists has suggested that zombie attacks might increase if the current projections of global warming are realized. “If the earth gets warmer, it means longer springs, summers, and falls, and shorter winters,” said John Carpenter-Romero, Ph.D., a zombie-ologist who co-authored the study. “And shorter winters means more time for the undead to prey on the populace.”

Dr. Harrister, the other co-author, and head of Zombie Robotics at Wayward Robot, Inc., explained that cold winters typically stalled the walking dead. “It is well known that zombies can’t operate in cold weather. It freezes their brains.”

The pair calculated a 32.782412% increase in zombie attacks if CO2 increased to twice its pre-industrial rate. “Clearly, this is a very troubling result,” said Dr. Harrister, “If we don’t do something soon, the streets will be filled with blood.”

I hadn't considered that. Recent efforts to involve more statisticians in decision making could better prepare us to deal with change.

Update:

In other news:

The heaviest snowstorms to hit the centre and south of the country in 50 years have continued to cause havoc to Chinese New Year travel plans, with 105 million people affected - 45 million more than the total population of Britain. . .

A staggering 150,000 homes have collapsed and another 650,000 have been seriously damaged, say disaster relief officials.

The long-term effects were looking equally ominous. "The impact of the snow disaster in southern China on winter crop production is extremely serious," said Chen Xiwen, the government's leading expert on the agricultural economy. "The impact on fresh vegetables and on fruit in some places has been catastrophic." . .

Government figures said that snow had destroyed crops on 3,000 square miles of land. Wholesalers in Beijing reported that supplies of some foodstuffs were down to a fifth of normal levels. In areas directly affected by the snow, such as the central industrial cities of Wuhan and Changsha, food prices have reportedly already doubled. . .

State propaganda outlets have tried to make the best of a bad job, lavishing space on the funerals of three "hero" electricians who died trying to reconnect broken power lines, while the People's Daily newspaper summoned up the Chinese equivalent of the Dunkirk spirit.

"When one place suffers misfortune, aid comes from all directions," it said. "That is the traditional virtue of the Chinese nation and, even more, it is a vivid portrait of the superiority of the socialist system."

This is tragic, far worse than, say, hurricane damage in the US. The zombie threat should be reduced, however it may be that zombies aren't as great a problem in superior socialist systems since any zombie attacks would be met by defenders coming from all directions.