From context, he’s talking about the probability to “destroy the planet”, not just a fire at CERN or Brookhaven. He doesn’t, though, give links to the reports, or state what the precise definition used is.
Oh my god!! Is she okay?!
To be honest, the full article sounds rather more alarmist, and borderline irresponsible, to me. First, they take an article as a jumping off point tnat doesn’t have anything to do with those black hole ‘concerns’, just to shoehorn in their rant; then, all assurances of the LHC’s safety are dismissed with a casual remark that ‘scientists can be wrong, too’, while speculations not even taken seriously by most scientists are accepted uncritically. Also, the allusion that safety assessments ought not to be believed because the scientists might have an agenda furthering their careers are borderline parody – even the most hardened careerist scientist realises that he need not worry about his career if the Earth is swallowed by a black hole.
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
[RIGHT]-- Douglas Adams[/RIGHT]
Stranger
:eyes bag of potato chips suspiciously:
I get sucked in by Lay’s all the time. 
I’d be more concerned for the well being of the aliens.
I have less faith in scientists not succumbing to rationalizations. I think about the two Space Shuttle disasters. Both of those happened in spite of clear warning signs. But that said, see below.
[QUOTE=ZenBeam]
This isn’t quite sufficient, though. In the LHC, the collisions occur in the center of momentum frame, so the resultant byproducts could have a small enough velocity to remain with the Earth. For the case of cosmic rays, the center of momentum is much larger, and any unanticipated dangerous particles would still have a large enough momentum to escape the Earth’s gravity. You’d need to extend the argument to show that the particle sticks around often enough (multiple interactions after its creation, maybe?) to be sure that that has already occurred.
[/QUOTE]
A reference to a paper addressing just this objection was given in the comment section of that blog post. Astrophysical implications of hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes (published in Phys. Rev. D, Aug. 2008). The authors try to thoroughly cover the what-ifs, with a minimum of assumptions.
It’s almost 100 pages long, so I’ve only skimmed parts of it, but briefly, there’s a stopping distance required for the resulting particle to shed velocity, so the argument Chronos gave works up to about 7 TeV for Earth itself, and up to about 100 TeV based on the Sun still existing. They also cover a number of other possibilities.
Just as a matter of interest, David Brin used something like this as a plot device in his book Earth. Someone somewhere created one or more tiny black holes (it’s been years since I read this, so I don’t remember the details) which fell into the earth and started bouncing around in there, creating so many tiny pathways that somehow turned into a neural network, making the planet sentient.
So it’s all good, if it happens.
Roddy