AN EVOLUTIONARY VIEWPOINT ON GLOBAL WARMING

Professor Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey is worried about - stop me if you've heard this one before - global warming. For this year's Royal Institution Christmas lecture, he'll be warning that the merest smidgeonette of an increase in temperature in the south polar seabed will lead to the loss of a zillion species. As the oceans warm, the ice shelves that extend from the polar depths into the sub-Antarctic light will shrink, and the thick mats of algae on their underside will vanish, and the billions of tiny krill that feed on them will perish, and pretty soon, up at the scenic end of the food chain, all those cute seals and penguins and whales will be gone.

And all this will happen if the temperature goes up two degrees, from butt-numbingly freezing to marginally less butt-numbingly freezing. "It is going to be really unpleasant," Prof Peck tells the Guardian. "We are going to lose things - we just don't know how much."

Maybe if the Antarctic food chain is incapable of evolving to cope with a two-degree increase in temperature across many decades, it isn't meant to survive. Science tells us that extinction is a fact of life, and that nature is never still: long before the Industrial Revolution, long before the first lardbuttus Americanus got into his primitive four-miles-per-gallon SUV to head to the mall for the world's first cheeseburger, there were dramatic fluctuations in climate wiping out a ton of stuff. Yet scientists and their cheerleaders, the hyper-rationalists at the progressive newspapers, have signed on to the idea that evolution should cease and the world should be frozen - literally, in the case of Prof Peck and his beloved algae - in some unchanging Edenic state.

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CRICHTON AGAIN

Michael Crichton has done us all the very valuable service of getting his comments into Parade Magazine -- a weekly insert magazine in many U.S. newspapers on Sundays. He is thus getting out to a very wide audience an antidote to the constant drumbeat of lying Greenie propaganda. The whole article is a delightful read with heaps of good points but below are just a few excerpts:

This year I turned 62, and I find I have acquired-along with aches and pains-a perspective on the world that I lacked as a younger person. I now recognize that for most of my life I have felt burdened by highly publicized fears that decades later did not turn out to be true. I was reminded of this when I came across this 1972 statement about climate: "We simply cannot afford to gamble.We cannot risk inaction. Those scientists who [disagree] are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored." This author wasn't concerned about global warming. He was worried about global cooling and the coming ice age.

We're all going to freeze! Or is it sizzle?

It may be mostly forgotten now, but back then many climate scientists shared his concern: Temperatures around the world had fallen steadily for 30 years, dropping half a degree in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. Pack ice was increasing. Glaciers were advancing. Growing seasons had shortened by two weeks in only a few years.

In 1975, Newsweek noted "ominous signs that weather patterns have begun to change.with serious political implications for just about every nation." Scientists were predicting that "the resulting famines could be catastrophic." Human beings never tire of discussing the latest report that tells us the end is near.

But it is now clear that even as Newsweek was printing its fears, temperatures already had begun to rise. Within a decade, scientists would be decrying a global warming trend that threatened to raise temperatures as much as 30 degrees in the 21st century. Such predictions implied palm trees in Montana, and they have since been revised downward. By 1995, the UN midrange estimates were about 4 degrees over the next 100 years. Although concern about warming remains, the prospect of catastrophic change seems increasingly unlikely.

Oh no, it's a population explosion!

Similarly, for all of my adult life, informed people have lived in continual anxiety about an exploding world population and the inevitable resulting mass starvation and environmental degradation. In the 1960s, experts like Paul Ehrlich spoke with conviction: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich argued for compulsory population control if voluntary methods failed. In the 1970s, The Club of Rome (a global think tank) predicted a world population of 14 billion in the year 2030, with no end in sight.

Instead, fertility rates fell steadily. By the end of the century, they were about half what they were in 1950, with the result that many now expect world population to peak at 9 billion or so and then to decline. (It's estimated to be about 6 billion today.) And mass starvation never occurred either. Instead, per capita food production increased through the end of the century because of the "green revolution" resulting from increased agricultural efficiency and better seeds. Grain production increased as much as 600% per acre, bringing unprecedented crop yields around the world.....

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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