The content on this webpage contains paid/affiliate links. When you click on any of our affiliate link, we/I may get a small compensation at no cost to you. See our affiliate disclosure for more info -----------------------
Last updated on July 16th, 2017 at 09:30 am
Daniel Botkin wonders why past changes in climate haven’t caused the decritterization that’ll apparently be caused by future changes:
This year’s United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20%-30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming—a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct.
Perhaps they simply moved out of their deadly Manhattan penthouses.
(Via Janice)
Well, the last round of global warmening wasn’t kind to the mammoth, or the mastadon, or the wooly rhinoceros, or the great cave bear, or the giant ground sloth.
However, it was great for humans – the warmer climate made it possible for us to invent useful things like agriculture and cities.
So, tough luck for Jumbo, but we’re looking out for number one.
Posted by Urbs in Horto on 2007 10 20 at 09:06 AM • permalink
Perhaps they simply moved out of their deadly Manhattan penthouses
Darn it, Tim. I thought that was going to be a link to the lady discovering the python in her toilet (fortunately, while she was washing her hands in the sink and not while ‘sitting down’).
Posted by andycanuck on 2007 10 20 at 10:00 AM • permalink
I read this essay in the paper version of the Wall Street Journal, which I, of course, read everyday. (assumes smug stance)
I thought this was especially interesting:
The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality.
The computer models are crude and not very realistic. And on the basis of those, all countries—no, only the Western countries—are supposed to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels—as a start—regardless of the harm it does to our economies and financial and social well-being of the citizenry? And when we consider the fact that greenhouse gas generation will simply transfer to exempt countries like China, India, and the Asian Tigers, it won’t do a lick of good?
Fuck that shit.
Posted by wronwright on 2007 10 20 at 10:33 AM • permalink
What the UN report means is that warm weather encourages people to fire up the barbie and grill everything in sight. I expect I alone will eat an entire species or two.
Posted by Shaky Barnes on 2007 10 20 at 12:12 PM • permalink
It’s all very simple: if you think evolution never happened, you’re a horrible ignorant Jesus freak; if you think evolution is still happening, you are a horrible ignorant climate denier and/or racist bigot, even if you did win a Nobel for discovering the structure of DNA. Either way, you’re anti-science.
Nothing is evolving these days except the American Constitution.
Will someone get these damned megatheria off my front lawn? What ARE they putting in the sangria these days…?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 10 20 at 07:03 PM • permalink
- Louis,
There are a lot of people, including in the West, who want to bring about just that result. Didn’t you realize that? It’s one of the issues this War on the Jihadi Terrorists is all about. Those who want a new Dark Age ally themselves with the jihadis, who also want it. That’s the explanatory basis of the empirically derived Blair’s Law, named for our genial host, who discovered it.Posted by Michael Lonie on 2007 10 20 at 10:11 PM • permalink
No conference in exotic locales for you until you revise your opinion, Botkin.