COMensarations
Monday, February 12, 2007
Be Prepared!
...because you can’t turn back the clock.
Far be it from me to question anyone’s theology, let alone someone who actually attended a seminary (although he didn’t finish)*, but isn’t blaming global warming on man’s activities just a little...well...prideful? Isn’t it saying that Man is the king-all-high-muckety-muck of the universe, the instigator of climate change, and therefore capable of reversing that change if he so wills? And that there is no one or no thing greater than Man?
But isn’t it true that man has yet to develop a bomb capable of the devastation of one really big volcanic eruption? That you could set off every nuclear weapon in existence today and the destruction wouldn’t be as bad as a major meteor strike, like the one in the Yucatan?
When I took biology in high school the emphasis was on ecosystems. One of the main lessons was that things in nature are cyclical and that ecosystems are constantly changing. Most of the global-warming-is-the-fault-of-man folks seem to ignore this fact. They seem to think that ecosystems and climate are static, despite evidence to the contrary, and insist that the way the world was in 1930, or 1830, or whenever, is the way it was supposed to be forever and ever. It never occurs to them that maybe “normal” could be defined as the way it was when mastodons roamed Siberia, which was a lush garden capable of sustaining the huge animals. They refuse to accept that we might be on the warming side of a cycle, and that there once was, and will be again, a cooling side. They refuse to accept that previous cycles were not affected by man at all, and that his effect on this cycle is quite likely negligible.
H.L. Mencken speculated that man invented gods to explain the things in nature he couldn’t understand. (Sorry, I don’t remember the title of the book.) Man then invented religious rites to try to get the gods to do what he wanted, e.g., make it stop raining when it was time to harvest the crops.
Nowadays, science explains nature (or tries to), and man is replacing religious rites with laws to affect nature and make it do what we want, i.e., stop climate change.
I don’t care what your religious beliefs are, putting man at the top of the climate change ladder is just ignorant. Even King Canute back in 1000 A.D. knew that man cannot control nature. I doubt very seriously that passing laws to try to prevent climate change will have any real effect. Passing laws to help people cope with the inevitable changes might, although the changes usually occur so slowly that they won’t make much difference, either. Remember Oaks’ Law: Social legislation cannot repeal physical law. If it could, let’s outlaw gravity to make shuttle launches easier and cheaper.
Don’t get me wrong, we shouldn’t allow unchecked pollution, but don’t imagine that you’re permanently affecting climate change by cutting down on smokestack emissions. Don’t allow other countries to dictate our industrial practices, and make us weaker, because of “global warming.” It’s going to happen regardless of our puny efforts.
Instead, face the fact that the climate will change. When it does, be prepared to grow different crops, move away from the shore, use different building materials, whatever. We can’t stop it, but we can cope with it. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, but the ones most responsive to change.” --Charles Darwin
But then again, maybe (King) Al Gore will invent a way to counter cosmic rays.
*Al Gore
Update: The incomparable Dr. Sowell writes in a similar vein today.
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