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Hi Norm,
There does always seem to be some kind of disaster headed our way. (I hear a giant meteor is getting uncomfortably close...)
In the sixties, it was all-out nuclear war (which definitely COULD have happened. The survivalist movement spent every waking moment preparing, including, in some cases, building (or buying) underground hideouts with various degrees of elaborate systems to survive a nuclear holocaust.
(That was the time when the best advice I heard was that in the event of nuclear war, the best defense was to place your head firmly between your knees and kiss your tail end good-bye!)
In the seventies and early eighties, conspiracy theories abounded, with people stockpiling food, weapons and other necessities in some of those leftover bunkers and in other remote areas because the government was going to do like the Nazis did before WWII - take over everything and take away everyone's rights.
Note that these things were possibilities, but they didn't happen. Lots of things that are possible never happen. Pessimism just makes life miserable, and won't stop any of these things from happening, anyway.
Now the big scare is global warming. But what is absolutely ridiculous about all the worrying going on is that the same scientists who are telling us that global warming is a reality are also telling us there's nothing we can do to stop it in our lifetime or in many lifetimes. They're saying that it took a long, long time to get to this point and that it's going to take a very long time to reverse the effects.
At the same time that this is going on, other scientists are telling us that an ice age over Europe is imminent as the North Atlantic Current is slowing down. Some are linking global warming to this slowing process.
So... if global warming takes a long, long time to happen and an even longer time to reverse, and if global warming is going to cause an ice age (that, I believe, means it's going to get really cold! lol), then what are we worrying about?
Personally, I think fretting about climate change is causing many people to forget about many of the other problems on this planet, including all the other pollutants other than a little extra CO2.
From studying archeaology and geology, it seems to me that the evidence that is being trumpeted as proving global warming due to a little extra CO2 in our atmosphere is VERY narrow thinking.
Why is the globe cooler right now than it was around 600 years ago? Kings records show that wine grapes used to be one of the crops in Northern England. Wheat used to be grown in Scotland.
Around 1400 AD it was no longer possible to grow these crops because it was too cold.
Viking graves have been discovered under the permafrost in Greenland. There's no record that the Vikings ever dug through permafrost to bury their dead or that they even had the tools to do so.
The first records of Iceland being completely surrounded in ice for part of the year are from around 1400 AD.
Older evidence, of course, shows that the earth was considerably warming at some point, with many of the areas presently covered by ice being covered with vegetation and supporting a wide variety of wildlife. Many are familiar with the discoveries of animal and vegetation remains under the permafrost in the Arctic.
In between the warm times have been both mini ice ages and at least one great ice age.
The whole point of this is that these climate changes left very distinct fingerprints on the planet, and were definitely not caused by human activity. Climate change happens, regardless of what humans do. We're a lot punier than we like to think.
God bless,
Dave
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