New York Times Green Blog: Climate Change is going to cost us. The sky is falling! The sky is fallin
In the August 30 blog post: "A High Cost to Deal With Climate Shift", Author Tom Zeller reveals the blindness that infects the entire Global Warming crowd. In the second paragraph, he states: "Everything from coastal geography and weather patterns to the global tableau of arable land, such that we’ve come to know and rely on them, will be - indeed, already are - in flux, and we had best start planning."
As if there were at some point a status quo, or perfect state at some time, and we have just discovered that things are changing.
We live on a dynamic planet, and it is ALWAYS IN FLUX. It always has been, and always will be, and there has never been a time of stasis, of perfect completion. The "good old days" of static arable land, coastal geography and weather patterns that "we've come to know and rely on" are a total myth, a chimera, a fable, that contaminates the thinking about climate change. There is no such thing, there has never been such a thing, and there never will be such a thing. The universe itself is far too dynamic.
Ask any meteorologist to point to a time of stable weather patterns. By and large, it is warmer in summer than in winter, but there has never been a time when you could predict with certainty which day in summer would be the warmest, or would have the fiercest storms, or what the temperatures would be.
Ask any geologist to point to a place with a stable coastal geography - the Earth is always in motion, adding things here, taking things away there. And it has always been thus.
It is a blindness that ignores this truth.
Global warming is, indeed, occurring. If it were not, the people in Chicago would be living under a mile of ice glaciers. The glaciers melting was a good thing, was it not? Humans have, indeed, contributed to the global warming. Six billion of us building homes and roads and burning fires tends to have an effect. Carbon dioxide is not the sole and only cause of global warming - there are thousands of other factors, some of which are not caused by man's activities. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller: "The Earth is a verb." The Earth is an active, changing place. Always has been, always will be. And we have always had to adjust to it. This is not news.
It comes as no surprise that the people hawking this as news, are also talking about how much it is going to cost us. Farmers around the world have been dealing with climate change for millenia. Now, we find out that it is going to cost us. I feel the icy fingers of someone else's hands in my wallet. People! We've got trouble! Terrible, terrible trouble! And that starts with T and that ryhmes with C and that stands for Climate Change!
The Earth is in flux. Just because you've never noticed it before is no reason to cry that the sky is falling. And that I'm going to have to pay someone else to deal with it.
As if there were at some point a status quo, or perfect state at some time, and we have just discovered that things are changing.
We live on a dynamic planet, and it is ALWAYS IN FLUX. It always has been, and always will be, and there has never been a time of stasis, of perfect completion. The "good old days" of static arable land, coastal geography and weather patterns that "we've come to know and rely on" are a total myth, a chimera, a fable, that contaminates the thinking about climate change. There is no such thing, there has never been such a thing, and there never will be such a thing. The universe itself is far too dynamic.
Ask any meteorologist to point to a time of stable weather patterns. By and large, it is warmer in summer than in winter, but there has never been a time when you could predict with certainty which day in summer would be the warmest, or would have the fiercest storms, or what the temperatures would be.
Ask any geologist to point to a place with a stable coastal geography - the Earth is always in motion, adding things here, taking things away there. And it has always been thus.
It is a blindness that ignores this truth.
Global warming is, indeed, occurring. If it were not, the people in Chicago would be living under a mile of ice glaciers. The glaciers melting was a good thing, was it not? Humans have, indeed, contributed to the global warming. Six billion of us building homes and roads and burning fires tends to have an effect. Carbon dioxide is not the sole and only cause of global warming - there are thousands of other factors, some of which are not caused by man's activities. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller: "The Earth is a verb." The Earth is an active, changing place. Always has been, always will be. And we have always had to adjust to it. This is not news.
It comes as no surprise that the people hawking this as news, are also talking about how much it is going to cost us. Farmers around the world have been dealing with climate change for millenia. Now, we find out that it is going to cost us. I feel the icy fingers of someone else's hands in my wallet. People! We've got trouble! Terrible, terrible trouble! And that starts with T and that ryhmes with C and that stands for Climate Change!
The Earth is in flux. Just because you've never noticed it before is no reason to cry that the sky is falling. And that I'm going to have to pay someone else to deal with it.