In general, things are so bad that they are getting better. And, unfortunately for those who have a political stake in the matter, things were never all that bad to begin with. Sorry that you’ve been misled. We’ve managed to crap up a few isolated areas of the planet well enough to create some pretty spectacular highlight footage for the doom and gloom crowd to exploit, but the planet has trumped them by being much more resilient than they expected. To name a couple – if I recall the rhetoric of the time the Exxon Valdez ‘disaster’ was going to destroy the ecosystem of the Alaskan coast for all time, but the natural cleansing action of the sea pretty much made our efforts at cleaning up look pathetic, and there is now little evidence that it ever happened. In the Gulf War, the fleeing Iraqi army set fire to just about every oil well in Kuwait, and the predictions of the shrill panic-mongers pointed to a global cloud of toxic smoke that would create an effect akin to an unproven but subjectively modeled theory of a ‘nuclear winter,’ throwing the entire planet into turmoil-- then a few dozen guys from Texas went over and put the fires out, and the crops in Iowa somehow didn’t fail from lack of sunlight. We can hurt, we can help, but the material difference we can make on a planetary scale is minute. The truth is, even our best efforts at self-extermination can’t stand up to things like the Huang He River flood in August of 1931, which wiped out an estimated 3,700,000 people all at once. We are very small, and the planet is very large.
I'm sure we could do more than we are doing, in terms of not crapping things up, but I'm just as sure that what we are doing is by no means hurting the planet, or humanity in general. Even the 'cloroflourocarbon' crowd has been forced to back off from junk science to a small degree, and now claim that it is carbon dioxide (people exhaling, for example) that is destroying the atmosphere and threatening life as we know it. Why life-spans continue to rise, even in 'developing' countries, is a mystery in the face of such dire warnings that we exhale at our peril. Faced with this conundrum, no less an authority than Jeffrey Sachs, formerly of Harvard and currently the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, now says that it isn't the carbon dioxide, per se, but the carbon itself, once freed by some yet unspecified chemical process, that is the threat. Proposing carbon as a threat to carbon-based life forms is going to take some time -- but hell, time we clearly have in abundance, since every time the doomsayers predict that we are all going to die tomorrow if we don't do as they say, we screw them up by sticking around. For an example, let's propose Manhattan, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or Boston, as a compromised 'ecosystem,' thoroughly and completely bent to the will of man, then count up the casualties caused by this utter degradation of the natural environment . . . I figure we'll struggle by, somehow.
Makes for pretty good entertainment, watching the passions of the political, but I doubt at this point if even they believe their own 'scientific' rhetoric. The planet is doing fine -- the adaptable critters are still scurrying around and proliferating, same as ever; every work of man is either continuously maintained or quickly reclaimed by natural forces, same as ever; the last real 'mass extinction' and 'rapid climate change' had nothing to do with human influences, nor will the next; human life spans globally continue to rise; and the only real threat I can see to our continued survival as a species, or to the interstellar harmony of the universe as a whole, is rap music.
Gairloch
“Actually, one of the surprises of the last couple of centuries is that we are not running out of stuff.” – Jeffery Sachs, 12/15/02
Such a surprise.