Let's learn to live with global warming

Global warming, whatever the cause, is apparently a reality, and we will have to learn to live with this reality.

Corey Binns, writing in the July-August Natural History magazine, citing the work of Michael Storey in Denmark, notes that fifty-five million years ago the Earth warmed sharply, some nine degrees Fahrenheit, possibly because of volcanic activity heating organic-rich marine sediments and sending 1,500 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases were released over a period of twenty thousand years, but it took more than two hundred thousand years for global temperatures to return to normal. Today, according to Storey, the burning of fossil fuels is releasing greenhouse gases at a faster rate than happened fifty-five million years ago.

Even if we could confirm the allegations that the present warming is mankind-induced, and even if we could successfully accomplish all the efforts that activists recommend to reduce manmade emissions, and even if no complicating geologic factors were present, it would still probably take centuries to bring global temperatures back to "normal." So, assuming no confounding geologic factors, we must learn to live with global warming.

There are more important issues to resolve if humanity is to live on. Genetic traits that were useful to the Neanderthals and the mammoths for survival may be pushing us to self-destruct, and civilizing programs are needed to rein in these drives. Population must be controlled: technological advances (medicine, food supply) have led to vast increases in population, but technology would be better used to reduce procreation. Another problem is the divinely inspired and sanctioned murder of persons that are not inspired by your divine.

Pressures induced by burgeoning population in the face of reduced resources, exacerbated by religious and political fanaticism and bolstered by a frightful and ever more available weapons technology far exceed global warming as a threat to humanity.

Marvin J. Schissel

chicschiss@aol.com

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