Global Warming

The Earth's going to burn up. We'll all be eating animals, endangered or not, in order to save trees to reverse the greenhouse gas effect. We'll all be too stupid to realize that eating all the animals didn't work and so start in on eating bushes, shrubs and trees. Then we'll all die, cold and lonely on a barren, hot rock circling the sun. And our most precious resource, our children, will never be born. Makes ya kinda wanna crawl back into the womb, don't it?

I am a big fan of PBS. Lately however, they seem to be full of doom and gloom. Every episode begins the same : "It's not a matter of if, but rather, when." Please, give me a break. If the reversing of the Earth's magnetic poles doesn't kill you, it might be volcanoes or tsunamis or the death of the Spotted Snowy Owl or the over fishing of the Minsk whale or the dreaded disruption to the annual migration of the Monarch butterfly. But the big hitter is "Global Warming", a phrase sure to send shivers down your spine.

I have a great respect for Dr. David Suzuki, but I think he's playing Chicken Little here. We won't even mention Al Gore. He still has too much on his hands perfecting the Internet to give this subject much serious thought as witnessed by his recent film.

The global warming issue is based on junk science, pure and simple. Even those scientists who originally supported the idea are now distancing themselves from it. It seems there is evidence that the world has gone through warming and cooling periods since time immemorial. And as much as the doomsayers would have you believe that we are in the midst of an abnormal heating period, we actually seem to be in the midst of a normal fluctuation. Blame it all on those nasty SUV's if you want, but the argument just doesn't wash.

A lot of people have their knickers in a twist over this Kyoto Accord. Sign up and save the Earth, they cry. How? I can spend a ton of money installing pollution reducing devices in and around my factory. I can recycle until the cows come home. And if I haven't done enough, I can buy 'credits' from someone who was lucky enough to meet standards. That is, if the standards are indeed attainable. How in the world can you supply the general population with all the burgers they can chow down, all the cell phones they 'need', all the goodies they 'must have' in their automobiles, all the DVD's and VCR's and iPods they gotta have and keep pollution at 1970's levels? How does it reduce pollution levels when I spend a fortune trying to meet the rules and some third world country is allowed to spew their crap into the atmosphere unabated?

But let's bring it back to basics. Mankind has been wandering the Earth for what, 65,000 years? Hell, the dinosaurs lasted longer than that and popular belief is that it took a giant asteroid hitting the Earth to wipe them out. Mankind has faced drought and it has faced ice ages and through it all, it has survived. Why? Because we adapted to the changes thrust upon us.

Take a look at Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man. They used to be pretty hairy buggers. Seeing as how they had no clothes to wear, they needed hair to keep warm. When they figured out what modesty was and started sporting loin cloths, they needed less hair. Fire was good and they again needed less hair to keep warm. Succeeding generations lost more and more hair to the point where, today, when we see a man with hair on his back, after the Neanderthal jokes are over, we want to do the bikini wax job trick on his shoulders. Adaptation, folks.

The Industrial Revolution gave us a multitude of smoke spilling factories and we adapted. Average life expectancy 100 years ago was about 38 - 40 years. Today, despite all this nasty pollution, we are looking at more and more people reaching 100 years of age and the hue and cry across the land is whether or not we want to live to be 120. Adaptation folks. The smog and pollution we have been breathing in, lo these many years, seems to have actually made us stronger. How else do you explain it?

The flu shot comes to mind. You are injected with a small amount of whatever flu bug happens to be the flavour of the day. Henceforth, you will never suffer from that strain of flu again. Put a little bad stuff in the body, the body will build up a tolerance to it and you are a better person for it. If it works for vaccines, why not on the grander scale of pollution?

Witness today the unceasing TV ads that tell us we need this or that vitamin, supplement, balm, ointment or drug to keep us whole and make us safe. Have we purified ourselves so much that we need to make the drug companies rich buying their products? The experts seem to agree that we need some bacteria in our lives to keep us healthy. No, I'm not talking about e-coli or salmonella here, but just some plain old, regular dirt. Although, e-coli and salmonella must be prevalent in under developed countries of the world and they haven't killed everyone, have they? Sure they would kill us, but we have some nasty diseases that would kill them too. They don't have a built up immunity to the disease. This was proven when the white man first set foot on the North American shore and killed a bunch of Indians with the introduction of smallpox. Adaptation folks.

We may not like the way we're going to look a thousand years from now, but we will adapt. To disease, to climate change, to eroded shorelines. Don't sell us short. We will survive despite what the doom and gloom sayers would have you believe.
And of course, our most precious resource, our children, will carry on.