Steve 41oo, quoting Chris Thomas, wrote:Thomas said scientific observations had already found that -- as predicted by the climate models -- 80 percent of species had already begun moving their traditional territorial ranges in response to the changing climatic conditions.
I will accept, for the sake of the discussion, what Chris Thomas calls" the more extreme scenarios". Why would they be such a bad thing? What's so terrible about a future where elephants roam the tropical rainforests of England and Illionis? What's wrong with 22th century Londoners growing citrus fruits in their gardens, importing their strawberries from Greenland and Iceland? In fact, what's wrong with them starting up a new and improved London in Spitzbergen, where the climate will be just as in old, 20th century London?
My point is: Even if I accepted the most extreme global warming scenarios as gospels I don't see them as catastrophic for humanity. Human populations are very mobile on the timescale of centuries. (If we polled our fellow correspondents where their ancestors lived 100 years ago, few of the ancestors would live where the correspondents live now. In my case, none.) Most of the national capital stocks depreciate and get rebuilt several times over on this timescale. So while such warming would be a problem -- a fact I have never disputed -- I see it it as pure hype when people present it as a doomsday scenario.
All this is assuming that I accept the most paranoid projections as a given -- which I don't, for reasons I have discussed at length earlier.
