The secular religion of environmentalism has found a new harbinger of death: the decline of British butterfly populations. Aaaack! Ratify the Kyoto treaty! Recycle your toilet paper! Drive your SUVs off a cliff (after filing the proper environmental impact statement with local, state, and federal authorities)!
Nature emits at least 95% of the carbon dioxide that’s released into the atmosphere. Humans release less than 5%. But it’s that 5% that is going to destroy the butterflies and the rest of the planet. Never mind that major volcanoes have put more debris and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than man ever has, and in short, violent spurts.
Strangely, although many environmentalists buy into the Gaia hypothesis, which says that the Earth is a single organism with many parts (including humans), they think a small rise in one kind of gas spells disaster for the planet. Is the Earth really that fragile? It’s survived five major rounds of extinction before. You’d think that plant life would increase a little bit to exploit this increased resource. It isn’t like CO2 is a new gas, invented by evil scientists.
Another good question is: so what? Environmentalists would respond that mass extinction would throw off the “equilibrium” of the planet. Again, so what? The planet would eventually find a new stasis after a while. According to paleontologists, something like 99% of all species are already extinct; what does a few more matter? Organisms come, and organisms go, and the planet seems relatively indifferent to their fate.
I referred to environmentalism as a “secular religion.” I didn’t mean that clean air and water are religious concepts, but rather that the ideological “story” of environmentalism is rooted in quasi-religious, quasi-Christian beliefs. There is the innocent Garden of Eden (when man was a hunter and gatherer), the Fall (agriculture, or perhaps industrialization — theologians disagree on this point), the Redemption (Earth Day, 1970), and the Apocalypse (global warming).
Once you’ve decided that man’s actions are dangerous and that we somehow stand outside of nature instead of at its pinnacle, it’s just a question of gathering evidence of man’s destructiveness. You do that through generating studies with the foreordained conclusion that man is going to destroy the Earth. Faith seeking understanding, as it were.
If the Earth is created by God and given to man, then it’s a moral failure to abuse it. But if there’s no God, then what does it matter if a few species disappear? Or a lot of species? Unless butterflies are God’s creatures and thus beautiful and worthy of respect in their own right, it’s hard to feel sorry for them.
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It’s consistent — one of the versions I read said something along the lines of “we’re in the middle of a 50,000 year extinction which dates to the beginning of humanity”. They want to blame themselves for everything. Whoops! Not themselves! They’re Concerned or Responsible or Well-Informed Scientists or some such and the rest of us are extinction mongers.
If global warming is really the grave threat that it’s made out to be, then there is only one way were are going to handle it: with a massive effort to convert the power grid to all or mostly nuclear fission plants. That is the only way we are going to generate enough power to preserve our economy and standard of living without producing “greenhouse” gasses. The French have something like 75% of their electricity generated by nuclear plants, and they actually managed to meet the Kyoto greenhouse limits because of that. Despite the fact that the French pioneered my idea, American leftists treat the idea as if you were suggesting having an unannounced nuclear bomb test in the middle of San Francisco. There’s no pleasing them.
Well, the biggest contributer to global warming is that yellow daystar that’s been around a lot lately. It frightens away the nice gray sky.
JohnH,
Then we can easily solve the problem: blow up the sun. No sun, no global warming.
Now all we need is a trilithium protomatter device…