Despite the myriad of Chicken Little “Final Countdowns” over the last 40 years, somehow mankind will muddle through, Rob Long writes at Ricochet:
All of this doomsday talk is nonsense, says the New Scientist:
In 2008, researchers attending the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference in Oxford, UK, took part in aninformal survey of what they thought were the risks to humanity. They gave humans only a 19 per cent chance of surviving until 2100. Yet when you look more closely, such extreme pessimism is unfounded. Not only will we survive to 2100, it’s overwhelmingly likely that we’ll survive for at least the next 100,000 years.
Take calculations by J. Richard Gott, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. Based on 200,000 years of human existence, he estimates we will likely last anywhere from another 5100 to 7.8 million years (New Scientist, 5 September 2007, p 51).
According to most rational calculations, human beings will outsmart the various threats to their existence — runaway technology, killer viruses, supervolcanoes, that sort of thing. There will be fewer of us, sure, if any of that stuff happens — death toll estimates in the case of a supervocano eruption that clouds the atmosphere with deadly ash are in the billions — but a hardy billion or two will still be writing television comedy or working the drive-thru window.
In other words, civilization will survive.
But only if we take action Right! This! Minute! on Goreball Worming, right? Well…
Our regular feature, “Quote of the Week” just doesn’t work here. Neither does decade or century. No, a whole new category all by itself is reserved for this quote from the newly appointed Climate Commissioner of Australia, Tim Flannery, noted zoologist and author of the book The Weather Makers.Here it is, brace yourself:
If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.
Lest you think that is an errant remark out of context, here’s the follow up from Flannery:
Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.
Crikey! So much for the “think of the grandchildren” argument used by Dr. James Hansen.
And speaking of the AlGore himself, he’s now claiming “Our democracy has been hacked” — which pretty ironic coming from a guy who considers the opposition to be a gang of “digital brown shirts,” but it’s simply the Goracle’s latest attempt at dissembling how right wing media bias cost him the election in 2000 and the rest of his fellow Democrats a couple of years later. To overcome that, he’s launched his “Current TV” “network” — which is what you’d do too, to blow your carbon footprint even further into the stratosphere, if you thought we had less than four years left to save the earth before “an irreversible slide into destruction,”right?
Or to put it another way, “Gaia Worship: Like the Enlightenment Never Happened.”
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