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Global sea temperatures in the Ordovician period were sweltering, estimated at around 100F at the equator - John Long, The Secret History of Sharks
I am reviewing The Secret History of Sharks for Epoch Times. (It is a first-rate account of the development of sharks from their origins to the present. I recommend it.) This passage struck me when I read it because of all the fuss about global warming climate change going on today. The Ordovician Period began 485.4 million years ago and ended 443.8 million years ago. It followed the Cambrian Era. We are talking about a long time ago. Since life still populates Earth, it demonstrates that 100F tropical water temperatures are survivable.
Tropical sea temperatures today are 86F, well below that of the Ordovician seas. Yet we are told that a 2-degree increase in the temperature will cause climate catastrophe. I am skeptical. Long goes on to discuss five major extinction events between life's emergence on Earth and the present. Each discussion is accompanied by some brief chin-pulling about how It Could Happen Here if we do nothing to stop it by constraining our lifestyles. (They are brief and do not spoil the book - for me at least only one to two on the eyeroll scale where at 10 your eyeballs pop out of your skull and roll across the room.)
Yet at the end of each extinction event life remained around, with the least adaptable going to the dustbin of history while the most adaptable filled the ecological niches vacated by their less-adaptable relatives. Every time. That is why sharks are still around. They adapt to change.
Of all of Earth's species, humans may be the most adaptable. When climate changes we find ways to adapt to it and thrive. This is not bound up in technology. Humans have lived in jungles, deserts and arctic wastes since prehistoric times, even if the most advanced technology they possessed were stone and wood tools. Modern technology makes living in hostile environments possible - even in space.
The real lesson is that change is inevitable and that we must accept and adapt to it. The environmental movement seems to fall into the trap of trying to contain change rather than embracing it, trying to create a static Earth over the objections of the evolving Earth. (Good luck with that.) Not only are their fears of climate catastrophe overblown but humans are able to adapt and prosper in the face of it. For example, if the Earth does warm the predicted two degrees, vast marginal arctic and subarctic territories become more productive, offsetting losses elsewhere. If CO2 levels rise, plant growth explodes, containing CO2 growth and providing more resources.
Change is inevitable. The choice is how you deal with it. Adapt and prosper. Refuse to change and die. Your choice. The Earth doesn't care what you decide.
Discussion (8)
Human beings can do something no other creature can do: We can harness energy beyond just our own muscles. Energy is the essence of civilization. Industrialization marked a mass increase in prosperity because it let us use more and more energy.
Energy is the core power we harness. With it, we can do almost anything. Without it, we are doomed.
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Not enough people understand or acknowledge this:
CHARTER MEMBER
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"Climate change" has failed to submerge the Plymouth Rock in centuries, but in the last twenty years the planetary coverage of green has increased at a rate of one percent a year (according to Jordan Peterson). Bad, bad CO2.
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Warm periods follow cold periods in climate. We are now in a warm period, though it's not a strong one.
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I embrace change. Other men ask "why?", I say "why the heck not?" If you accept TheScienceTM as all enlightened people do, the task at hand is not to whine about lost species and flooded lowlands but to adapt. To that end, I invite you to invest in my Baffin Bay tropical resort with luxury housing and the new global holiday magnet. Some of you might look at the Davis Strait in the pic below and think why would anybody but an Inuit even consider living there.
But what if that same icy place were much, much warmer? What if palm trees grew and tourist-eating polar bears were extinct? What if hordes of heat-mad Americans sought relief and a new home? The answer, my friend is cha-ching, baby! Go north, young man!
For a prospectus contact my colleague Art Fleister at Nocturnal Aviation Enterprises.
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