I finally found a decent overview on "Climategate." It only underlines my frustration with this situation: we are heading for climate change. It's myopic to think that we won't have minimums and maximums. Our recorded history is less than 20,000 years. The period with decent scientific data is shorter than 200 years. We're going to blow through temperature thresholds with each generation-- if the Earth is warming, we will keep breaking records.
Did industry and fat Americans in SUVs cause this change? Or, are we fleas on the dog's back? I think we are too small to make change on the scale we are talking about. Also, human-caused warming may explain the temperature on Earth-- but what about Mars? How is the temperature climbing on other planets if we're the cause?
All of this hand-wringing about climate change and reversing it doesn't serve the situation. We are part of the ecology. Flora and fauna lose their niche. Humanity's virus like quality of spreading everywhere means we're hard to supplant. We can be put under hardship; but we can also find opportunties-- just as English vineyards in the time of the Roman Empire grew grapes but turned to hardier crops as the temperatures dropped. We shouldn't be making people pile into hot buses to fix the planet-- we should look for places to grow food; or places to drop solar farms to power our air conditioners. Evolution-- natural selection-- is a combination of random traits and how they find favour with the conditions. If there is no change, evolution will creep along. We're here because of thousands of environmental crises-- from massive glaciers to slow mountain lions-- our environment shapes the path of our species.
If anything, the debate about whether global warming is human-caused is causing most of the problem. Making a linkage to the cause means that if the cause is incorrect it erodes the data that supports that climate change is happening. We shouldn't focus on the cause, but on our ability to adapt. When bears face a warmer climate, they can't buy thinner pelts-- some of them die off and some of them breed offspring who may be capable of surviving and breeding their own adapted offspring. Unlike the forces of nature where generations of adaptation bring about species survival and evolution, we can do it within a generation by making our technology evolve and make that adaptation spread to all of the people who need that benefit.
