John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS
"Here's what climate change could look like in Canada"
First, "could" isn't "will," and I think that important to say.
Humanity has adjusted to many big changes, including ice ages, over tens of thousands of years.
It will adjust to this, too.
I don't doubt in the least that climate change is underway.
But that is not the same thing as saying we can control it, by a carbon tax or any other means.
Nor does it mean that we humans caused the change.
The great Roman writer, Tacitus, referred to North Africa as "the granary of Rome."
No one would call it that now, and the change had nothing to do with people.
Alberta was once largely under a sea millions of years ago.
Sixty million years ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth, and there was not a human in sight, but every last one of the dinosaurs is gone.
The earth is simply a dynamic place, sometimes violently so as with great storms and earthquakes, not some static idyll that humans came along and disturbed and now need to set right again. To my mind, that view much resembles some feeble Bible story like the Garden of Eden, but it is implicit in a great deal of what one hears today from self-proclaimed champions of the earth.
Indeed, adjusting to change over time is likely to be far less costly, and far more certain in its effect, than any grand and costly schemes to prevent it.
Every time I hear of such schemes, I think of the Soviets in, say, the 1950s. They had many huge and ambitious schemes for changing the very physical face of their country, but all came to naught or, worse, when done, created terribly adverse effects.
The drying-up and shrinking of the Aral Sea was one of these. The mountain waters which naturally replenished the sea were in part diverted to create irrigation to vast new lands put under agriculture. Today, the sea has immense parched, cracked-earth areas, and one sees old fishing ships rotting in the sun.
We simply do not know enough to re-engineer the earth.
