Aug
19
2009
By David Finnigan
Thanks partly to Fiona McDonald’s ‘Are humans still evolving?‘ piece on this blog, and partly to Portopolitico’s ‘The Failings of the Green Left‘ post on his Armchair Critique, I have been needled into looking around me at the situation of the environment circa 2009 AD.
It’s surprisingly difficult to assess the situation with any objectivity.
For the last 20 years, the public discussion around climate change has been dominated by the increasingly-shrill carbon lobby funding one climate denier after another, until they have no-one left but the dregs and the lunatics.
Continue Reading »
Aug
13
2009
By David Finnigan
Since the Club of Rome published its 1972 treatise The Limits to Growth, there has been a steady trickle of scientists and writers producing plausible accounts of the consequences of Global Warming. It doesn’t seem to have stuck.
People had no difficulty visualising the consequences of a nuclear war. But the concrete impacts threatened by climate change seem vastly harder to grasp.
Pandas. I've never seen one, I could live without them.
One minor quibble is that the issue is frequently framed in terms of the charismatic megafauna we stand to lose. Of course no-one wants the Giant Panda, the Blue Whale or the Polar Bear to become extinct. But at the same time, it’s quite easy to envision a world without whales, bears or pandas, which is virtually unchanged.
Continue Reading »
