ACY                    Red in tooth and claw                        October 2007

Yes, I'm referring to Mother Nature!  And as far as this old planet goes, She seems to know what She is doing.  She has overseen quite a few mass extinctions in her time, and it looks as if She is ready for the next one.  The present dominant species is pushing the climate towards the next mass extinction.  How long do we have to go?  That's anyone's guess, but all the signs are there that we are pushing Nature further than She is willing to go with the present general situation.

If we look at other planets in the solar system, we can see what REAL weather can be like.  Present day hurricanes give us a taste of what can happen, but looking through a telescope, we can see that Nature is capable of much bigger things than we have seen to date on this planet.  But let's just contemplate what would happen if the present severest weather became the norm.  Agriculture would cease, as it cannot go underground.  So mass starvation would result. We might survive for a while until we ate all the food stocks and the present livestock, but all animal life on this planet relies on agriculture of some sort or other.  And if Katrina-style weather became the norm we would be in very very serious trouble.

A second threat is rising sea-levels. Seven or eight metres is seriously mooted.  Give or take a bit, that's over twenty feet.  Think of the towns and cities that would flood!  True, Holland has shown that it is possible to build flood defences to cope with that sort of water rise, but at what cost?  And the first failure of a sea dyke would have enormous consequences.  But mankind works on the principle that "we'll muddle through".  But will we?  Further, rivers need to drain into the sea; and if the sea-level rose by twenty feet, the rivers would need to rise by that amount too.  Think of the Thames or the Trent twenty feet higher than it is now.  Sea-dykes wouldn't be much use.  We saw the problem of heavy rain quite recently in middle England.  That's peanuts compared withy a twenty foot increase in river levels.

One thing we are likely to see is mass evacuations from the most vulnerable regions.  We are having trouble with immigration as it is.  If many many thousands, perhaps millions, of displaced persons descended on Europe or North America, we might have to erect machine-gun posts at our borders.  The worst scenarios are horrendous.

A lot of politicians work on the principle  that it will happen slowly and we'll have time to take remedial action.  This MAY be true, but we can't rely on there being time on our side.  I'm coming up towards 82 and I will probably not see the proverbial hit the fan.  But I do fear for my children and their children.

The stupid thing is that something like the problem was foreseen by Malthus in the late 1700s.  He worried about population exceeding food supply.  He didn't know then about man's population growth affecting the climate.  But the principles of overpopulation were clear than, and mankind has just ignored the inevitable.  Even more ridiculous is the fact that the Catholic Church and the Muslim world are a against population control.  They truly must believe that Armageddon is a good thing.

I rest my case.