In a clever but ominous piece of reporting, London’s Financial Times suggested that by the year 2100, the wine regions of Europe as they are known today would vanish. France and Italy, by then parched nations, would lack the arable soil needed to grow grapes. The best land might lie instead in Norway, in Finland, or even farther north. The newspaper’s article came just after the United Nations’ recent report on climate change. The global situation is dire, with extreme weather, storms, wildfires, and devastating heat now afflicting the planet on a regular basis. The last ten summers have been the hottest in a century, it said. And worse was to come. The world should immediately discard polluting fossil fuels.
The problem with all these eloquently dire forecasts is the chief inhabitant of the planet: man.
Man is a special creature. With exceptions, he lives in the present, and the present, despite all these unsettling climate variations, remains tolerable. Man will change to a car powered by non-polluting fuel, but only in the world of the FT and the UN. In most of the world, including Africa and parts of Asia, these climate measures are simply too costly to consider. Among states wracked by war and famine, they seem ridiculous. Sudan cannot play France and hew to New Age enlightenment.
The other factor delaying global climate control efforts is more visceral, and, like those who oppose the COVID vaccine, shamelessly vexes conventional science.
The problem with all these eloquently dire forecasts is the chief inhabitant of the planet: man.
Some hold, with not-so-foolish wisdom on their much-criticized side, that the planet is billions of years old and throughout its history has witnessed dramatic changes in climate. Man may be in part responsible for the latest lurches, but his industry and smog, his cars and fumes, have been present only since the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s. Climate change can take centuries, if not millennia, to develop, which means at least some of the planet’s climate gyrations might belong to planetary evolution. To most scientists, suggesting this is to embrace something akin to God and creationism. It is bunk, they say. What is occurring today is all man’s fault.
Perhaps.
Yet the dinosaurs didn’t perish only because of an asteroid. No. Over thousands, then hundreds of years, the climate changed dramatically enough to wipe out large reptilian life. There came both hot periods and cold. For more thousands of years, the world was nearly all seas and oceans. Over time, the woolly mammoth came to be best suited to Earth’s deep chill.
In a nutshell, man is as arrogant as always, seeing the modern world as Ptolemy saw the ancient one, positing that the universe rotated around Earth. Not quite so, as it turned out.
The warriors of the coming climate apocalypse are more than entitled to hector man for his terrible polluting transgressions. What they cannot know, however, is whether he’s the sole culprit — which borrows from Ptolemy’s view of the world — or whether this is an old and veteran globe speaking its mind, perhaps coming to again prefer mammoths to man, or, and this is entirely possible, remake the whole of the landscape with not a human in sight.
