Re: Windies touring squad

In message <1178459012.314777.262540@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Gavin Cawley <gcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
> > A myriad of measuring techniques? RH, they are called "thermometers"
> > and rely on thermal expansion of liquids, a very well understood piece
> > of physics that has not changed since 1659. Romer in the early 1700s
> > proposed a common temperature scale fixed on the freezing temperature
> > of brine and boiling point of water, so it is perfectly reasonable to
> > expect thermometers to be tolerably well callibrated from the mid
> > 1700s at worst. The fact that the individual time series overlap
> > allows a degree of cross-calibration. Note that Manly is aware of the
> > difficulties involved and gives caveats in his paper.

> > The CET is an area average time series (which is more useful for
> > climatology as it is not overly affected by the effects of geography
> > on local climate), therefore it neccesarily involves a myriad of
> > sources. Also the averaging process will attenuate the variance
> > component of the errors of individial measured temperature time
> > series, having written an essay on probability theory, I'm surprised
> > you didn't know that. Note that as the CET is a monthly time series
> > there is a large degree of temporal averaging as well as spatial,
> > which will also attenuate errors in the individual sources.

> I look forward to RH's dismissive one-liner, Gavin.

> Richard

Being ever the optimist, I am hoping for rational discussion (but will make do with RH displaying his ignorance via the dimissive one- liner). ;-)

Published in Mother Earth magazine Jan/Feb Issue 2007

Other articles

Debt; trade; Governance and Aid - editorial position
Minority report - A reply to Derek Walls' Darker Shades of Green - Wayne John Sturgeon
The quiet coast - Stuart Millson
An Ecological Englishness - Allan Pond

The overheated climate debate

Robert Henderson

The hysteria

"Britain has 4 years to help cool the planet" shrieked a recent
headline in the Metro (15 9 2006). It was prompted by a report
commissioned by the Cooperative Bank and Friends of the Earth and
produced by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research of the
University of Manchester.

The story by Anne Campbell continued in the same purple prose vein:
"Ministers have only four years to carry out a major new plan to cut
carbon emissions if Britain is to help cool the planet. The claim was
made as green campaigners spelt out a new roadmap to saving the world."

Tabloid journalistic excess grossly distorting research? Perhaps,
because scientific research papers are normally full of caveats even if
their final message is clear. Putting forward a message at odds with
the sponsors of the report's views? Sadly no, for commenting on the
report, the Co-operative Bank's director of corporate affairs, Simon
Williams, spoke in the same emotive, cliched, hectoring and
meaningless way: "This is more than the yet another wake-up call. Even
if scientists take an increasingly gloomy view of the continually
increasing view of the continually increasing impact on our
environment, this report shows that if we start acting now we can cut
carbons. But we need decisive action by the Government."

The story and its media presentation demonstrates all that is wrong
with the debate on global warming: it is hysterical and absurdly
alarmist in tone, the report is financed by those with a vested
interest in one side of the debate, debatable ideas are presented as
incontrovertible fact and calls are made for governments to pursue
policies without any proper regard to the effects on their own people
or the behaviour of other governments throughout the world.

Expert opinion

Notwithstanding the unsatisfactory way the global warming debate is
conducted, the large majority of climate scientists agree that man-made
global warming is occurring. Can the "experts" all be wrong? Are we
all going to Hell in a man-made global warming handcart? I put
experts in inverted commas because "expert" advice so often proves to
be nonsense and frequently dangerous nonsense to boot.

Here are a few stories drawn from the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs over
one month which show "experts" either contradicting previous expert
opinion or expert opinion being show to be inadequate. "Trauma patient
care 'may do more harm than good'" (Daily Telegraph 7 9 2006 - study
shows brain damaged patients taking anti-inflammatory corticosteroids
are 3.2 per cent more likely to die than those taking a placebo),
"Counsellors raise victims' stress" (Sunday Telegraph 20/8/2006 -
University of Amsterdam study shows victims of traumatic events who
received counselling displayed poorer mental health - based on such
symptoms as depression and anxiety -than those who had no counselling),
"Beta blockers blamed for '8,000 needless diabetes cases a year (Daily
Telegraph 7 9 2006 - inadequate expert opinion), DDT in Africa saves
babies lives says WHO (Sunday Telegraph 17 9 2006 - this after decades
of experts saying DDT is very dangerous), Woman in a persistent
vegetative state uses thought to communicate (Daily Telegraph 8 9 2006
- brain scanning shows woman diagnosed as brain-dead is conscious and
able to respond to words spoken to her, this after the medical experts
have consistently sworn blind that such a diagnosis meant the person
was effectively dead. The effect of such a diagnosis is that people
have had life support systems turned off and been left to die of thirst
and starvation).

Of course these are all newspaper stories not scientific reports,
albeit from broadsheets rather than tabloids. The reports may be to a
degree inaccurate or give an incomplete picture of the research. But
however cautious one might be in taking the stories as gospel or
complete, it is difficult to see how, for example, the WHO DDT story
could be anything other than true in its basic message that DDT should
be used. What the stories illustrate is the fact that "expert opinion"
is far from being exact or permanent even when it is dealing with areas
which might be broadly described as scientific.

Where "expert" opinion strays into fields which are not scientific, for
example, economics, it is even less credible as superior opinion
because its predictive power is poor verging on non-existent. Sometimes
the human experts' bluff is called in the most embarrassing way. In
"The unsaid truth: machines are better [company] stock pickers, a
Dresdner Kleinwort "behavioural specialist" James Montier described
the results of an exercise in which he compared the results of
mechanistic (computer) stock selection with human selection and found
the mechanistic approach was significantly better (Daily Telegraph 15 8
2006).

When scientific "experts" are shown to have been wrong they will say
they gave the best opinion possible on the known facts at the time;
that science is a work in progress not a finished corpus of facts.
Emma Dickinson, a spokesman for the British Medical Journal, recently
stated this quasi-official scientific position nicely: "Science
moves from observation to observation and you get scientific progress.
There is no end point...It is the nature of scientists to disagree with
each other - that's how science moves on." (Sunday Telegraph 27 8 2006)

Whether scientists always behave like that and never go beyond the
existing evidence or miss obvious flaws in their experiments' designs,
their data collection and their interpretation of data is to say the
least very debatable - my mind turns to the recent British cot death
cases involving Professor Roy Meadows, whose "expert" evidence wrongly
sent a number of women to prison with life sentences for murdering
their babies - most disturbingly, his "expert" evidence was wrong
because he did not understand basic statistics.

Nor is it true that scientists always present their data in an
unsensational and accurate way. Several years ago the Human Genome
project was announced as "completed" by the scientists who won the
race to publish. This gave a whole new meaning to the word "completed",
because not only was the function of most genes and the relationship
between genes not known, after the announcement the geneticists
involved in the project were still unable to give an accurate number
for the genes which make up the human genome.

But even if scientists did by some miracle always behave in the most
competent, intelligent and conscientious way, it would not solve the
basic problem arising from their get-out clause of "no scientific
certainty". If science is as they say always "a work in progress" and
any erroneous "expert opinion" can be explained away by the "best
opinion on the available evidence at the time" ploy, they have no
responsibility and, by extension, nor do the politicians who accept
their advice with the rider "we must be guided by the experts."

It is in the context of the general fallibility of expert opinion that
we need to judge the climate scientists who support global warming. We
should also remember that they are the same class of people who were
saying 30 years ago that there would be a new Ice Age (In another
thirty years I suspect we shall be back to the Ice Age just around the
corner "expert" advice.) Anything they claim now can reasonably be
treated with suspicion.

If scientists were simply academics whose work had no general
significance the get-out clause would not matter. They could be right
or wrong as often as they liked and their mistakes or ignorance would
have no more effect on society than do the mistakes and ignorance of
classicists. But the reverse is true: scientific "knowledge" has a
most powerful effect on society. Politicians and interest groups
grab hold of the research which suits their purposes and treat it as
objective fact. Often they do not understand the science. The
consequence is that much public policy is made on scientific claims
which are at best the most educated of guesses and at worst no more
than wild speculation.

Governments and elites everywhere have a natural tendency towards
authoritarianism and social control and consequently need no
encouragement to use scare stories to increase their power. Scientific
scare stories are the perfect type because the general public is even
less equipped to judge the truth or otherwise of scientific research
than politicians and is collectively a sucker for "scare stories" -
that is particularly true of "the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh-unless-we-do
- this" stories.

But even if the public was not so easy to manipulate with scare stories
there would be little they could do even in a supposed democracy such
as Britain. In fact, what Britain (and all other reputed democracies)
has is not democracy but what academics like to call elective
oligarchy. This allows the electorate to do no more than choose
between competing parts of the elite every few years. If the competing
parts of the elite have different policies there is some electoral
choice and democratic control; where the elite agrees on a policy
there is no choice for the electorate.

If an elite has bound a country by treaties into supranational bodies
the electorate is even further removed from any chance of exercising
their will if the decision is made outside the framework of national
politics. That is precisely what has happened to Britain through her
membership of the EU and treaties such as the UN Convention on
Refugees. In the case of global warming, policy is made by the EU and
consequently while Britain remains within the EU the British
electorate has no choice to make. Currently, the EU policy on man-made
global warming is both to treat it as an established fact and to adopt,
at least in theory, severe CO2 reduction measures. More on that later.

But it is not only CO2 which is a greenhouse gas, although it is
reckoned to be the most important one. Methane is next on the list of
villains. It is produced by for example animals, agriculture, coal
mines and decomposing matter in landfill waste disposal sites.
Happily, governments have not as yet decided to place limits on the
number of animals, including human beings in the world, but they have
started to ban landfills. Again this is a policy forced on Britain by
the EU.

Bringing up the rear are nitrous oxide (5 percent of total emissions),
which comes from burning fossil fuels and from some fertilizers and
industrial processes and human created gases (2 percent of total
emissions) are by-products of industrial processes. These are also
increasingly subject to government controls.

The joker in the greenhouse warming pack is water vapour which can vary
from virtually zero to 4 per cent of the atmosphere. This cannot be
directly controlled by Man.

Political correctness

The global debate is further skewed by the inclusion of man-made
global warming within the protective fortress of political
correctness.

Man-made global warming slipped neatly into political correctness
because it fits naturally with the liberal internationalist creed which
instinctively seeks "world action" on anything and everything and
starts from the view that the West is only rich and successful (while
the rest of the world wallows in various states of social and economic
ineptitude) because the West has both historically and now, in some
curious way, exploited and abused the rest of the world. Indeed, the
wealth and success of the West is frequently described as "obscene" by
the man-made global warmers. At the political level, both within
mainstream parties and pressure groups, the belief in man-made global
warming is a conduit for liberal angst.

Let me illustrate the mentality of the global warmers with reference
to a couple prominent figures: Frances Cairncross (the president of the
British Association and chairman of the Economic and Social Research
Council) and the losing democratic candidate in the 2000 presidential
election Al Gore, who has a documentary film in the cinemas at present
(Sept 2006) entitled An inconvenient truth.

Cairncross believes that global warming can only be dealt with by
"persuading this generation to accept sacrifices on behalf of
posterity; and persuading countries that will gain from climate change,
or lose little, to take action not on behalf of their own grandchildren
but of the descendants of people in other nations"' (Daily Telegraph
(Daily Telegraph 04/09/2006).

Gore's film is two hours or so of unashamed man-made global warming
polemic, which is delivered in the form of a lecture by Gore intercut
with film from outside the lecture theatre. He gives the ideological
game away early in the piece with his statement "Global warming is not
really a political issue; it is a moral issue". The reason he
considers it a moral issue is made clear in the rest of the film: most
of the land which is thought to be most at risk from rising sea levels
is in the Third World.

Nowhere in the film is anyone allowed to put the case that each nation
should look to its own safety and convenience and not to some
international salvation. This is par for the course for public
discussion of the subject in Britain and most of the First World - I
have been unable to find any mainstream politician in the West who puts
the nationalist case. The nearest one gets to it is the resistance,
mainly in the USA and Australia, to the economic disruption which would
result from taking the action the global warmers demand. But even here,
the resistance is not on the grounds that warming will not affect their
country much or at all, but rather it is based either on a denial that
warming is occurring or that warming is simply a natural cyclical
phenomenon which cannot be affected by any action Man takes.

The essentially ideological nature of the man-made global warming side
of the argument can also be seen from the reluctance of many
campaigners to address the question of whether Man can adjust to the
effects of global warming. Gore makes great play with the fate of New
Orleans when it was hit by Hurricane Katrina as a global warming
disaster. In fact, Katrina did not demonstrate that Man is helpless in
the face of such climatic events as a particularly violent hurricane.
Instead it showed what happens when Man does not plan properly for
natural disasters. Katrina was a fiasco because the flood defences of
New Orleans (the levees) were inadequate. Had the money been spent
strengthening the levees (and this was known before the hurricane hit)
the city could have withstood the worst effects of the hurricane. The
same applies to the aftermath of the hurricane. The failure at both
state and federal level to adequately respond after the hurricane hit
was also human failure not a failure to deal with an impossible
situation.

What could have been done for New Orleans could be done in principle
for much of the land which would be flooded if the global warmers' most
lurid predictions for a rise in global sea levels (20 feet or so) came
true. The problem of course from the global warmers' point of view is
that most of the land which would be flooded without man-made defences
is in the Third World which has neither the money nor the expertise to
build the necessary sea defences or to deal with disasters once they
have hit. This knowledge prevents most global warmers from pushing
prevention and mitigation as a solution to the alleged threat rather
than a reduction in CO2 emissions. Nor, of course, do the global
warmers mention the fact that much of the Third World's problems are
caused by uncontrolled breeding and that most of the world's population
now and for the foreseeable future will live in the now developing
countries. Responsibility for the global warmers in the first world is
a one way street: the first world is responsible for what their peoples
do; the peoples of the rest of the world is not.

Finally take the global warmers' response to the fact that Britain's
share of CO2 emissions is tiny, 2pc of the world total. When the
point is made that whatever Britain does it can have very little effect
on global warming because we are responsible for so little of the CO2,
the global warmers retreat to the adolescent moral exhortation of
"Britain needing to set and example to the rest of the world".

The consequences of a quasi-belief in man-made global warming becoming
part of the elite ideology are considerable. It means that those who
oppose either the idea of man-made global warming or the favoured
elite means of adjusting to it are denied regular opportunities to
publicly put it. Most dangerously it prompts politicians construct
policies to deal with the alleged problem, most notably the Kyoto
Protocol (1997) designed to reduce CO2 emissions. Such measures may
be ineffective in achieving their aim but they do place burdens on the
countries which take them seriously and implement measures to meet
their treaty obligation. Of course, most countries do not and never
will meet such obligations.
The Third World and energy related greenhouse gases

Apart from their current and ongoing industrialisation, it is
surprising that no one ever queries the type of claims made about
energy consumption in the underdeveloped world as it is now. The
global warming campaigners are forever telling us that the Great Satan
of Global Warming, the USA, has a per capita use of energy many times
that of the toiling masses of the Third World. The rest of the
developed world including Britain is less of a demon, but still a
considerable global warming villain in the eyes of the likes of Friends
of the Earth.

These claims have always struck me as somewhat odd. How is that the
five billion or so people who live in undeveloped or developing
economies and burn raw fossil fuels straight into the air manage to
emit less global warming gases than the billion or so people living in
the developed world whose energy waste outputs are generally filtered,
whether that be in a power station or in a car? I am not saying that
the current quantifications of energy use and greenhouse emissions are
wrong, merely that it is odd that no one with a public voice ever
questions whether they are.

Let's assume that man-made global warming is happening

Some facts. At the most generous estimate, five sixths of the world's
population live in countries which are either still far from fully
fledged industrialised societies (India, China), or are essentially
non-industrialised (take your pick from any country in sub-Saharan
Africa). The idea that those countries will not continue with
industrialisation is fanciful to the point of madness. If only half of
the developing world achieves full industrialisation within the next
quarter century their output of the gases supposedly responsible for
global warming will utterly dwarf what we have now, especially if the
projections of world population rising from 6.5 billion to nine billion
over the century turn out to be correct. Most of that increase will
come in the Third World.

Even within the developed world it is improbable in the extreme that
most governments will be prepared to take action that will severely
affect the lives of their people. The USA and Australia for two are not
committed to the Kyoto Protocol. Frances Cairncross, the president
of the British Association and chairman of the Economic and Social
Research Council and a man-made global warming advocate, recently
admitted this: 'Miss Cairncross says the Kyoto agreement to cut
greenhouse gas emissions is having little impact. India and China,
representing a third of humanity, have not signed up and the United
States "does not take any notice". (Daily Telegraph 04/09/2006).
Anyone who believes that most of the world will forgo industrialisation
or that industrialised societies will de-industrialise is being naive
to the point of idiocy. If the world is going to Hell in global
warming handcart nothing is going to stop it.

The worst policy for any developed state would be to take action to
pile costs and restrictions on their own societies while most of the
world goes its own sweet non-green way. Yet the British political
elite are doing just that. Not only have they signed up Britain to the
Kyoto Protocol, Britain, through its membership of the EU, is committed
to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) which began operating in 2005.
Under this scheme each EU member has to set a target for emissions. It
then issues permits up to that target to private companies and public
bodies within the member state. If the member state's emissions exceed
the permits it has issued, permits have to be purchased from elsewhere
in Europe - the permits issued by a member state can also be traded
within that country.

In practice this has the consequence of twice disadvantaging Britain.
First, we have burdens on our industry and economy which most of the
world does not have. Second, there is no equality within the EU because
the various EU members set their own targets for CO2 reduction. In
Britain's case that is a more stringent target (12.5pc reduction on the
1990 UK emissions) than most EU members , including Germany. According
to an OpenEurope pamphlet "The high price of hot air: the EU Emissions
Scheme is an environmental and economic failure (July 2006), this meant
in 2005 that the UK had to buy in œ500m worth of additional permits
from foreign business rivals while German firms made a profit of œ300m
selling some of their permits to foreigners, something they could do
because their emissions target reduction was significantly less than
that of Britain.

There is an irony in the fact that the governments, political parties
and many of the interest groups who promote the man-made global warming
agenda are supporters of globalism and consequently supporters of
policies which are directly in conflict with any reduction in CO2. At
one and the same time these people advocate a world in which goods and
people can move freely across national borders and the under-developed
world is encouraged to industrialise while insisting that CO2 emissions
are reduced.

The academics

Any academic who wishes to challenge the man-made global warming
orthodoxy faces two problems: he or she will find it very difficult to
(1) get grants to conduct research and (2) get their work published
in leading academic journals. These are great disincentives to go
against the orthodoxy because in the modern academic world continued
employment, promotion and academic reputation rests heavily on
published work. If those disincentives are not enough, any academic who
goes against the orthodoxy is likely to be shunned by his fellow
academics. He will not be invited to conferences.

Nonetheless, there are sceptics, for example the Australian based
Lavoisier Group argues that global warming is simply part of Nature.
One of their number is William Kininmonth, a former head of the
Australian National Climate Centre. His book, Climate Change: A Natural
Hazard, sums up their ethos. The Age 29 November 2004.

A different sort of sceptic is Bjorn Lomborg, author of The
Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomburg does not deny that man-made global
warming is occurring. Rather, he disagrees with the idea that reducing
greenhouse gases is the answer to the alleged problem. Lomburg's
argument is that even if really savage cuts in hothouse gases,
especially carbon dioxide, are made over the next century or so, the
effect on global warming would be trivial, delaying warming to the
levels projected by the global warming believers by a few years at
most.

Lomburg adds to this argument the immense cost of doing what the global
warmers want. He argues that this money would be better used by
adapting to higher temperatures and/or diverted to other issues such
as AIDS and providing clean water. Most of this money would be
directed at the Third World. Lomburg is in fact a liberal
internationalist who differs from the global warmers only in his
preferred solution to the alleged problem.

It says much about the quasi-religious nature of the man-made global
warmers that despite Lomburg's liberal internationalist credentials and
intentions he is a hate figure in global warming circle. For the true
believers it is not enough to believe in man-made global warming you
have to buy into the "right" solution. The fact that they are so
violent in their response to anyone who dares to challenge them tells
you a great deal about their confidence in the strength of their
arguments, namely, they have little actual confidence. Like religious
believers they love their faith but know in their heart of hearts that
it is not fact but belief and consequently open to challenge. This they
cannot deal with emotionally.

The extent to which the man-made global warming has become the
international orthodoxy can be seen from the stance of the United
Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its
chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri is a man without doubt,viz: "One can say
scientifically it is human action that is driving the bulk of changes
that are taking place today." The Age 29 November 2004

The sceptics' main arguments

The claims of the man-made global warmers fall towards the wild
speculation side of the educated guess/wild speculation spectrum. Even
the claims that the world is getting warmer are far from being
rock-solid. Some global-warming sceptics point out that modern
temperature data tends to come from people measuring the temperature
near to or within towns and cities, whose temperature is higher than
that of the natural (non-urban) temperature of the area. The rise in
temperature which has been measured may be wholly or largely a
consequence of the great increase in urbanisation since the Industrial
Revolution. This consideration would be particularly pertinent where
historical records are compared with modern records because the older
the record the less urbanisation and the greater the chance that the
actual temperature has been recorded. In short, comparing temperatures
now with temperatures in the past may be a case of comparing apples and
oranges. It is also worth noting that the claims such as that Britain
has reliable temperature records going back 350 years are grossly
misleading. There are records made by individuals at different places
and times which have been collated in an attempt to give a historical
temperature chronology. There is no standardisation of measurement or
continuity of measurement in any place over the centuries and
consequently even comparisons between recordings of temperature made by
different people at different times in the same place are dubious.

Global warming sceptics also refer to the discrepancy between
temperature records taken at the earth's surface and those recorded by
satellites and balloons in the low to mid-troposphere - the atmosphere
which extends to about 6 miles above the earth. The satellite and
balloon studies show no warming in the low to mid-troposphere in the
past twenty years or so. This is very strange if warming is occurring
at ground level for hot air rises and should heat the troposphere. It
is worth noting that the troposphere is not intimately affected by
Man's energy emissions as is the case with measurements taken in or
close to the urban heat islands.

The scientific sceptics also attack the global warming thesis on two
other main grounds: the fallibility of computer models and the effect
of the sun's activity.

Global warming predictions are made using computer models so GIGO -
garbage in, garbage out - applies. As the weather forecasters show,
predicting the weather even in the immediate future is fraught with
insuperable difficulties. If that is so difficult, why should we
believe the climatic future can be meaningfully predicted fifty or one
hundred years hence, particularly when phenomena such as cloud
formation, oceanic heat transport and the mixing of the air are still
poorly understood?

The Sun's magnetic field and solar wind - mainly consisting of
electrons and protons emitted by the Sun - shields our solar system by
from cosmic rays (very energetic particles and radiation from outer
space). The shield is not 100% effective and some cosmic rays reach
the Earth. Moreover, the sun's activity is not constant which means the
shielding effect of the sun varies because the strength of the shield
is dependent on the sun's activity.

Cosmic rays influence cloud formation. Consequently, the amount of
cosmic rays reaching the Earth affects the planet's overall cloudiness.
Clouds affect the radiation from the Sun which reaches the Earth's
surface and that affects global temperature. Interestingly, satellite
data shows a strong correlation between the amount of low clouds over
the Earth and the quantity of cosmic rays hitting the Earth. The
implication is that the Sun's activity is the major or even sole
culprit for global warming.

Assuming the worst

Let us allow that the world is warming, whether due in whole or part to
Man or through natural changes, what should we do? Build sea defences,
ban building in threatened areas, abandon areas which are incapable of
defence, build stronger buildings, develop new strains of crops to
deal with changing environments. Even the most apocalyptic global
warming scientists do not project a rapid and catastrophic event
such as that depicted in the film the Day after tomorrow. Even if the
global warmers are correct, the future is controllable.

How do we decide?

Some history. 10,000 years ago the world was just emerging from the
Ice Age, the last of many ice ages. 4,000 years ago much of the Sahara
desert was fertile land. 2,000 years ago and Britain was warm enough
for the Romans to introduce wine growing on a significant scale. 1,000
years ago Europe, including Britain, entered a period of considerable
warming, warming strong enough to allow Greenland to be colonised by
Norsemen. A few centuries later and the glaciers re-advanced
sufficiently to cause the Greenland settlements to fail. All of
these events took place before industrialisation. They represent
dramatic changes in climate and the general environment, yet humanity
managed to survive without any difficulty.

Similarly, Man has greatly changed his environment throughout history.
The most obvious change has been in the size of the human population.
This was tiny 10,000 years ago, moderate 2,000 years ago, large 200
years ago and is now truly gigantic for an organism of Man's size - we
are in the top 5% of land animals by size.

The environmental consequences of Man's increase has been immense.
Large tracts of land have been converted from forest to open land, much
of it cultivated. Nowhere is this seen more dramatically than in
Europe. Yet despite this qualitative change Europe has not suffered
any environmental disaster. On a more local scale England went from a
medieval agricultural world which had a large component of open
(communal) fields with few hedgerows to a world of smaller, privately
owned fields following the various bouts of enclosure in the period
1450-1850. Again, no environmental disaster occurred, despite the fact
that greens today are forever warning of a loss of diversity through a
reduction in the variety of habitat because of the re-creation of
larger fields in England.

Finally, consider this fact: no general ecological scare story has
ever come to pass. It may be that the world does warm for a while, but
it has done so before and the balance of probability is that the earth
and Man will accommodate the current warming without causing any
general environmental disaster just as they have accommodated previous
climatic change.

--
Robert Henderson
Blair Scandal website: http://www.geocities.com/ blairscandal/
Personal website: http://www.anywhere.demon.co.uk
.

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