So Cold...

[poliphilo]

Odi turned up on the doorstep yesterday afternoon with bags full of potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, parsnips, melons, aubergines and plums. She'd been to an outdoor market where they were selling off frozen and frost damaged produce for silly money. 

My afternoon appointment with the practise nurse has been cancelled. They didn't tell me why she wasn't coming in, but she's probably snowbound.

George Monbiot says these vicious winters we're having are actually a sign of global warming.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The phrase "global weirding is new to me. I like it.

Of course the climate is shifting around all the time. It's only a few hundred years since northern Europe went through a mini-ice age.

What annoys me is the apocalyptic mind-set that insists this latest shift is likely to wipe us out. I really don't see why it should. We've been around for several million years now and have always managed to adapt.

[oakmouse]

Now Itotally agree with you there. No, this won't be the end of the human species. We survived this far, including through an ice age or so, thank you very much. We'll hit the wall some day --- most species do --- but I don't for one moment believe that global weirding is the name tag on that wall.

But then I'm one of those people who don't believe that the world ever ends for any reason short of the death of the sun. Cultures end, societies end, religions end, species end, families and tribes end, but the world itself goes chugging along its merry way just fine. We're not as important as we think we are.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you can take such an objective view of it all: I'm more inclined to think that Dickens had it right. Scrooge could think dispassionately about the need for "reducing the surplus population," but when faced with the possible death of Tiny Tim, he melted (like the glaciers).
Yes, our species has survived numerous climate changes--including the one that killed off such a large percentage of the humans then alive that DNA research shows we're all descended from fewer than 100,000 survivors. I really don't want to be alive when our numbers drop from 7 billion to, oh say 7 million.

[oakmouse]

There's no credible evidence that anything like such a drop will result from global weirding within a single human lifetime.
Rapid, immense drops in population are extremely rare. We're more likely to go through the quite normal and much slower drop caused by fewer births, more infant mortality, and a higher death rate for elderly, sick, or otherwise vulnerable adults. See the recent experiences of the former Soviet former Union for the kind of thing that we can reasonably expect.

As far as objectivity goes, the fact that I can look at the probable overall fate of my species in a somewhat detached fashion has nothing whatsoever to do with my personal response to grief and loss. The former is the subject under discussion. The latter isn't part of the conversation, and isn't any of your business.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

I really should have said "one" rather than "you," because we're all susceptible to the "Scrooge" effect--I didn't invent the truism that goes something like "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." That's why charities use the faces of dying orphans rather than bar graphs and flow charts to raise money.

I also apologize for another error of magnitude: the "keyhole" or "bottleneck" of population at the time of the extinction of the Neanderthal, about 65,000 years ago, was estimated at 10,000, not 100,000. And while that population crash was not felt within a lifetime, it came close to wiping us out. Still, as you say, Homo Sap rebounded, again very quickly--and spread all over the planet.