Reply To: Wealth of Nations, and Economics of Abundance

[Brian H]

Duke Leto wrote: You again miss the point. If the Ice Packs are as unstable an environment as you are claiming they must be, there could never be evolutionary incentive for a large predator to evolve with the adaptational traits specific to that environment.

Their adaptations include that environment, but are not exclusive to it. Polar bear fossils predate numerous long episodes of extreme polar warming and ice loss. So they are versatile.

There is a very strong inherent bias in both people and researchers to assume that the current scene is the best and variation from it is necessarily destructive. Just an example: during the last Ice Age, so much water was tied up that coasts extended up to hundreds of miles beyond current shorelines, and there is much evidence accumulating that human proliferation and global spread was expedited by the ability to “bounce” along the coasts from harbour to harbour in simple boats, eating shellfish and shallow-water fish, and coastal plant life. Early colonization of the Americas, e.g., may have simply bypassed the glacial “plug” obstructing the central land mass. So the Ice Age was a “good thing”? Perhaps.

Human climate influence is trivial on the scale of natural processes, notwithstanding Gore’s order-of-magnitude exaggerations and egregious errors. If we are actually headed for another “Maunder Minimum”, though, we may have to clutch at straws such as requesting the Chinese to burn as much coal as possible to preserve heat and promote plant growth.
🙂
😆