Changing Nature

In the early 1700s, settlers in the central valley of what would become the United States noticed that the Mississippi River would carry a much higher volume of water every Spring, causing flooding.

So they decided that they had to travel up to the head of that river, discover what was causing it to increase its volume every Spring, and prevent it from doing so, in order that the people downstream, and particularly in New Orleans, would no longer be inconvenienced and in many cases killed by the annual floods.

They discovered that the cause of the extra water each Spring was melting snow in Minnesota, and so they decided that the solution to their problem was to make it stop snowing in Minnesota. They spent the next hundreds of years attempting to make it stop snowing in Minnesota. They  failed utterly, of course, and that is why the Mississippi River still floods many square miles of land and drowns New Orleans every Spring.

Reality, of course, is different. Humans were more rational back then.

Rather than controlling nature, trying to make nature stop doing what nature had been doing for thousands of years, they decided to see what they could do to find ways to cope with what nature does. So they built levees along the river to contain the floods, allowing the Mississippi River to continue doing what nature intended for it to do, and to allow the human population to live comfortably with that reality.

The Earth has been getting warmer for 10,000 years, and we just recently noticed that. Really kind of hard to miss, what with ice caps coming all the way down to Washington, DC and then disappearing, but still…  A group of people have decided to become really alarmed about that, and I’m not going to say they are wrong, but their solution strikes me as out of touch with reality.

They are trying to stop the Earth from getting warmer. They are not seeking ways to cope with what nature is doing, they are trying to change what nature is doing. Is anyone proposing to do the current equivalent of building levees? No. They are trying to make the planet stop doing what the planet has been doing for 10,000 years.