February 1, 2007
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a… Giant Meteor?
Ok, so no giant meteor. And no superman (sorry for the letdown). But giant meteors and today’s topic do have one thing in common: they’re both theories about the extinction of dinosaurs. Today, we’re talking about climate change, a la this article in the Sydney Morning Herald.
I’d hope that it was at least vaguely recognizable by anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past five years that we (and by we, I mean the earth and all its inhabitants) are in serious trouble. The author of this article, Mike Archer – who is a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sidney, Australia – paints a bleak picture of the future we face should our present rate of climate change continue.
Archer seems to focus on the fact that this increasing rate will have a drastic impact on our existance; extinction has been the most common outcome of extreme change – for us, just as easily as the dinosaurs. But what seems more important is how climate change will effect the land masses and populations that survive. Humans today are mobilized; unlike our ancestors, we are not fated to die due to our geographic circumstance. This seems to suggest that people will migrate to higher land, increasing the population density problem, and the malthusian cycle will cease to function.
Somehow I forget where I was going with this…
