"Dan" wrote in message
...

Unless you haven't notice, there is no stasis in the Earth's climate,
just as there is no statis in geology, the sun, the planets, or
anything else.

There never has been and there never will be.

Pulitzer winning author and civil war historian Bruce Catton noted that all
North American civilization and human history is what happened between ice
ages, and someday Detroit will be crushed by ice and ground into sand. It
shouldn't take politicians to tell us, however, that there are mercury in
the fish, PCBs in the river, concrete-etching acids in the rain, smog in the
air and rampant, unexplained asthma epidemics in children.

For twenty or thirty years or more people refused to believe that smoking
was dangerous, and some still refute that second hand smoke is toxic.

As a true conservative and conservationist I tend to think that reasonable
caution is in order. Maybe it's exaggerated, maybe it's not. But, we can
all look at the damage done by excess living and industrial waste and know
that we've seen all this before. In Oregon, there was a time when trout
fry introduced to the Willamette River died almost immediately from the
toxins, and the river still smells like a latrine. For over a century
this wasn't viewed as a problem and anybody who made a fuss about raw sewage
in the drinking water was a radical.

I prefer to put the politics aside and simply look at the fact that it's
possible, and if it's possible, it is our responsibility to guard our way of
life against the potential threat. I haven't read the Gore book, didn't
vote for the guy, and I don't buy into the extremist/alarmist propaganda,
but, having been accused of being an ecoterrorist for simply stating that if
a company clearcut over a certain streambed, it would kill off our native
Coho salmon, I know the truth is in the middle somewhere and so it must be
identified and considered. Politics and economics will NEVER lead us to
the truth of the matter, but, Easter Island offers us a parable of what can
and has happened to civilizations who didn't properly respect their
environment.

-c