Too many people today abide by a simple-minded equation: nature is good, humans are bad. But there's nothing unnatural about manipulating the environment -- animals do it all the time.

from - http://www.liberzine.com/jamesmarkels/001210globalwarming.htm

Nature good, humans bad?
by James N. Markels

The climate is warming! The climate is warming! While I think my part of the globe could use a bit more warming to ease the chilly winds lately, a lot of people are worried about the earth's slowly changing climate and what effects that might bring. Thing is, the earth's climate has been warming and cooling for millions of years without humans around. What's so different now is that humans are having an effect, and there's a philosophy about human interaction with the environment, embraced by greens, that fears any changes and has been gaining in influence.

The philosophy is quite simple: Nature is good, humans are bad. It doesn't matter what "natural" circumstances entail or what humans
do. While razing a rainforest and leaving behind a barren wasteland is bad, it's no better to change a desert into a thriving forest or city.
Overfishing where life is plentiful is as bad as the notion of creating plankton blooms and fish in an otherwise lifeless ocean. Humans are
unnatural, and the more we do the worse it is.

But there's nothing unnatural about manipulating the environment. Animals do it consciously all the time, like by constructing nests and
other structures for homes, or unconsciously by overhunting a local ecosystem or simply ravaging a given area. Of course, humans can do it on a much larger scale, but any animal would do the same if it could. Living things act to survive, and if they can think up a way to change the environment to make surviving easier, they would do so. For example, I'm sure that bears would create fisheries to ensure a food supply if they were smart enough to do it. They're not, but we are. It's not unnatural that we do this.

The green philosophy denounces the effects that humans have had on the climate, as there is scientific evidence to suggest that the earth is
indeed warming, and humans are releasing chemicals into the atmosphere that aid such a change. But since the earth's climate fluctuates naturally already, humans at best are merely part of the equation. Perhaps we're accelerating the rate of warming that would have already
occurred, or maybe we're preventing a cold snap. Looking at the earth's climate history, it certainly wouldn't be natural for there to be no change at all. At the very least there are solar fluctuations.

The current mean temperature of earth is about 57 degrees F, but this is below the historical average by a significant margin. For the billions of years when the dinosaurs roamed the land and there was a wide variety of organisms flourishing, the mean temperature was roughly 10 degrees F higher. Humans have done particularly well when the mean temperature was higher than today, like from roughly 7000 B.C. to 3000 B.C., when the earth was about 4 degrees F warmer. If anything, humans (and wildlife in general) had a worse time of things when the climate cooled, which if our current mean temperature is below the historical average, we seem to be experiencing. We're supposed to be better off with this?

See, the claim global warming activists make is that, for some reason, the current climate is optimum, and if humans affect it then that's bad. If the earth was warming without our help, would those activists be advocating that humans get involved and try to cool the climate? After all, the same bad things (like the predictions of higher ocean levels and more violent storms) are going to occur whether the warming is caused by humans or by nature. What then? It would only be consistent for them to resist efforts to halt natural warming. In other words, it's somehow better that Mother Nature screw you than human action. Bah.

Global warming, despite the rhetoric, is not what the activists despise. They despise human action. It's a moral crusade, only loosely associated with the state of the environment. That is why the talks in The Hague to put teeth into the Kyoto Protocol failed. Greens want to punish those who affect the climate instead of actually moving to minimize human effect. Otherwise they would have accepted U.S. proposals for creating sinks (like forests) that eat up the carbon dioxide produced by industry and automobiles. But it doesn't matter to
the greens that the carbon dioxide is eaten up later, they want to stop it from being produced in the first place, even if that wrecks conomies
and lives.

What we all must acknowledge is that climate change will happen, naturally or by human action. The question, therefore, shouldn't be whether change is good or bad, but rather which change is preferable. Are we better off if it gets warmer or cooler? Comparisons of the two options, such as Thomas Gale Moore's book, Climate of Fear, have indicated that we'd be much better off hedging towards things being warmer than otherwise. More study into the possibilities would be far more useful to us (and the living things on the earth, frankly) than a luddite-like movement against humans using their natural abilities to make life better by changing the environment. --30--