The Foundry

The headlines define alarmism: “Global warming to wreak havoc on U.S. crops and forests, report says.” The AP reports: “Climate change is increasing the risk of U.S. crop failures, depleting the nation’s water resources and contributing to outbreaks of invasive species and insects, the Department of Agriculture said in a report released Tuesday.”

Read deeper though, and you learn: “The report did not evaluate how the risk faced by farmers, water-supply managers and others might be reduced if they changed practices or crop and livestock varieties to adjust to changing conditions.” Imagine that: humans using innovation to adapt to their environment.

As Wired points out, even if liberals were able to impose draconian policies far more invasive then their current cap and trade proposals, the climate change outlook for the next 60 years would remain completely unchanged:

The Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, calculates that even if the US, Europe, and Japan turned off every power plant and mothballed every car today, atmospheric CO2 would still climb from the current 380 parts per million to a perilous 450 ppm by 2070, thanks to contributions from China and India. (Do nothing and we’ll get there by 2040.) In short, we’re already at least lightly browned toast. It’s time to think about adapting to a warmer planet.

Wired concludes:

In his 1992 best seller, Earth in the Balance, Al Gore derided adaptation as “a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our own skin.” Better to take Stewart Brand’s advice from the opening page of the original Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” We’re in charge here. Let’s get to work.