Adapt or Perish

 One dinosaur some time during the Jurassic age says to another, “Dang, it’s getting cold.”

The other says, “Yeah, I hear there was a big explosion a while back and it’s causing climate change.”

“Well, just ignore it. It’s never been cold before. It’ll warm up.”

As we all know, the hapless dinosaurs couldn’t ignore the cold and they perished. Meanwhile the small warm-blooded creatures adapted to the new conditions and they not only survived the ice age, they thrived and evolved.

Have we humans learned anything from this experience? If you ask the United Nations, the White House, some scientists, and Al Gore, you would think that placing blame for climate change would solve the problem. No matter where the dinosaurs might have place blame for their situation, they were impotent to do anything about it. Are we humans so omnipotent that we can even cause climate change, let alone solve the problem if it would exist?

The fact is we can observe, record and postulate the forces of nature, in some cases even make predictions, but our scientific process is limited by the inability to conduct experiments that can be repeated to verify cause and effect. Climatic causes at best can only be theorized.

I don’t know if earth’s climate is getting warmer, colder, or staying the same. I suppose it depends on what length of time is considered an average. Studies show the climate has cooled or not changed over the last 15 years or so. Not a long enough period, some scientists say. I say so what?

If you consider evolution, we are here only because the warm-blooded creatures were equipped to adapt to harsh environmental conditions and were able to evolve because the much larger dinosaurs were not able to adapt. The operative word here is “adapt.”

During yet another Ice age, other warm-blooded creatures, such as the wooly mammoth, failed to adapt by heading to a warmer climate, and they too perished.

History is replete with extinction of species simply because they didn’t or couldn’t adapt to changing conditions. Rather than place blame for climate conditions and try to survive the changes with futile attempts to change them, we might be better advised to use what knowledge we have to find a solution for surviving the changes.

I am afraid that telling humans we are responsible for severe weather and expecting us to focus on reversing a condition that may or may not be causing the weather changes is not only arrogant but futile given that severe weather on this planet is the historic norm rather than any man-made anomaly. The old adage adapt or perish has never been more apropos than to our threat of “global climate change.”