Liberal conservationism
A friend of mine went to the Australian Open this year, and while down under he visited the Great Barrier Reef. He said that the water was so warm — 93 degrees — that the reef was dying. There are those among us — to whom I refer as liberal conservationists — who believe this rise in water temperature is due to human-caused global warming. For example, there is the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which falsely claims:
“There is now overwhelming scientific and political consensus that climate change is occurring as a result of human activity, […]”
It’s interesting to me to wonder what these fear-mongers would have been saying 20,000 years ago, when the Great Barrier Reef began to form. No doubt, there would have been alarms about the intrusion of the coral into the previous open sea. For the next 14,000 years, these same liberal conservationists would no doubt have been hysterical over the rising sea level, that further enabled the coral reef to spread, even growing over the continental islands that became submerged.
Now, of course, the liberal conservationists are saying that we must spend trillions of dollars to halt an estimated sea rise (due in their view entirely to human factors, of course) of a couple of meters, a far cry from the 120 meters of sea level rise that made it possible for the coral reef to grow and spread in the first place.
What’s striking about the liberal conservationists is not their insistance that man is the cause of all the Earth’s problems, but their willful stupidity about the way things are and have been for millions of years. So self-centered are they that they pick themselves as the frame of reference from which to judge every other era, no matter how limited that frame of reference is. I call this the “Salton Sea fallacy.”
Greg Raven, Apple Valley, CA