Friday, January 01, 2010

Mass Extinctions? No Worries!


In what appears to be an unstated expansion of his arguments against the science of climate change, George Will takes a "what, me worry?" attitude toward cataclysmic disasters and mass extinction.
Today, we know there is a lot of play in the joints of the Constitution and that every 40 million years or so asteroids more than half a mile in diameter strike Earth. Yet the Constitution still constitutes, and the fact that flora and fauna have survived Earth's episodes of extreme violence testifies to the extraordinary imperative of life.
Except everything in human history tells us that our Republic will not last forever. And, yes, life will almost certainly go on after a huge meteor strikes the earth or "dust and water vapor [have] a 'greenhouse effect,' holding in heat and cooking much life out of Earth". Life exists in the deepest parts of the ocean and, as they say, cockroaches are resilient. But I, personally, am more interested in whether human life will continue.

2 comments:

  1. Okay, wait. He really just said that because the Constitution of the United States has not been abolished after a couple centuries of use, we don't need to worry about mass extinction of species?

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  2. I am of the impression that the closest thing to scientific literature that George Will has ever read is a Michael Crichton novel.

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