Do me a favor, willya?
1... Print that sentence in 36-pt font on 8.5x11 inch paper.
2... Staple that paper to Al Gore's forehead.
Good visual.
I actually read the idiot's book, Earth in the Balance. I'd just come off a binge of natural history books. I actually kept a record of the places in Gore's book where he stated things that were flat out contradictions to what the geologic palentology etc. thinking has figured out. Gore makes the ridiculous statements that we're facing the biggest loss of species ever!!, and I wonder, has the guy never read up on the basic stuff? Didn't any body ever tell him about the dinosaurs? Or Neandertals, which were here for something like 150,000 years ... as for us, we barely know didly about ourselves beyond 6,000 years? We think we're so smart we don't need God? That we're in control? Big mistake.
The only way to survive the ride is to adapt to the environment -- God shows us how to adapt to each other no matter what the environment. This is an entirely possible scenario -- say we got zapped, over the course of two to 15 years, with a drop in temps that brought freezing weather to the West Coast. It's happened before. Pretty silly to think it couldn't happen again. The garden states. And home to tens of millions in areas of L.A. and San Francisco, in places not equipped for freezing temps.
We'd need energy and nimbleness double-quick. We've got the oil and natural resources to supply energy to keep folks from freezing. Food production would be hit hard. The only way to survive would be to adapt by doing all the things the environmentalists are shrieking we cannot do, MUST not do.
From my vantage point, we can bet safely on the short term, but in reality have no idea what awaits us climate-wise in any given decade. Our human records go back to zilch, and I've seen with my own eyes massive banks of giant fossilized oyster shells in the low mountans a good 30 miles from the ocean. Whatever put them in that state bespeaks sudden, massive movement somewhere along the way, and a vvvVVV---E---E---R---YYYYYYyyyyy long way at that; we have NO historical perspective beyond the last nanosecond, geologically speaking. This vanity that we impact the weather is pretty new -- not even 50 years old. It would be awfully darned funny -- if it wasn't to the point where we're threatened to be hog-tied into enacting its most dangerous and hairy consequences.
Frankly, I don't think it's anything that the Judeo-Christian "system" (as one of the Founders called it) and some free market capitalism couldn't fix.
Environmentalists are Dark Age ignorants.