...they take credit for hurricanes in the US.

In the delusion department, this ranks up there with Paul Ehrlich's single handedly stopping the population bomb from exploding.

You got to really wonder why a god with the honorifics "Merciful" and "Compassionate" supposedly would use hurricanes or suicide bombers to punish innocent "unbelievers". Or have Al Qaeda as his cronies. My take is that if Al Qaeda were right in their religious beliefs, then they'd one of the prime recipents of divine disfavor. After all, what would such a god do to people who worship him in such a sick and twisted way?

what other religious crap has been said about New Orleans and Katrina? I don't live in the US and haven't followed the news very much... Probably some religious types have already said it's a punishment for the partying, tit-flashing, carnivals and hookers. Oh yeah and it's got a french culture twist.

Hey, why not take credit for the hurricane? If I recall, they took credit for Columbia going down and killing the first Israeli astronaut. So, why not this too?

K, Ehrlich may have been wrong in terms of time frame, and 'bomb' might better be described as 'slowly rising tide,' but if you don't think it is a problem consider this; is there LESS traffic on your local roads now, than 30 yers ago? Are your schools LESS crowded? Are your cities LESS congested? If so, where are you? I want to move there! (New Orleans excepted)

K, Ehrlich may have been wrong in terms of time frame, and 'bomb' might better be described as 'slowly rising tide,'

See 'Defusing the Population Bomb' at http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-15-99.html

every objective fact and environmental trend is running in precisely the opposite direction of what the widely acclaimed doomsayers of the 1960s - from Lester Brown to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome - once predicted. Birth rates around the world are lower, not higher, today than at anytime in at least a century. Global per capita food production is 40 percent higher today than as recently as 1950. The "energy crisis" now is such a distant memory that these days oil is virtually the cheapest, not the most expensive, liquid on Earth. In sum, the population bomb propagandists have all the intellectual credibility of the Flat Earth Society.

> Are your schools LESS crowded? Are your cities LESS congested? If so,
> where are you? I want to move there!

If you don't like cities, why do you choose to live in one? There's plenty of room in the red states.

Anyone who wants to live in rural isolation can do so. If you prefer to live around restaurants, theaters, stores, coffee shops, museums, opera houses, and public libraries, on the other hand -- well, you ought not to complain about the concentration of population that makes such things possible.

Brian-The "energy crisis" now is such a distant memory that these days oil is virtually the cheapest, not the most expensive, liquid on Earth.

Are you sure about that?

Oil is less expensive than milk, or even bottled water, for that matter. With those two liquids outpricing oil, it certainly can't be the most expensive, especially given the relative abundance of water on this planet...

Hmmm...so when a large number of Muslims (and during a religous event, no less) in Iraq, stampede over each other and into a river, when a rumor of a suicide bomber circulates, who takes credit for that one...?

Of course they prefer not to know that hurricanes just happen here at this time of year, period. Some worse than others, but it's just as inevitable (though more forecastable) as another signifigant seismic event on the fault lines in Iran. It will be interesting to see if God (or the West) gets credit/blame, the next time one of those occurs....

It will be interesting to see if God (or the West) gets credit/blame, the next time one of those occurs....

No wait, the other thing: tedious.

Seriously, is there going to be any surprise or novelty here?

Brian: "every objective fact and environmental trend is running in precisely the opposite direction of what the widely acclaimed doomsayers of the 1960s"

Even so, there are some things that still make me worry:
- We have fished away 90% of the all the fish in the worlds oceans.
- There is so much fertilizer draining into the Gulf of Mexico (and other places) that huge aquatic oxygen-starved "dead zones" appear each year.
- There is a buildup of salt in much of the world's farmland, and an economically feasible way needs to be found to remove it or develop high yield salt-resistant crops.
- At the current rate of deforestation nearly all rainforests will be gone by 2030-2050.
- The world's antibiotics are becoming ineffective against major diseases. We need new ones. 25-40% of all pharmaceuticals are derived from plants found only in the rainforests. Billions of years of evolution develops medicinal compounds we would never think of.
- The world's deserts are expanding.

But yes, in terms of things that are immediately around me and I experience in everyday city life, things are OK. Do I expect them to be OK for another two thousand years of civilization? Not without using technology to dodge some serious bullets.

25-40% of all pharmaceuticals are derived from plants found only in the rainforests.

Do you have a cite for that? My understanding is that the claims of rainforests as a source of medicines have always been grossly exaggerated.

Dispute that figure if you like. It's one of many.

If only 20%, or 10% of our drugs came from the rainforest would we say oh well, we don't need it as much now? How much more of the rainforest should we decide we can do without? Half of what's left? Two thirds? Who was it that decided it would be beneficial to expend 90% of the world's fish? And what exactly was the benefit? I bet fishermen today wish they could turn back the clock.

The rainforests as reservoirs of biodiversity took millions of years to develop; they have been around a hundred million years. They would have lasted hundreds of millions of years more, but most is now gone in just a lifetime or two. Sure you can plant trees, but you won't get the same kind of dense canopy and self-reinforcing rainforest ecosystem. You won't get the topsoil back, and you would have to wait millions of years for evolution to take its course and get the biodiversity back, together with all the various agents that the plants and animals evolve to protect themselves from millenia of strange diseases and each other.

Once there is too little diversity within an ecosystem it becomes vulnerable to disease and perishes, as do individual species whose numbers become too few, would you not agree?

I never said rainforests are expendable. All I am saying is "we must protect rainforests because of all the medicines we got/might get from them" is a poor argument, which may potentially backfire if these wonder drugs fail to materialize. Especially considering that over starting few years ago drugs are beign designed to match human biochemistry rather than found in nature, and as our understanding of human genome and metabolism increases, that process will only accelerate. The days of "discovered" medicines -- whether in rainforest or in deep sea vents are numbered. That does not mean we should consign these ecosystems to oblivion, but it does mean we need better arguments to defend them.