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Originally Posted by Ladogaboy
Please define "present" and "natural range." Present and natural range meaning what we have experienced in the last 50 years? 100 years? 200 years?
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How about the last 5000 years, give or take a few: the period in which essentially all our civilization developed, and to which our agriculture (and much else) is adapted.
[QUOTE[Are we talking about about the natural range that includes winters so bitter that the Delaware River froze over and soldiers literally froze to death while marching.[/QUOTE]
Bitter? Grew up in that country, on a tributary of the Susquehanna. It froze over every year, solidly enough to skate on. Likewise, anyone outdoors for prolonged periods without proper cold-weather gear risked freezing to death. But did the Indians freeze to death in the same climate?
[QUOTE[A range that includes the Sahara Desert's expansion over the last 10,000 + years? (predating modern fossil fuel use)[/QUOTE]
But not predating goats or intensive grazing :-)
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How are those people who are (supposedly) in awe of nature and the environment so afraid of change?
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It's the rate of change, and the extent, which matters. Yes, barring a complete runaway Venus-effect warming, some species will survive, and it'll all be the same in a hundred million years or so. While I admit to a certain intellectualy curiousity about what a world inhabited by the descendants of extremophile bacteria would be like, I really prefer a world in which I can reasonably expect to go on living comfortably for the immediate future.
It's illuminating to consider that the closest natural analog to the current warming is probably the Permian-Triassic extinction event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian...tinction_event