Global Cooling? That is so 1970's...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

Global warming, Global cooling, and Climate Change pundants remind me of the quote:

"Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about."

And that reminds me, I am still waiting for my flying car.

That's correct. Our planet was significantly warmer during the 12th and 13th c., so much so that many parts of Northern Europe like Scandinavia and even Greenland were a lot more hospitable than they are today (despite the "global warming" - does that suggest anything to you?).

In the 14th c. the climate changed gradually and we had what is now sometimes called the Little Ice Age. It did have a very considerable impact on the population of Europe at the time - harsher living conditions, less arable land, more diseases and in many places depopulation or at least demographic stagnation.

That the climate is changing is a fact of life. It has been changing all the time anyway. Our actions certainly have an impact on the environment but by and large, all the major factors are unpredictable and beyond our control. On the other hand, the human race is very adaptable. We have survived things as bad as the Ice Age. Not that it's easy, but it can be done.

"...while human society is readily annoyed, it is very resistant to serious damage, and the advance of technology makes it more rugged with every generation." - John McCarthy

I'm definitely more concerned with impact events. Quite hard to deflect a big space rock coming at you.

I suppose progeny has it's place in the list of goals and objectives of most folks. Perpetuating the species is for the most part an instinctual drive that we seem to have inherited, or were blessed with, whichever you prefer.

Regardless, each of us has a fixed duration, no one lives forever, and whatever may come after our time here is done, I doubt we are going to care much one way or the other what happens to those who will come after, whether they face annihilation from some cosmic source, or they manage to do themselves in as a whole. While it is charitable to consider how our lives and our actions will affect the outcome of our race in the long run, from a practical point of view it doesn't really have that much bearing on our own existence in the here and now. Whatever vested interest we may have in making life a little better for our children's children, it must by necessity wane once our mortal coil is shed. Even for those who believe they may come back, the chance that anything you could do in this lifetime would have a perceivable effect on your next incarnation is far too small to be a motivating factor in your present.

The bottom line is, as Seargent Barnes put it "Everybody gotta die sometime, Red", which to me means that no matter what I do now, I am gonna be gone soon, and even if I come back here again, I am only gonna end up dead again, so I might as well make the most out of the time I have now, try and be respectful of others and the world I live in as if I have to share it with everyone else, and figure that whatever happens after I start my dirt nap, my concerns will be elsewhere then.

This is the quote I tend to live by:

+1 on that.

I heard a quote somewhere that there are more people working in an average McDonalds than there are full time searching for "impactors" (tech talk for Death Asteroids).

And let's not forget about Planet X's visit in 2009 and 2012...