Apocalypse Not - Matt Ridley Says It All

Matt Ridley has an excellent piece in Wired  about the apocalyptic thinking that pervades society, and how predictions of ecological, economic and societal disasters have inevitably proven  false. An endless parade of dire predictions  about acid rain, skyrocketing cancer deaths, peak fuel, and other scares turned out to be plain wrong.  He finishes with a discussion of the current disaster du jour,  climate change, and makes the common sense observation that adaptation to change is probably the best  response to any likely warming.  As he says:

So, should we worry or not about the warming climate? It is far too binary a question. The lesson of failed past predictions of ecological apocalypse is not that nothing was happening but that the middle-ground possibilities were too frequently excluded from consideration. In the climate debate, we hear a lot from those who think disaster is inexorable if not inevitable, and a lot from those who think it is all a hoax. We hardly ever allow the moderate “lukewarmers” a voice: those who suspect that the net positive feedbacks from water vapor in the atmosphere are low, so that we face only 1 to 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century; that the Greenland ice sheet may melt but no faster than its current rate of less than 1 percent per century; that net increases in rainfall (and carbon dioxide concentration) may improve agricultural productivity; that ecosystems have survived sudden temperature lurches before; and that adaptation to gradual change may be both cheaper and less ecologically damaging than a rapid and brutal decision to give up fossil fuels cold turkey.