Climate Change: The Keywords (Part 3 of 3)

Written by Geraldo LuĂ*s Lino,
Special to Climate Change Dispatch
18 November 2010

With 150,000-plus years inheritance of accumulated knowledge, Mankind has no shortage of conditions for facing any environmental scenarios created by the natural oscillations of the climate dynamics.
The word resilience can be described as the capacity of resistance, elasticity and recovery from physical shocks. This is a property that Mankind has always demonstrated to possess while facing all kinds of threats to its evolution, and this is also the third and most important keyword for the needed reassessment of the climate debate.

Despite some transitory interruptions in the civilizational process and a lot of setbacks and tragedies of all dimensions, the intrinsically creative, associative and synergetic nature of our species have granted Mankind the evolving capacity (in terms of knowledge and socio-political-economic relations) and the resilience needed for overcoming all sorts of challenges so far: adverse climatic conditions, food scarcity, epidemic and pandemic diseases, natural hazards, conflicts of all kinds, bad rulers, short-sighted leaders, and with unfortunate frequency, irrationality pandemics fed by exotic ideas disconnected from any coherent process of understanding of the universal laws – like environmentalism and its standard bearer the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory.

It is worth reminding that our species appeared in the penultimate Ice Age somewhere in Africa and set out from there to conquer all the continents under much more unfavorable climatic conditions than those prevailing in the Holocene period, the last 12,000 years. It was under the harsh conditions prevailing during most of that time span that our forebears developed the “physicalâ€