http://www.stuff.co.nz/timaruherald/4064691a6571.html

Climate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week.

Man's contribution to the greenhouse gases was so small we couldn't change the climate if we tried, he maintained.

"We're all going to survive this. It's all going to be a joke in five years," he said.

A combination of misinterpreted and misguided science, media hype, and political spin had created the current hysteria and it was time to put a stop to it.

"It is time to attack the myth of global warming," he said.

Incidentally, when I first noticed the Grist blog headline, I thought it was going to be an article about the new seed storage facility.

You do, however, admit up front that you wish to introduce a bit of humor. This ark thing is definitely an example of environmentalists engaging in an activity for pure entertainment. I'm surprised GreenPeace has that much extra time and cash on hand. Must have saved all the whales and have nothing else to do.

As I have probably written before, by the way, the story of Noah and the Flood is ethically hideous, Yahweh comes across as a monster, and it has been considered a powerful bit of biblical evidence why belief in God is evil.  And that it should be served up to children, in many ways, to teach them about what God is like, is grotesque.

Maywa's "40 days of flooding" is a rather comically understated way to refer to the biblical Flood.  It sounds rather as though the basement drain was backing up, and the prima-donna plumber said over the phone, "Well, maybe I'll come and look at it, and, then again, maybe I won't."  And a few weeks later: "Oh, did my secretary to remember to call you to tell you that my wife and I have been away on a cruise to Australia and Antarctica?  And now that we are back, you can't believe how behind I am in my housecall list."

Genesis 8.4 does indeed say, "And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat."  We have no good idea what place the biblical author had in mind.  But traditionally, for nearly a couple of millennia, "Ararat" has been identified as a beautiful, snow-capped, round-peaked mountain in the land inhabited by the Armenians (so, east of Asia Minor, south of the Caucasus and north of Mesopotamia), and has long been venerated by them as a place of great holiness.  So if nothing else comes of this ark business, at least the Armenians are getting some attention out of it, and it is nice to be nice to the Armenians.

It would be interesting to know how Ararat's snow cap is faring these days.  If it has been shrinking, in fact, like Kilimanjaro's and like the high-altitude ice and snow on a number of other mountains, then it certainly makes sense to bring some media attention there, quite appropriate in connexion with the climate-change-related events at the G8 summit.

As for the animals: We can never say enough about the biodiversity crisis.  And we clearly have not done enough to make it clear, that the fundamental danger associated with the climate crisis is its threat to this planet's biodiversity, meaning the entire community of living creatures that have evolved here and live here.

Nevertheless, it is strongly to be hoped that no animals, wild or domesticated, have been unduly stressed or at all mistreated, in putting together this Ark demonstration at Mount Ararat.

There is of course another Ark, being built or already built, in the Netherlands (mentioned not long ago in Grist).  At least that one has a petting zoo, which is sweet, so long as it is handled responsibly.  Presumably that means sheep and goats and donkeys and ponies and llamas, and maybe a placid dog or two.  Small pigs, and rabbits? -- well, with someone responsible holding them, and if everybody goes gentle, that is possible.  Ducks and chickens? -- probably not good for petting, but sure, they could be running around.  Reptiles, especially crocodilians and snakes? -- as with the pigs and rabbits, if they are being held by experts, and the contact is brief, that is doable; there are lots of museum shows and zoo shows in which children are allowed to touch reptiles, very very briefly, and generally the reptiles seem not to mind.

Unlike many other animal-rights supporters, I think that exhibitions of animals -- certain kinds, by no means all -- in zoos and natural science museums can be of benefit to animals.  Coming into contact with live animals, and learning something about them, can move people, especially children, to have sympathy for them, and even to become committed to their welfare.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Moving on from the trees to the process... how much energy was consumed and how much CO2 generated during construction. There's cutting and processing the trees, moving them up to the site, moving and feeding workers to assemble to symbolic object.

Moving on to the the results... it will probably become a tourist attraction. People will consume energy traveling to the site. There will be an influx of pilgrims and other ark-worshippers. There will be a need for Chinese children to manufacture souvenirs and those useless tokens will ahve to be shipped to Mount Ararat to be sold in newly constructed shops. If the ark does not remain on Mount Ararat, how much carbon will be emitted moving it around the globe?

Food for thought.

I would like to see some discussion about efforts to construct modern arks designed to preserve biodiversity.

Please see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1033 ... for a recent news story on this subject.

They are already proving to be valuable. From the article referred to above...

"In 1996, Iraqi botanists dipped into their own seed bank, packed up 200 kinds of seed, and sent them for safekeeping in Syria. It was a wise move. Once the Iraq war began, their seed bank was looted. It had been kept in the town of Abu Ghraib.

'The fact that Iraq has had large-scale destruction and may at some point still be able to bring those crops back is a very hopeful thing,' Raven says."

It is also possible for groups or individuals to adopt endangered plants and grow them in their gardens, cooperating with others to ensure genetic diversity. This can be done to protect cultivated plants neglected by our agricultural-industrial complex or to protect native plants so that it will be possible to return them to "restored" native ecosystems once the human species comes to its senses.

NOTE: check with federal and state authorities before growing listed endangered plants, as it might be illegal, especially if it looks like you gathered your starting material from the wild... VERY ILLEGAL! But that is why this needs to be discussed. Should individuals be growing endangered plants?

We need to create REAL arks for future generations.

Is there anything like a seedbank, or "ark," for animal DNA?  I believe the traditional conservationist practice has been to capture animals on the brink of extinction, and to get them to breed in captivity, until their population reaches a certain satisfactory number, at which point the conservationists can begin to reintroduce them into their native wild environment.  In the US, that has been done with the black-footed ferret and the California condor.

Mexican wolves have been released in the Gila mountains in SE AZ and SW NM, but I do not know if that program included a prior capture-and-breed episode.  And that program may not succeed, seeing that the human beings of the region have been showing lethal signs of lycophobia.

In Costa Rica, and perhaps other Central American countries, frogs native to high altitudes are being collected and kept in captivity, since their habitats are disappearing.  One wonders how long that kind of very well-meaning project can be maintained.  It sounds like an Ark that will never find its Ararat.

So to repeat: Is anyone compiling a bank of animal DNA?  The cloning technicians seem to be getting better all the time at cloning different kinds of animals, so perhaps such a bank will make sense.  Somebody I think has been toying with the idea of cloning a mammoth, since there is a fair amount of frozen organic remains of mammoths, and since Asian elephants (who would provide the wombs and the nurture) are fairly closely related to mammoths, and since conditions in northern North America and Siberia are probably not much different from what they were like when mammoths flourished.

One wonders if anyone would object to creating a kind of Pleistocene Park in Siberia or the Yukon valley, inhabited by a herd of neo-mammoths.  It seems like it should be doable, after all.  But would that not be ironic, to go through the trouble of creating a mammoth herd, only to see them succumb to the effects of global warming.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.