Here’s an interesting story about the resilience of marine life at the Bikini Atoll nuclear test site. Back in 1954, an extremely powerful nuclear weapon was detonated there that “generated a wave of heat measuring 99,000ºF and spread mist-like radioactive fallout as far as Japan and Australia.” Nevertheless, “much to the surprise of a team of research divers who explored the area, the mile-wide crater left by the detonation has made a remarkable recovery and is now home to a thriving underwater ecosystem.” Naturally, like any sensible person, Cato’s Indur Goklany reacted to this with a post about how global warming’s not so bad:
99,000 degrees Fahrenheit! By comparison the upper-bound estimate for global warming is a puny global temperature increase of 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit (less in the ocean). So even if global warming wipes out life on earth, global warming catastrophists can take comfort that nature will, as it inevitably must, reassert itself.
I miss the good old days of denialism. That at least make sense. If the environmentalists were just mistaken and there was no global warming, then of course we wouldn’t want to take action to stop it. But now there’s still demand for rationales for inaction, but the straightforward denialist position has become untenable, so we’re getting a lot of really weird ideas.
Public domain photo of Operation Crossroads Event Baker explosion