Smelly Conclusions
link Flowers losing scent due to climate change.
Ok, now it’s getting serious. For lands to flood, habitats to disappear and glaciers to melt are bad enough. But now for flowers to lose their scents? An abomination.
Kudos to these scientists for uncovering yet another major calamity about to befall mankind as a result of global warming. The discovery of this new phenomenon now edges out some others on the list of issues of urgent importance to mankind. More specifically, it comes in at a firm 187,778th position after smelly feet syndrome and before excessive nasal hair.
Special mention should be made of the scientists’ acuity of reasoning which enabled them to attribute the loss of floral scent directly to global warming. The confidence with which they were able to conclude this surely qualifies them for some kind of award or at the very least, a fancy floral arrangement.
The article goes on to describe the ‘butterfly effect’ of this condition, leading the reader to conclude that massive impacts on food production will result unless science steps in to modify genes in plants to avert catastrophe. While I’m all for the application of science to help out with issues that affect mankind, history has shown that the earth’s ecosystem has its own order and means of working out excesses and shortages. Amazingly this happens even without the input of humans.
Fairly recently, in Canada’s north, someone concluded that wolves were endangering the caribou population and therefore justified targeted killings to cull the wolf population. There are those who believed that doing so would upset the natural predator/prey balance and that the caribou population would grow larger than would otherwise be naturally sustainable. So? Well, it turns out that caribou and certain deer are carriers for parasites that are lethal to boreal growth, which of course creates a whole new set of problems.
If we believe modern science, organisms have a way of adapting to their environments though not always in a way that is considered favorable. If there were scientists around a few million years ago, they’d be fretting that fish were sprouting legs and were adapting to land life. If the global warming crowd were around then, they’d be panicking that all fish would evolve themselves out of existence. In any event, with regard to the ‘defragrancing’ of flowers, maybe the scientists can work on the smelly feet problem.