[Janice D. Soderling]

Wrong, John, I don't hope it happens. Surely you don't think me so petty as to hope for world catastrophe so that from my cremated ashes will rise a quavering "I told you so".

Plagues have historically followed war. Until recent medical progress, epidemics regularly and radically reduced population. Global air travel will speed it up, just as the advent of the sailing ship sped it up in its day.

You've heard of the plague in its various forms, well-documented through the centuries. Three great world pandemics of plague are recorded, in 541, 1347, and 1894 , and countless smaller ones all causing devastating mortality of people and animals across nations and continents. Plague irrevocably changes the social and economic fabric of society. Check this out, John, we have them in Sweden too. http://www.medievalhistories.com/des...lages-england/

You do know that new diseases pop up all the time? There are plenty of fleas and rats and bats to spread them. You do know what ebola and mrsa are? And that polio, tuberculosis and smallpox aren't really eradicated.

It is only in the past hundred fifty years or so that Pasteur proved the germ theory and vaccines were developed to give the Western world a false sense of hubris. Now some feel so safe they say, "Ha, ha. Why isn't everyone dead then? I don't want pasteurized milk or measles vaccine for MY kids."

I'm not passing on a conspiracy theory or "my phone is bugged by aliens". It is Darwinian. What fits in best, survives. And that ain't humankind. Rats and bacteria reproduce faster and have the leading edge.

While it is true that cyclic patterns of warming and cooling can be observed from the past, CO2 emission is speeding up the process and can irrevocably change the recovery pattern. I remember a scientific paper I translated thirty years ago that informed us that if all the emission were stopped "right now" (i.e. then) there would still be twenty years of continued damage as it continued to rise. Nothing has changed regarding that except that there is now more in transit.

I remember in early 1960 a magazine from the UN (there used to be those) about the spreading of desert area of the earth. That seemed so unreal at the time.

The Ra expedition in 1972, reported marine pollution and presented their report to the United Nations.

I used to spend summers on a Baltic island and watch the sailboats come sailing in through waters covered with poison algae. The Baltic Sea is dying for lack of oxygen just like the Gulf of Mexico and other once pristine seas. Its dead marine zones are growing because of excess nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus used as fertilizers in the countries around the Baltic Sea. This are observable facts in OUR lifetime. http://planetsave.com/2008/06/24/bal...ack-of-oxygen/

A dead sea is a dead sea. It has no Easter, it does not rise on the third day.

Check this out. http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...y-destruction/