global warming caused chocolate!

There's no question that global warming won't eventually set up ideal conditions for tropical forests somewhere. The short term anxiety - over the next century or two - is whether changing weather and rainfall patterns won't kill off the tropical rain forests we've got before the new ones have gotten properly under way.

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

is probably a good model for what Exxon-Mobil and its fossil-fuel extracting friends want to see happening, and while it wasn't an extinction event, it was notable for the sudden appearance of a lot of new species.

A whole lot of ecological niches shrank or vanished, and the species that had been occupying them suffered population crashes (but mostly didn't go extinct) and evolved new species that could exploit the new ecological niches that had suddenly appeared.

Life adapts - it has had plenty of practice - but the process of adaption isn't much fun for the individuals involved.

It's a rather extravagant route to new goodies.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Mmmmm. I love chocolate. I'm gonna go release all the freon from my old air conditioners.

Bob

Let all the hot air out of Sloman's head. It will cause more warming that a little freon.