and the yuppies are worried about what wine they'll drink w/their organic veggies. Typical of effete scum.

What part about "canary in the coal mine" didn't you understand?

We won't have enough oil to ship the wine, anyway. Back to making our own mead--oh, wait--the honeybees will all be dead.

I'm so glad I don't have kids.

Speaking of being glad not to have kids (me too), why doesn't Salon with all its parenting articles in the Life section write about how having kids now is looking more and more like cruelty? Bringing kids into an armageddon-like over heated world. Why?

I have recently read some material concerning the effects of "The Little Ice Age" on England, the initial denial of the continuing effect, and the eventual accommodation to "the facts on the ground." Even then, some mention was made of wine.

I also recently traveled in an area in North America that is littered with huge rocks in various configurations, that constitute glacial moraine. the magnitude of the forces is almost incomprehensible. This area was covered by glaciers with a thickness of kilometers.

There is an article in a science magazine that observed that a man eating beef and walking would be responsible for exudation of more CO2 than a man driving a motor vehicle the same distance, due to the gas generated in the process of raising cattle.

Indeed, the current unsustainability of mammalian life on our planet may be attributable to the numbers of homo sapiens sapiens now present and burgeoning. Every effort to contain "pollution" is thrwarted by increasing population, since even allowing for variabilty in consumption among areas, there is a cumulative negative consequence of population growth as commodities including soil, which is not replenishable at the rate of utilization, are exhausted. Also, "pollution" is a factor of population.

The Earth has experienced gross fluctuations in the "environment." So long as they remain within certain parameters, we'll survive. If they don't ... well, individual lives are anyway finite. And there are other resource limitations that also create limits. Our programming that fosters biological replication will be frustrated. So ...

We're just another life form. Life forms adapt or they don't. They come and they go. We are so infatuated with ourselves and impose such restrictions on use of available means to have preferred groups survive, that we doom our species. Armageddon may be a biblical concept. but it seems to be half-hearted in that it precedes an edenic period. The counterpart by analogy is distinguishable by being a transition to exinction. Or will these changes in process, affect our behavior?

We'll just ship in a few cases from Santa Claus Vineyards at the North Pole.

I'm just wondering. I don't have anything particularly insightful to share on this topic (except that I'm pregnant, and now even more terrified than I was before I read it), but I always wonder why even the most boring "since you asked" or movie review usually gets 40+ letters but environmental articles consistently hardly get any.

I've had no doubt about the reality of global warming, or of its impact on weather conditions here in the United States. Evidently, monitoring something as fragile as a wine grape seems as good a measure as any of our changing weather conditions.

While I could certainly learn to appreciate Syrah and Riesling over, say Merlot, I also applaud vineyards that embrace biodynamic and organic growing methods. If nothing else, they help to preserve the integrity of soil, water, and air. For me, this is just as important as taste. (Read http://www.organic-nature-news.com/organic-wine.html)