Experts: Global Warming Threatens Ruins

Borrowing a favorite question of OpinionJournal's Best of the Web Today: What would we do without experts? USA Today has an article from the AP that reports:

From ancient ruins in Thailand to a 12th-century settlement off Africa's eastern coast, prized sites around the world have withstood centuries of wars, looting and natural disasters. But experts say they might not survive a more recent menace: a swiftly warming planet.

Apparently something else has done more than threaten the "prized sites around the world." Why else would they be called ruins? Someone now expects us to get all worked up over the possibility that a bunch of ruins might get a little more ruined? It seems to me that there are too many people in this world with too little to do.

Recent floods attributed to climate change have damaged the 600-year-old ruins of Sukhothai in northern Thailand, the report said, while increasing temperatures are "bleaching" the Belize barrier reef...

Notice that the recent floods are "attributed to climate change." By whom? Have they not had floods in Thailand before global warming became a hot button issue? In a sense all dramatic weather events for all time are caused by climate change.

An increase in temperature of one degree in a hundred years is now bleaching the Belize barrier reef? I would think that if the reef is getting bleached that most of the bleaching is due to the 75 degrees or so of base temperature rather than the global warming increment.

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