Creation Care or doomsday?

Wake up with a bracing mug of Creation Care via Rejuvenate magazine's interview with Southern Baptist John Meritt, and then chow down on esteemed Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner's prediction of our collective extinction from "overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change."

Fenner, 95, has won awards for his work in helping eradicate the variola virus that causes smallpox, and makes his argument reluctantly, because he doesn't want to discourage those working for corrective change:

Fenner, who is emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, said homo sapiens will not be able to survive the population explosion and “unbridled consumption,” and will become extinct, perhaps within a century, along with many other species. United Nations official figures from last year estimate the human population is 6.8 billion, and is predicted to pass seven billion next year.

Fenner told The Australian he tries not to express his pessimism because people are trying to do something, but keep putting it off. He said he believes the situation is irreversible, and it is too late because the effects we have had on Earth since industrialization (a period now known to scientists unofficially as the Anthropocene) rivals any effects of ice ages or comet impacts.

Fenner said that climate change is only at its beginning, but is likely to be the cause of our extinction. “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he said. More people means fewer resources, and Fenner predicts “there will be a lot more wars over food.”

Fenner's scientific colleague Stephen Boyden is somewhat more optimistic:

Frank may well be right, but some of us still harbour the hope that there will come about an awareness of the situation and, as a result the revolutionary changes necessary to achieve ecological sustainability.

Fenner does not of course worry himself about an assault by intelligent machines. In his well-considered view, we're about to be our own Terminators.