I'm sure we'll survive the extinction of the honeybee. Or its decimation. I doubt if the bee will become totally extinct, it may evolve into a creature less suited to our needs, and its population may never fully recover to their former numbers. But agriculture as we know it may not. Or maybe we'll just learn to live on a very different diet.

I suppose we can always go back to slash-and-burn, or hunter-gatherer. Or cannibalism. Remember, the honeybee is not a natural creature, it is a domesticated animal that we have modified and adapted to our needs. There are many species of wild bees in the world, but only a few varieties of Apis mellifica pollinate our crops.

The same may be true of global warming. No doubt the earth will stabilize at some new level of equilibrium, but its unlikely we will be able to adapt fast enough to make the change. Consider a world where a great desert spreads from the Rockies to the Appalachians in just a generation, where the Sahara becomes the new breadbasket of the planet, and the glaciers reclaim Europe.

Of course, we don't really know what will happen, or if anything, so it will be hard for us to adapt or plan for it--especially if our leaders insist that nothing is going on, that its all a hoax, or that its all somehow just in our heads.

Then again, the changes may be quite survivable, when looked at in context. We may just kill each other off fighting for water, arable land, fishing grounds, or the oil and minerals we'll need to get through the change.

The world is always changing, what's different this time is its changing so fast. And we tend to forget that the world got along fine without us, it will still be here long after we're gone. The earth will take care of itself. But it doesn't have to take care of us.

In Rapa Nui, the seafarers came in fleets of sea-going canoes. They cut down the trees to clear farmland, and when the population became too big for the island to support there were no trees left to build boats. The population fell from 15000 to 3000 in just a few years.

Some people refuse to believe that story, but the moral is true even if the history is wrong.