Plissken wrote:Sure, and if the greenhouse effect gets much worse, a combo of shifting tidal pressures from the melted polar caps and increasing temperatures might reset the whole board.
But, don't worry, it's all natural...
Exactly. Mother Nature's way of ridding herself of a dangerous infection. The increased emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human technology are still governed by the laws of Nature--and Physics, for that matter. Greenhouses gases increase, Earth's climate changes. Earth gets warmer, ice caps melt. Ice caps melt, we all drown.
The unnatural thing about increased emissions and the other ways humanity is affecting nature is that we're putting the environment that sustains our species at risk--hence endangering our own species survival. No other species on earth does this (not even lemmings, whose seeming suicidal tendencies are actually nothing of the sort). We can make the planet unlivable for ourselves, and we're doing it, too, at an alarming rate. But Nature will still be Nature--the laws that govern it will continue to govern it--long after we've greenhouse-gassed ourselves out of existence.
I think the problem is that humans can look ahead into the future further than any other animal we know of, and yet most of us can't see far enough ahead to understand the actual consequences of our actions. Most other animals live from meal to meal, on instinct: they don't
want anything except to survive, except in an unconscious or instinctive way. Humans have fully developed senses of aquisitiveness; we create things to want, and then make plans for how to get what we want. Those plans often seem long-term to us: let's drill in ANWR, and in ten years we'll no longer be dependent on foreign oil. That makes sense; who wants to be dependent on foreign oil? Solving the political/economic problem might help us for fifty years or more--that's a long time in terms of the individual human life span. But if we want our species to survive in the truly long-term--the way other species, like alligators or ostriches, have--we need to consider the environmental ramifications of our actions.
Humans can't screw up Nature. It is what it is. But we can make our environment unlivable for our species. And IMHO, that's what we're doing.
Halfway down the stairs Is the stair where I sit. There isn't any other stair quite like it. I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top; So this is the stair where I always stop.
