Cloudscape

The killing of a human, even humans of exceptionally low intelligence and therefore of proportionally low sentience, is considered the worst possible crime, yet the killing of other animals which scientists have confirmed to be highly intelligent, and certainly appear to be more sentient than many humans (such as those that are mentally retarded), deserve no trial. Mental retardation can sometimes reduce IQ to below 20. If people who are profoundly mentally retarded are protected by law, it only seems reasonable that dolphins, as well as elephants and some primates, should also be protected by law, yet there is no international law that protects them.

This has nothing to do with ethics. This distinction is made purely out of our instinctive urges to preserve the human race. Animals of near-human sentience should have the same rights as humans, all the more as there are many people whose intelligence is barely above that of some animals. Our need to preserve our own race is so strong that we will keep even people in permanent vegetative state alive, yet most people see the killing of sentient animals as being as innocent as a sport.

We have invented law at least partly to protect ourselves, and not just out of respect for others. Someone who kills humans is a threat to humans and may therefore also be a threat to ourselves, but if someone kills animals, even highly sentient animals, this does not pose a threat to us.

We have no instinct for the preservation of nature as we have an instinct to preserve our own species, and any respect we do show for nature comes forth from our own sentience. A respect, as has been shown, that dolphins, one of the most sentient species in the world, actually share, as evinced in the risk they are willing to take to save humans. The only other species that is known to possess such levels of empathy, high enough to spontaneously save a being of another species, are humans.

We are inclined to underestimate other sentients because, unlike ourselves, they have no civilization. This is not because of their lack of intelligence, however, but rather because of their lack of efficient manipulatory appendages — that is, hands. Aside from our intelligence, our hands are the most important thing that set us apart from other animals, and while they may seem to be less significant than our intelligence, this is actually quite misleading.

One is inclined to assume that our civilization proves our intelligence, but it is important to remember that our neocortex has no longer changed in morphology in the past hundred thousand years, as our civilization, rather than furthering its evolution, made it unnecessary to our survival.

It would not be fair to compare the complexity of dolphins' lives to that of our own, as dolphins have never had the chance of achieving the complexity of environment as that in our civilization. Rather, because our brain as it is now isn't very different from what it was before civilization was formed, we should compare it to how complex our lives were before we formed civilizations. Comparing our own way of hunting with theirs, it would seem that theirs is more complex. It is our ability to use tools that at this point really distinguishes us from dolphins.

Consider how dolphins organize their hunting, surrounding gigantic shoals, dispersing them and driving them to the surface. This isn't as simple as doing the same with a herd of terrestrial animals, a feat that any pack of wolves can manage. The fish in shoals are enormous in number, and in shoals of Atlantic herrons can number up to 3 billion. As a result, shoals act as very complex systems, and it isn't possible to pick fish out of the shoals until they have been dispersed numerous times, neither is a single fish enough. The shoal has to be of just the right size so that it is enough for the entire group, but not so large that it becomes impossible to catch any. If a smaller group escapes, it is lost.

To disperse a shoal as a singleton predator is one thing, but to surround a large shoal in a group is another entirely. Hunting in this way is comparable in complexity (though not in danger) to a high-profile military operation, the significant difference between the two being that this particular operation is in 3D.

This seems like a minor detail, but it multiplies the level of complexity involved. For a pack of hunting wolves, the only directions from which to choose are left and right. To a group of dolphins, it is far more complicated. Every move has to be carefully coordinated, and this requires a high degree of cooperative and language abilities.

Because of the disparity in brain morphology, it is hard to compare dolphin to human intelligence, but the most relevant finding is probably the number of synapses in dolphin cortices: dolphins have 0,87 · 10¹⁴ cortical synapses, compared to 1,3 · 10¹⁴ in the human cortices (Encyclopedia of Marine Animals, page 147). The estimates of the latter cipher vary, however, and the estimates of the cortical synapses in dolphins would likely also vary if more research went into it. However, based on these ciphers, dolphins would have 67% the number of synapses humans have. This does not mean that they would have 67% of our intelligence, but rudimentary as it is, this would probably be the best approximation we have so far.

We seem to be biassed against animal intelligence because out of instinct we want to be special, despite ever more research pointing to the contrary. If our image of the intelligence of animals changes, however, so should our ethics about deciding about their lives. Ethically, the killing of animals of near-human sentience is tantamount to homicide.

 

There have been thousands of researches into global warming, and for some reason, they all contradict one another. This may mean three things about part of these researchers: either they're careless, they're biased, they're frauds. According to recent research 2% of scientists admit having falsified data, while as much as 34% of scientists admitted having omitted data contrary to their assumptions. Since we cannot know which of the three it is, and we can hardly do our own research all by ourselves, the best thing we can do is to combine the results from all these researches and take the average from their results. It's surreal that we can trust scientists so little that we have to resort to such primitive methods, but it's the best we can do. If the disparity in these results shows us anything, then it is that we should not be too quick to trust researchers. Either how, we can best trust the results that have been replicated the most.

Look up graphs of global temperature, gather a large number of them together, study them carefully and compare them. You will find some sources that claim the last ten thousand years have been exceptionally warm, others that say the last ten thousand years have been exceptionally cool. You will find some sources claiming that the Middle Ages have been warmer than now, others that claim that it is warmer now than in the Middle Ages.

Furthermore, you will find sources that place today's temperature on graphs of the past millions of years, and you will find graphs that show only the past hundred-and-fifty years, so that in either case you cannot tell if man was the cause.

You will also find sources that compare solar activity with temperature claiming it to prove that the increase in solar activity causes the increase of temperature, but either minimize or ignore the deviations in temperature, while you will also find sources that show only temperature, while ignoring solar activity.

And finally, you will find sources comparing temperature with carbon dioxide concentrations. Some will selectively choose periods in which the increase of temperature follows the increase of carbon dioxide as a proof that carbon dioxide is the main cause of temperature increase, while other sources will selectively show periods in which the increase of carbon dioxide increases temperature, claiming this to be proof that carbon dioxide does not increase temperature at all.

If, like these scientists, you are biased, then you will choose whichever source you want to believe and ignore all others. If you are a seeker of truth, then you will search a compromise between these sources. The truth is most likely to lie somewhere in between, as it usually does.  The world is not doomed to turn into inferno, nor is everything perfectly fine.

The average, most replicated results are most likely to be correct, while the extremer, rarer results are the most likely to have been influenced by bias. This is a direct accusation of the scientists that brought these results, and I believe that they should be given any credence (or, for that matter, a license). I write this to warn anyone who does research on any field whatsoever to consult different sources, and conclude that their evidence is correct only if there are no other sources presenting evidence to the contrary. Meta-analysis is highly useful. Some meta-analyses calculate averages between the data of different studies, which likely provide the most accurate and reliable results.

Studies that combine data from different studies indicate a relatively mild increase of temperature — not high enough to portend doomsday, but high enough to be a reason for concern, in that it will have a major impact on the diversity, richness and beauty of the biosphere, and therefore as well as on the quality of our own lives.

Either how, all studies thus far have reveal that anthropogenic greenhouse gases (AGGs) are responsible for the increase of temperature, even the studies that claim the opposite. Some studies have been able to minimize the increase of temperature due to AGGs with the popular "3 watts per square meter" number, but none have come to an actually low number — 3 watts per square meter is actually quite a lot if one does the math, enough to cause an increase in global temperature of 0,9 kelvin (see article below).

That they arrived at this number, without realizing its significance, shows that it is likely to be correct, as these results are not distorted by bias towards the idea of global warming.

See also:

Holocene Extinction Event

It might be that many psychoactive plants, such as Saint John's wort, a herbal antidepressant, did not evolve their psychoactive substances through mere coincidence. If it was coincidental, it might have occurred in a few plant specimens, but it wouldn't have come to be present in every single specimen of the species. Evolution does not happen without reason. If a mutation occurs and it is useful, then there's a chance that it is passed on onto next generations, but if it has no use at all for the species, then it will disappear.

Obviously, it must have been some use for these substances. Thus, either the psychoactive effect of these substances on animals was useful for the plant, or the psychoactive effect of these substances is a side effect of the substance's real use to the plant. However, as no other use of these substances has been observed, and the plant only wastes energy on producing them, it is obvious that we should assume otherwise.

Moreover, most plants containing psychoactives contain several psychoactives with a similar effect, even though these psychoactives are very different in structure and composition, so that they are unlikely to have been produced in the same chemical pathways. For instance, compare the substances hyperforin and hypericin found in Saint John's wort: hyperforin is aliphatic, whereas hypericin is cyclic. Hyperforin is derived from phloroglucinol, while hypericin is derived from anthraquinone. Either psychopharmaceutical cannot be produced through the combination of the other with other molecules present in the plant, contrary, for instance, to the substances found in Rhodiola rosea, an antidepressant and alleged adaptogen.

Why would a plant produce two different psychoactives with similar effects in entirely different ways? It might therefore be that for some reason, their psychoactive effect increased their odds of survival.

Perhaps these plants, much like the silk worm do today, have always depended upon human cultivation, and developed their psychoactive effect from the artificial selection of humans, much like livestock developed their increased body mass from human selective breeding, or like dogs developed their obedience. As selective breeding shows, human influence can cause evolution to accelerate dramatically, so that it is very well possible for thousands of medical and psychoactive plants to evolve in only tens of thousands of years. What is clear is that herbalism has existed for at least 5.300 years, based on a body found in the Swiss Alps with medicinal herbs among his personal effects.

When some plants of a species developed a mutation causing them to produce psychoactives, someone would have discovered it eventually, especially if their effects were short-term. If the effect was pleasant or interesting, the discoverer might have decided to find more of the plant, and grow some for later. As the plants which were grown were selected according to their potency, they became more and more distinct from their original species generation after generation, so that they eventually formed an altogether separate species.

It is also likely that many medicinal plants evolved in this way. However, it might also be that certain plants containing medicinal substances might themselves have had uses for it, for although plants have no nervous system which might react to psychoactives, they do have a biochemistry, which, though it differs immensely from that of animals, nonetheless also has many things in common with it.

Plants whose effects were long-term were probably only cultivated in later periods, in the Neolithic, since it was unlikely for anyone to discover the effects of long-term working psychoactive or medicinal plants unless they happened to grow amidst the crops. In this case, the plants were likely to be reaped along with the crops, and parts of the plant may have been eaten by accident, or their substances where inhaled during threshing.

While the first Agrarian Revolution happened only 10.000 years ago, a more primitive form of cultivation might have been possible much earlier, since it requires no actual agriculture to grow psychoactive plants for consumption. After all, psychoactive plants can be used at relatively low amounts to have their desired effect, whereas agricultural plants need to be grown in much higher quantities to provide for food. The Amazonians have almost no agriculture, yet they cultivate ayahuasca using cuttings. In fact, despite their lack of agriculture, they call the Amazon a "cultivated forest," that is, a forest that they helped shape. The existence of ayahuasca might be an indicator that to some extent, the Amazon might indeed be called a cultivated forest. It seems that, at the least, they did help one particular plant to come into being, though the liana, as one might expect, is rare.

Among the psychoactive plants, there are two types: some are symbiotic, and some are parasitic. Basically, a psychoactive plant is parasitic if it is addictive, because the cultivators then no longer use the plant out of their own volition, and therefore, it no longer matters whether the plant has any actual benefit to them; whether it benefits them or not, it is already ascertained that they will continue to cultivate it. The cultivators do not base their selection of addictive plants on whether or not it is healthy, but merely on how well it satisfies their addiction. It might therefore be said that, as a rule, addictive psychoactive plants are never healthy.

The symbiotic plants are the kind that are cultivated because they are of benefit to the users, and are invariably not (or barely) addictive. Most of these plants either act on long-term, such as herbal antidepressants. Among the short-term acting varieties, the overwhelming majority are entheogens.

For instance, the Amazonians use ayahuasca as a medicine for physical and mental illness, enabling the user to find the cause of the illness. Similar plants are found to be used by other Native American tribes for the same reason, such as the San Pedro cactus. Because of the medicinal use of these plants, it was, of course, important in their selection that they were healthy, and relatively safe to use. Those who cultivated these plants for medical use or as a means of self-improvement obviously choose those strains that proved to be the least harmful and most beneficial.

One could say that this could be vaguely compared to a clinical trial, except that the guinea pigs were actual humans, usually the shamans or the natives themselves, and without the procedures of scientific method, such as double-blindness or follow-ups. Moreover, the results were only passed on through folklore and were never written down, and because there was never a careful analysis of the users' health, only the significant findings were noticed: in people who lived in such primitive conditions, such petty symptoms as a skin rash were easily overlooked. Despite all these drawbacks, however, I believe that these trials were not without merit, for they were repeated countless times over thousands of years. Because any strain of the plants that proved to be less toxic than the rest, they evolved until they became of the very low toxicity of which they are today.

For instance, cannabis, unlike tobacco, causes no lung cancer, and there even appears to be a negative link between cannabis use and lung cancer, indicating a protective effect. It has been hypothesized that cannabis contains substances which protect the lungs, because any inhalation of smoke would normally cause an increased risk of lung cancer. It seems very unlikely that a plant which is smoked would spontaneously develop substances which negate the damage caused by smoking by pure chance.

Also, it has been found that marihuana contains substances, such as cannabidiol, which are antipsychotic. Heavy use of marihuana can increase the risk of developing psychosis, and the presence of cannabidiol in marihuana could counter this effect. Unfortunately, modern commercial cultivation of dealers, unlike the wiser cultivation of the shamans, has overlooked this danger. Instead of choosing the strains of cannabis based both on safety and potency, they based it solely on potency, ignoring safety altogether. Because of this, the ratio of cannabidiol to the other cannabinoids in marihuana has decreased, which might in part be responsible for the increase of psychosis among seen among heavier users of marihuana today. That this ratio has changed again so quickly because of human cultivation is an indication that the selective breeding of marihuana had once been based on the presence of the cannabidiol, for if it would always have been based solely on the concentration of THC in the thousands of years it had been cultivated, as it is now, the cannabidiol would by now have disappeared or nearly disappeared.

Ironically, another way in which some plants proved to be safer than others was through a bitter taste. Almost any psychedelic plant there is known tastes extremely bitter: kratom, san pedro, peyote, psilocybe, salvia divinorum and ayahuasca are all renowned to be thoroughly disgusting. Marihuana is very bitter when eaten, which might have been how the plant was originally used. Of all psychedelic plants, the most disgusting of all is ayahuasca, and it is accordingly also the most potent. In addition, the psychedelics can also cause vomiting if too much is used, and new users of ayahuasca almost invariably vomit, although more experienced users are able to keep from vomiting the brew. It appears that this bitterness is meant as a warning to those who use it. New users are more likely to be stop eating early, repelled by the taste, while experienced users, being more used to the taste, would be better able to conquer their disgust for it. Aside from this, the bitterness is also an indicator of the plant's potency and the dosage the user takes in. To unprepared users, it can be a foretaste of the suffering it might bring about if they are not ready for the experience.

A German and Dutch proverb actually says that what tastes bitter is healthy: "Was bitter dem Mund, ist dem Herzen gesund," which is also used in Dutch as "Bitter in de mond maakt het hart gezond." While it is true that many medicines taste bad, this is only an issue in herbal medicines, which need to be eaten or swallowed as a viscous brew. It is very likely that this bitterness is meant to ensure that the right dosage is used. It seems too coincidental that practically every psychedelic plant there is is bitter in proportion to their potency.

Everything should be in moderation, and anything that is in excess will be dangerous. The thing is that it is far easier to use drugs in excess than it is to do something else to excess. Usually, it is very hard to do something to an excess, as it will become harder the more we then do it. When we do something to excess, our body usually warns us of this, but this is not the case with drugs. For instance, if one trains too hard in the gym, one will eventually be stopped by fatigue and cramps, but there is only a very small step between swallowing a single pill and an entire bottle. The most important reason why drugs are so dangerous is that our body does not stop us from using too much. If our body did not stop us from feeding or drinking too much, it would be equally dangerous.

Ergo, for herbal psychedelics to be safer, they needed something to replace the body's own feedback mechanisms, such as a bitter taste. It is unlikely that the shamans consciously choose the psychedelics for their bitter taste in the knowledge that this would moderate usage. Instead, they probably merely observed that people who only used the bitter variety were healthier.

Most psychoactive plants which aren't addictive appear to be harmless or even beneficial to health. On the other hand, some plants might also use psychoactives as a poison like any other, either to warn animals not to eat them them or to kill those that did. Datura stramonium, for instance, is quite dangerous, and none that were so bold as to try to use it thought the experience so pleasant as to even consider cultivating the plant. Hallucinogens as a warning might be a pretty drastic warning compared to nettle sting, for instance, but may imprint a permanent traumatic memory even on an animal's inefficient memory. It is possible that the Amanite uses this same strategy, as an addition to its physical toxicity.

Aside from those meant either to keep animals from eating the plant or psychoactives meant to coerce the user into cultivating the plant through addiction, however, most psychoactives found in plants seem to be largely beneficial.

The notion that these plants live in symbiosis with humans is reminiscent of the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that all organisms in the biosphere are part of a greater superorganism; and although there is clearly not by far as much union between the organisms of the biosphere and the cells of a single organism, there do seem to many symbiotic relations between different species. In the end, any species depends on countlessly many others, and many depend even on us.

There are some that say that as the earth has been able to sustain itself for billions of years, we need not worry about climate change. The danger about climate change, however, is not that it would destroy the Earth but that it would damage it. One might as well say that as one usually survives a bout of flu, there's no need to use medication against it. Climate change has caused mass extinctions in the past and it is certain to do so again in future unless it is prevented. No-one wants to live in such a period of mass extinctions. But mass extinctions are effectively happening, likely in part due to natural causes and in part due to anthropogenic causes.

Solar activity, deforestation and global warming may all play their part in this. Either how, it cannot be said that we are ourselves too small to have an impact on the globe, as we've already impacted 83% of the Earth's land area. In fact, it's quite likely that deforestation is partly responsible for the increase of C14 (carbon-14, a more useful measure in climatology because it is found both in CO2 and CH4, methane). The Amazon Forest alone is thought to be responsible for 10% of world's the carbon stores.

The radiative forcing of carbon dioxide has been measured, moreover, and those measurements prove that the increase of carbon dioxide is at least in part responsible for the global warming: it has been shown, mathematically, that a doubling of carbon dioxide leads to an increase of 3 kelvins. Well, carbon dioxide concentration hasn't been above roughly 250 ppm for the past thousands of years, and hasn't been above roughly 300 ppm for the past hundreds of thousands of years, but since the Industrial Revolution it rose to 390 ppm as of 2009 (sources), an increase of 30% which would cause 0,5 kelvins of increase in global temperature, which is pretty close to the increase which has been observed, about 0,75 K. It must be noted that the 0,5 kelvin value does not include positive climate feedbacks, which may or may not account for part or most of the remaining 0,25 K.

It is sometimes said that the radiative forcing of anthropogenic greenhouse gases is no more than roughly 3 watts per square meter, which would be equivalent to placing a christmas light on every square meter of the planet, but this representation is quite misleading. Against what one would expect, those christmas lights could count up to something quite big. Counterintuitively, when one does the math, one achieves the same figure: a radiative forcing of 3 watts per square meter would still cause an increase of average global temperature of half a degree. The solar constant is 1368 watts per meter. About 30% of this energy is reflected back into space, leaving about 960 watts. These 960 watts account for an average temperature of 290 kelvins (which would otherwise be close to absolute zero). 960 by 3 is 320. 290 by 320 is 0,9. This is, of course, but an approximation.

An increase of about one kelvin doesn't seem much, but in the span of a century, which is an extremely short time on geological scale, this is quite a lot. In fact, should this change continue for another thousand years, which is still a very short time on geological scale, then this would lead to an increase of temperature equivalent to that of the Paleocene-Eocene Temperature Maximum. During the PETM, the temperature had increased by 7 degrees over a period of thousand years, an effect so dramatic as to bring about tropic forests as high as the arctic circle, called boreotropic circles. Worse, the global warming is speeding up, and is predicted by the most accepted scenario's to be 1,4 kelvins for the twenty-first century, though some scenario's predict an increase of only 0,5 kelvins, while others predict 4,4 kelvins. The only solace is that while a hundred years may be little on geological scale, it is quite a lot today on human scale, so that it may give us time to reverse global warming.

Then there's the less important issue that as carbon dioxide increases further, it could eventually have mild toxic effects. If the carbon dioxide further increases, it could have an impact on health both to humans and animals (especially to humans, which spend a lot of time indoors). In the US, carbon dioxide concentrations in working environments may not exceed 0,5 percent by law. The average percentage outdoors is already 0,38%. A concentration of 1% causes dizziness within hours. However, if we were to breathe air of somewhat lower concentrations not just for hours but for our entire lives, it could have a greater effect on our health, especially since this concentration is higher in cities.

Over the past hundred and fifty years, CO₂ concentrations have increased from 280 to 380 ppm, and this increase is exponentially. Based on observations from Mauna Loa (R. F. Keeling et al.), the carbon dioxide concentration has been increasing from 338 ppm in 1980 to 380 ppm in 2008, with an average increase of about 0,4% per year. If this trend continues, then within 50 years, the CO₂ concentration will have increased to 463 ppm. In 100 years, 570 ppm, or 0,57%. In just 30 years, if working places are still to follow the US law that the air should not contain more than 0,5% CO₂, they will have to be built in the countryside. In fifty years, it will no longer be possible at all. Meanwhile, people in metropolises will be faced serious health complications. In some congested areas in metropolises such as in Kaduna, the CO₂ concentration can already rise to 1800 ppm, enough to increase the risk of accidents.

Moreover, an obvious discrepancy has been observed between solar activity and carbon dioxide concentration, which becomes especially conspicuous from 1950s onward, whereas before the 1800s, the two had been parallel (Reimer et al., SIDC, NGDC). However, this deviation becomes less apparent dependent on what scale one places it in the graph, so that it can be represented as being smaller than it really is. We are dealing with small variations, of course, but in such a complex system as the biosphere, those small variations can have big results — not over the long run, but surely enough to affect our own lives, which is, after all, what matters to us. Also, in contrast to C14 concentrations, sunspot activity hasn't been particularly high over the past few thousands of years according to some sources (Solanki et al.), though according to most sources, it is warmer now than thousands of years ago.

In fact, research indicates that the Arctic has been receiving less and less energy over the past 8000 years, and that this cooling trend would normally have continued for another 4000 years, weren't it that another phenomenon had reversed it (University of Arizona). The north pole should have been cooler than it has been in the past eight millennia, and yet it is melting rather than growing.

It is true that through sunspot activity, increase in global temperature can increase carbon dioxide, but as most data show that the former is not responsible for the latter, it must logically be the other way around. It is a often a premature assumption that if two things are causally related and either precedes the other, one thing causes the other and that is the end of it. However, this leaves the possibility that the causal relationship is bidirectional, ie either may cause the other.

A similar and even worse prejudice is that when it is found that something causes a particular effect, it is also the sole cause of the observed effect; however, it is very often so that an observed effect has several causes, especially with more multiplex systems, such as those of psychology, biology, sociology and in this case, geology. In fact, when there is widespread dispute amongst scientists which of several possible causes is the effective cause, what we find is that it is, one could almost say, almost always so that all are at least to some extent involved, as the mere fact that so many scientists find reasons to assume that a particular cause could be responsible often means that those are good reasons. The truth often lies not in either extreme but in the middle.

Some researchers argued that the increase of C-14 follows the increase of global temperature, rather than the other way around, based on the fact that in past cases of global warming, the increase of C-14 often lagged behind the increase of global temperature by 800 years. It is indeed true that global warming causes a release of C-14, partly because drought releases C14 from withering plant material and partly because heat releases C14 from melting ice reserves. However, it must not be forgotten that this causality is bidirectional: temperature increase will lead to an increase of C14, but an increase of C14 may also lead to an increase in temperature, so that these form a positive feedback. It is unscientific to simply assume that because the latter can cause the former, the former cannot cause the latter.

Either how, the abrupt increase of temperature from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution would be very coincidental if there was no correlation. Keep in mind that a hundred years is an extremely little time on geological timescale; hundred years for the entire earth is about twenty seconds for the average human. If someone gives an injection to a human and he faints twenty seconds later, it is likely to be due to the injection.

Nonetheless, we should be open to possibilities, as this correlation might indeed have another explanation. The sun can have a great variety of effects, since the entire biosphere thrives on it. Chizhevsky propounded that for some reason or other, most historical events appeared to be related to a high number of sunspots, based on examination of human history and its relation to past sunspot activity. This might, for instance, be because of the stimulant effect of sunlight, which increases dopamine, serotonin and glutamate, along with other neurotransmitters. These changes are ideal to stimulate motivation, which is one of the reasons oriental philosophies associated yang, masculinity, with the sun. Sunlight has been implicated in an increase of cognitive and creative abilities, and perhaps — who knows? — this was what prompted the sudden revolutions in the nineteenth century, not only in technology (the Industrial Revolution itself), but also in science (the later part of the Scientific Revolution), and arguably even in art (the rise of romanticism which, for instance, produced some of the best-known classical composers). I am saying this not because I believe this to be the case, but to open our minds to possibilities: it is very hard to know for sure what causes what in matters that take so much time, as there is no way to experimentally verify it and therefore no way of scientifically fully proving it.

It has recently been proposed, based on a comparison of today's global warming with that of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, that carbon dioxide alone does not fit into the models of global warming for that period, and that some other cause must have been involved as well (Rice University). If our models are wrong, it may well be that there is another factor responsible for global warming today, as well. However, it might be that this study overlooked other greenhouse gases such as CH4, a far more potent greenhouse gas.

Either how, whether we are the most important factor in global warming does not matter that much in itself: either how, we are the only ones who can deliberately do anything about it. If we were the ones who caused the increase of carbon dioxide, then it's too late now to repair that by simply stopping anyway, and if not, then there's no way to stop it anyhow; instead, then, we must reverse it. Either how, the increase will continue for some time now unless we do something; partly because it takes a lot of time to revamp an entire civilization of seven billion people, partly due to a vicious cycle of increase of heat leading to increase of carbon dioxide and vice versa. Being so slow and long-winded, geology is a very inert system, and so is our own civilization. We need to take active measures to actually restore the earth's temperature.

When someone develops a disease because of toxins in the plumbing, you're not just going to remove the toxins in the plumbing and wait till the disease stops, and whether the toxins in the plumbing are from the pipelines (of human cause) or from the water supply itself (natural cause) has little to do with that. We must cure the diseased ecosystem, even if the disease will pass with time and the victim will survive it.

The biosphere is not afflicted by the bubonic plague, but nor is what happening just a common cold, either. If we follow this analogy, it could best be compared to a bad bout of flu. It's not terminal. We've had it before. For a week or two we're bedridden, but afterwards we have renewed inspiration for life. Except that in this analogy, that "week or two" is actually millions of years. One day nature will have renewed inspiration for life, but right now, we're still having a bad bout of flu, and by the time it's healed of itself, we will no longer be there. If we want to live in a healthier, richer biosphere, we'll have to cure it ourselves. We need medicines.

It is factual that the biosphere is going through mass extinctions, and while this will allow the biosphere to evolve further, right now, we're still in the middle of a mass extinction event. Are we really so keen on being the ones to see that happen, or would we rather see another scene of the theatre?

I believe we have the inclination to shy away from this task because we are afraid to face our own responsibility. We do not like to be the culprits. Yet, if the Earth were going through a mass extinction event of its own fabrication, we would gladly be the brave heroes to tackle the problem. But does it really matter whether it is our fault or nature's? Either how, we need to stop this. It can be done. Various techniques have been proposed to capture carbon dioxide — scrubbing towers, artificial trees, quicklime process. Other forms of geo-engineering have been proposed as well, such as space sunshades, cloud seeding or reflectivity enhancement, ocean nourishment to increase phytoplankton, and increase of albedo through such simple methods as cool roofs or cultivation of reflective crops such as wheat.

In the past, mass extinction events have ceased just as they came, naturally. Now, however, it did not come naturally, and so it is not likely to cease naturally, since we appear to be the cause. Nature can heal her wounds, but not when the knife is still stuck in her flesh.

How dangerous global warming is for us, I think, is not so important. Our primary concern is not our own safety but the safety of nature, and it is short-sighted to worry more about our own prosperity than about the thousands of species we bring to extinction. Humans can adapt. When struck by floods or hurricanes or desertification, they can be displaced. But nature is not as flexible as ourselves. It does not possess our ingenuity with which we can change in a matter of centuries, and it is not used, even after all the calamity it had gone through, to change this fast. The ecosystems have already been weakened, for instance by our continuous practices of deforestation; in this state, it cannot be put under any more stress without irreparable damage. Sure enough, it will come through whatever torment we put it through: but it will come through maimed, leaving our children on an earth that has become homogenized. One day, our descendants will despise us for having destroyed so much beauty in the world just to satisfy our decadence.

I do not think that global warming in itself is the worst thing we are doing to the planet. If we can cause global warming, we might also cause global cooling. Furthermore, we have increased the temperature with only about half a degree, whereas we have impacted 83% of the Earth's surface, and a large part of it in the most abominable way. Across the entire earth, we have reduced beautiful treasures of nature into into apocalyptic landscapes of materialism. We have bedecked the earth with sights more horrible than any ever seen in the billions of years of our planet's history, and while these industrial sceneries may in themselves have a simple and twisted kind of beauty, it is none that could replace the sublime and multiplex beauty of nature. Global warming in itself can be reverted with the proper technology, and technology is advancing fast; but the destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of their species, however, is a lot harder to reverse through technology.

Mass extinctions are effectively happening, partly due to global warming and partly due to deforestation. These mass extinctions have happened since the beginning of the Holocene epoch when the first larger settlements arose; this ongoing series of mass extinctions has been called the Holocene extinction event. The ecosphere has gone through many mass extinctions before, and it needed them for evolution to occur, but we really do not want to be the ones to have to go through such mass extinction, lest we lose the most beautiful thing on earth in our lives, nature. At some point, if you have been saved from being blunted by society, you must have been moved by that beauty; can we afford to lose that? Has our comfort become more important to us than beauty?

We are the only species on the planet having the power of controlling the earth in such way a we do: we should make extinction obsolete, and not accelerate it. We should take care of life as tenders of a garden, and not damage it by becoming its harmful weed.