Global Warming

Stupid Word of the Day: The Copernican Principle - states, essentially, that you aren't special. Y'know, in a cosmological sense. Nothing personal.


Typically, when one of my fellow students asks me about global warming, I'll throw them off course by saying something like

"Actually, analysis of the current data concerning sunspots and the solar magnetic fields suggests that we may be entering a period of solar quiesence, similar to the one that caused the so-called 'Little Ice Age' in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which could more the offset the effects of global warming, and actually result in a net cooling of the Earth in the coming century."

They will say

"Really? Is that so?"

Or something along those lines, then walk away.

And although the above statement may be true, it is not my real view on global warming.

The truth is, the earth goes through cycles of heating and cooling. Sixty-five million years ago, the Earth was ten degrees warmer, on average, than it is today. Ten degrees! It was so warm that even places deep in the arctic circle were as temperate as the southernmost part of Alaska today, with lush forests and lovely dinosaurs running around and killing each other all over the place. To quote Biden, let me say that again; ten degrees. And Al Gore is getting all worked up about a measly .57 or whatever.

To say that man is completely responsible for all of the drastic snail-paced climate changed is arrogant in the extreme. To think that we as a species could, through the emmision of certain gasses which have been hypothesized to trap a fraction more heat than a regualar atmospheric mix, completely alter the entire biosphere, is like thinking that a kid, as a student, could throw the entire school into disarray by covering one teacher's whiteboard. We've shifted from the we humans art better than thou, animalia mindset of the middle ages, where it was thought that humans were blameless, and not animals at all, to a mindset that goes more along the lines of oh my gosh, we're destroying the environment! We're the most horrible things ever to tarnish the beautiful surface of the planet! How I wish I was a blameless cow! But really, both are equally arrogant. At first, we thought we were special enough to be perfect. Now, we think that we're special enough to be the opposite.

To take the Copernican Principal out of its lofty cosmological origins, and apply it to biology, presents a pretty accurate picture. Humans are arrogant creatures, and we always like to think that we're special - that we're in the center of the universe, that we can destroy the world without trying, that sort of thing. The Copernican principle blocks this out. We aren't special. We're just another species. We may be a particularly viscious and destructive one, but we are still just one of the crowd. No other species in the past has unintentionally destroyed the world, so why do we think that we should be able to?