The sublime arrogance of the human race

Once upon a time, when I was working as a journalist, an editor-in-chief belonging to the useful idiot species ordered us to publish two pictures of the same picturesque village, German or possibly Swiss. The older image, taken the previous year, showed the village covered in snow. The more recent one illustrated a snow-less winter. What better proof of global warming do you want?
The sad truth is that this sort of scientific proof has every chance of being believed by the general public, not only because the average Joe is quite uneducated in such matters, but also because we, as a species, are quite egocentric and the little we know about our world must be the absolute truth. What you and your grandma remember of the weather is ample proof that your point of view is right. Popular science operates the same way. On NASA’s climate page there’s a graph showing temperatures between the 1950 and 1980. Judging by our pathetic lifespans, thirty years is a whole lot of time, that’s serious data we got there. Elsewhere, we’re told we’re seeing record temperatures for the last 136 years! Wow, imagine that! More than 100 years...

What the North Pole might have looked like 55 million years ago

I’m not a scientist and I was minding my own business (reading about ancient civilizations) when I stumbled upon scientific articles referencing previous episodes of global warming. Like the ‘Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum’ when average temperatures were 8 degrees Celsius warmer than today. That happened 55.5 million years ago (when, as far as we know, there were no humans around to cause global warming).
Just think about it - 55.5 million years. Followed by another lesser episode of global warming roughly 2 million years later. In scientific papers, a ‘short period of time’ refers to ‘less than 200,000 years’. To put things in perspective - 200,000 years ago our ancestor Homo Sapiens still squabbled with our Neanderthals cousins.
All that we think we know, all the data we use to silence each other is completely insignificant when we talk about a planet that’s 4.5 billion years old. Civilizations could have come and gone without a trace in such a huge time, the Earth warmed up and cooled down again countless times. Undoubtedly, honest scientists out there are doing the best they can to understand our past with the limited instruments they have at their disposal.
The news these days are full of warnings about a melting glacier - our fault we’re told. People are naturally alarmed because we’ve all learned in school about ice and polar bears living the poles. Nobody taught us about the ancient times when there were palm trees growing at the poles.
What caused that global warming? Fuck knows! Sorry, but this is the most honest answer we can give at this time. If we were not such an arrogant species, we’d have the decency to admit that we don’t know jack-shit about our planet’s past or future.
Looking at our modest barely two-million years old history (date of the oldest Homo Erectus fossils), we’d have to admit we’re irrelevant as a species. All those bloody do-gooders with their‘Save the Earth’ campaigns are just a bunch of hypocrites. If anything, it is our species who will become extinct. The Earth will survive and flourish without us!

Thanks for reading