The Double Arrogance of the Climate Change Narrative
By: Daniel Goldman
Tags: Humanity, Science, Future, Climate Change, Ethics

𝐆𝐫𝐫𝐥𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭 makes the following statement.

But for those people who claim “it’s not affecting me”, I say: “do you want your children and your grandchildren to grow up in a world whose species diversity and richness is severely impoverished?

Definitely. It affects us. We are poisoning ourselves. But also she makes the following statement.

There is so much that we just don’t know about Earth’s flora and fauna, and now that climate change is front-and-center, we will likely never know what Earth was like before our destructive actions and effects overwhelmed all its ecosystems.

It’s true that there’s a lot that we don’t know about the Earth’s flora and fauna. It’s also true that we’re probably responsible for a lot of the current reduction in biodiversity. But I also think that it shows such massive arrogance, not on a personal level as I mean no disrespect to her, but on a cultural level. In response to her statement, I made the following comment.

There is so much arrogance in this statement. Humans think that they’ve overwhelmed the Earth. Please. The Earth does far more to itself than we’ve ever done to it, or even could do to it right now.

Human Actions vs Nature

Let’s go into this idea for a bit. I mean, we can do a lot of damage, right? Think about how much destructive force we wield through the atom bomb. Imagine if we set off every single bomb. Surely there’s nothing in nature with that much destructive force, right? Wrong.

This quora answer has a great deal of discussion on the topic of the destructive force of nuclear weapons, and their limits. The estimated total destructive power of all of our nuclear weapons is roughly 6.5 gigatons. That’s not small figure! But it pales in comparison to some of the larger supervolcanic eruptions. Wikipedia has a decent size list of supervolcanic eruptions. Consider the Lava Creek eruption, which occurred on the Yellowstone hotspot (Yellowstone is basically a massive caldera of a volcano). The eruption was estimated at 870 gigatons: more than 100 times the explosive force of the world’s entire nuclear arsenal.

If we move beyond the Earth and look at what the rest of the universe can do to this planet, and has done to it, our superiority complex becomes even more embarrassing. Asteroid impacts are a real threat. They’re not just overused movie tropes. There are numerous asteroids that narrowly miss hitting Earth. And sometimes there’s little warning until they’re very close by. While a rare event, an asteroid like the one involved in the Chicxulub impact that caused a mass extinction about 65 million years ago, would release the same amount of energy as about 100 teratons of TNT, which is over 100 times greater than the aforementioned eruption, or 10,000 times as powerful as our entire nuclear arsenal.

With an advanced enough observation and defense system, this risk associated with such collisions could be mitigated, but such mitigation would still require us becoming a lot more space worthy than we already are. We’d likely need a defense system in place far out into the solar system, as well as numerous observation posts.

We think of the atom bomb as such a horrific thing, and it is. We think of ourselves as so powerful for wielding it. But we’re not. We’re arrogant.

The Significance of Earth

A final point that I’d like to mention is our own perception of the Earth. We tend to think of Earth as significant, because it’s where we’ve grown up. As we enter our teenage years, all we’ve known is this world. And to be sure, it’s a nice world. But our current understanding suggests that this planet is in no way unique.

There’s solid justification to suggest that there are numerous Earth-like planets in this galaxy alone. By some estimates, there are currently upwards of 40 billion Earth sized planets orbiting stars, with about 11 billion of them orbiting sun-like stars (Earth Analog). If even 1/100th of one percent of those 11 billion planets are like our own, Earth would literally be one out of millions.

Further, as I mention in my discussion about whether we’re one of the ancient species of the galaxy, it’ll be around 100 billion years before there are no more sun like stars. Earth is but one world among a vast ocean of worlds in our own galaxy, all of which will be long dead before new worlds like ours stop forming. And given what we’ve learned about the potential habitability of worlds around red dwarfs, it’s likely that life will thrive in the universe for literally trillions of years.

This world is insignificant, except to ourselves. We are insignificant, except to ourselves. The world will die one day, regardless of what we do. The world, one day, will wipe us out, regardless of what we do, unless we move on. So on one hand, we are arrogant in thinking that we do nothing to harm the current state of this world, but we are also arrogant to think that our actions are truly significant.

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