In the comments section of
an article about scientists' plans to clone a woolly mammoth, I read this:
This animal is extinct for a reason - the earth warmed back up. This animal would be miserable today, and when the earth warms further to return itself to normal, this animal would be even more miserable.I can barely fathom all that is wrong with this. For one thing, if the heat of the Ice Age ending was responsible for the mammoth's extinction then it goes to reason that today's temperatures would pretty much kill any newborn mammoth instantly, not make it miserable. An entire species doesn't just go extinct from being miserable. If it did, there'd be no old people in Florida; they'd all be killed by the act of wiping their brows at outdoor cafes.
But also, and this is the part that makes my jaw drop, the commenter seems to believe that global warming is just the Earth warming itself, presumably from the Ice Age, to return itself to normal. Now, I don't know what the guy thinks normal is, but maybe he means the good old days before life, when
the planet had acidic oceans and sulfuric air. But also, he is crediting a planet with intent, which is odd but hey, maybe it's just how he says it and not that he really thinks Earth is doing anything
for any reason or purpose. As for the whole concept of it, I guess the fact that the Earth is warming at a rate almost unheard of ever before is just like when a marathon runner slows to a walk at the end of a race and then breaks into a sprint once the finish line is in view. Earth was warming slowly, because it was tired, but now that 200` days are finally in sight, with no help from people or industry at all, it found a renewed sense of purpose and decided to really push forward. Sure.
You know what's sad? Not just that people really believe that the Earth is warming on its own for some purpose only knowable in its planet-mind, but that they vote. They sit on school boards. They actually affect the rest of us with their preposterous notions of things. And sometimes, when a concept has been so over-simplified and dumbed down that they can actually sort of understand it, they argue against people who understand the original unabridged truth, and the dumbed down folks have followers. And sometimes, they even elect themselves royalty who declare the educated to be elitist.
