I do not contest the global warming model of climate change. But it needs saying that the current phenomenon of the planet's ambient temperature rise is a feature of the end of the last ice age, which is an ongoing process still far from "finished" so long as polar ice caps and mountain glaciers exist. The last ice age did not finish 10,000 or 12,000 years ago as we sometimes hear. Most people do not realize it because of our generally warm climate and because of the currently fashionable talk about global warming, but we are still in an ice age.
The rise of human civilization — domestication of animals, domestication of planted crops, the building of cities on the strength of agricultural surpluses and the subsequent inventions of money and writing — coincides with the end of the ice age. And like I say, it's not over yet. So maybe when the ice age is definitively over — when the ice caps and glaciers are gone — then civilization will also have reached its end.
I do not mean that human greenhouse-gas production is not contributing to global warming. It is. Nor do I mean that our efforts to retard our greenhouse gas emissions are without merit. Nor do I mean that global warming is a good thing because of its inevitability and because it is largely natural at this stage in the global climate's evolution, because for us as a species it certainly is bad news.
But enthusiasm for promises to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to levels of previous emissions — as reported in the July 10 article "G8 eyes 80 percent emissions cut by 2050" — is just stupidly misplaced excitement. Global climate temperature rise is unstoppable, and all the environmentalist and political frenzy is just theater — of the absurd, maybe.