Wise Words

Here's Scott Sumner,

It seems to me that the human race is rapidly approaching a crossroads where we need to decide whether we will continue to pretend to be innocent creatures inhabiting the Earth, like bunny rabbits, or whether we will forthrightly acknowledge that for better or worse we basically control the fate of the Earth from here on out. No matter what, whether we decide to use geoengineering or not, we will decide where global temperature will be 100 or 200 years from now. We will increasingly decide which species become extinct, and which species that would have gone extinct (even without humans existing) that we will artificially save. Within 100 years we will be able to prevent any future asteroid impacts on Earth. We have already created nuclear technologies that require us to watch over nuclear waste for 10,000 years. I don’t think it makes sense to use intuition about not fooling with Mother Nature any longer.