The Earth Is Indifferent

George Will has read an essay in The American Scholar quarterly by Robert B. Laughlin, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, and has written a fine column for Newsweek summarizing Laughlin's conclusions. The cover of that issue of American Scholar carries this snide lead: "The Earth Doesn't Care If You Drive a Hybrid."

The entire column is definitely worth reading. Here is Will echoing Laughlin's conclusion, a conclusion which we at COTTonLINE also endorse:

Climate change over geologic time is, Laughlin says, something the earth has done “on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” (snip) Six million years ago the Mediterranean dried up. Ninety million years ago there were alligators in the Arctic. Three hundred million years ago Northern Europe was a desert and coal formed in Antarctica. “One thing we know for sure,” Laughlin says about these convulsions, “is that people weren’t involved.”

It is extreme hubris to believe we hold the fate of the planet in our hands. Humans have less influence on Gaia than a flea has on an elephant.