Reinventing Nature

Puling drivel:

This period of stability — known to geologists as the Holocene — has seen human civilizations arise, develop and thrive. Such stability may now be under threat. Since the Industrial Revolution, a new era has arisen, the Anthropocene, in which human actions have become the main driver of global environmental change [emphasis added]

There is not one solitary shred of vetted, rigorous evidence that supports such a bombastic claim -- let alone the vaunted "consensus" the mainstream press is constantly trying to hawk to the public. It is pointless fear-mongering at its worst, sharing the same quasi-intellectual space as Al Gore's pocketbook.

Without pressure from humans, the Holocene is expected to continue for at least several thousands of years.

To meet the challenge of maintaining the Holocene state, we propose a framework based on 'planetary boundaries'. These boundaries define the safe operating space for humanity with respect to the Earth system and are associated with the planet's biophysical subsystems or processes.

Horsefeathers! Humans are part of the Earth -- including our houses, factories, roads and airplanes. The arrogance and self-loathing which suggests we should strive to "maintain the Holocene state" derives from the sad delusion that we are outside that system, its "caretakers," rather than an integral part of it. Technology is not evil, nor is it good; it simply is. It is the manner in which humanity defines its relationship to existence. Fundamentally, there is no difference between a hide hut and a thermonuclear bomb. The universe does not have a conscience, nor the planet a soul. And we are not gods.

Climate change (the new code phrase for anthropogenic global warming) is simply the latest in a long line of straw men propped up by neo-Luddites and self-loathing academics. Their real goal remains what it has always been: self-congratulatory smugness and the desperately-sought satisfaction of teaching all us production drones how superior is their own intellect, how deluded are we sad little worker bees. In their twisted worldview, we money-hungry proles live in unwarranted luxury, while they -- the poor, underpaid, unrecognized geniuses -- labor feverishly to Save The World. It's all very unfair, you see. So they stamp their feet and scream, "Pay attention to me! I can Save The World from Certain Doom!"

In other words, it's an inferiority complex writ large.

It saddens me that Nature magazine, formerly a bastion of solid, clear-eyed scientific rigor, has shamelessly whored itself out to the (highly profitable) anthropogenic global warming hysteria which has polluted large swaths of modern science. It maintains the trappings of serious scientific literature, but the standard has been dropped in the mud, ground under heel, and left to rot. It is no longer the serious, gray-haired journal I grew up reading; it now has more in common with grocery-store tabloids than peer-reviewed journals.

RIP Nature.