Pawns of the the God-chemists.

We humans tend to be a bit presumptuous about our elevated position in the universe.

A few hundred years ago humans thought the earth was the center of the universe and the sun merely a distant gift from God providing us with its heat and light.

We are getting a lot better, but even today many of us claim that our powers of higher reason make us unique among the animals and burden us with a duty to protect the earth.

Allow me to play the devil’s advocate for a moment.

While I don’t doubt that global warming is a very real phenomenon, isn’t it conceivable that, perceived free will notwithstanding, we humans were actually put here for the mere purpose of burning fossil fuels?

Perhaps the powers that be, God, Mother Earth, etc., decided that the earth was getting a little low on carbon dioxide and becoming a little chilly.

Maybe the recent (in geological time) ice ages left too much land area exposed and reflected the sun’s heat back to space, cooling the earth even more.

If I were an earth God, I would surely want to turn up the heat a bit.

After all, what we call fossil fuel was once a very large number of happily photosynthesizing and procreating giant ferns, now uselessly stuck underground. The dinosaurs apparently lived in a balmy tropical paradise. Maybe humans evolved to return some of the lost carbon and warmth to the atmosphere.

If the cosmic imperative is to warm the earth, the rampaging destruction of the forests is also a good measure.

This releases carbon dioxide and water, both greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere. On the other hand, all that smoke helps create clouds which reflect sunlight and warmth back to space. Also, deforestation eliminates trees and their temperature moderating capabilities. So who knows?

But that leads me to my next idea, buffers. Buffers are chemicals which help to resist change in a system. Any good biological or chemical system is buffered. Amino acids, the building blocks of life, buffer our cells so they keep working in a consistent manner.

Maybe the buffers of the human race are the environmentalists and government bureaucracies. I am neither a militia member nor a logger, but the role of a buffer is to slow down change, and these elements in the human race certainly do that.

As far as the God-chemists are concerned, it is a perfect system. They give us just enough smarts to make the necessary changes, but not enough to know what we are doing, which slows us down considerably. We really have no idea what to do with ourselves.

The bottom line is that we just live, procreate and dream primitive alligator dreams like every other mammal. Certainly, we have a shot at being great organisms, but I don’t think we are there yet.

We ought to admit our fallibility and quit being so dang presumptuous, because I am sure the God-chemists have built self-termination into the system for good reason.