We emerged from monkeyhood in the context of repeated ice ages, which forced our ancestors to continually migrate and/or adapt to different habitats, essentially temperate. Then in the past ten thousand years of extraordinarily stable climate, we were able to become sedentary, have regular food surpluses, invent cultural accumulation.

What comes next? Nobody knows : there is no precedent (in the Pleistocene) for the CO2 level -- we're already off the scale -- and temperature ranges we're heading for.

Intensification of agriculture has gone very far, and it's premature to say we can't take it a great deal further. Exhaustion of resources is a graver and more imminent danger than climate change itself : can we make the transition to an intensive, resource-lean agriculture capable of sustaining a population of billions? The history of humanity makes me moderately optimistic, but doesn't say whether we can get there without massive die-offs.

Human intervention on the climate is a fact. There's no going back to a hypothetical natural state, not at a planetary level. The long term future of civilized humanity requires that we actually take control of the climate, rather than drowning in our own extreta.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}