> (a picture is worth a thousand words)
> http://busybeingfabulous.typepad.com/.a/6a00e55065630088340120a538fa20970b-800wi
In which we read, among other things, "The planet is fine. The people are fucked!"
But this depends entirely on what one means by "the planet":
"Climate change over the past ~30 years has produced numerous shifts in the distributions and abundances of species1,2 and has been implicated in one species-level extinction3. Using projections of species’ distributions for future climate scenarios, we assess extinction risks for sample regions that cover some 20% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface. Exploring three approaches in which the estimated probability of extinction shows a power-law relationship with geographical range size, we predict, on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15–37% of species in our sample of regions and taxa will be ‘committed to extinction’. When the average of the three methods and two dispersal scenarios is taken, minimal climate-warming scenarios produce lower projections of species committed to extinction (~18%) than mid-range (~24%) and maximum- change (~35%) scenarios. These estimates show the importance of rapid implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for carbon sequestration."
- "Extinction risk from climate change," Thomas, et al. <http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6970/full/nature02121.html>
A generous reading of calls to "Save the planet!", however clumsily those calls may be expressed, would acknowledge that they are, at heart, a call to change whatever it is that (some) human beings are doing to destroy much of the life on it.
Pricks to hubristic anthropocentrism are almost always a good thing. Disempowering cynicism, not so much.