Carbon Footprints In the Sand

A throw-away line at the start of Chapter 8 in Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey reads "Global warming, and the Little Ice Age [were] truncated by miracles of heroic technology."

Leela, in an episode of Futurama responded to the happy sentiment that global warming never happened with "Oh, it did, but luckily nuclear winter canceled it out."

And wonderfully now, science is finding bits and pieces of evidence that may indicate any global climate shift would actually be in the cold direction a la "The Day After tomorrow."

Wonderful.

Well it was a joke until now, but here's what I honestly believe:

1. Mankind has a noticeable impact on global climates, chiefly due to the depletion of resources/other alterations to local biomes
   
2. Any resulting climate shift will probably cool the planet significantly in response, and
3. The danger of global warming is not the planet getting too hot, it's the temperatures fluctuating too much causing massive, cataclysmic natural disasters that will destroy most coastal regions and alter the climates of both developed and food-producing regions.

So, sadly, I have to actually encourage people to add heat to the planet. Honestly, I don't care what you do so long as you don't feed money into the oil companies. Get a solar-powered house and a Prius and for all I fucking care you can ride to work on an aerosol jet pack.

At this point we can really just hope that whatever way we fuck up the planet happens to be precisely equal but opposite to how biology is stacked against us.

Because how many times has The Daily Show made a simple, valid point that made you say, "Hey, wait. Yeah…?"