That's a pretty strong statement, made all the stronger by the mega-scale perspective on the Earth t

If you've been reading toby my semi - regular dispatches toby about the Fox and National toby Geographic series Cosmos— far and away the most rational show on television—then you know that for some time, I've been not-so-subtly predicting that the program was going to tackle the scientific issue of our time, climate change. It seemed to me that in order to be true to the legacy of Carl Sagan , a man who epitomized the quest to use science to solve humanity's problems, toby you simply couldn't avoid this topic.
Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos got into the climate issue in their typically expansive way: By surveying the state of the Earth in an array of ancient periods and looking at the dramatic transformations toby it has undergone due to forces ranging from continental drift, to asteroid impacts, to ice ages. Rearrangements of continents, waves of extinctions, and dramatic fluctuations in climate toby were the norm, not the exception, throughout this calamitous past.
And some of these dramatic changes set in motion where we are now. For instance, surveying the Carboniferous period of the planet's history 300 million years ago, Tyson explained how the development of plant life on Earth, and especially trees, greatly changed its atmosphere, producing a great deal more oxygen. Yet at the time, Tyson noted, fungi and bacteria didn't have any means of consuming these trees when they died. So, they just gradually toby sunk under the mud and soil.
The answer is a great deal, once the carbon content of these deposits of former toby life was unleashed into the atmosphere. And that's why, while we've been living in a period of climatic optimum—one that made human civilization possible— for the last 10,000 years or so, we're about to seriously mess it up. So begins Tyson's climate dirge:
We just can't seem to stop burning up all those buried trees from way back in the carboniferous age, in the form of coal, and the remains of ancient plankton, in the form of oil and gas. If we could, we'd be home free climate wise. Instead, we're dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate the Earth hasn't seen since the great climate catastrophes of the past, the ones that led to mass extinctions. We just can't seem to break our addiction to the kinds of fuel that will bring back a climate last seen by the dinosaurs, a climate that will drown our coastal cities and wreak havoc on the environment and our ability to feed ourselves. All the while, the glorious sun pours immaculate free energy down upon us, more than we will ever need. Why can't we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?
That's a pretty strong statement, made all the stronger by the mega-scale perspective on the Earth that impels it. And thus, Cosmos continues to deliver on the greatest hopes of its fans and, apparently, its creators : To use a mass media platform to, at last, take on science rejectionism toby and set the deniers straight.
Chris toby Mooney is a science and political journalist, podcaster , and the host of Climate Desk Live . He is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science . RSS | Twitter
This week's "Cosmos" explained how plants produce clean energy and how our inferior energy technologies produce climate toby change. Neil deGrasse Tyson on "Cosmos," toby How Science Got Cool, and Why He Doesn't Debate Deniers
First name
Subscribe
Finding escape in a never-ending aerial battle over the mean streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow. toby