Light the celebratory tire fires!

While simultaneously clubbing a baby seal!

I can't wait to play halflife three and watch rick and morty season three then.

Ever the optimist.

This news only slightly alleviates my anxiety over Scott Pruitt taking the reins at EPA today.

You're like a political Clippy.

So steele made a new 'environment' category. I'm looking forward to prodigious posting of Secretary Pruitt's upcoming deregulation spree.

Yeah, I remember Clippy.
And I wouldn't call it 'loosely related', it is, as my misguided friend midden would say, part of the cycle of things.

I kid, I kid.

Extinction events happen. I'm not saying they're fun to live through, but like winter, it's part of the cycle of things. They also open up the crowded field to new solutions to old problems.

My point is that it's not a question of the environment getting better or worse, just different. You know, like plagues and tornados.

"Of course the climate is changing. The climate is always changing!"
-oft repeated GOP talking point. Marco Rubio especially likes this one.

Helpful hint: read the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry on the Holocene Extinction.
spoiler alert: it's NOT part of the 'cycle of things'.

Of course the climate is changing. And of course humans are a huge part of the cause. And humans are just as natural as anything else. And the Holocene Extinction is part of the cycle of things, like plagues that wipe out their host species then go extinct themselves. In all liklihood, the environment with all it's ever-changing biodiversity will continue on long after our species is Dust in the Wind.
Kansas - Dust in the Wind (Official Video)

(Only semi-ironically included.)

No offense, but you're kind of taking the fatalistic 'it's god's will, so there's nothing we can do about it' argument.
No, the fact that we as a civilization (as opposed to merely another species) have at least the ability, if not the will to mitigate our destructive tendencies means that we are NOT 'as natural as anything else'. So by your thinking, that we're 'dust in the wind' anyway, we might as well just party down, shit and throw our trash anywhere we want, drive hummers, and not vote.

its not fatalistic God's Will
it's accepting Gaia as the earth mother who will take care of herself with or without us

I find it calming, not fatalistic

edit: a la http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381825/

i'm with you.

humans are so up our own asses, we actually think we could permanently affect the planet.

in reality, we will just permanently fuck it up for our use.

This concept saved me from chronic nightmares of nuclear holocaust back when the 1st gulf war was starting. Been with me ever since. Thanks, William Shatner!

it's like Jeff Goldblum says in jurassic park.

"life will find a way".

and i also might add that the Earth survived for a few billion years without us, I think it can do just that again.

mmm, jeff goldblum

Sounds pretty fatalistic to me.

not fatal. Life!

Wikipedia definition -
Fatalism generally refers to any of the following ideas:

The view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do.[1] Included in this is that man has no power to influence the future, or indeed, his own actions.[2] This belief is very similar to predeterminism.

An attitude of resignation in the face of some future event or events which are thought to be inevitable. Friedrich Nietzsche named this idea with "Turkish fatalism"[3] in his book The Wanderer and His Shadow.[4]

That acceptance is appropriate, rather than resistance against inevitability. This belief is very similar to defeatism.

yeah what i'm talking about is neither of those man. this isn't a binary thing

I don't think its "fated". and i do believe/think we can fuck up the planet for us (nuclear winter anyone?). so, logically, i think we can also prevent our fucking it up.

but outside of this, i see a pattern in our planet's history that i realxe we might not be able to escape.

So if we can prevent it, why not try to prevent it?

Also, the original concept of nuclear winter as forwarded by Carl Sagan was the potential annihilation of all life on Earth.

the earth would be like back before there was life on earth!

Something is only bad if it creates lasting damage on a cosmic scale?

A completely preventable mass extinction is a permanent effect on the earth. Those species *might* be replaced with others in millions of years, but the ones that are lost are lost forever.

species may be gone, but the earth will still exist.
even if it doesn't get repopulated by anything. that's the nature of existence

I would love it if you would read Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar and tell me your thoughts on it.

for sure! it sounds intriguing

I don't mean it as fatalistic. If we are smart, we won't fuck up the planet for ourselves, but if we are not, it's probably not the end of the world.

When you are talking time scales of millions of years, as this article is, juxtaposing that with the idea of the environment "getting better" seems silly to me. Most species only last one million years or so. If they are really lucky, they might last ten. Even in Sagan's nuclear winter, I suspect there'd be the equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion a few million years after, as tiny critters repopulate the planet from deep sea and subterranean refuges to diversify into a whole new ecosystem.

see, if I tried to explain it it'd be way less coherent but this is how I think about it too.

and I don't feel fatal about it, i find it comforting that life will persist if its meant to.

hell, at least its a more hopeful position than any western religion... talk about fatalistic...

God knows everything that ever happened or ever will happen (it's all part of his Plan), but you still have free will. No, really! God has known exactly what you are going to do since before the beginning of time, but it's still somehow your choice, and you will be horrifically punished for all eternity if God doesn't like those choices. If you happen to be headed for Hell, He created you knowing you were going to suffer eternally beyond all human imagining, and He did it anyway. So he must have actually wanted it that way. You never actually had a choice. The only reason you are going to suffer for eternity is because God is and asshole. Or the Church doesn't have a clue what it's talking about.

- My thoughts at age twelve before refusing to be Confirmed as a Catholic.

George Carlin's take on the matter.

George Carlin - Saving the Planet


Plastic, assholes!

With all the gallows humor, I find it —as usual with his stuff— somehow refreshing.
Seeing a sketch like this, at first you could dismiss him as your usual nihilist-populist demagogue (in his final years he seemed to give in more and more to the bitter side). For me, nevertheless, there's always a deep humanistic kernel in his point of view and exposition. I think he can't help being sincerely revolutionary, even in his most eschatological, bleak moments.
Or maybe it's just his funny face and his beard that charms me, I don't know.

global warming is actually a positive thing, assuming it prevents the next ice age we're headed towards.

Current events have messed up my sarcasm detector. I'm going to try to assume you're being sarcastic here.

about 50/50 actually

Plaguenado

Sharknado.