Global Warming

You may well ask why science did not warn us of global warming sooner; I think that there are several reasons. We were from the 1970s until the end of the century distracted by the important global problem of stratospheric ozone depletion, which we knew was manageable. We threw all our efforts into it and succeeded but had little time to spend on climate change. Climate science was also neglected because twentieth-century science failed to recognize the true nature of Earth as a responsive self-regulating entity. Biologists were so carried away by Darwin's great vision that they failed to see that living things were tightly coupled to their material environment and that evolution concerns the whole Earth system with living organisms an integral part of it. Earth is not the Goldilocks planet of the solar system sitting at the right place for life. It was in this favorable state some two billion years ago but now our planet has to work hard, against ever-increasing heat from the Sun, to keep itself habitable . We have chosen the worst of times to add to its difficulties.