The Earth is dying. That is not hyperbole. That is reality.

Human beings are torturing the Earth to extract every ounce of useful mineral. We are scouring the land to produce just one more crop before the soil gives out. We are fishing the oceans clean of every living thing that is tastier than a jellyfish. We are depleting every aquifer, felling every tree, feeding every last blade of grass to a cow to be slaughtered for meat, leather, and assorted industrial products. Whatever is left we are killing with global warming, and remember that we are still in the early stages of global warming. The world has only been warming since around 1980. It is now warming very rapidly indeed. Under any likely scenario, there is no end in sight.

Global warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. It’s very simple really. Digging things up and burning them takes carbon out of the ground and puts it into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide and other gasses in the atmosphere trap warmth through a well-understood and universally accepted mechanism called the greenhouse effect. It is as if the Earth were covered by a planetary carbon quilt. It is theoretically conceivable that the most of the new carbon entering the Earth’s atmosphere is coming from natural sources or that human beings have not yet added enough carbon to the atmosphere to cause a greenhouse effect. But it is not theoretically conceivable that human beings could add infinite amounts of carbon to the atmosphere without causing a greenhouse effect.

Given that carbon dioxide levels are known to cause a greenhouse effect, that carbon dioxide levels are known to be rising, and that burning fossil fuels is known to release carbon dioxide, it seems pretty reasonable to connect the dots and conclude that rising global temperatures are related to the burning of fossil fuels. Even if the real truth (suppressed by climate scientists the world over) is that global warming to date has not been caused by the burning of fossil fuels, this does not imply that it is safe to burn all of the remaining fossil fuels that are still buried in the Earth’s crust.