I am endlessly amazed by what we believe we know. Or more precisely, by how confident we are in our ignorance. Does anyone even have a faint sense of how vast this planet actually is — and how laughably insignificant most of what we do becomes once you scale it to planetary dimensions? Humanity has an impressive talent for mistaking local noise for cosmic consequence.
All the emissions mankind manages to belch into the atmosphere pale beside a single serious volcanic eruption. One good spasm from the Earth’s crust will sling multiples of global annual emissions into the sky without so much as asking permission. The planet has been doing this for a few billion years and has not once paused to consult our spreadsheets.
Even at the manic height of the Cold War, when two superpowers stared each other down with tens of thousands of megatons of thermonuclear enthusiasm, there would still have been plenty of places on this planet that would not even have noticed a global nuclear exchange. Not philosophically. Literally. Life would have gone on, quietly, indifferently, elsewhere.
Yet people remain endlessly credulous. They sincerely believe that dropping a nuke into the Yellowstone caldera would somehow “trigger” a supervolcano — a notion that neatly advertises a complete lack of understanding of geology, rock mechanics, pressure systems, and scale. It is magical thinking dressed up as scientific anxiety.
We adore our conspiracy theories. They flatter us by implying intention, control, and intelligence behind the chaos. History occasionally throws up coincidences that make one of them sound briefly plausible, but the uncomfortable truth is far simpler: the powers that be are not nearly smart enough, organized enough, or competent enough to run a genuine global conspiracy. What we have instead is inertia, self-interest, bureaucratic decay, and systems lumbering forward on momentum alone.The planet doesn’t care. The universe doesn’t notice. And most of what terrifies us exists only because we’ve lost the ability to think in scale.
https://www.rff.org/publications/issue-briefs/contrails-aviation-and-climate-change/