Open access
BETWEEN THE GREAT EXTINCTION OF MEGAFAUNA AND GLOBAL WARMING: ON THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONCLUSIONS DRAWN FROM THE COMPARISON OF TWO DISTANT IN TIME CASES OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION
Jarosław Mikołajec1
ECOLOGY – FROM IDEA TO PRACTICE
Publication language: Polish
Journal article
Transformations No. 1–2 (88–89) 2016, Publication date: 13 May 2016
Keywords: megafauna, extinction, global warming, denialism, Giddens paradox
Abstract The subject of the article concerns philosophical conclusions from a comparison of two distant in time environmental disasters: the extinction of megafauna, which took place in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, and modern global warming. Both processes are examples showing that seemingly small reasons can lead to dramatic consequences. The denialist position, occupied mostly by non-professionals in the field of climatology (Z. Jaworowski) and right-wing ideologues (A. Wielomski), reject the anthropogenic nature of global warming, treating it as a natural phenomenon. Assigning a man-made possibility of climate change is according to the denialists a sign of human conceit. Denialists do not understand that the question about the possibility of the human impact on climate, or more broadly, the possibility of the human impact on the environment, concerns the natural sciences, and not axiology. The destruction of the environment is a natural and timeless phenomenon because it arises from the human condition in the ecosystem as a „foreign body”. Global warming should also be understood in this way.
Politechnika Śląska w Gliwicach, Katedra Stosowanych Nauk Społecznych
E-mail: zaporoze@o2.pl