A very common response to stories of the slow motion train wreck that is global warming is to say, 'well, whatever is going on, it certainly isn't humans. What arrogance to think that us puny humans can affect the climate of a whole planet'.
I've puzzled over this for a while. It seems to come, incongruously, from people who otherwise are very much of the chest-beating, born-to-rule, dominance-over-god's-creation, you'll-only-take-my-SUV-from-my-cold-dead-hands kind of people. So you would think they would be proud of shock-and-awing a whole planet by returning CO2 levels to those of the days of the dinosaurs on Noah's Ark. 'Mission Accomplished' could be the bumper sticker.
Why the aw-shucks modesty then? Why the sudden shuffling of feet, the modest lowering of the eyes, the 'wasn't me miss' kind of schoolyard denials?
Well I think these people have been caught with conflicting ideologies meeting head on at a crossroads. They are also the 'go west young man' 'nature is limitless' type of people. They see themselves as Daniel Boone, Kentucky rifle in hand, living off the land. Or Tom and Huck, living off the river.
They are therefore people who genuinely cannot see that millions of Daniels and Toms, each killing game, or hooking fish, or chopping down trees, can and have done enormous damage. Instead they see just what they, individually, do, and cannot conceive of extending this to all the other individuals. So they scream blue murder about any attempts to introduce conservation measures of any kind anywhere. There must be no limits to fishing or hunting or logging - nature is limitless. And they will doubtless keep on saying this until the last tree has been cut down and the last fish has been caught.
And so, back to global warming, and they must apply the same ideology. Their own, individual, output of CO2 they see as being tiny. As they drive across the wide open plains, they, and the exhaust gases pouring from their SUV, seem puny. So if they were to start recognizing that they have to think in terms of all the SUVs, and all the other human activities that generate CO2, and the cumulative effect over the last 200 or so years, then you would have to examine your own life. And you would have to stop hunting and fishing, would have to get rid of the SUV, have to reduce your consumption of wood and paper products, have to cut down on your personal energy and water use and waste. Would have to understand, in short, that 6 billion soon to be 9 billion people can alter a whole planet, and not for the better.
Would have to accept individual responsibility on the one hand and become part of the world community on the other. And these are the kind of people who have always been big on individual responsibility. Haven't they?