Juan Pablo Castillo

We live on a largely pleasant, yet historically cool world, where average temperatures hover around 15C. This current baseline includes the 1.4C rise since the start of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. We are rarely reminded Earth's climate is roughly 10 degrees 'colder' than the long-term global average of 18C to 26C across hundreds of millions of years. A warmer climate would not be a crisis, and never has across the history of biological life. Humans and our unique, symbolism-based culture evolved against this cooling, drying backdrop of the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, which has lasted 34 million years since the glaciation of Antarctica. We are currently in its coldest phase — the Quaternary glaciation — which has endured for 2.58 million years. Almost all human civilisation - and our acute sense of modernity - arrived during a brief, 11,700-year warm interglacial oasis known as the Holocene. This demonstrates that we are an 'ice age adapted' species, as are all modern mammals. Yet the current climate crisis is built around an institutional dogma, which ignores this vast geological history, operating as if the earth works just like a greenhouse, which it doesn't. It's all complex. While orbital cycles dictate the 'macro' climate epochs of the Earth over millennia, the current debate focuses entirely on the 'micro' trend of the last 250 years. Our planet is constantly responding to the orbital aberrations identified by Milutin Milanković. Over the short term, this changeability comes from natural variability in solar radiance, ocean currents, atmospheric water vapor and volcanic activity; over the deeper long term, it is guided by the ponderous tectonic creaking of continental plates. The world's oceans, water vapor and clouds contribute 50% to 70% of atmospheric warming. The geological record reveals that only after the oceans — especially the Southern Ocean — have warmed for centuries does dissolved CO₂ outgas from the deep waters, a process unfolding over 5,000 to 10,000 years. To focus exclusively on a trace gas like CO₂ is to ignore the true scale and power of these natural systems. Furthermore, the narrative completely missed the biological utility of this gas: NASA satellite data has shown a significant increase in global green foliage over recent decades, largely driven by elevated CO₂ levels acting as an airborne fertiliser. This green wave, alongside booming global agriculture, was entirely unanticipated by backers of the crisis agenda. Today, this narrative runs directly counter to thermodynamic reality: we simply cannot run a modern economy without high-density fossil fuels, a baseline power that wind and solar cannot replicate. To pretend otherwise is to forget our place in the natural world, where we live largely by chance, and only as invited guests — not as Overlords.