Ispend a lot of time on the Internet; it’s become my second home in the 20 years I’ve communicated science online. And recently I came across an image that stuck with me: a cartoon of a sad, crying Earth covered in cut-down trees that says, “No intelligent species would destroy their own environment.”

I think this cartoon and the ideas it represents are both wrong and destructive. I don’t want my son, who is eight years old, to believe that humans are dumb and evil—both because that’s a pretty big bummer and because it’s obviously untrue. But I often find myself quite lonely in having that perspective, and I’m wondering if, perhaps, there are other folks out there who feel the same as I do.

Humans didn’t cause climate change by being stupid; they caused it by being extremely smart. W

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