27 degrees and rising. I can feel it sapping all my energy.
Indeed, madam. A trifle bit warm for my tastes.
We’re at 36°C on some days in Germany 
Sounds awful! It’s a much more bearable (though still rather high for my liking) 17 degrees here at the moment.
Don’t worry, a new (little) ice age may well be on its way to Europe! And, like the recent heat, mostly due to man-made climate change…
I’d be quite happy with that. I do, however, think that the notion that humans can change the climate of the earth is the utmost hubris.
Well, there’s over eight billion people crowding up the place. And most of those people want to eat meat, as if they were nobility, and they want to drive mostly gasoline-powered vehicles, and take hot showers, and fly across the globe, and surf the internet all day preferably on mobile supercomputers, and order all kinds of luxury commodities mass-produced in large factories with massive greenhouse emissions. But sure, I am hubristic, not you who choose to close your eyes to all that! 
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Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much an environmentalist, and humans trashing the planet like that is a grossly shortsighted thing to do. This is a bad thing for purely selfish reasons, of course, because it won’t hurt the earth in the long run, though it will make our sojourn on it distinctly less pleasant.
One of the reasons being it’s changed the climate. And yes, none of that will hurt the Earth, because the Earth is just a rock. It will only hurt most of the organisms living on it.
The climate has changed considerably more in the past than it has in recent years. And I’m just talking about human history. During the Neolithic, for example, far more land was under cultivation in the British Isles even than today. What is now boggy wasteland had farms and agriculture. All of this is part of the natural cycles of the earth and the sun.
It’s also worth pointing out that on a geological scale, the earth is cooling down, from its formation. If, by some miracle, we were able to make it warmer, that would be a good thing, from our point of view, though it would only delay the inevitable.
Human history began about 300,000 years ago, my dear. The man-made global warming I’m talking about started little over 50 years ago, though its causes trace back to the Industrial Revolution, of course.
Again, within what timeframe? The universe as a whole cools down, probably “ending” in heat death, so even if we could turn the Earth into a sun, that would only delay the inevitable, yes. But it wouldn’t even be a good thing from our point of view!
We don’t have to go back 300,000 years, though. We only have to go back around 5000 years, to the Neolithic, as I mentioned, to find temperatures significantly warmer than today. That was known as the “Atlantic” phase. I fully agree that industrial pollution is really foul and disgusting, but it only accounts for a tiny proportion of carbon in the atmosphere.
I’m personally no fan of hot weather, and my favourite ambient temperature, when out and about, is around 0C, but even I recognise, as pretty much everyone does, when they stop and think about it, that warmer and wetter conditions are better for life to flourish. We’re lucky, therefore, that we’re not heading into another ice age, at least as far as we can tell, as we’re certainly due for one.
Human activity can cause mass extinctions which ripple throughout ecosystems. The nonliving matter would be fine of course. If consciousness can exist in nonliving (biologically speaking) matter, because somehow scientists figure(d) out how to make that happen, one wonders what kind of “life” it would have on a planet or in a universe/reality that is devoid of it (biology). Would moving material supporting consciousness still count as biology? Would it synthesize energy from the sun or other heat sources?
How would one define that sort of life that is conscious, but not biological? How would one define its death?
If all of the universe is different stages of photosynthesis (rearrangement of matter/energy) … is it alive?
In a sense, I think everything is indeed alive, or rather, that the life force is everywhere, but then, I’m something of an animist. But I’m not sure it’s useful to say this, though, and it’s probably better to stick to the usual definition of life, to avoid confusion. Having said that, is fire alive, for example? It consumes matter in order to exist, and can reproduce through sparks. In what sense is it not alive?
Not as a global average. Moreover, as I indicated, the big difference is in the rate of climate change. The global average temperature has been rising far more quickly in the past 50 years than ever before in at least the last 200,000 years. And this is because of Modernity (the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, etc.).
Warmer and wetter than when it’s freezing, yes; not “the warmer and wetter, the better”!
How do you know we’re not heading there? The Little Ice Age was a local event… And it seems North-Western Europe may well be heading there again. Still, the global average temperature will keep rising—unless we take drastic measures.
The question is not whether it’s alive but whether it’s conscious. And I, too, am something of an animist, namely, I subscribe to Integrated Information Theory. Living beings may be conscious, but a group of living beings is not. Likewise, atoms may be ever so slightly conscious, but most groupings of atoms are not.
The transitions between the various phases since the last ice age, Boreal, Atlantic, and so on, are quite sharp, in the archaeological record. Just like evolution itself, it’s not a gradual, linear progression, but rather, a series of jumps, leading to a new equilibrium for a while, then another jump. The current warming already seems to have been going on for a century or more, depending on who you read. This is fully in line with previous transitions in the past.
Actually, technically, we’re in an ice age, and it started around 2 million years ago. Before that, the earth didn’t have ice ages, since it was warmer. Since then, it has been one long ice age, punctuated by somewhat warmer periods, one of which we’re currently in. We still have lots of ice, the further north and south you go.
I don’t think I would describe an atom as having any possibility of consciousness, animist though I am. It seems like a wholly mechanistic sort of thing.
Oh wow. I think I’ve hacked in to the universe’s Intranet. And it is a conscious whole.
And completely organic.
It’s fire … widely distributed, but not so widely it disconnects.
Just kidding.
Not nearly as sharp, at least not on a global scale.
I suppose it all depends on who you read.
I suppose you’re talking about the Pleistocene. Truth is, we’re on the verge of ending not only the Holocene, but the Pleistocene. But read what you like.