For an interesting article at The Register, see “Prehistoric titanic-snake jungles laughed at global warming”. Would environmentalists concerned about global warming not mind it if we could preserve all the threatened species by either finding them new habitats or genetically engineering them ever so slightly to survive in the warmer environment?

To make things easier, we could just eliminate mosquitoes entirely, thus malaria and other mosquito-transmitted diseases would go away.

From a utilitarian perspective, if environmentalists consider nature to be a good thing, they have somewhat of a moral obligation to increase the variety and complexity of biomass. It’s like planting trees, on a larger scale. Therefore we have a moral obligation to eventually increase the temperature of the planet so that Antarctica can be covered with temperate forests filled with animals, like it was for two hundred million years before the Azolla event. After the Azolla event made the world much cooler geologically overnight by causing the CO2 ratio in the atmosphere to “fall from 3500 ppm in the early Eocene to 650 ppm during this event”1, things got even worse when the Drake Passage opened, creating a frigid Circumpolar Current. Before the Azolla event, the last cool period, with continental glaciers, was the Karoo Ice Age, 260 million years ago. I have proposed attempting to artificially close the Drake Passage as an eventual far-future way of warming the Earth if we chose to.

This is not normal. We are in the middle of a 2.58-million year Ice Age. It’s cold everywhere. Still, it’s fair to say that we currently lack the technology to responsibly engineer a transition between this cold “Icehouse Earth” and a warmer, lusher, “Greenhouse Earth”. Therefore, we have an obligation to fight against global warming for the time being. (To the extent that you regard it as a threat in your personal calculations — while it is generally agreed that anthropogenic gases are warming the Earth, it is uncertain how much the temperature will increase over the next century and whether sea level increases will be measured in millimeters or centimeters.) Still, I hope that some environmentalists would be receptive to warming the Earth if, at some future point, it were better for nature to thrive. The status quo of the cold, barren, grasslands-covered present-day Earth is not necessarily what is best for nature.