re: #11 freetoken

But the earth is only 6000 years old, so there’s no such thing as the Pleistocene or Eocene, and hence nothing to be overridden by human effort, duh.

In all seriousness, there are certainly myriad equilibria in which the earth/climate dynamic system could be found. I’m not an expert on this system in particular, but neither is Hawking, and I am more of an expert on dynamic systems than he is. The long and the short of the matter is that I think our current equilibrium is very stable, and to force us out of this equilibrium would take a lot more than the introduction into the atmosphere of the minuscule amount of CO2 we’re capable of putting there.