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It looks as though civilization is under attack. Fundamentalists of various stripes, survivalists, and certain ideologues seem to be, at worst, determined to bring about its collapse. Worst of all, to my mind, the general population gazes upon the looming demise of civilization with an apparent indifference that is astonishing.

Scientifically, the exact process by which civilization got started is not known. It is known to have something to do with the development of farming.

Even the Bible endorses that, for those who know the story of Cain, the farmer who killed his brother Abel and is credited with building the world's first city. (Technically, "civilization" means "living in cities.") Also, any estimated age of Earth that I have seen that was calculated using the Bible (which calculations always start with Cain's parents, Adam and Eve) has turned out to be a fair-to-excellent estimate of the age of civilization.

At any rate, farming made relatively large surpluses of food possible. That allowed for the existence of significant numbers of people who were not concerned with procuring food, other than to own a farm, buy food, or, in the case of slaves, have it provided by their owners.

There is no doubt that slavery was present from the beginning of civilization. My theory is that groups of warrior-like people offered farmers protection from raiders in exchange for food. Then they realized that they could turn their enterprise into a protection racket, in which they extorted most of the food from the farmers. Before long, they realized that maximum efficiency would be achieved by simply enslaving the farmers.

The enslavers also used slaves to build fortresses. Those fortresses became the seed crystals of cities, where people could live and be protected from the worst the world had to offer by submitting to the local tyrant.

As local tyrants conquered more territory their wealth grew and so did their cities. The Roman Empire was the apotheosis of that process.

[Serfdom, the slightest possible moral improvement over slavery, was the basis of feudalism, which technically was not civilization because it was not predicated on the existence of cities.]

Civilization is now threatened with extinction. It might not be much morally, but materially it is all we've got. Civilization as we know it does at least protect the farmers without extorting or enslaving them.

If civilization were to collapse there is no doubt that some human beings in small groups would be able to scratch out a subsistence existence here and there. Life would surely be, as Thomas Hobbes would say, "nasty, brutish, and short," but human life would continue in some form.

Or, we can make the effort to save civilization. If we want to avoid the worst, we have to start immediately.

The primary threat to civilization is a material threat. It is a scythe aimed at the legs upon which civilization has always stood: farming.

The threat is global warming. The temperature of the air and the water on surface of this planet is increasing.

People who deny that global warming is happening are being irrational. I don't endorse locking them up, but I do endorse ignoring them while those of us who are not irrational (in that way, anyway) get on with saving civilization.

For as long as civilization has existed, Earth has had a stable-enough climate that has supported large-scale agriculture. Now that is changing.

Some people seem to think that we can simply shift crops northward to suit the new temperatures. That would be wrong.

Global warming will create such climatic dislocations that agriculture as we know it will cease to exist. If agriculture as we know it ceases to exist, civilization will cease to exist.

The ultimate cause of global warming is beside the point. Arguing about that is like standing in the yard while one's house is on fire, arguing with one's spouse about the cause of the blaze. As the late, great Gene Wilder would doubtlessly say, eyes and hair equally wild, The... HOUSE... is on... FIRE. PUT... the FIRE... OUT!

Whatever is the cause of global warming, we only have one response available to us. We have to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases being disgorged into the atmosphere.

One big thing we can do immediately is to turn off our air conditioners wherever that is at all feasible. (Modern high-rises don't permit it, but it can be done everywhere else.) Fans consume a small fraction of the electricity that air conditioners do. It is a great irony that burning mountains of coal to make ourselves cooler has contributed to getting us into this mess, but there you go.

The survival of civilization depends upon stopping global warming... now! If we fail to do that, civilization is kaput.