Extinction

Stephen Jay Gould wrote on man's extinction by Nuclear War in his "The Flamingo's Smile", written back in the early 1980s, when that was still a spectre hanging over us. But global warming is the new catastrophe, by which we might destroy the whole earth. His words still stand good here about life on earth, and the threat we bring:

I cannot imagine anything more vulgar, more hateful, than the prospect that a tiny twig with one peculiar power might decimate a majestic and ancient tree, whose continuity stretches back to the dawn of earth's time and whose trunk and branches house so many thousand prerequisites to the twig's existence.