(1) We are all lunatics. One primary function of society, like a well-run asylum, should be to stop the dangerous lunatics from hurting the harmless ones. Unfortunately, human nature is such that the reverse usually applies: the dangerous lunatics are running the joint, and most of the harmless ones seem enthusiastically to support their tyranny.

 
(2) Planet Earth can be likened to a jug of custard with a thick skin on top, but suspended in space so the custard forms a sphere with the skin entirely surrounding it. This skin is in fact in several sheets, like ice floes, butting up against each other and constantly in motion. That skin is what we think of as the world. It is dotted with myriad pinpricks through which the custard wells up: we call these volcanoes. Every 10 million years or so we have a basalt flood, where the skin tears open and molten rock floods a sizeable portion of the world, rendering many species extinct. All the anthropogenic climate change that mankind has every caused or is ever likely to cause is trivial in comparison.