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In a word: no.

“But I thought this girl was an environmentalist” you say?! Well, I am, but I’m also a scientist, and as such I know that the one thing the nay-sayers have right is that humans are indeed too puny and insignificant to destroy the big rock we live on.

Nope, the world will go on, no matter how much CO2 we emit, no matter how many plastic bags we throw away, no matter how many rainforests we destroy, no matter how many nuclear bombs we “test”. The planet won’t alter course, won’t implode or fall out of the sky, won’t, in short, bat an eyelash.

The fact is that the planet has already survived hot times, cold times, meteors and mass extinctions. There have been rainforests at the poles and seas on top of the prairies, and the Pangaea of old has been cracked and splintered into the continents we know today.

Yet amazingly, the Earth has persisted.

So, you ask, do I think climate change is bogus? No. Do I think the people who tell me to save the trees and the whales are a bunch of lunatics that should be ignored? Absolutely not. Our changing environment is the single greatest threat to humanity that has ever existed. And therein lies the key.

Before I explain further, please raise your hand if you’ve ever peed in a pool… I’m willing to bet everyone’s hand went up. Personally I had to put up both hands… and both feet! And really, what’s wrong with peeing in the pool? The pool itself doesn’t get damaged by urine. The liner doesn’t disintegrate, the pumps don’t jam up. And pee is essentially sterile, so it doesn’t actually make the water dirty.

But if nothing bad happens from peeing in the pool, then why are we all told not to do it? It’s about perception and value assignation.

Most people love to swim. It’s a great way to exercise and a great way to cool off on a hot day. Because the water in a pool provides us with those opportunities, we each assign value to the water based on how much we like it. Nobody, by the way, cares two snits about the actual pool, we just care that it holds the water that we swim in. Society as a whole, also assigns value: to the purity of the water – or at least to the perceived purity of the water. (I’ll save the chlorine debate for another time.)

So let’s say we crowd a pool full of kids, and tell them to let their bladders loose, and to keep doing so, for hours or days or however long it takes. Eventually, the pool will start to smell like pee and look like pee. Society’s perception of what is clean tells us that pee doesn’t make the cut (although I’d be willing to bet that uric acid does just as good a job of controlling bacterial and algal growth as bromine). No one’s mother wants their kid sitting in something dirty, so the swimmers/peers will get out of the pool. If they can no longer swim in the pool, they will grieve the loss of the thing that personally valued.

But what of the pool? It’s still there. The urine-laden water will eventually be replaced by rainwater, which will probably sprout lots of algae, turning the water green. It will still exist, essentially unchanged and certainly undamaged, but it won’t possess the characteristics that we valued - namely clear, see-through water.

If we extend this scenario to the whole planet, we see that there’s only one difference: we can keep peeing in the planetary pool without fear of breaking it, but we also realize that we can’t climb out of the pool once the water turns yellow.

Our descendants will have to live in a world where the things our generation valued have either been fundamentally altered, or have disappeared altogether. It’s not a question of planetary survival; it’s a question of humanity’s way of life. If we dig up and cut down all of the world’s resources, and send them to the dump, we will eventually have to start looking to the dump for our resources. If we fill the air with toxic dust we’ll have to consider asthma a fact of life. If we let bees and ants and butterflies disappear, we’ll have to learn to accept pine needles as replacements for the vegetables we can no longer grow.

But it will still be Earth, and Earth will still go around the sun, and every atom that’s here tomorrow will be the same atom that was here yesterday. And no one cares about the planet any more than they do the pool: we care about the things the planet holds, and we especially care about how those things are arranged. And the problem lies in the fact that we’re rearranging those things, and we’re at risk of not liking the result. More to the point, we’re at risk of not being able to cope with the result.