'Cosmos' excerpt:
And yet we ravage the Earth at an accelerated pace, as if it belonged to this one generation, as if it were ours to do with as we please . Our generation must choose. Which do we value more: short-term profits or the long-term habitability of our planetary home?
The study of the global climate, the suns influence, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, these are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are funded poorly and grudgingly, and meanwhile we continue to load the Earths atmosphere with materials about whose long-term influence we are almost entirely ignorant.
Can you see the error? Sagan enters this topic with a clear animus against the profit motive and a pre-established belief that industrial civilization is ravaging the earth. These are the obvious cultural biases of a late-20th-century modern liberal. So he considers two alternative theoriesthat we are destroying the planet by cooling it down, or we are destroying the planet by heating it upand calls for more government funding to figure out which is correct.
Sagan also claimed it would take years and years to put out the Kuwaiti oil fires started on the orders of Saddam Hussein, and that the smoke would cause drought and famine in India. As often happened he was dead wrong. Again.