Planet Earth is indifferent to the concept of good and evil created by one of its species, human beings. Earthquakes, cyclones and storms are amoral. No matter how hard it is for the arrogance of human beings, when people talk about the point of no return in connection with climate change, what is at risk is not the survival of the planet.

It is only a question of the survival of the species which regards itself as the most intelligent but insists on a suicidal lifestyle. This, in contrast, is immoral.

Ethics and morals are lacking in people who set up an economic system that destroys resources that cannot be replaced and cumulatively has the arrogance to regard itself as the most civilised in the world.

What is missing is the most elementary common sense, when primacy is given to the primitive accumulation of capital, as if two centuries of industrial revolution had not passed, when an orgy of consumption rules daily life and the absurd logic of “development” dominates, imposed by weak, inefficient leaders.

The earthquake in Indonesia followed by a tsunami which swept through a number of countries and reached as far as the east coast of Africa caused 220,000 deaths (how many more victims must there have been of illness, hunger and injuries) and changed the position of the North Pole by 2.5 cm, where the glaciers are melting at an astonishing speed.

The fury of hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans (USA), killed 1800; the changes in the winds and the currents of the Atlantic as a function of global warming were not irrelevant to the scale of this event. More than 200,000 were made homeless because the levees of the Mississippi were not in the right place and the floods were severe.

The Sichuan earthquake (China) caused more than 40,000 deaths and made 1.5 million homeless when modern buildings of hazardous construction collapsed like houses of cards, just to mention the catastrophes than have been most prominent in the media and that have attracted the attention of the international community in the past three years.

In the Algarve and on a more modest scale, the collapse of the cliff on the Praia Maria Luísa in Albufeira caused five deaths and even though it was impossible to predict the date and time it would happen, sooner or later the cliff would no longer support further building,

Nature is amoral, the concept of blame or responsibility is alien to it, even though one way or another human intervention has given it, immorally, a substantial push, by causing profound climate and geothermal changes in recent years, transforming the amoral catastrophes into immoral tragedies.

But there is no doubt that the fiasco of the Copenhagen summit is profoundly immoral, when 193 countries, including those that claim to be the leaders of the world, resoundingly fail to reach a concrete agreement that will allow the human species to survive.

Not two weeks later, once again the strength of the amorality of the natural elements returns with Haiti being hit by another violent earthquake. The ominous counting is not yet over, but it has already reached a figure of 60,000 dead and about one million homeless.

Even so, Nature is not as deadly as the human species, which daily immolates itself on the altars of immorality.

_{'global-warming' 'climate' 'earthquakes' 'cliff_collapse'}