Unfortunately, it's not a normal cycle at all.
This much is true. We are in uncharted waters.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the human race has acquired the power to alter the very physical mechanics by which the planet operates. Science fiction authors started toying with these ideas in the 1930s, and, with the detonation of an atomic bomb, scientists became increasingly horrified and appalled at the destructive possibilities of our behavior, perhaps Oppenheimer and Einstien in particular.
Studies on global warming by the major oil comapnies performed over half a century ago have been an "open secret" for decades, and climate deniers have been ridiculous and pathetic fools since the Reagan era.
As a child in the 1950s, by the time I started school, or shortly thereafter, I was aware that the human race possessed the power and the means to destroy itself. Every person reading this undoubtedly takes the Native American belief that "we belong to the world, the world doesn't belong to us" as pitiful and amusingly quaint at best.
If you consider the Planet Earth as a single organism, are we, the human race, the "Crown of Creation" committing suicide, or are we, the human race, an assassin, killing the planet from within, like a cancer?
