(New Scientist) Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us

From New Scientist magazine:

WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch. The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?


Full article here:
Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us

is like building sandcastles on the shore, as the tsunami approaches.

WWIII will be humans fighting humans to try to marshal the resources to reverse the destruction before it is too late. The war to save the planet. It will be a mess.

250 million years ago an asteroid hit the Antarctic, causing a shock wave to circle the globe, refocusing at the antipode in Siberia, causing a huge pool of lava to open up. The gasses from that basalt lava, now known as the Siberian Traps, caused enough warming the ocean warmed up, melting the frozen methane (clathrates) on its bottom, which caused a lot more warming. Eventually 95% of life on Earth was destroyed. Afterwards, only a single species of reptile was able to flourish, and this led to the age of the dinosaurs.

The clathrates in the Arctic have started to melt. Bubbles have been observed off Spitsbergen. So far they aren't reaching the surface, but they are contributing to accelerated ocean acidification, and without massive geo-engineering it is only a matter of time.

The latest predictions say we will reach these conditions by mid-century.

Yes we have to settle other issues if we are to gather the political will to do this, but it is literally do or die, in our lifetimes. Now. Not in a couple of hundred years like the article says. Drop what you are doing and work to fix this.

The world is really only designed for micro organisms.

Most of world history supports this.

...debris. All life.

So perhaps the planet can "recoup" from our "unnatural" expansion into its environment.

It will not be able to "recoup" from the natural expansion of the sun.