The earth will be fine, but we humans might not be. We can only survive within a pretty narrow range of conditions.
You seem to think the Earth is somehow huge and our effect small, but that is not true. Above I posted the numbers of natural animals and birds left versus human cattle (birds and mammals) and natural mammals are just FOUR PERCENT LEFT compared to human cattle.
Also we have reduced forest cover immensely, leading to reduced resiliency of the ecosystems. Humans are affecting ALL ecosystems, planet-wide now. Our effect is not "dandruff" - we are a cancer, not an inconvenience.
The biggest threat is loss of diversity of ecosystems, and deforestation, and only third comes climate change - but that is made worse by the first two - ecosystems that could otherwise evolve and adapt to change, are now already seriously damaged, and that will only increase the effects changing climate has. Oxygen breathing life is only possible on this planet because of the plants and (very important!
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html half of oxygen comes from algae) algae blooms in the seas that produce the oxygen all animal life uses.
But don't worry, other life will bounce back when we have killed off ourselves.
It baffles me how you seem to misunderstand the size of Earth. Have you ever been in an airplane for a bit longer trip and looked out the window? Earth is not huge, its a pretty small planet. It is not limitless.
https://earth.org/human-activity-land-surface-changes/What changes has human activity caused to the Earth’s land surface? Farming is a major cause of climate change and biodiversity loss, with species abundance having fallen by over 20% globally since 1900. Diversity within agriculture fares no better, as the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that just 9 species of plant account for 66% of global crop production. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of local food crops are heading towards extinction, being replaced by more marketable staples such as wheat, rice and maize. The scale of agriculture’s impact can be attributed to humanity’s influence on land surface changes: more than 70% of Earth’s land surface and two-thirds of marine environments have been significantly altered by human activity. Arable lands and grazing pastures cover one-third of Earth’s land surfaces and consume three-quarters of the world’s limited freshwater resources.
Just look at those numbers. We have
significantly altered 70% of land area, 66% of seas, our fields (utterly devoid of anything but a monoculture crop - so all forests cut) cover 30%. You have a serious misunderstanding of the scale of human influence.
Habitat loss and fragmentation are the primary threats to 85% of the species on the IUCN’s Red List of threatened and endangered species. Agriculture is a major driver of this as large swathes of highly productive areas such as forest, meadow and wetland habitats are cleared to make way for fields and grazing land.
In places such as the USA, 75% of processed foods in supermarkets contain genetically modified ingredients, including 92% of maize and 94% of soybean products. These crops are cloned, such that a single disease or pest could wipe out the entire field. The resulting fragile agroecosystem fuels a reliance on pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers to promote crop growth and prevent damage.
We remove the forest with its multitudes of organisms, and replace it with a monoculture of one, modified organism. Don't see a problem?
More than 68 billion tonnes of top-soil is eroded every year at a rate 100 times faster than it can naturally be replenished. Laden with biocides and fertiliser, the soil ends up in waterways where it contaminates drinking water and protected areas downstream. Water treatment and healthcare-associated costs alone cost US taxpayers billions a year. Furthermore, exposed and lifeless soil is more vulnerable to wind and water erosion due to lack of root and mycelium systems that hold it together. Healthy soil is rich in humus, which holds more water, and decreases erosion through increased soil density and particle clumping. A key contributor to soil erosion is over-tilling: although it increases productivity in the short-term by mixing in surface nutrients (e.g. fertiliser), tilling is physically destructive to the soil’s structure and in the long-term leads to soil compaction, loss of fertility and surface crust formation that worsens topsoil erosion.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visual ... e-ice-age/Once humans figured out how to cultivate plants and livestock for regular sources of food, they needed land to use.
For centuries, the loss of greenery was relatively slow. By 1800, the world had lost 700 million hectares each of forest and grassland, replaced by around 900 million hectares of land for grazing animals and 400 million hectares for crops.
But industrialization in the 1800s rapidly sped up the process.
Percentage of Habitable Land 1700 1800 1900 1950 2018
Forest 52% 50% 48% 44% 38%
Grassland 38% 36% 27% 12% 14%
Grazing 6% 9% 16% 31% 31%
Crops 3% 4% 8% 12% 15%
While half of Earth’s loss of forests occurred from 10,000 years ago to 1900, the other half or 1.1 billion hectares have been lost since 1900. Part of this loss, about 100 million hectares, has occurred in the more recent time period of 2000 to 2018.
The biggest culprit?
Though urban land use has rapidly grown, it still pales in comparison to the 31% of habitable land now being used for grazing livestock. Most of that land came at first from repurposed grasslands, but forests have also been cleared along the way.
So a full ONE THIRD of all habitable land area has been turned from forest - to barren landscapes of cattle pastures. Almost all of the biodiversity and resilience is lost. Often permanently, as agricultural land use leads to erosion, and the forests cant grow back easily even if the land use was stopped.
Even more serious are the tropical forests, where all the nutrients have dissolved out of the ground to depth of several meters to tens of meters, and all the nutrients needed for trees to grow are within the ecosystem - meaning that when you cut the trees and take them away, the land cannot ever again support a similar forest. And then you need fertilizers to even grow food there. The whole Amazon area is like this. (I have studied forest and mire ecology at a university for several years, so I know something about these issues personally)
https://www.dw.com/en/the-amazon-nutrie ... a-50139632Rainforests in Brazil are burning. Their loss can never be restored. That's because these soils are not just infertile, they're the most nutrient-poor soils in the world — and they're unsuitable for agriculture.
Nowhere else in the world is the number of animal and plant species as high as in the Amazon rainforest. Not even the rainforests in Asia or Africa can compare. The Amazon region has more species per square kilometer than in the whole of Europe.
One example: In just one hectare (about the size of a sports field), researchers were able to identify more than 450 tree species. In all of Germany, by comparison, there aren't even 100. The numbers are so huge that it's difficult to imagine how such a thing is possible.
Read more: Amazon wildfires: Leaders pressure Brazil to quell 'international crisis'
An abundance of species
Beyond that, there are tens of thousands of plant species, including countless medicinal plants, over 2.5 million insect species, 1,300 kinds of birds, 430 mammals, over 3,000 fish species, hundreds of different amphibians and reptiles. Numerous species are discovered every year, and many have yet to even be been seen by us humans.
These rainforests are a gigantic accumulation of biomass. Their plants grow on several levels, like floors in a building. There are tree giants that grow to a height of 60 to 80 meters. Then, there is the middle tree level. Below, it is very dark and humid, because the crowns of the trees are so close together that they act as a green blanket.
....
In this rainforest "universe," there are infinite niches for animals — thanks to an abundance of food, like leaves, seeds, fruits and nutrients. Everything is in the plants. As is the CO2 the trees extract from the atmosphere and store as they grow. All the while, they produce oxygen.
The amazing thing is that the soil is as poor in nutrients as the vegetation is rich. The humus layer, which is that dark, organic stuff in the soil that develops when plants or animal matter break down, is minimal nearly everywhere. The soil in the Amazon rainforest is the poorest and most infertile in the world. If one cuts down the forest, it is irretrievably lost. The humus layer is quickly washed out. Three years after clearing the forest (at the latest, nothing will grow there. What remains is washed out, worthless soil.
But why is that so?
The rainforest feeds itself. Most nutrients are absorbed by the plants and do not get into the soil at all. It's a kind of supernatural cycle. The few plant remains that do reach the ground — leaves or branches — are decomposed in no time by fungi and bacteria thanks to the year-round warm and humid climate. The nutrients released, such as potassium, calcium and magnesium, are immediately reabsorbed by the roots.
There is virtually nothing left for the soil. Nor can a fertile layer of humus ever form. Just a few centimetres below the top layer of soil, there is nothing more than sand or clay. All nutrients in the rainforest are stored in the plants themselves, not in the soil. For agriculture, rainforest soils can therefore only be used for very short periods of time.
https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forestsOver the last 10,000 years the world has lost one-third of its forests. An area twice the size of the United States. Half occurred in the last century.
And so on and so on,
but I have a feeling that you are not interested in an honest dialogue about these issues. Seems you have made up your mind and decided that a belief is good enough. Am I wrong?
What we often forget is that today it is not just humans doing something - it is humans using heavy machinery doing something. We are using fuels to power our servant machinery, multiplying our ability to affect our environment many hundred times over.
It is the equivalent of 600 slaves for an American is the amount of work we can do to change our environment. That is bloody huge.https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/each-ame ... ervants-2/And this source is an American capitalist enterprise mouthpiece - they think this is all great and dandy, of course.
Can you see a few countries that have done more than their part?
I calculated my own CO2 emissions, they come to 2700 kg per year so 2.7 tons. Mostly it is this low because no animal products, no car, no flying, and live in a district heated apartment and buy very little stuff, and biowaste is wholly collected and composted, as well as paper, cardboard, plastic, metal and glass collected and recycled. Average for my country would be 8 tons. We have one of the best recycling and collection systems in the world though - mandated by law. And it actually mostly works well.
At the same time, a Wyoming person produces over a 100 tons...
