I like to imagine the Earth fighting back in some crazy Jumanji way. Plants start growing super fast and breaking apart buildings... stretching out into the sky to suck up the carbon.
Silliness. We're not hurting the earth. We're just making it a bit less hospitable for us. It's bad, but it's not the apocalypse that some will have you believe.
> It's bad, but it's not the apocalypse that some will have you believe.
Maybe. Your statement masks the deeply serious potential consequences.
Yes, it's not going to look like fire-and-brimstone hell on earth; volcanoes spewing ash into the darkened, lightning-filled sky, mile-high tidal waves drowning major population centers, the ground splitting open and swallowing cities whole...
But what happens if another migrant wave washes over Europe consisting of starving people whose land is inhospitable due to drought-induced crop failure? One large wave from Syria has provoked considerable social unrest and has contributed to the rise of multiple nationalist, far-right parties. How much more instability can that region take before a war occurs? What would a world war in the age of nuclear weapons look like?
Or, what if we hit the scientifically-plausible scenario of runaway climate change resulting from multiple positive feedback loops triggering melting of methane ice on the seafloor, and arctic thaw allowing decomposition of large amounts of organic matter? If the average global temperature rises by 6 degrees C, the hottest days will be so hot that they will have the potential to outright kill many staple crops. In addition to the sea-level rise, large areas of land will be uninhabitable due to heat. As with the above scenario, what happens when large groups of people are starving and can no longer survive where they are currently located? How much instability can human civilization tolerate?
...and that's not even the worst case scenario. What if the temperature really takes off and we experience an anoxic event[0], where the oxygen level in the ocean depletes and they begin emitting highly poisonous hydrogen-sulfide gas? Such an event is linked to high temperatures, high oceanic acidity and high levels of atmospheric CO2. This event would kill the majority of life in the ocean, and due to the combination of the hydrogen-sulfide gas' effect on land animals plus the damage it would cause to the ozone layer resulting in increased UV exposure, this would kill the majority of life on land, too.
Earth doesn't need to "fight back"---it only lets species that can cope with the changed environment take over.
Once, oxygen was toxic to most of the species on earth, when some algae started producing it by photosynthesis. If Earth fought back, we'd had very different species by now.
