i wouldn’t say optimistic. Either way humans’ fate would be the same, and i don’t know that an ice-having world is inherently better than an ice free jungle planet, though as someone with ancestry from cold areas i prefer the former personally (which is irrelevant because i’ll be quite dead before the ice would come back even in a cold scenario). I think the point is as a species we are both very impactful and in other ways not so much. We right now have an impact as a colonial culture similar to a comet or something like the Deccan Traps. Both of those were pretty shore in the broad history of Earth and they changed the trajectory a lot, but ultimately earth went back to being earth.
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The problem is the rate of change. When things change too quickly, at planetary scale, species are driven extinct. If the carbon was released more slowly, over millions of years, then it might be a net positive, but at the rate at which it is happening, there is no time for species to adapt, and the overall negatives will outweigh the positives.
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the meteor and/or volcano that killed most of the dinosaurs was very sudden (i know it’s still unclear which caused what level of issues, but either way). Was that a good or a bad event? It’s unclear if we’d have sentient dinosaurs using some dinosaur iNat by now without the comet, or if we’d had a steady state with what things were like back then, or something else entirely. but human civilization wouldn’t exist without that event. Which could be seen as good or bad but really is neutral. I think it’s objectively bad for humans to alter the climate and kill a bunch of species, but i ultimately think habitat destruction will have had more effect than climate change in the long run. Really it doesn’t matter because they are both caused by the same thing.
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One could argue that it was neither, because it was not an event caused by a moral agent (beings that could choose different courses of action and understand the consequences). If such a meteor or volcano was the result today of premeditated human activity (or that of any other sentient lifeform) one could argue unequivocally that it would be bad. Maybe, millions of years down the line, a consequence of the KT extinction was the emergence of human sentience, but that’s not an outcome that could be predicted, so could not justify the deliberate engineering of a mass extinction. Even with hindsight, we don’t know if evolution might have produced something even more incredible if more of the dinosaurs had lived, so we can’t say that the outcome was “better” than it would have been without a mass extinction.
I agree with you, too, about habitat destruction. They’re both having huge and interlinked effects (and are often caused by the same processes, such as deforestation and livestock farming) but for now, habitat destruction is still the cause of greater disruption to biodiversity than climate change is.
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Yeah, to be honest my preferred way of looking at it is to combine habitat loss, human caused climate change, and other similar things into different aspects of the same broad problem of human, or colonial, behavior. Sometimes i call it ‘biosphere collapse’. Climate change and habitat loss/ecosystem collapse are linked and make each other worse, for instance.
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This well-studied trend among endothermic animals partially explains why the largest known terrestrial mammals are smaller than the largest known terrestrial dinosaurs (sauropods), whereas the largest known aquatic mammals are larger than sauropterygians. Even early sauropods such as Vulcanodon were slightly superior in weight to modern Loxodonta and had a comparatively small surface area. It’s worth noting that sauropods specifically, being more closely related to theropods (including birds!) than to other dinosaurs, had a series of pneumatic sacs running through their vertebrae and more porous bones than giant mammals allowing them to reach much greater sizes.
Humans are indeed known to have hunted most megafauna to extinction outside of Africa and Eurasia, potentially because African and Eurasian animals evolved alongside Homo sapiens and its relatives whereas others did not.
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