Technology

the planet will live on and heal.

Unfortunately, this line of thinking ignores the elephant in the room: inertia.

There have been prior climate change events that have gotten up into the +8-12℃ range (which, BTW, means palm trees at the poles and the extinction of any land species over 45Kg/100lbs), but the difference there is that they have taken many hundreds of thousands of years to get there, allowing whole ecosystems to migrate across entire continents while continuing to sequester carbon.

Our changes to date have - when compared to the very-next-fastest event in history - compressed over 150,000 years of climate changes into less than 75.

This means that not only is there a massive amount of inertia involved with our changes - several orders of magnitude greater, which will force CC to continue on well after humanity completely ceases adding to the problem - but ecosystems are just going to die in place. They simply aren’t being given the time to migrate or adapt, leading to significantly unoptimal/degraded CO2 sequestering, compounding the problem.

Or, in other words, this inertia is destroying the brakes that could slow and eventually reverse CC.

Finally, as the sun ages over the millennia, it throws off more and more heat. The global average needed to cause a runaway Venus Scenario has slowly been creeping down over the last few billion years, and may have already crossed the +12℃ level.

Which means that, even if humanity just ceases to exist today, there may be enough inertia to kick off sufficient feedback loops (methyl hydrate eruptions, permafrost eruptions, etc.) to push the planet into that Venus Scenario, extinguishing all life on Earth.

Sweet dreams.

Source: BSc in Physics & Math, former classmates in the CC & biology fields. I read the pre-print evidence they are collecting and can see where it points.