[maxbond]

I'd point out that the mechanism you're proposing is itself an anthropogenic change in the environment. We've altered more than just the atmosphere of this planet. Their overall point, "we've effed this planet, and I believe that's caused this specific problem," would still hold, whether or not they were sufficiently precise with their language.

The ways we've "effed" the planet are so numerous and interconnected that it makes sense, at least to me, to lump them together into an umbrella term everyone is familiar with. There is no clean separation between our mining practices and what has happened to the water and what has happened to the atmosphere - they are intimately related.