[cesaref]

I like to think that in 50 million years when we're long gone, whatever has evolved from the burrowing mammal that survived the mess we've caused will be looking at a thin brown layer in the geological record and wondering quite what caused the mass extinction event.

One of the crackpot ideas will be that an earlier civilisation managed to mess up the entire planet, but that's so ludicrous that they will conclude it was most likely a weird asteroid impact or something like that.

[qaq]

If you look at temperature shifts at 50 million year scale whatever wea are doing is basically irrelevant https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_widt...

[mrintegrity]

Those rapid temperature swings were related to / resulted in mass extinctions and had various natural causes. The current rapid temperature swing is caused by human activity as is well accepted by any scientist who isn't a crackpot.

[asadotzler]

We are a natural cause. Any position otherwise is silly.

[tommit]

What's silly is this comment, as it has in no way furthered the discussion. It only enables one to feel smug for a hot minute. Surely you're smart enough to infer that "natural causes" are said in contrast to "human-made causes".

[ben_w]

Silly perhaps, but conventional, as humans like to think of themselves as capable of cooperation to solve challenges larger than any one person, and to think of themselves as wiser than (other) animals and thus able to see these challenges well in advance.

[lenkite]

Those natural causes will occur again - regardless of whatever we do as a species.

[ben_w]

What we do as a species can't rule out things like star lifting. The future doesn't need to be limited to what we've done so far.

[ben_w]

The mass extinction will be visible, as will the unusual chemistry found only in that narrow, but global, layer.

Also, note the last section of your linked graph is a vertical line on that scale. It still would be if you zoom in to 50 million years rather than 500 million. Anthropomorphic climate change is a vertical line even if you zoomed in to 5 thousand years.

[swader999]

I think theres a rogue star set to mess with our orbit in about a million years so talk of another fifty might be lofty.