Common misconception. We won't kill the planet even if we tried to. Wed make it too hard to sustain billions of humans, sure. But they are very different things
This is a good distinction because its a common idea but its based on a conflation: human civilizationhealth and planet health. Planet health is hard to even think about apart from humans but the planet in no way “needs” us.
It's a silly distinction. Unless we're wiped out by a virus or something similar, whatever ends us is likely to also take down a huge part of the biosphere as well - as is already happening.
"Burning something down" doesn't mean literally killing all life. But the unnecessary deaths of likely billions of animals in the long run should weigh enough to stop this nitpicking.
Same could be said about any of the many mass extinction events in earth history. Not that I’m in favor of setting the planet on fire, but if you zoom out far enough it’s clear earth would bounce back from even a nuclear war coupled with climate change and microplastics.
> Like, do you think I'd argue that any of the previous mass extinctions were good
Without the most recent one, mammals and thus humans wouldn't have flourished... So yes. If you conversely care about those people dying, then you should be celebrating the comet that killed the dinosaurs
Could you explain why I "should" be celebrating that? There's no logical sequence leading from "caring about people & animals dying" to "one should think that previous mass extinctions were good".
The current mass extinction was in no way inevitable, it is caused by humans. We can still have an unknowably large impact on the number of lives lost. I don't know why we should pretend otherwise.
Fortunately that particular extreme scenario doesn't seem likely. Radiance scales with the fourth power of temperature, and we're not filling the atmosphere with Venus levels of sulfuric acid. Our CO2 output will be self-limiting when it kills us and we stop outputting it.