All the changes we are seeing now are absolutely nothing compared to the impact bacteria had had on the climate.
Take ANY other process and speed it up by 5-6 orders of magnitude and see how different it is. For example, try sipping your coffee at only 3 orders of magnitude faster — it'll literally require an explosion to accelerate to 1000fps and then decelerate to 0 to traverse the 2' from saucer to lips in in 2/1000 sec instead of 2 sec. The effect on ecosystems is similar; changes that would be easily adapted to by all flora and fauna are instead fatal to many. And those ecosystems sustain us.
Moreover, even the slow pace of bacterial climate change is no solace — the most notable change they caused was the Great Oxidation Event and Snowball Earth wiping out almost all life for 300 million years.
I'd prefer to not whistle ignorance into the wind. I'd rather we take simple measures that make life better for everyone and everything, and yes, using sustainable energy sources instead of burning valuable and increasingly scarce hydrocarbons is a basic step.
[0] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019asbi.book..261T/abstra...
Had the bacteria said “hey guys all this Oxygen we’re making is seriously disrupting the environment and killing a lot of stuff, we should limit our productivity in order to ensure that doesn’t happen, after all we’re the greatest things that will ever be on this planet so we have to make sure it’s well suited for us and only us forever and ever and ever”, here we would not be.
Even if we make your assumption that humans are somehow entitled to do whatever we want, it is massively stupid to ignore the fact that we depend on an extremely complex web of life to survive. We can break some links, but breaking too many will literally be suicidal.
When we see that we are doing something that WILL inevitably break many of those links (not to mention flood most of our major cities in decades, which is already happening), the only wise thing to do is to adjust course to prevent that destruction.
Yet you seem to think it is a good idea to spread ignorance and stupidity. That way is guaranteed to NOT advance even humanity's self-centered interests. Do you have some fetish about burning hydrocarbons or some religion that makes it sacred?
So your contention would be that we should all die off so something else can come around in a few hundred million years?
My point is rather that if we do die off, there will be something that comes along, and it will in all likelihood be an evolutionarily “better” species than humanity. For instance, if we die in nuclear armageddon, there’s a very good chance that whatever comes next will have significant radiation hardening capabilities, and perhaps would even be able to metabolize radiation. These individuals would be far better suited to be Earth’s intergalactic vanguard.
Are you going to mention the Siberian Traps next?
My dude, civilization almost collapsed several times due to like, one volcano. Imagine a 20% increase in global CO2 due to human activity.
You can say "well, the earth recovered from the Permian extinctions" but that's meaningless, we're talking about _humanity_.
Trilobites weren't all "oh, no worries, the Cyanobacteria didn't end life on earth so we're totally fine, brah! We're _rationalist trilobites_!"