Those are key points in the article, but I didn't read them in the way you did. This article is largely about many research groups coming together to build a more nuanced understanding of our impact on the environment over the past thousands of years.

It also suggests the prevailing views of climate change are simplistic. We, even in much more "primitive" times, have been mucking up the earth to our benefit. It's bound to happen, of course. All that energy must come from somewhere.

I don't think the article suggests that the situation we're in now isn't happening. The article reads almost breathless—in on the knowledge that we're in a dire situation. Do we really need more reasons to illustrate our impact on the environment?

It also speaks to our strange compulsion to believe in the duality of human and nature. How do you get the public to recognize that there is no such thing, only one symbiotic whole? I hope we can figure out how to work together.

Yes I would argue they aren't denying CO2. They are saying that humans have been doing massive changes to global-scale systems for a while now.

That mean they are trying to say that the simple chemical property of increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases heat retention isn't false, or that humans aren't doing it.

I'd say it's more akin to them warning there may be more insidious or less-well-understood dangers to human civilization and the Earth biome than just global warming.

Personally, mass extinction of species comes to mind. A wide variety of species enables equilibriums to be established with changing conditions, given a proper allowed rate of evolution.

Current anthropomorphic changes to the world are far faster than typical climate shifts, which occurred on the scale of 1000s of years, not decades.

Combined with humanity reducing the number of available species to adapt, mass extinctions seem akin to us playing russian roulette:

- did killing off this species collapse the entire system? No? - how about this one? No? - how about this one? Uhoh.

> I'd say it's more akin to them warning there may be more insidious or less-well-understood dangers to human civilization and the Earth biome than just global warming.

> Personally, mass extinction of species comes to mind. A wide variety of species enables equilibriums to be established with changing conditions, given a proper allowed rate of evolution.

From what I understand, the main existencial issue of CO2 and the subsequent global warming is the extinction of oxygen producing plankton in the oceans, which are apparently much more significant O2 producers than a typical forest.

This isn't a large multi causal multi-species antropogenic extinction, it is a single group extinction failure mode, directly caused by 'just global warming' which will automatically mean game over. We absolutely do need to curb greenhouse gases (not just CO2) and decelerate the trend of global temperature increase.

Agreed, that is a pretty straightforward danger.

But just because that is a simple and direct danger, does that mean that mass extinction isn't killing off "key cog" species in more complicated critical machinery?

The goal of scientific research is not to score points for your side in a political debate. It is to uncover truth.

Regardless, I think you have misinterpreted this article anyway and it is saying the opposite.

Your reading was selective and not comprehensive. "Viewing humans and nature as entwined doesn’t mean that we should shrug our shoulders at current climatic trends, unchecked deforestation, accelerating extinction rates or widespread industrial waste. Indeed, archaeology supplies numerous examples of societal and ecosystem collapse: a warning of what happens if we ignore the consequences of human-caused environmental change."

Rather, the opposite: Comparing to a baseline before humans made big changes in the landscape, the changes today are larger than had been assumed.