Even if global warming was a hoax and humans were not responsible for climate change, we’d still be left to face the fact that humans have ruined the environment. Stephen Meyer, a professor at MIT, wrote, “Over the next 100 years or so as many as half of the earth’s species, representing a quarter of the planet’s genetic stock, will functionally if not completely disappear … Nothing – not national or international laws, global bioreserves, local sustainability schemes, or even ‘wildlands’ fantasies – can change the current course. The broad path for biological evolution is now set for the next several million years. And in this sense the extinction crisis – the race to save the composition, structure, and organization of biodiversity as it exists today – is over, and we have lost.”
Forgetting global warming then, what is the human impact upon the planet?