We are in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, the extinction event with the highest extinction rate. Killing the animals is part of what we have done to destroy species, there's also habitat destruction.
And if we are smart enough and we melt the East Siberian Arctic Shelf we are next in line after we release enough methane to recreate Permian-Triassic extinction event.
"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." ... then go extinct.
The P-Tr extinction event is acknowledged as being the most severe of all. One of the causes is the sudden release of methane present in seabeds... which is a self-reinforcing phenomenon: as temperature raises, methane release accelerates, reinforcing the temperature raise which reinforces the methane release and so on... That could realistically happen again within our lifetime.
So does anyone know exactly what brought the planet back to normal after the release of all this methane? Why didn't the Earth careen into an unstoppable spiral of planet-wide heating like Venus did?
While Venus could have an atmosphere capable of supporting life at one time, Venus' hydrogen is believe to have been ejected into space by solar winds due to a lack of a magnetosphere capable of countering them.
Much of the Earth's original carbon supply has been sequestered in the form of carbonate rocks. Much of the planet is covered with miles of them. That carbon isn't going anywhere.
That is what I was wondering as well. The climate on eart seems to be very britty and very robust at the same time. What stops it from going completely crazy?
Maybe it's a variation of the anthropic principle? Earth is not a Venus simply because we're here to observe it.
We don't (yet) have data about climates on Earth-like planets in other solar systems. It could be that Earth is an extreme outlier in having a stable climate system.
"One of the causes is the sudden release of methane present in seabeds"
You mean "one possible cause among many" (including, ATW, meteor impact, volcanism, sea level change, sea oxygen content change, sea acidity change). That doesn't make it one of THE causes. The word "possible" needs to be in there.
And if we are smart enough and we melt the East Siberian Arctic Shelf we are next in line after we release enough methane to recreate Permian-Triassic extinction event.
"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." ... then go extinct.