The Real Crisis

 In 100 years almost none of us will be alive barring some miracle medical breakthrough.  Our descendants will be barring some catastrophic event.

What will the world be like and do we care?  For most of history our ancestors didn't worry about the world even as they were changing it.  We likely hunted to extinction many of the largest mammals and once we figured out agriculture removed trees and started to irrigate.

How much did any of this impact the World?  Probably very little in comparison to natural occurrences.

Still if you look at our oldest civilizations the landscape was altered to accommodate our needs.  It was when we learned that carbon from the past was available to us for things like heating and to run our new machines that things heated up (literally).  

We don't create carbon, we just recycle it so to speak.  All living things incorporate carbon and much of that was trapped in the earth as the circle of life kept happening.  Plants, especially ones in marshy areas took their carbon with them as new generations of plants grew above them.

Digging up and releasing this carbon will reverse the hundreds of millions of years in basically a flash.

We are already pretty far down this path and we can continue or stop.  Ideally we would find a way to re-trap the carbon.  Some of the changes are now inevitable and the earth will survive and so will we.  We might have to migrate to new cities in Greenland of the Antarctic as our current habitats become inhabitable.  

This is the crisis we have to worry about.