Book rec for the "sky is falling" crowd.

[hunter]

37. I suspect nearly all periods of rapid climate change in earth's history...

... are a consequence of biological innovation.

We tend to think of life adapting to physical changes in the earth's environment, but it goes much further than that because these physical changes are usually caused by biological innovation.

In a very substantial way it was the evolution of C₄ plants that created the chaotic climate conditions our ancestors adapted to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_photosynthesis

If not for this biological innovation by PLANTS we'd probably still be bonobo-like creatures living in the forests.

The common image people have of paleontologists is someone looking for fossil bones, but it's the evolutionary innovations in biochemistry that have left their mark everywhere in the geological record.

If modern industrial human soon goes extinct, which seems very likely, the greater consequences of our existence, the geochemical changes, the reduced biodiversity, will be rapidly erased.

I think humans are still a "flash in the pan" at this point. Time will tell, but none of us are likely to be around ten million years from now.

I'm not dismissing the environmental damage we do, but our industrial species of human will probably be one of the species lost.

A decrease in intelligence is as likely as an increase simply because it takes a lot of energy to maintain intelligence, and with greater intelligence there is more to go wrong in the developmental process.