So when will people stop minimizing that, literally, the planet is dying?
We are, however, in the midst of the sixth great extinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction . The evidence for this is pretty dang convincing, even independent of things like global climate change, and it has been going on for quite a while now, starting with the disappearance of mega-fauna from the American continent.
If you do find anyone attempting to "minimize" this fact, you might try pointing something out: each prior great extinction was accompanied by a replacement of the "dominant" species on the Earth. As the current reigning "dominant" species, this seems like something that might be very concerning to humans...
Except this time we are the cause of the extinction. I think that's a pretty important difference.
What is different, in this case, is that in all past cases if the dominant species played a role in bringing about a mass extinction it was almost certainly an accident. We have the (possibly small) chance of potentially averting our own replacement as dominant species, if we're smart...
You're doing exactly what I'm saying playing with semantics. For all intents and purposes on the timescales that we actually care about, the planet is dying.
The planet; as-in this rocky, water-world orbiting Sol, will exist for BILLIONS of years.
The _life_ on this planet AS WE KNOW IT is dying, along with ourselves. That is a huge difference and one that needs to be repeated with as much clarity as possible.
Will homo-sapiens still exist in 10,000 years? maybe. 100,000 years? doubtful. 1,000,000 years? nope.
Will single-celled life forms, virus, prions, etc still exist? Probably.
This entire pyramid that we have existed at the top of is brutally fragile and will not continue as it is forever. To repeat one of most favorite quotes: "Nature is in a constant state of recovering from the previous disaster."
This is the distinction. Something as immutable as granite can't die. We can barely wrap our brains around the concept of water being able to erode such permanence. How can you expect them to believe such histrionics? But life, that is more delicate and temporary then a snowflake in the Sahara.
Well, to nitpick a bit, not billions, for the "water-world" part. A few hundred million. It'll likely be quite parched by the 1 billion mark. Large, complex life forms are expected to have a Really Bad Time starting in the 500-600 million year range and shortly (geologically speaking) be gone entirely, assuming no acute planet-scale disasters before then.
Question regarding the "loss" of the oceans:
Won't that turn the atmosphere into 'soup'?
What they are saying is that ecosystem which is on the planet is going to hell including the ability for said ecosystem to support life. Either all life, or more specifically the ability to support human life.
No one, no one, is thinking the literal planet is going to go boom.
Do you honestly think the person who said this doesn't understand that rocks aren't alive and will keep on existing whether there is life on it or not?
This is not a productive comment. Everyone knows that "the planet" in an environmental context refers to the living things on Earth. It's an extremely common and universal metaphor. I have no idea why threads always have this one guy who feels like pointing out that the metaphorical language isn't literally true is insightful.
If civilization does not collapse in the next mere 1,000 years, I'm very bullish on technology indistinguishable from magic, which would come very handy in assuring our continued survival well into the billions of years.