What do you mean it is relative to when we evolved? I think you are masking the claim that changes in the environment have no anthropogenic cause. Am I reading you right?
It is not masking something to write a sentence you don't understand, rather that could be accounted for by both my lack of willingness to write a long piece for a forum topic, and that you seem to want tunnel vision that discards other relevant global changes and only focusing on the one that our current state of evolution caused us to fixate on - which is relative to when we evolved.
I am instead suggesting it is rather silly to focus on because the amount of change mankind could make, relative to the already minor impact mankind has on environmental change, serves no useful purpose, causing more problems.
I should point that the most recent issue of New Scientist has a summary of a scientific paper that postulates that life itself actually contributes substantially to continental drift by drastically affecting weather patterns, soil moisture retention and various other ideas.
Yeah. Nonsense. Pre-industrial era life did very little to the environment that would effect weather, except for the Indian rain dances which we all know worked effectively. Weather changes and soil moisture retention may have coincided with changes in animal and human populations and activities but soil moisture retention causing plate drift is like suggesting a fly hit the world trade center and knocked it down.
They made the claim that a lifeless earth would have settled into a more uniform "shallow ocean world" rather than one that has relatively high tectonic activity, much of which is postulated to be exacerbated by erosion forces.
What they did there was seek to convince people in a non-scientific way that an idea they had might be true. Am I wrong in thinking that this is what magazines do, generate controversial articles to boost readership? It's a business, with those involved financially gaining from drawing people into the content. If anything, life and especially humans have a tendency to erode and level an area, not the other way around, but again it is to a trivial extent relative to planetary changes occurring regardless of either.
That might be a topic for another thread, however, but I, personally, believe that industrialization will have a profound impact on the biosphere, climate and even geography of the world on a scale we haven't even begun to see yet.
I completely disagree. Industrialization increases the pollution balance in the atmosphere which we need to maintain below a certain threshold for temperature moderation, crop growth, and health of all living species. At the same time the sky is not falling, the impact otherwise is out of our control and would happen either way and in fact had already been happening for millions of years when humans weren't a significant presence on earth.
We are now back at the beginning of my post. We're noticing things around us that have been going on for millions of years and trying to blame human actions relative to this stage in our evolution, things that will keep going on long after we cease to exist as a species. All this data we have is only due to us now collecting data about it. How many years out of millions do we have data on? Not guesses and theories, but data?
There are a lot of quacks out there but the one thing they all have in common is their central theme is we need to drop everything and change to suit them. This is the vanity of man, that when someone isn't content they want the rest of the world to change instead of changing oneself.