Economist and futurist Jeremy Rifkin straps on his tinfoil hat: He sees trace amounts of natural, harmless atmospheric gas causing "mass extinction of 70 per cent (of the biological diversity) in your kid’s lifetime"

Planet Earth is on the verge of disaster, economist warns

EDMONTON - There is no doubt Earth is on the verge of disaster, as our fossil-fuelled civilization pushes the planet toward one of the greatest extinctions of the past 450 million years.

Humans have the tools to lessen the damage and transform society within the next 30 years, but we are already too late to prevent some of the damage as a warming atmosphere creates more unstable weather, and more species go extinct, economist and futurist Jeremy Rifkin told the Emissions Reduction Summit Monday.
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“We are monsters, we are devouring this special experiment in the universe, and this is not sustainable.”
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“That climate will put us back to the climate of 3 million years ago, when there was a much different ecosystem. For every one degree of temperature rise on this planet, the atmosphere absorbs about seven per cent more precipitation from the ground, with more floods, wild fires, droughts … and mass extinction of 70 per cent (of the biological diversity) in your kid’s lifetime,” said Rifkin.