I can't tell what the point of this article is. It seems to me to be intended to undercut concern about global warming by comparing current events to the geological history of the planet.

Human beings have only been on the planet the last few hundred thousand years, and civilization has only existed for several thousand years. On the graph showing average temperatures over the last 500 million years that vertical line at the far right is overwhelmingly the result of human activity over the last few hundred years.

The global warming we are creating raises two concerns. One is that we are raising the temperature of the planet so fast that other forms of life on the planet--including the crops we depend on for our existence--cannot adjust quickly enough, and will perish. Related to that is the continued existence of civilization. Devastating storms and floods and droughts are already straining to the limit its very existence.

Civilization is people living without producing food. You don't have to live in a megalopolis for that to be true: in even the tiniest hamlet people live without producing any food. People who don't care for the overall effects that civilization has produced at this point would be wise to think very seriously about a world without cities: what it would be like if cities did collapse and all those people flooded into the precious, bucolic, idyllic countryside (where, it so happens, I live).

if you want to fix civilization: "A New Liberalism" (a "24 min read" here in Medium); concerning the economy: "De-growth with Only Positive Effects" (a "6 min read" here in Medium), with nothing I publish here behind the paywall