The planet isn't dying. The planet is just a ball of rock running loops around the gravity well of the closest star.
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...
> 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.
I think the jury's still out on whether or not this is actually different from the past extinctions. Yes, there was an asteroid impact around the time the dinosaurs went extinct, but every year there's some new paper or some new bit of evidence that points to the possibility that the asteroid wasn't the only factor in the K-Pg extinction. It's quite possible that dinosaurs had some role in their own extinction as well.
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...
For the person on the street who does not even care about the details of ocean acidification or atmospheric CO2 concentrations, "the planet is dying" is a sufficiently strong and useful statement.
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.
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...