The Sixth Extinction : An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, 2014, (Henry Holt and Company), has been on the New York Times Best Seller List, and has won a Pulitzer prize, among other honors.  It describes the very recent signs of distress to forms of life in several regions of earth and disturbing events due to mankind induced changes of our earth.  These things are happening  right now,  for example, the total dying off of many amphibians, due to a new virus to which they are susceptible, unleashed by the changing climate, and the distress of corals because of the oceans dissolving more CO2 from the air, which tilts the oceanic pH toward the acid side.

She then describes five major times of extinction over the last 500 million years, including the extinction wave in which the dinosaurs were killed off, due to a meteorite which hit the earth, altering its climate.

Kolbert tells us how we are the agent of a huge climate change, and suggests that we could stop our actions which are causing this, but she has no certainty at all that we willl, or will not, in fact change our ways.