Not that screwing up radio-carbon dating will drive anyone to actually do anything about fossil fuel consumption, or even that ruining such dating is part of a vast fossil fuel industry plot. But … heck, that's annoying, from an historic (and anthropologic) perspective.
Our reliance on fossil fuel combustion is ruining carbon dating | Ars Technica
Releasing ancient carbon into the atmosphere is prematurely ageing the Earth.
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I think there is a lot of overlap between the climate change denying crowd and the young earth creationist crowd, and since the young earth crowd doubts the validity of carbon dating they probably see this as another benefit of fossil fuels.
+Ryan Beck I have no doubt that we will now see a flurry of argument from the YECs that claim all C14 dating is now suspect, therefore they must be right.
I'm sure that whoever/whatever unearths our civilization will have figured out an alternative. Besides, that big, black smudge in the rocks will only be a century or so deep.
+Thomas Jones Read an interesting article a while back about how problematic a recovery of human civilization would be, assuming some complete collapse. Pretty much all the easily accessible (and a lot of not easily accessible) resources (fossil fuels, metals, rare earths, helium) have been already taken up (and, in some cases squandered beyond recycling from the hypothetical ruins). It would be more of an Easter Island scenario than a Dark Ages scenario.
Hard to say. You gotta figure that if we're talking species annihilation, by the time another intelligent species evolves, the Earth would have completed at least one full carbon-cycle. Succeeding civilizations would have a LOT more-concentrated carbon reserves to draw from.
Similarly, current society has harvested, purified and concentrated a lot of those metals and rare earth materials into waste dumps. Thus, it could be a lot less effort for subsequent species to get those resources.
Helium's a bit more problematic since, once released, it eventually leaves the atmosphere. That said, much of the helium you'd want to use for energy production is rare, already, and not yet heavily extracted (better off doing off-planet mining for it).
Well, yeah, if it's species annihilation, the cockroaches can work it out for themselves.
The article had some issue I can't recall with the "but there's all this refined stuff in landfills and ruins" argument, but I can't recall what it was at the moment.