The End is Nigh (again)

[dugimodo]

It's not scaremongering, it's accurate. They worked out a baseline level for animals naturally going extinct, doubled it as a margin of error, then compared it to what's happening now and discovered it's happening at approximately 100 times that rate. That's by definition a mass extinction event. 90% gone is what happens by the end of a mass extinction, when 50% of dinosaurs were gone were they not in the middle of a mass extinction? These things don't happen in a day.

In the last 100 years our effect on the surface of every land mass on the planet is incredibly visible, only a blind man could miss it. Without even being a scientist any of us who think about it can probably name a few species man has made extinct in recent history (recent in planetary climate terms) and that's without any study or research. seen a Moa lately? any large wild predators left in Great Britain?

http://earthsky.org/earth/sixth-mass...-happening-now
https://cosmosmagazine.com/geoscienc...eady-happening
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...cientists-warn

Seeing the damage we do and warning we need to work to stop doing it is not scaremongering - it's responsible and necessary. Even if they are wrong, that doesn't make it ok to just keep killing off species and transforming the whole planet to our own ends.

But hey, Humans are all that matter right, nothing else is important. Oh and we are so smart we will survive no matter what we do to everything else around us. We don't need plants to make oxygen for us or to provide us with food, we'll just invent something and grow it in a lab right? The world would be better off without pesky insects and vermin and we can all just live in clean sterile sealed environments away from that nasty old nature that's so inconvenient after all.

We are part of the environment, not separate from it. What we do matters, both for us and for the rest of life on the planet. If we ignore that sooner or later it'll bite us in the ar$e, maybe not the way that anyone has predicted because after all predictions have a way of being wrong but to just assume it'll be ok it's foolish and short sighted.

[1101]

I seen a Moa lately? any large wild predators left in Great Britain?

seen a mammoth lately : must be man that caused that to go extinct
seen a rhino or mammoth in the UK lately. They used to live there . Lets blame man on those as well . Couldnt possibly be any other reason I guess .Nope, man didnt cause that.

just more scaremongering

[dugimodo]

Bollocks. We know man wiped out the Moa and wolves and bears from Britain as I said. That's not in doubt. We also know of hundreds, if not thousands, of other species we have helped along the way to extinction.
This mass extinction is at least in part man made, previous ones were not. Where's the confusion. 100 times the baseline extinction rate is scaremongering? I suppose warning you if a truck is about to hit you would be scaremongering too? Alerting people to actual real observed data is not scaremongering. Perhaps the predictions of where it's all heading might be, but it's worth being alarmed about I say.

People are in denial about our own ability to screw up the planet - she'll be right mate.

[1101]

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog...maybe_not.html

"There's no doubt that humans have caused and are causing animals to go extinct, but to compare the current situation to previous mass extinctions is misleading."

"The field of conservation biology is a crisis discipline," she wrote, suggesting that the field is inclined to forecast doom and gloom in order to promote needed environmental protections.

"Conservationists themselves have said that the field breeds a culture of despair,"


https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-not-ed...ass-extinction

[zqwerty]

Don't worry it's already too late to do anything, may as well relax and enjoy things whilst you still can, the last chance we had to alter the path we were on was back in the 70's, maybe even earlier, hard to say exactly, now no matter what we do we are riding the tiger.

There is so much lag in the system that the effects of the mismanagement of the Earth by it's mostly uncaring top predator denizens cannot be undone by actions in the present.

The biggest problem is over-population and that will take care of itself the hard way as time moves on, there was a choice but now it's gone.

[pctek]

seen a mammoth lately : must be man that caused that to go extinct

Could be. Although from various docos I have watched and some books I have read, it's usually a combination of factors.
Even the last extinction, the accepted view is the asteroid, but probably not...more likely a bunch of things around the same time as the asteroid.

Which it will be with this one too.
Loss of habitats, destruction of forests, pollution of the seas, pesticides, herbicides and other assorted chemicals, all sorts contributing to it.

We can't live without other creatures, not even bugs. Especially bugs actually.
There may be some of us left, but it won't be much fun I'd say.

[zqwerty]

The overview:

http://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-t...lert-Latest%29

[R2x1]

a mass extinction is where allmost everything dies . en mass . 90% of everything gone .

thats not happening . Cant just cherry pick some animals, birds & fish that are dying out , ignoring all the species that are doing just fine thanks.
Mass extinction, pfft : rats mice sheep, slime , grass, pine trees, insects , cows, dogs etc etc : no threats to those . How can it be a mass extinction when so
many species are doing so well.

Species died off all through earths history. Its been happening since day one of life on the earth. Its just what happens over time .

a banana for those articles

: is it mass extinction when one species of banana is dying off, but other varieties of banana doing OK ?

A Mass Extinction is a simultaneous banning of Catholic Rituals, and a great success in the weight loss department.