6th mass extinction!

[Sriram]

Hi everyone,

Here is an article about the 6th mass extinction, which scientists say we have now entered.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33209548

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The Earth has entered a new period of extinction, a study by three US universities has concluded, and humans could be among the first casualties.

The report, led by the universities of Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley, said vertebrates were disappearing at a rate 114 times faster than normal.

The findings echo those in a report published by Duke University last year.

One of the new study's authors said: "We are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event."The last such event was 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs were wiped out, in all likelihood by a large meteor hitting Earth.

"If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover and our species itself would likely disappear early on," said the lead author, Gerardo Ceballos.

They found that the current extinction rate was more than 100 times higher than in periods when Earth was not going through a mass extinction event.

Since 1900, the report says, more than 400 more vertebrates had disappeared.

Such a loss would normally be seen over a period of up to 10,000 years, the scientists say.

The study - published in the Science Advances journal - cites causes such as climate change, pollution and deforestation.

Given the knock-on effect of ecosystems being destroyed, the report says benefits such as pollination by bees could be lost within three human generations.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) says at least 50 animals move closer to extinction every year.

Around 41% of all amphibians and 25% of mammals are threatened with extinction, it says.

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Also see...

http://us.cnn.com/2015/06/20/world/mass-extinction-animals/index.html

Cheers.

Sriram

[torridon]

All very worrying. I doubt humans will go extinct but degraded ecosystems of the future will have a much smaller carrying capacity and the pain of our reduction is going to be unimaginable.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

All very worrying. I doubt humans will go extinct but degraded ecosystems of the future will have a much smaller carrying capacity and the pain of our reduction is going to be unimaginable.

This is the Darkside that Pinker never puts into his equations since it flies in the face of purported ''Human Progress'', not that Pinker being wrong is any source of solace.

[torridon]

All very worrying. I doubt humans will go extinct but degraded ecosystems of the future will have a much smaller carrying capacity and the pain of our reduction is going to be unimaginable.

This is the Darkside that Pinker never puts into his equations since it flies in the face of purported ''Human Progress'', not that Pinker being wrong is any source of solace.

I think this goes much further and much deeper than the Pinker/Gray debate.  All life on Earth is going to be paying the cost of successful human flourishing. Who among us does not want greater prosperty for our children ? The beavers and the antelopes and the dung beetles perhaps, but we are not programmed to put the needs of other creatures ahead of the needs of our own children.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

All very worrying. I doubt humans will go extinct but degraded ecosystems of the future will have a much smaller carrying capacity and the pain of our reduction is going to be unimaginable.

This is the Darkside that Pinker never puts into his equations since it flies in the face of purported ''Human Progress'', not that Pinker being wrong is any source of solace.

I think this goes much further and much deeper than the Pinker/Gray debate.  All life on Earth is going to be paying the cost of successful human flourishing. Who among us does not want greater prosperty for our children ? The beavers and the antelopes and the dung beetles perhaps, but we are not programmed to put the needs of other creatures ahead of the needs of our own children.

Yes but as we know and as you secularist humanists frequently see to it, the definition of prosperity changes. Are you talking about Osbornian Prosperity, or the prosperity wrought by migration or what.
Under Osbornian prosperity there is flourishing of the few at the expense of the many with some vague ''heaven for one's children's.children''...that's people, not just animals.

Climate change cannot be classed as prosperity I would have thought?

[SusanDoris]

We are so lucky to be living now, and the extinction of the human race is still way into the future - although I feel so sad for the people living nearer the time of such extinction* - but there is hope!! This book:

What Has Nature Ever Done For Us?: How Money Really Does Grow On TreesPaperback– 10 Jan 2013
 
by Tony Juniper(Author)

tells of recovery and work that is being done now to restore some of the damage done. I'm an optimist anyway, but the book is optimistic and positive too, as well as being clear.

*That is also probably me thinking about my own obviously limited time left here!

[torridon]

All very worrying. I doubt humans will go extinct but degraded ecosystems of the future will have a much smaller carrying capacity and the pain of our reduction is going to be unimaginable.

This is the Darkside that Pinker never puts into his equations since it flies in the face of purported ''Human Progress'', not that Pinker being wrong is any source of solace.

I think this goes much further and much deeper than the Pinker/Gray debate.  All life on Earth is going to be paying the cost of successful human flourishing. Who among us does not want greater prosperty for our children ? The beavers and the antelopes and the dung beetles perhaps, but we are not programmed to put the needs of other creatures ahead of the needs of our own children.

Yes but as we know and as you secularist humanists frequently see to it, the definition of prosperity changes. Are you talking about Osbornian Prosperity, or the prosperity wrought by migration or what.
Under Osbornian prosperity there is flourishing of the few at the expense of the many with some vague ''heaven for one's children's.children''...that's people, not just animals.

Climate change cannot be classed as prosperity I would have thought?

I think we are all preprogrammed to want growth.  Any government that advocated reduction rather than growth in the economy would be quickly ditched by its electorate.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

All very worrying. I doubt humans will go extinct but degraded ecosystems of the future will have a much smaller carrying capacity and the pain of our reduction is going to be unimaginable.

This is the Darkside that Pinker never puts into his equations since it flies in the face of purported ''Human Progress'', not that Pinker being wrong is any source of solace.

I think this goes much further and much deeper than the Pinker/Gray debate.  All life on Earth is going to be paying the cost of successful human flourishing. Who among us does not want greater prosperty for our children ? The beavers and the antelopes and the dung beetles perhaps, but we are not programmed to put the needs of other creatures ahead of the needs of our own children.

Yes but as we know and as you secularist humanists frequently see to it, the definition of prosperity changes. Are you talking about Osbornian Prosperity, or the prosperity wrought by migration or what.
Under Osbornian prosperity there is flourishing of the few at the expense of the many with some vague ''heaven for one's children's.children''...that's people, not just animals.

Climate change cannot be classed as prosperity I would have thought?

I think we are all preprogrammed to want growth.  Any government that advocated reduction rather than growth in the economy would be quickly ditched by its electorate.

But you have to set that against being preprogrammed to be scientific and to be aware and to predict environmental danger.
Which programme overrides which?

[Walt Zingmatilder]

All very worrying. I doubt humans will go extinct but degraded ecosystems of the future will have a much smaller carrying capacity and the pain of our reduction is going to be unimaginable.

This is the Darkside that Pinker never puts into his equations since it flies in the face of purported ''Human Progress'', not that Pinker being wrong is any source of solace.

I think this goes much further and much deeper than the Pinker/Gray debate.  All life on Earth is going to be paying the cost of successful human flourishing. Who among us does not want greater prosperty for our children ? The beavers and the antelopes and the dung beetles perhaps, but we are not programmed to put the needs of other creatures ahead of the needs of our own children.

Yes but as we know and as you secularist humanists frequently see to it, the definition of prosperity changes. Are you talking about Osbornian Prosperity, or the prosperity wrought by migration or what.
Under Osbornian prosperity there is flourishing of the few at the expense of the many with some vague ''heaven for one's children's.children''...that's people, not just animals.

Climate change cannot be classed as prosperity I would have thought?

I think we are all preprogrammed to want growth. 

Growth.....or greed?

[torridon]

I think this goes much further and much deeper than the Pinker/Gray debate.  All life on Earth is going to be paying the cost of successful human flourishing. Who among us does not want greater prosperty for our children ? The beavers and the antelopes and the dung beetles perhaps, but we are not programmed to put the needs of other creatures ahead of the needs of our own children.

Yes but as we know and as you secularist humanists frequently see to it, the definition of prosperity changes. Are you talking about Osbornian Prosperity, or the prosperity wrought by migration or what.
Under Osbornian prosperity there is flourishing of the few at the expense of the many with some vague ''heaven for one's children's.children''...that's people, not just animals.

Climate change cannot be classed as prosperity I would have thought?

I think we are all preprogrammed to want growth.  Any government that advocated reduction rather than growth in the economy would be quickly ditched by its electorate.

But you have to set that against being preprogrammed to be scientific and to be aware and to predict environmental danger.
Which programme overrides which?

I'm rather pessimistic on the whole. I think pinnng our hopes on technical fixes is a bit pie in the sky; we simply don't have the collective political will to face the reality and the costs of climate change and population explosion.

[Udayana]

All life as we know it on Earth will be extinct at some point - is this a problem? Emotional/"programmed" responses can be disregarded - how important are they really?

[BashfulAnthony]

© WWF,

"Just to illustrate the degree of biodiversity loss we're facing, let’s take you through one scientific analysis...
The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate.
These experts calculate that between 0.01 and 0.1% of all species will become extinct each year.
If the low estimate of the number of species out there is true - i.e. that there are around 2 million different species on our planet** -  then that means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year.
But if the upper estimate of species numbers is true - that there are 100 million different species co-existing with us on our planet - then between 10,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct each year."

Scary, eh?

[ad_orientem]

I'm all for looking after the environment and think that modern humankind is somewhat detatched from nature, but reading this I feel hyperbol etc.

[ekim]

You can see it all happening on this site:  http://www.poodwaddle.com/clocks/earthclock/

[Harrowby Hall]

All life as we know it on Earth will be extinct at some point - is this a problem? Emotional/"programmed" responses can be disregarded - how important are they really?

The eventual extinction of life is certain and accepted. The problem, surely, is that we - as a species - have developed technologies which can make that extinction occur rather more rapidly than if the planet were left to its own devices.

In our own short-term interests we are reducing the possibility of there being a long term.       

[torridon]

I'm all for looking after the environment and think that modern humankind is somewhat detatched from nature, but reading this I feel hyperbol etc.

And do we have any reason to take your opinion as anything other than worthless ? Have you conducted your own multidisciplinary study of fossil vertebrate extinction patterns ? If so , please do share.

The human race has talent to study and understand such issues but time and again, as with climate science, public understanding of our knowledge base is undermined by conspiracy theorists, armchair experts, vested interested, science deniers, and all manner of assorted fruit cakes and idiots

[Udayana]

HH, torridon, sounds like a fair deal to me - humans will get back exactly what they put in, what they deserve. That is karma.

[ad_orientem]

I'm all for looking after the environment and think that modern humankind is somewhat detatched from nature, but reading this I feel hyperbol etc.

And do we have any reason to take your opinion as anything other than worthless ? Have you conducted your own multidisciplinary study of fossil vertebrate extinction patterns ? If so , please do share.

The human race has talent to study and understand such issues but time and again, as with climate science, public understanding our our knowledge base is undermined by conspiracy theorists, armchair experts, vested interested, science deniers, and all manner of assorted fruit cakes and idiots

Eh?

[Leonard James]

All we can do is fight to conserve the conditions necessary for us to survive on earth, or move to another planet. It's not going to make much difference to the universe whether we become extinct or not.

[Hope]

I think we are all preprogrammed to want growth.  Any government that advocated reduction rather than growth in the economy would be quickly ditched by its electorate.

If that is the case as far as humanity is concerned, and not just 20th/21st Century Western humanity, why did so little growth take place for the first few 10s of thousands of years that humanity existed on earth?  After all, it is only the last 3-400 years that have seen any real economic growth.

[torridon]

I think we are all preprogrammed to want growth.  Any government that advocated reduction rather than growth in the economy would be quickly ditched by its electorate.

If that is the case as far as humanity is concerned, and not just 20th/21st Century Western humanity, why did so little growth take place for the first few 10s of thousands of years that humanity existed on earth?  After all, it is only the last 3-400 years that have seen any real economic growth.

I doubt there would have been any significant change in fundamental human nature in such a short timescale. When the Mongol hordes ravaged across medieval Europe it wasn't sustainable living that was on their minds. When Hannibal rode elephants across the Alps he had conquest and expansion in mind.  European conquistadors all but wiped out the native peoples of south America in their lust for gold. Early humans did not just remain in Africa, they went out, and settled every continent bar Antarctica wiping out the megafauna as they went.

Human families have always tended to feature more children than parents - this means that people have to choose between expanding their range, or seeing their offspring face decreasing prosperity generation after generation. You'll probably be familiar with this problem from your time in Nepal, a landlocked country of poor subsistence farmers where parents for generations have been dividing their land plots amongst their children which means, with no opportunity to expand there, each generation gets a smaller land plot than their parents so the people become poorer and poorer over time. Take the Nepali example and scale it up to a global level, a finite planet has a finite carrying capacity, human expansion and growth cannot carry on regardless and yet there is only one country in the world that has successfully implemented a population reduction program - China - but this policy would not be feasible in a democracy. I feel very pessimistic about the future, I fear humans have a crunch point of unprecedented global conflict coming over the next hundred or so years. And in the ferocity and our desperation to survive in this, there will be little regard for ecosystems, for forests, for other creatures, all of which of course will only tend to exacerbate the underlying problems of ecosystem degradation.

[Rhiannon]

As the mother of young children I can't afford to feel like that. I'm not a big fan of hope, but in this case I think we really do have to have hope that humanity will be able to get its act together and avert the worst of the disaster. Otherwise there seems to be little point in our children growing up to do anything worthwhile at all, and that is a horrible thing to suggest to them.

[wigginhall]

It's grim news, along with climate change.  I feel basically pessimistic, as climate denialism seems to be growing now, and the calls for economic growth are just as strong.   Nature has been our dustbin since the industrial revolution, and it seems unlikely that we can stop now.   There are some signs of hope, in the different conservation movements, but when the chips are down, conservation often plays second fiddle. 

[BashfulAnthony]

As the mother of young children I can't afford to feel like that. I'm not a big fan of hope, but in this case I think we really do have to have hope that humanity will be able to get its act together and avert the worst of the disaster. Otherwise there seems to be little point in our children growing up to do anything worthwhile at all, and that is a horrible thing to suggest to them.

Hope is all some have.

[torridon]

As the mother of young children I can't afford to feel like that. I'm not a big fan of hope, but in this case I think we really do have to have hope that humanity will be able to get its act together and avert the worst of the disaster. Otherwise there seems to be little point in our children growing up to do anything worthwhile at all, and that is a horrible thing to suggest to them.

We all present positively to our children; we can start out reading fluffy bed time stories to them and in the fullness of time they can come to a more realistic understanding of life. As adults we continue to need hope, we thrive with acheivable goals in mind, with no hope, we descend into depression and lethargy. We have multitudinous ways of keeping a positive frame of mind, most of which involve some subtle elements of self-deception.

There are signs of hope around, for instance, I feel greatly warmed by the recent Papal encyclical which might help focus our minds on bigger issues. He showed leadership there, and we need people in positions of influence to help awaken us from our collective lethargy sometimes.