Best Evidence Yet Supports We Are Undergoing a Mass Extinction
The latest evidence shows with a high degree of confidence that we are currently undergoing Earth’s 6th Mass Extinction Event.
Do a Google search on earth’s most massive extinction events in which
a significant chunk of its species disappeared off the face of the
earth. You will most often find that 5 such events have been identified
throughout earth’s history, the most famous being the extinction 60+
million years ago that wiped out the Dinosaurs (except the birds of
course).
For years now there’s been talk and studies that
show that we are in another such period of time in history, sometimes
called the Holocene Extinction. These studies have been criticized
however for assumptions that were seen as exaggerating the extent of the
crisis.
A new paper recently published, “Accelerated modern human–induced
species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction” concludes that our
fears are justified.
They used a conservative estimate for the amount of extinctions that
occur when there is no mass extinction currently happening. This is
essentially the business-as-usual extinctions that are always happening.
This is called the Baseline extinction rate and this number is critical
because anything near this figure could clearly not be considered a
mass extinction. The baseline used for this study was 2 E/MSY which
means: 2 extinctions for 10,000 vertebrate species every 100 years.
