The 6th Mass Extinction is upon us

Every additional day that I teach 13 and 14 year olds, the more I believe it

Quote
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...Scientists warn humanity's voracious consumption and wanton destruction is to blame for the event, which is the first major extinction since the dinosaurs...
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Hmmm...

[sounds like the answer is lower taxes and less regulation—more everyone for themselves and less cooperative and collective efforts]/tunnels.

ImTheCaptain said:

Earth Is Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction

Click to expand...

This is really interesting and I enjoyed reading it. However, I don’t think this article should bring us much comfort for two reasons. One is that this guy isn’t not worried about on going human caused extinction, he is just saying that it hasn’t risen to the level of previous mass extinctions, yet. He’s right that ecosystems are constructed like networks or webs and removing linkages from those webs can cause instability. if enough linkages are removed the whole network can implode. This guy’s basic premise is that we’ve been removing linkages around edges and those linkages have a lower probability of causing systematic collapse. We’ve also created a new cause of extinction with exotic invasive species that maintains partial ecosystem integrity but reduces biodiversity. Coyotes, for example have invaded the eastern US and essentially replaced the red wolf, so we’ve lost the red wolf genetics but maintained the ecological niche of a top predator. Biodiversity collapse is a problem in and of its self which poses many of its own risks to society, including elevating the probability of a mass extinction getting underway because the system becomes less adaptable to perturbations as the diversity of genes in the system declines.

The other big response I’d have is that we only have a sample size of 5 prior mass extinctions to base our predictions of future mass extinctions on. There might be more than one way that a mass extinction materializes, like maybe a biodiversity collapse at the top of a food change leads to a destabilized system and the whole thing collapses. Maybe clam extinction happened because clam predators disappeared first and then clams had no population control. We also have a very limited data on those previous mass extinctions because the Fossil record is incomplete. This guy can’t definitively say that the Permian extinction didn’t start with the rare megafauna at the top of the food web because those are the rarest species in the fossil record.

That’s my take anyway.