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Originally posted by PrettyHurts
We knew this would happen but thanks for the 411
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thanks for posting that you knew about recent studies showing that current animal extinction rates from anthropogenic climate disruption now rival the extinction that annihilated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Once again, this month's survey of the planet shows how climate disruption is continuing to intensify.
Current extinction rates are at least 12 times faster than normal because people kill them for food, money or destroy their habitat, said Anthony Barnosky, a biology professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
“If that rate continues unchanged, the Earth’s sixth mass extinction is a certainty,” Barnosky said in a phone interview. “Within about 200 to 300 years, three out of every four species we’re familiar with would be gone.”
The findings, due to air in a documentary on the Smithsonian Channel on Nov. 30, add to pressure on envoys from some 190 countries gathering next week at a United Nations conference in Peru to discuss limits on the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
“We might do as much damage in 400 years as an asteroid did to the dinosaurs,” Sean Carroll, a biologist who leads the Department of Science Education at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, said in an interview. He was also interviewed for the documentary.
Temperatures already have increased by 0.85 of a degree since 1880 and the current trajectory puts humanity on course for a warming of at least 3.7 degrees Celsius, the UN estimates. That’s quicker than the shift in the climate when the last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago.
