Sixth extinction? (Introduction)

by David Turell @, Saturday, June 20, 2015, 15:03 (3204 days ago)

Paul Ehrlich, purveyor of gloom and doom is back:-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150619152142.htm-"There is no longer any doubt: We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity's existence.-
"That is the bad news at the center of a new study by a group of scientists including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Ehrlich and his co-authors call for fast action to conserve threatened species, populations and habitat, but warn that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.-"'[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," Ehrlich said.-"Although most well known for his positions on human population, Ehrlich has done extensive work on extinctions going back to his 1981 book, Extinction: The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species. He has long tied his work on coevolution, on racial, gender and economic justice, and on nuclear winter with the issue of wildlife populations and species loss.-"There is general agreement among scientists that extinction rates have reached levels unparalleled since the dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago. However, some have challenged the theory, believing earlier estimates rested on assumptions that overestimated the crisis."-One must read Julian Simon to get a balanced view:-http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html-"This is the litany : Our resources are running out. The air is bad, the water worse. The planet's species are dying off - more exactly, we're killing them -at the staggering rate of 100,000 per year, a figure that works out to almost 2,000 species per week, 300 per day, 10 per hour, another dead species every six minutes. We're trashing the planet, washing away the topsoil, paving over our farmlands, systematically deforesting our wildernesses, decimating the biota, and ultimately killing ourselves. - "Simon paints a somewhat different picture of the human condition circa 1997. -"'Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way," he says. "Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials - all of them - have become less scarce rather than more. The air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe. Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue.-"'Fear is rampant about rapid rates of species extinction," he continues, "but the fear has little or no basis. The highest rate of observed extinction, though certainly more have gone extinct unobserved, is one species per year ...'" -Simon won a famous economics bet with Ehrlich in 1980:-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager


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