Earth 'entering new extinction phase' - US study

[triumphguy]

A timely if extremely scary report, given the Pope’s Encyclical:

bbc.com/news/science-environment-33209548

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.

The scientists looked at historic rates of extinction for vertebrates - animals with backbones - by assessing fossil records.

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.

 

[friardchips]

I wouldn’t publish anything the BBC reports. They will put their own emphasis on it. They are not friends of the Church or of the truth.

If people show love to one another, then this incorporates appropriate love to our surroundings, and our Creator will influence such love and take care of things, of us.

The Pope’s encyclical was a great commentary against the pro-abortion/climate change, demonically-charged, agenda-pushing, bureacracy-loving, eco-worshipping, communisitic gas-janets of our time, who will not be satisfied. At least we now have bridges to start building that we might lure those mixed in, through lack of purpose, with such dedicated moral destoyers, away from such company and instead towards holy light.

“Free the guinea pigs!”

The Pope wisely put things in proportion.

The media will try and distort his words.

 

[Hans_W]

I wouldn’t publish anything the BBC reports. They will put their own emphasis on it. They are not friends of the Church or of the truth.

If people show love to one another, then this incorporates appropriate love to our surroundings, and our Creator will influence such love and take care of things, of us.

The Pope’s encyclical was a great commentary against the pro-abortion/climate change, demonically-charged, agenda-pushing, bureacracy-loving, eco-worshipping, communisitic gas-janets of our time, who will not be satisfied. At least we now have bridges to start building that we might lure those mixed in, through lack of purpose, with such dedicated moral destoyers, away from such company and instead towards holy light.

“Free the guinea pigs!”

The Pope wisely put things in proportion.

The media will try and distort his words.

I don’t see anything anti-religious or anti-Catholic in that report. It states the fact that we are likely to be responsible for the mess the world is in. This in in agreement with what Pope Francis has told us.
The report voices the author’s (Gerardo Ceba) opinion about future consequences. This are his predictions, which you might questions, but you can’t deny that animal species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate.

I can’t see the connection with “pro-abortion/climate change, demonically-charged, agenda-pushing, bureacracy-loving, eco-worshipping, communisitic gas-janets of our time” you are alluding to. BTW I think that Pope Francis’ encyclical makes his stance on climate change very clear.

 

[Path_Finder]

This article was from a few days ago; very alarming as well and I thought similar in tone.

phys.org/news/2010-06-humans-extinct-years-eminent-scientist.html

 

[triumphguy]

This article was from a few days ago; very alarming as well and I thought similar in tone.

phys.org/news/2010-06-humans-extinct-years-eminent-scientist.html

I can see why so many people would rather bury their heads in the sand and avoid this topic, or choose to believe this is all some kind of hoax.

Denial - not just a river in Egypt!

 

[friardchips]

I don’t see anything anti-religious or anti-Catholic in that report. It states the fact that we are likely to be responsible for the mess the world is in. This in in agreement with what Pope Francis has told us.
The report voices the author’s (Gerardo Ceba) opinion about future consequences. This are his predictions, which you might questions, but you can’t deny that animal species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate.

I am just predicting media reports will have a sense of irony in them and so I won’t read them as I know what they are about.

Don’t be fooled by scare-mongering tactics; if you wish to be, that is your look out.

I have a history of knowing about computer design and I recognise doctored images when I see them. Some such images appeared on television. There was a polar bear on a few metre squared piece of ice. I knew it was fake. The polar bear had been placed in an image program to look as if it was on the ice. If the ice was going to melt, which it would not have done in a matter of only five minutes, then the polar bear would have swam off the ice long ago. It was fake. Now if this issue is happening everywhere at such analarming rate then why do the media need to fake images? It was fake. That was that.

Now I think climate changes. And when it does, it affects people. I think humans, big business in particular, abuse this earth, and so greater awareness is not a bad thing, but scare-mongering is. Becuase it entails lying.

Corruption.

The Climate Change/Global Warming gas janets, are not people who really care, not the ones at the top of the ‘game’. These are the people who harvest statistical data and manipulate it. Big money. Many will not see abortion as a serious topic on these sites yet will be all about raising funds for tackling climate change, all of which, hits the low-earners, and doesn’t solve any of the problems. Where does this money go?

I can’t see the connection with “pro-abortion/climate change, demonically-charged, agenda-pushing, bureacracy-loving, eco-worshipping, communisitic gas-janets of our time” you are alluding to. BTW I think that Pope Francis’ encyclical makes his stance on climate change very clear.

He does. But in proper persepctive of ALL LIVING THINGS.

The pro-abortion campaigners are also often highly charged pro-choice supporters.

There are links.

Also, there are petitioning sites, one of which has directors all made up of ex or current climate change pushers. There are never petitions running with this site that are about anti-abortion or anti-euthanasia. These sites harvest statistics and manipulate the data to exaggerate support for their more wide-ranging agendas. I know because I looked into such companies. And in one such case I remember, a pro-choice website admitted they had falsified data (“accidently”, apparently) shared from one such petitioning site - linked with a government party with an agenda.

Lies. Too many to not be revealing.

The truth is that the people who have the Climate Change agenda do not really care for people or the environment. Because they do not go after big businesses who do the damage. The wealthy at the top are not answerable to anyone. And those who do really care and really do work to make real change, are too serious-minded, to bother about the fad-climate change hipsters.

If governments want to endorse climate change then why do they not put a curb on car production? Why do they not curb manafacturing businesses? Why do they not stop driving around in big-engined cars?

And as Pope Francis said in his encyclical, if climate change people care so much about nature (which they don’t; they care about their pockets and themselves) then why don’t they care about unborn children and embryos? Are we not a part of nature too?

Think.

 

[friardchips]

friardchips:

The pro-abortion campaigners are also often highly charged pro-choice supporters.

This is a typo, as I meant to say: 'the climate change…campaigners are also often highly charged pro-choice supporters.’

 

[sps49]

I can see why so many people would rather bury their heads in the sand and avoid this topic, or choose to believe this is all some kind of hoax.

Denial - not just a river in Egypt!

Have you read the actual report by chance? It was published a year ago, so it must have been a real brain burner for it to have taken this long to percolate up to the level of the BBC’s attention. In the report, they state that they could only use a few species as samples, and that the uncertainties were large, especially for insects. They used biodiversity models, and climate models to arrive at their conclusions. That should give you serious pause as to the predictive ability of this report. And the BBC’s timing stinks. Download the report and read it for yourself, because all of the editorials seemed to miss a few of the facts I mentioned.

 

[edwest2]

Fear sells. It gets eyeballs to web sites, blogs, etc.

Those with the money sometimes poke the peasants into a state of alarm. Why? Because they can. It keeps site hit counts higher than they might be. Can’t have “Things are improving on the environmental front.” And it’s primarily a tiny percentage of the world’s population that can effect serious and timely repair: Big Oil, Big Multinational Corporations that own factories that spew millions or billions of tons of pollutants into the air, and who sometimes dislike taking sensible measures on making improvements since that would eat away profits.

Sustainability? Renewable energy? Not much money in that.

Let’s throw extinction out there to alarm the peasants further.

Ed

 

[friardchips]

Fear sells. It gets eyeballs to web sites, blogs, etc.

Those with the money sometimes poke the peasantsinto a state of alarm. Why? Because they can. It keeps site hit counts higher than they might be. Can’t have “Things are improving on the environmental front.” And it’s primarily a tiny percentage of the world’s population that can effect serious and timely repair: Big Oil, Big Multinational Corporations that own factories that spew millions or billions of tons of pollutants into the air, and who sometimes dislike taking sensible measures on making improvements since that would eat away profits.

Sustainability? Renewable energy? Not much money in that.

Let’s throw extinction out there to alarm the peasants further.

Ed

Aye. :sad_yes:

 

[wmw]

The Scientist is not wrong, but his assumptions are. He is assuming that the way things are done today will continue unchanged. It’s like the horse and buggies in London in the 1800’s they studied the rate of increase of horses and concluded there could never be enough roads or crews clearing horse manure to continue the growth of London. Thankfully they didn’t start a taxation program to limit horse ownership; otherwise, the industrial revolution would have been greatly delayed.

Changes will have to be made greenhouse gasses do need to be slowed and eventually stopped, but just because we don’t see the answers to every problem do we need to curtail economic development and cause our own problems in many other ways.

The answer to the 1850’s problem was the automobile. We need to have faith that our future will hold similar transformations that will sustain us for the problems we see coming today. Secularist thinking would be alarming because their can be no faith in a God that is guiding history. We as Catholics and our brothers and sisters in faith must be the light of hope that converts this thinking away from alarmist reactions to greater leaps forward and cooperating with God’s plan for sustaining us. God’s command remains in effect, “Be fruitful and multiply”, and it is still a Good command.

 

[gilliam]

6th mass extinction under way may put humans at risk, study shows

Mammals, birds and reptiles are disappearing from the planet so rapidly that a team of scientists concluded Friday that Earth is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, one so dire that it could threaten the existence of humanity.

The scientific study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, determined that animals are going extinct at a rate 100 times faster than normal if nature was on its regular course.

The joint study by scientists from the UC Berkeley, Stanford University and other research institutions said humans are polluting the ecosystem, destroying habitat and killing off species at a rate so rapid that the demise of animals like elephants, tigers, rhinoceros and others could occur within three human lifetimes.

“In real terms, we’re in trouble,” said Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor and president of the Center for Conservation Biology who co-authored the study. “This is another indicator that we are sawing off the limbs that we are sitting on.”

Ehrlich and co-author Anthony Barnosky, a paleontologist at UC Berkeley, said extinctions thus far have been the result of overhunting and habitat destruction from overdevelopment, but climate change is likely to push things over the edge.

sfgate.com/bayarea/article/6th-mass-extinction-under-way-may-put-humans-at-6338783.php

 

[sps49]

6th mass extinction under way may put humans at risk, study shows

Mammals, birds and reptiles are disappearing from the planet so rapidly that a team of scientists concluded Friday that Earth is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, one so dire that it could threaten the existence of humanity.

The scientific study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, determined that animals are going extinct at a rate 100 times faster than normal if nature was on its regular course.

The joint study by scientists from the UC Berkeley, Stanford University and other research institutions said humans are polluting the ecosystem, destroying habitat and killing off species at a rate so rapid that the demise of animals like elephants, tigers, rhinoceros and others could occur within three human lifetimes.

“In real terms, we’re in trouble,” said Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor and president of the Center for Conservation Biology who co-authored the study. “This is another indicator that we are sawing off the limbs that we are sitting on.”

Ehrlich and co-author Anthony Barnosky, a paleontologist at UC Berkeley, said extinctions thus far have been the result of overhunting and habitat destruction from overdevelopment, but climate change is likely to push things over the edge.

sfgate.com/bayarea/article/6th-mass-extinction-under-way-may-put-humans-at-6338783.php

I don’t suppose any one has bothered to read this paper either? This paper has similar uncertainty issues as the previous one, except it does not make an attempt to quantify these. A hint as to how much of an issue uncertainty is this telling sentence from page 1:

“However, direct evaluation (of extinction rates) is complicated by uncertainties in estimating the incidence of extinction in historical time and by methodological difficulties in comparing contemporary extinctions with past ones.”

It may be an interesting paper that will spawn further research, hopefully get a handle on the uncertainties. There are severe unknowns, such as where the species are, and how many there are. To look at this as a definitive prediction is unwarrented by what they have so far presented.

 

[SonOfMan]

I would be ok with the earth and humans going extinct, we are an evil species. Is that wrong of me to feel that way?

 

[edwest2]

6th mass extinction under way may put humans at risk, study shows

Mammals, birds and reptiles are disappearing from the planet so rapidly that a team of scientists concluded Friday that Earth is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, one so dire that it could threaten the existence of humanity.

The scientific study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, determined that animals are going extinct at a rate 100 times faster than normal if nature was on its regular course.

The joint study by scientists from the UC Berkeley, Stanford University and other research institutions said humans are polluting the ecosystem, destroying habitat and killing off species at a rate so rapid that the demise of animals like elephants, tigers, rhinoceros and others could occur within three human lifetimes.

“In real terms, we’re in trouble,” said Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor and president of the Center for Conservation Biology who co-authored the study. “This is another indicator that we are sawing off the limbs that we are sitting on.”

Ehrlich and co-author Anthony Barnosky, a paleontologist at UC Berkeley, said extinctions thus far have been the result of overhunting and habitat destruction from overdevelopment, but climate change is likely to push things over the edge.

sfgate.com/bayarea/article/6th-mass-extinction-under-way-may-put-humans-at-6338783.php

The same Paul Ehrlich who this alarmist book in 1968?

amazon.com/Population-Bomb-PAUL-R-EHRLICH/dp/0345021398/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

We should all be dead by now.

Ed

 

[Robert_Bay]

MODERATOR NOTICE

No ad hominem posts, please

 

[edwest2]

amazon.com/The-Culture-Fear-Americans-Minorities/dp/0465003362/ref=pd_sim_14_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0TKX50YET25AGAKHNYR2

Ed

 

[triumphguy]

I guess the scientists are pretty accurate when they state that 400 invertebrate species have gone extinct in the modern era, when formerly that level of extinction would have taken 10,000 years.

Is this alarmist?

Was Amos an alarmist or a prophet?

 

[Path_Finder]

6th mass extinction under way may put humans at risk, study shows

Mammals, birds and reptiles are disappearing from the planet so rapidly that a team of scientists concluded Friday that Earth is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, one so dire that it could threaten the existence of humanity.

The scientific study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, determined that animals are going extinct at a rate 100 times faster than normal if nature was on its regular course.

The joint study by scientists from the UC Berkeley, Stanford University and other research institutions said humans are polluting the ecosystem, destroying habitat and killing off species at a rate so rapid that the demise of animals like elephants, tigers, rhinoceros and others could occur within three human lifetimes.

“In real terms, we’re in trouble,” said Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor and president of the Center for Conservation Biology who co-authored the study. “This is another indicator that we are sawing off the limbs that we are sitting on.”

Ehrlich and co-author Anthony Barnosky, a paleontologist at UC Berkeley, said extinctions thus far have been the result of overhunting and habitat destruction from overdevelopment, but climate change is likely to push things over the edge.

sfgate.com/bayarea/article/6th-mass-extinction-under-way-may-put-humans-at-6338783.php

Just for the record, I believe Paul Ehrlich has allegedly been proven wrong on a number of his predictions in the past. I’m not dissing the whole article.

Since Ehrlich wrote the “Population Bomb” and has probably done a few other things, I think from a Catholic perspective, his views are a bit of a red flag.

Ehrlich suggested that if they could choose a male child this would reduce the birthrate). Legislation should be enacted guaranteeing the right to an abortion, and sex education should be expanded.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb

Ehrlich was one of the founders of the group Zero Population Growth during 1968, along with Richard Bowers and Charles Remington. He and his wife Anne were on the board of advisers of the Federation for American Immigration Reform until 2003. He is currently a patron of Population Matters, (formerly known as the Optimum Population Trust).[37]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich#Left-wing_critics

While some criticized Ehrlich’s work as simply a repetition of Malthus’s 19th century argument, Ehrlich’s most vocal opponent, economist Julian Simon, was skeptical of the more central tenets of the population bomb, particularly the definition of limits. In the 1970s, Julian Simon published two central pieces that served to galvanize the population debate: The Economics of Population Growth (1977) followed by The Ultimate Resource (1981). Simon argued that the relationship between population growth and economic growth was not as simple as Ehrlich believed, and that the extent to which population pressure impacted resources was overstated. The crux of Simon’s argument centered on his belief that Ehrlich’s limit on the availability of resources was misdirected. Simon instead argued that it was not possible to have too many people, for the only limit in determining the scarcity of resources was human imagination. People, the economist suggested, were the ultimate resource. According to Simon, ingenious, resourceful humans had the capacity to invent crops with higher yields, or to construct inexpensive, safe housing for growing populations. Simon’s other contention was that current views on population and resource issues failed to take the long view, and that frequently too short a time frame was considered when examining demographic problems.

cgge.aag.org/PopulationandNaturalResources1e/CF_PopNatRes_Jan10/CF_PopNatRes_Jan1010.html

So, at the least, one might be cautious as to what Mr. Ehrlich has said and this may only scratch the surface. This is not a condemnation on the gist of what we are being told but I’d be careful with what Mr. Ehrlich advises.

 

[sps49]

I guess the scientists are pretty accurate when they state that 400 invertebrate species have gone extinct in the modern era, when formerly that level of extinction would have taken 10,000 years.

Is this alarmist?

Was Amos an alarmist or a prophet?

You could indeed have that impression if you failed to read either of the published papers.