The Slo-Mo Trainwreck Continues
The World is Having an Extinction Event
But We Live too Fast to See It.
Permian Extinction - A quarter billion years ago. 75% of all Animal, 95% of all sea creatures and plants wiped out. Took perhaps a two to three million years to happen. The "big finish," the eruption of the Siberian Flats.
Even this humongous catastrophe took maybe a million years to finish the kill off.
Dinosaur Extinction - 66 million years ago. All the dinos plus about half of plant life and sea creatures wiped out. Took perhaps half a million years to happen. The monster rock that hit Earth (Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico), and some others, plus the Deccan Flats eruptions in India were the villains.
[source] [source]
We Probably Wouldn't Have Noticed. If there happened to be humans around (there weren't) in the middle of either of those giant extinctions, things would be changing so slowly that even if you lived to be a hundred, things would, when you died, look pretty much how they looked when you were born. Human life is just a blip in time.
BUT NOW! The current "extinction event" is moving so much faster than the previous biggies, we can see it happening.
How's this headline for "seeing it?"
As Climate Disruption Advances, 26 Percent of Mammals Face Extinction. Click that and read the article. Scary!
And things are worse in the oceans:
But We Live too Fast to See It.
Permian Extinction - A quarter billion years ago. 75% of all Animal, 95% of all sea creatures and plants wiped out. Took perhaps a two to three million years to happen. The "big finish," the eruption of the Siberian Flats.
Even this humongous catastrophe took maybe a million years to finish the kill off.
Dinosaur Extinction - 66 million years ago. All the dinos plus about half of plant life and sea creatures wiped out. Took perhaps half a million years to happen. The monster rock that hit Earth (Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico), and some others, plus the Deccan Flats eruptions in India were the villains.
[source] [source]
We Probably Wouldn't Have Noticed. If there happened to be humans around (there weren't) in the middle of either of those giant extinctions, things would be changing so slowly that even if you lived to be a hundred, things would, when you died, look pretty much how they looked when you were born. Human life is just a blip in time.
BUT NOW! The current "extinction event" is moving so much faster than the previous biggies, we can see it happening.
How's this headline for "seeing it?"
As Climate Disruption Advances, 26 Percent of Mammals Face Extinction. Click that and read the article. Scary!
And things are worse in the oceans:
-
The speeds of many negative changes to the ocean are near to or are tracking the worst-case
scenarios from IPCC and other predictions. Some are as predicted, but many are faster than
anticipated, and many are still accelerating.
So here we are, causing extinctions at a faster rate than past natural calamities - FAST ENOUGH FOR US TO ACTUALLY SEE! - and we are sitting on our thumbs.
Just saying….
[I've been beating this drum a while, but every time I see new data, I get agitated and just have to take another crack.]
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