A ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ Coming Up? Crunching the Numbers - Highlighted Article

From: Watts Up With That

By: Paul MacRae

Date: July 18, 2022

A ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ Coming Up? Crunching the Numbers

In a popular textbook on writing creative non-fiction, the authors echo a familiar claim of global-warming alarmists: that thanks to our carbon emissions, we are creating a “sixth mass extinction” that will wipe out most of the planet’s animals and possibly humanity itself. The authors write:

Your [the reader’s] life has witnessed the eclipse of hundreds of thousands of species, even if they passed out of this world without your awareness. (The current rate of species extinction is matched only by that of the age of the dinosaurs’ demise.)[emphasis added][1]

This belief in a “current” mass extinction (usually blamed on climate change but also, much more plausibly, on habitat encroachment) is widely held and often cited by the environmental and anti-global-warming movements.

For example, eco-crusader and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, contended that we are losing 100 species a day, or almost 40,000 species a year.[2] Gore took this figure from a book by biologist Norman Myers; where Myers got his numbers is discussed below.

In his 2006 film and accompanying book, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore makes a similar although slightly vaguer claim:

Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc; it is us. (continue reading)

A ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ Coming Up? Crunching the Numbers