PowerSwitch

This article is about something rather important, probably the most important thing concerning the human species. Ever. You might at first think it's just about 250 million year old fossils. It's not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/scien ... dying.html

Thanks, Biff. Very important paper.

Here's the original Payne and Clapham paper - it available free:
http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/Qj2 ... 711-105329

So when do we all start forming orderly queues to join the fossil record?

It looks pretty inevitable to me that the anthropocene mass extinction will at least rival the K-T extinction that took out the dinosaurs and may end up as bad as the Great Dying. We're not just messing up the climate. We're also changing the chemistry of the oceans, introducing all sorts of new chemicals into the ecosystem that aren't produced by nature, introducing alien species all over the place, majorly altering groundwater levels, irradiating the whole planet with nuclear contamination...and the list goes on. We are basically changing the ecosystem in 1001 different ways, without any prior understanding of the likely consequences.

And it just keeps getting worse. And it is completely obvious that the human race is not going stop doing what it does until the ecosystem itself stops us. Put all that together, and the resulting picture is very grim.

UndercoverElephant wrote:And it is completely obvious that the human race is not going stop doing what it does until the ecosystem itself stops us.

Yup. Said that a few times. Can something get truer as time goes by?

emordnilap wrote: Can something get truer as time goes by?

It can become more obvious.

UndercoverElephant wrote:

emordnilap wrote: Can something get truer as time goes by?

It can become more obvious.

Yes definately but it will be too late by then

Thanks Biff - something to read with my morning coffee.......