Biological Annihilation Era Is Underway, Experts Warn

Full PNAS article available: Biological annihilation via the sixth on...es and declines

And the solution is ...
Ehrlich says, "reduce the scale of the human enterprise".
grelber says, "end the human experiment".
Potato. Potahto.

How distressing.

I found this bit of information particularly interesting:

"Conservatively, scientists estimate that 200 species have gone extinct in the past 100 years; the “normal” extinction rate over the past two million years has been that two species go extinct every 100 years because of evolutionary and other factors."

100 years....almost perfectly coincident with the invention of the automobile and our voyage down the road of ever-increasing fossil fuel consumption.

Considering the impact of humans (many scientists now call our point in time the Anhropocene period), our species should be listed as endangered. We have succeeded in making too many people, who chase too many finite resources, who produce too much waste that cannot be neutralized by the environment. Add to the mix that greed, both governmental and private, prevents politicos from doing anything about it.

Too many of us forget (or never knew) that our understanding of the mechanisms that support life is limited, at best. Any attempts at reverse engineering our planet would be pure experiment. We don't know how to do it. We live on a spaceship that depends upon interactions of organisms to sustain life for all.

I am sure that life will survive us. After all, there have been mass extinctions in the past and life has rebounded. It just won't include us.

I like short panels that sum things up perfectly...

https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aZMvjyV_700b.jpg

That's too good.

Indeed. That "Gaia Gotcha" is dead on!

what I really love is how she says it with such a warm smile on her face...

But isn't that exactly what loving mothers do ... no matter how imbecilic the behavior of their offspring?

Remember that commercial? "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!"

Reverse engineering the planet is one thing. However, it seems that, even when honest efforts are made simply to reverse engineer our behaviour, the efforts can be negatively affected by our other mistakes. I think about the significant thrust to get automobiles changed from internal combustion to electric.

The irony is that more than 40% of the electricity needed to charge the new vehicles will be coming from coal-fired plants.

Of course you are assuming a chemical battery energy source for electric cars. A more practical, albeit longer term solution would be hydrogen fuel cells rather than batteries. BMW, Mercedes, and I believe it is Toyota are experimenting with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in California and elsewhere and the Germans are running a full cell powered high speed train I regular service. — Of course that still leaves the question of the power required to obtain the pure hydrogen and compress it.

And it may be a microscopic animal, called a tardigrade (Water Bear), who gets to turn out the lights.

True dat.