From the start of this blog, my focus is at human behaviour, how it is forcing climate change and leading overall living being into crisis. This is also an urge for all of us to think and act responsibly. Some of the issues mentioned before are quite behavioural, soft and appealing. Whereas some issues might be quite new and different to you. Here in this post today, I will discuss some papers that has mentioned about upcoming Great Extinction, Palaeoclimatologist has describes about the five mass extinctions in different phases of earth climate change. Now different studies are arguing that sixth mass extinction has now started.
Dinosaurs went extinction before about 65 million year ago during Cretaceous. Now the Holocene seems to be the worst scenario after than on biodiversity loss. We have already loss 338 + 279 (extinction at wild) species of vertebrates since 1500AD (IUCN red list). Ceballos, et al. (2015) uses lower than conservative for mass extinction rate estimates. 2E/MSY i.e. 2 mammal extinctions per 10,000 species per 100 years. IUCN extinction list was considered for analysis. Although the estimate was based on half of conservative rate, using which should increase the extinction period, the result showed that the extinction rate was 100 times more than than the background rate for mass extinction. Based on this estimates of extinctions, the species that went extinction in 20th centuries would have lived for another few thousand of year. This could be a hint to Sixth Great Mass extinction.
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| Adopted from: Ceballos et al. 2015 |
Similarly another paper by Barnosky et al. (2011) has used palaeontological information coupled with IUCN red list to access the extinction of vertebrate in recent and historical mass extinction. Holocene extinction has been analysed by using short period of time and matched with historic extinction in millennia. The paper suggest the rate of current time extinction is higher than it was during previous mass extinction, indicating Holocene mass extinction has started,
Leakey and Lewin (1996) estimates that 30 thousand species get extinct each year because of human activities. Wake et al. (2008) has also observed a very critical status with amphibian, which could by now entered the mass extinction phase.
The sixth mass extinction are forced by Human activities and there are none to blame upon. Both of the paper focus on effective conservation effort that could help reducing the extinction rate.
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| Source: Coreaybradshaw |
Different paper has suggested on great loss of fauna. They somehow suggest that we are heading toward great tragedy of massive loss of biodiversity and the current conservation approach are not sufficient enough to tackle this problem. Many of us might not be even aware of this issue and consequences it might cause.
As it becomes clear we human are dominant cause of rapid extinctions of species. In this situation, if we care about species loss then we need to careful on our behaviour and activities. Choice is ours either to force extinction or conservation. What I want to appeal is that the door is closing, immediate, collective and effective action are urgent !!!
Are there any possibilities to 'bring back to life' using DNA of those species as a result of ongoing technological advancements?
ReplyDeleteStudies are ongoing, might be possible but these artificial process can have many other consequences,similar to geo-engineering process which could be effective but at the cost of huge risk on ecosystem. Last resort !!!
DeleteDevelopment Vs Conservation, a main obstruct for biodiversity conservation. Major portion of the living species are confined within the developing countries, which are facing major challenges of poverty and civil war. Unless and until, biodiversity became the priority for those countries, 'sixth great extinction' will continue in a greater speed. Combined effort of poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation is the need of today's world.
ReplyDeleteYes, agreed. If you see my previous post on "Inequalities matter" it makes clear that poor countries who are not responsible for warming have to bear more social cost. My point is current effort quite feeble to tackle thus have to go for effective, immediate and collaborative actions.
DeleteIf we consider the mass extinction as a “natural cycle” of earth (as evident by the previous five mass extinctions which were not caused by Humans), the 6th mass extinction is inevitable.
ReplyDeleteIn nature, the strongest rules. As humans developed “brain”, they started ruling the earth as they became the strongest with other tools. Each country, each society and each individual want to become more powerful than others. To feed the ever growing hunger for the power, we have developed enough tools and means of mass extinctions. There are piles of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and other hidden weapons in most of the countries. We are ready to release nukes and chemical weapons to ourselves just to satisfy our ever increasing desire for power and money. We are now waiting for a “mad person” to pull the trigger. Principally, it (mass extinction) can happen in next 5 minute.
Among all these power games, we have forgotten the fact that we are also “animals” in the eye of nature. Earth is a small tiny piece of rock in the whole universe where tiniest creatures called “human” are living. We have become very proud of our technological innovation. We talk about going into Mars. We talk about our capacity of neutralizing any possible threat of asteroid strike. But sometimes we cannot even find a missing plane, a ship and persons in our oceans/backyards. Our ability to defend ourselves against such asteroid strike will be tested, if a really big one comes directly to us. This also, principally, can happen any moment.
We have also forgotten the fact that we are “one species” in earth. We should respect the others who are in the food chain. Deforestations, ocean pollution and excessive carbon emissions are some of the reasons because of which some of our fellow species have already vanished. We are acting as catalyst of whole extinction process. This can be prolonged and can even be avoided if we take proper corrective actions now. But this demands extremely strong desire of the world super powers who has ability and resources with them to do that. Can they cut the industrial productions? Can they reduce the use of fossil fuel? Can they avoid burning oil and coal for generating electricity? Can they stop dumping industrial and nuclear waste in oceans? Can they allow the growth of trees naturally in place of thousands of acres of palm plantation? Can they avoid milking fossil water and stop depleting aquifer under the desert which is acting as natural heat insulation of earth just to grow food and to keep cows in desert?
The 6th mass extinction will happen. If we leave asteroid thing to god, we will extent ourselves, sooner or later.
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ReplyDeleteBoth experimental and modeling research indicates that warming waters and the other byproduct of elevated greenhouse gases, rising acidity in the oceans, would likely cause coral reefs to disappear almost entirely by 2070. These "rainforests of the sea" support 25 percent of all the ocean's species -- and 10 percent of the world's fisheries, which provide the principal protein for hundreds of millions of people and inject billions of dollars per year into the world economy.
ReplyDeleteAvoiding such dire scenarios requires a multi-pronged effort to address all known extinction drivers -- including protecting remaining habitats, halting poaching, cleaning up pollution, slowing and stabilizing human population growth, and ascribing economic value to biodiversity in general and to keeping species like elephants and tigers alive rather than selling their bodies for parts. And indeed, efforts focused in those directions have proven successful in bringing some species back from the brink.
But human-caused climate change has fundamentally changed the extinction game to one we are destined to lose if we simply continue business as usual. The only way to prevent the extinction of thousands of species will be to slow greenhouse warming dramatically, which requires rapidly shifting from a fossil-fuel economy to one dominated by carbon-neutral energy.