At The Holocene-Anthropocene Boundary - 75% Of All Mammals Face Extinction +/- 300 Years - Study

[hatrack]

EDIT

For the oceans the anthropogenic environmental stressors of the 21st century are equally diverse. Ocean warming is again just one factor, next to overfishing, pollution & anoxia, and ocean acidification. Altogether, the blue planet could be at the brink of the same extinction event that is also approaching the green planet, terrestrial Earth.

A Nature study earlier this year has looked at marine and terrestrial biodiversity threats combined – and found for instance 75 percent of all mammal species to be at risk of extinction within 300 years, and defined such a massive loss of biodiversity as establishing the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event. That would mean the combined effort of a couple of billion human beings, relentlessly producing and consuming over a couple of centuries time, would somehow have very creatively managed to outweigh the impact of the PETM methane clathrate bomb.

Because the Paleocene-Eocene may be visible as a large extinction event in Earth’s fossil record, too many species survived to make it officially classify as being one of the true mass extinctions. The Holocene-Anthropocene Responsibility Minimum may be bigger news – should there be geography classes, epochs from now.

Oh yeah, one final note: the new study’s model outcome range depends on IPCC SRES scenarios. Just like we saw yesterday bad things happen under the business as usual A2 scenario . Worse things happen in reality though. We somehow managed to surpass the A2 emissions – burning yet more coal and emitting all that carbon into the actual atmosphere, instead of some computer model. And the failure of Copenhagen means we chose not to get back on track.

EDIT

http://www.bitsofscience.org/climate-biodiversity-loss-holocene-mass-extinction-2800/

[gristy]

1. "The Holocene-Anthropocene Responsibility Minimum may be bigger news".

Apparently not big enough news for the article to tell us what this is.

When I google the phrase "Holocene-Anthropocene Responsibility Minimum", I get all of 5 hits. One of them this thread, and the other 4 the article linked to in this thread.

:shrug:

[hatrack]

2. It's the Baronofsky article in Nature, March 2011 they're referring to

Alas, I am not a subscriber, so here's what's available w/o.

Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?

* Anthony D. Barnosky,1, 2, 3
* Nicholas Matzke,1
* Susumu Tomiya,1, 2, 3
* Guinevere O. U. Wogan,1, 3
* Brian Swartz,1, 2
* Tiago B. Quental,1, 2, 5
* Charles Marshall,1, 2
* Jenny L. McGuire,1, 2, 3, 6
* Emily L. Lindsey,1, 2
* Kaitlin C. Maguire,1, 2
* Ben Mersey1, 4
* & Elizabeth A. Ferrer1, 2

* Affiliations
* Contributions
* Corresponding author

Journal name:
Nature
Volume:
471,
Pages:
51–57
Date published:
(03 March 2011)
DOI:
doi:10.1038/nature09678

Published online
02 March 2011

Palaeontologists characterize mass extinctions as times when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short interval, as has happened only five times in the past 540 million years or so. Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia. Here we review how differences between fossil and modern data and the addition of recently available palaeontological information influence our understanding of the current extinction crisis. Our results confirm that current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record, highlighting the need for effective conservation measures.

EDIT

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v471/n7336/full/nature09678.html

[gristy]

3. Indeed, I had read about that myself a few months back.

But I still don't know what the "Holocene-Anthropocene Responsibility Minimum". That phrase seems to have been pulled out of thin air.

[GliderGuider]

4. I think the phrase means

"Why should we give a shit if the biosphere survives? Use it up, throw it out, screw the critters, and the devil take the hindmost."