• MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      15 days ago

      Exactly - current extinction rates are estimated to be 100-1000 times higher than the natural backround rate, which is why many ecologists started calling this the “Holocene extinction” decades ago.

  • TingoTenga@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    edit-2
    16 days ago

    Nice, long article for doom scrolling. Highly recommended.

    Three-hundred-million years ago, the planet repeatedly lost control of its carbon cycle and suffered 90m years of mass extinctions, including two of the biggest global catastrophes of all time – both CO2-driven nightmares. In one case, it nearly died. It was felled, in the words of the palaeontologist Paul Wignall, by “a climate of unparalleled malevolence”. At the very end of the Permian period (252m years ago), enough lava erupted out of Siberia and intruded into the crust that it could have covered the lower 48 US states a kilometre deep.

    A kilometre deep.

    (,) the best estimate is that we’re emitting carbon perhaps 10 times faster than even the mindless, undirected Siberian volcanoes that brought about the worst mass extinction ever.

  • TuffNutzes@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    16 days ago

    Keep churning out the CO2 and the plastic. All that matters is the next quarterly earnings report and shareholder satisfaction.

  • Revan343@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    15 days ago

    Welcome to the anthropocene extinction event; it’s been going on for a while, but it’s only going to get worse