Sigh. Even Native Americans are the bad guys when hysterical scientists start pounding the End Of the World Drum. A new study predicts that we will cause a mass extinction worse than what happened to the dinosaurs. From the story:
The study of the fossil and archaeological record over the past 30 million years by UC Berkeley and Penn State University researchers shows that between 15 and 42 percent of the mammals in North America disappeared after humans arrived. That means North American mammals are well on the way - perhaps as much as half way - to a level of extinction comparable to other epic die-offs, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Anthony Barnosky, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and co-author of the study, said the most dramatic human-caused impacts on the ecosystem have occurred in the last century. “We are seeing a lot of geographic range reductions that are of a greater magnitude than we would expect, and we are seeing loss of subspecies and even a few species,” Barnosky said. “So it looks like we are going into another one of these extinction events.” The analysis by Barnosky, research associate Marc Carrasco and Penn State’s Russell Graham was published this week in the scientific journal PLoS ONE. It compares the extinctions of mammals in North America after humans arrived 13,000 years ago to the five mass extinctions on Earth over the past 450 million years.
Bad humans! Evil humans! We should be the ones to become extinct and then the world would be like Eden. Of course, no one would be around to appreciate it.
It could happen, of course—if we are stupid enough to permit nuclear weapons to continue to proliferate. But mass extinction of the kind in which entire entire species types (as with the dinosaurs) are wiped off the face of the earth from global warming and human enterprise? I think not.
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