From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
On Behalf Of LizR
>> I must admit I've heard the extinction rate is way higher than usual -
asteroid / methane burp high. (Although if it's us or them, as I said,
that's a different story...)
>Liz - it is not hearsay [...] There is substantial, incontrovertible
evidence that the extinction rate has literally spiked through the roof.
>>That's not just hearsay it's idiotic. 66 million years ago 2/3 of all
species, not individual animals but entire species, became extinct quite
literally overnight, and 252 million years ago it was even worse, the
extinction rate was 90%. What we're experiencing now is not even a burp.
You do not know that those extinction events happened overnight - in fact
you are wrong on that. The asteroid may have impacted off of the Yucatan
overnight, but it could have taken decades and even hundreds of years to
play out, and to us looking back from 66 million years it would all seem
like it happened in an instant of time. Know one knows what caused the Great
Permian Extinction - there are hypothesis, but the argument is still
unsettled. That extinction event could have taken many thousands of years to
run its course - maybe even tens of thousands of years.
Overnight? How many nights is that?
Besides a few numbers, about other extinction events in the very distant
past you have stated nothing more than your opinion colored by multiple
adjectives.
Unless you have some - factual -- basis to dispute that the available data
suggests that the current rate of species extinction - going on right now in
our contemporary times - is around 10,000 times the average background rate
(species go extinct every year and have been for as long as there has been
life, but it is the rate at which this is happening that has spiked through
the roof). unless you have a fact based argument. you have nothing but your
anger and hatred of greens, which may work for you, but is not science
based.
You, I and everyone cannot see it for what it is, because we live a mere
hundred years (if we are lucky) - we are within a blip in time. You speak of
events from scores or hundreds of millions of years ago. How would it have
looked to a contemporary. We see the KT boundary as marking an instant in
time, but how long in years did it take for the two extinction events you
mentioned to play out. It seems like an instant in time to us, because we
are at such far remove from it.
And people do not recognize that we are living in the midst of another great
extinction event because our temporal perspective is day by day - and not
decade by decade and century by century.
If you are going to dispute the data - you will need to dispute the data.
> That this is so should really make thinking people question why?
It's no great mystery why some animals become extinct today, it's because 7
billion large mammals of the exact same species have spread from the pole to
the equator, and that has never happened before. It would have been amazing
if a event like that didn't cause a few animals to join the 99.9% that have
already gone extinct in the last 3 billion years.
It is not a few animals John-despite what you choose to believe - we humans
have triggered and are the cause of what is the beginning stages of a great
extinction event. You deny this -- with vehemence - but the data supports
the claim that the current extinction rate is around 10,000 times the usual
levels. You choose to call that "a few animals" - I find it amazing, what
ideology will make otherwise smart people do and say.
Chris
John K Clark
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