Colorful drawing by Nat Morley of a large and growing "tree" of life, a tree with leaves of all different kinds, and with many types of animals perched on the branches, including foxes, moose, parrots, squirrels, skunks, wolves, pandas, ostriches, cardinals, bears, goats, giraffes, kangaroos, penguins, cheetahs, and owls, among others. At the base of the tree are two humans, wielding axes, chopping deeply into the trunk, leaving the tree almost ready to come crashing down.

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1. Bread and Circuses (breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 14:51:29 UTC Bread and Circuses

   Here's a cheery article for you...
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   "The Sixth Mass Extinction is happening now, and it doesn’t look good for us"

   In the timeline of fossil evidence going right back to the first inkling of any life on Earth — over 3.5 billion years ago — almost 99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. That means that as species evolve over time — a process known as ‘speciation’ — they replace other species that go extinct.

   Extinctions and speciations do not happen at uniform rates through time. Instead, they tend to occur in large pulses interspersed by long periods of relative stability. These extinction pulses are what scientists refer to as mass extinction events.

   At least five mass extinction events have been identified in the fossil record. Mounting evidence is pointing to the world having entered a sixth mass extinction. If the current rate of extinction continues, we could lose most species by 2200.

   According to the fossil record, the average ‘lifespan’ of a species is around one million years, which equates to a background rate of about 0.1–2.0 extinctions per million ‘species-years’. This makes the number of observed extinctions in the modern era 10 to 10,000 times higher than the background rate. Even the most conservative estimates that ignore undetected extinctions firmly place the modern era well within the expected range to qualify as a mass extinction.

   Most of the damage to the Earth’s life-support system has happened over the last century. The global human population has tripled since 1950, and there are now approximately one million species threatened with imminent extinction due to massive population declines, representing about 10–15 percent of all complex life on Earth.

   Recent evidence suggests global warming causes up to ten times more extinctions than we might expect by looking only at a species’ upper temperature limit. In fact, when we take the relationships between species into account — such as predators depending on their prey, parasites depending on their hosts, or flowering plants depending on their pollinators — near-future extinctions are expected to sky-rocket.
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   FULL ARTICLE -- https://360info.org/the-sixth-mass-extinction-is-happening-now-and-it-doesnt-look-good-for-us/

   #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #BiodiversityLoss #Extinction