Actually I won't intellectually satisfied unless I see little toe-tags saying "Killed by Man-Made Climate Change"..
That's sort of what I was looking for and I never would have even asked the question had I not already known beforehand that the answer to the question of how many species have been driven to extinction by modern climate change is zero. It is interesting, and f'ing sad to note that our raptors and the raptors across the globe are steadily dwindling due to wind turbines and those who claim to love the earth more than anything are seeking legal loopholes that would allow further reducing their numbers without penalty.
Let's look at the cool graph Fatass loaded, showing 450,000 years of CO2 and temperature fluctuations, plotted on top of each other, so anybody can see the CO2 levels out both peaks and troughs, of warming and cooling trends, by forcing activity.
Take a look at the last 180 years or so, of CO2 measurements. We are due, for another drop in CO2, which
usually drops, after it levels off, at about 280 ppm. But not after the 18th Century, when the industrial revolution happened. The red line shoots up, to 400 ppm CO2, which can only be attributed to human defoliation and emissions:
Extinctions are difficult to review because the non-anthropogenic extinctions are difficult to calculate, but the science is reviewable:
Background extinction rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background extinction rates are typically measured three different ways. The first is simply the number of species that normally go extinct over a given period of time. For example, at the background rate one species of bird will go extinct every estimated 400 years.[5] Another way the extinction rate can be given is in million species years (MSY). For example, there is approximately one extinction estimated per million species years.[6] From a purely mathematical standpoint this means that if there are a million species on the planet earth, one would go extinct every year, while if there was only one species it would go extinct in one million years, etc. The third way is in giving species survival rates over time. For example, given normal extinction rates species typically exist for 5–10 million years before going extinct.[7]
Extinctions are
way above any sensible rate, and therefore, die-offs and extinctions are to be noticed, as significant, anyway:
Has the Earth
With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, from frogs and fish to tigers, some scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that occurred only five times before during the past 540 million years.
Each of these ‘Big Five’ saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct.
In a study to be published in the March 3 issue of the journal Nature, University of California, Berkeley, paleobiologists assess where mammals and other species stand today in terms of possible extinction, compared with the past 540 million years, and they find cause for hope as well as alarm.
“If you look only at the critically endangered mammals – those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations – and assume that their time will run out, and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal, and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm,” said principal author Anthony D. Barnosky, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, a curator in the Museum of Paleontology and a research paleontologist in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
“If currently threatened species – those officially classed as critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable – actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive within as little as 3 to 22 centuries,” he said.
Nevertheless, Barnosky added, itÂ’s not too late to save these critically endangered mammals and other such species and stop short of the tipping point. That would require dealing with a perfect storm of threats, including habitat fragmentation, invasive species, disease and global warming,
“So far, only 1 to 2 percent of all species have gone extinct in the groups we can look at clearly, so by those numbers, it looks like we are not far down the road to extinction. We still have a lot of Earth’s biota to save,” Barnosky said. “It’s very important to devote resources and legislation toward species conservation if we don’t want to be the species whose activity caused a mass extinction.”
Coauthor Charles Marshall, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and director of the campusÂ’s Museum of Paleontology, emphasized that the small number of recorded extinctions to date does not mean we are not in a crisis.
“Just because the magnitude is low compared to the biggest mass extinctions we’ve seen in a half a billion years doesn’t mean to say that they aren’t significant,” he said. “Even though the magnitude is fairly low, present rates are higher than during most past mass extinctions.”
“The modern global mass extinction is a largely unaddressed hazard of climate change and human activities,” said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. “Its continued progression, as this paper shows, could result in unforeseen – and irreversible – negative consequences to the environment and to humanity.”
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As usual, the good information ended up in Nature Magazine, March 3, 2012. Here is a June 2012 article:
TLC Home "The Sixth Extinction is Underway: Are You Worried Yet?"
"There is a holocaust happening. Right now," writes Jeff Corwin, author of 100 Heartbeats, in the Los Angeles Times. "And it's not confined to one nation or even one region. It is a global crisis. Species are going extinct en masse." Corwin goes on to explain:
"Every 20 minutes we lose an animal species. If this rate continues, by century's end, 50% of all living species will be gone. It is a phenomenon known as the sixth extinction. The fifth extinction took place 65 million years ago when a meteor smashed into the Earth, killing off the dinosaurs and many other species and opening the door for the rise of mammals. Currently, the sixth extinction is on track to dwarf the fifth."
"Whether they're big or small, extinctions change the world," writes Tracy V. Wilson at HowStuffWorks.com, before adding that the background rate of extinction is somewhere between one and five species per year. Today, however, "the extinction rate appears to be anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times greater than that."
"The causes of this mass die-off are many: overpopulation, loss of habitat, global warming, species exploitation (the black market for rare animal parts is the third-largest illegal trade in the world, outranked only by weapons and drugs)," writes Corwin. "The list goes on, but it all points to us."
Once again, we're the bad guys; but so what?
Extinction is more than just dinosaurs and dodos. Every species plays its role in the delicate balance of our eco-system. Lose one and well, let's just say the slope gets mighty slippery. So if you're not losing sleep over the sixth extinction, let's talk about honeybees. We may not give honeybees much thought but a fair portion of our food relies on them (specifically commercial honeybees) at the critical early stages of its development. This is why the sudden disappearance of honeybees, a.k.a. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), is all the more alarming. Jasmin Malik Chua at TreeHugger.com tells us: "The bee losses are especially distressing in light of a study last year that concluded that pollinators such as bees, birds and bats affect 35 percent of the world's crop production, increasing the output of 87 of the leading food crops worldwide."
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Earth Is A Planet In Crisis Conservationists Claim As Wildlife Numbers Fall And Consumption Rises | World News | Sky News
Earth is a planet in crisis with wildlife populations declining by more than 30% in the past four decades, conservationists claim.
A new report examined how more than 9,000 populations of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians and fish are faring.
It comes in the face of record over-consumption of natural resources with serious implications for human health, wealth and well-being.
Freshwater creatures in the tropics have seen the worst declines, of around 70%, while tropical species as a whole have seen populations tumble by 60% since 1970.
In Asia, tiger numbers have fallen 70% in just 30 years.
Wildlife is under pressure from ever-growing human demand for resources, the study by WWF, the latest Living Planet report from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network said.
And research into demand for water revealed 2.7bn people live in areas that suffer severe water shortages for at least one month of the year.
People are exploiting resources such as water, forests and fisheries and putting greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere at a much higher rate than they can be replenished and pollution absorbed.
The "ecological footprint" of human activity was 50% higher than the capacity of the Earth's land and oceans in 2008, the most recent year for which figures are available, with people living as though we have a planet and a half to sustain us.
Rising population and consumption means that by 2030, two planets will not be enough to meet human demand, threatening the resources including food, freshwater and a stable climate that people need to survive, the report said.
WWF-UK's chief executive David Nussbaum said the underlying cause of declines in nature was the rate of human consumption.
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There you have it. In the last 200 years, CO2 took an unscheduled jump, way up, to 400 ppm, when it was on schedule, from the last four trends, to move down, to the trough equilibrium, but humans were multiplying, polluting, and defoliating, a whole wicked lot. The cumulative human impact is killing species, and the recent die-offs we see are from a human-affected environment, which is ******* up, in tune with recent egregious human interventions.
Yeah, some of the die-offs will be from algae, not pollution, directly. Yeah, humans don't issue all the CO2. But humans cut or burned the forests, which burn faster, when polluted by human-caused acids. Cop to it, people. You are responsible, for damage done, by previous generations. We need to re-green.