Not quite sure what the motivation of this article is here, because the author (likely intentionally) dodges calling out that he's making a distinction between the pure definition of extinct meaning no more individuals of a species being left, and the more colloquial term referring to massive die-offs. Just because total extinction of a species may asymptotically take centuries doesn't mean there isn't catastrophic loss of life in the meantime. So it seems, at best, he's being disingenuous.<p>And for someone who should be intimately familiar with the subject, to call climate change "the most serious problem" we're facing, this to me suggests he either doesn't know what he's talking about, or he has other motivations here, or he's just an idiot.<p>Widespread pollution of our groundwater, rainwater, oceans and air - in many places now at toxic levels, collapse of ecosystems, massive habitat loss and destruction, global depletion of resources, all will affect us to a greater degree and sooner than climate change (to be fair, climate change will exacerbate these other factors).<p>And on top of everything else, he's completely ignoring that the pace of many of these trends are accelerating.<p>The fact that there is a tremendous diversity of life forms now, after the planet having clearly suffered past extinction events, is just plain obvious and makes much of what he says here about adaptation and evolution not very interesting.
Not "edging up to" a mass extinction? No kidding, we are 10,000 years into one, and going strong -- if not 45,000 years, or more, judging from the experience of Australian megafauna.<p>We have not made a huge dent in the oceans yet, Steller's Sea Cow notwithstanding -- and it's not -- but give us just a little more time. As its acidity rises, it will get progressively harder for any species to produce a shell. Who knows how many uncatalogged species of copepods will vanish, unnamed?<p>To me the great mystery is how African megafauna continue to survive. Even the elephant has not quite succumbed yet. The Wrangel Island mammoths fell to not more than a few hundred Inuit ancestors, starting barely 4000 years ago, and it was over in no time.
Does the issue not stem from the human obsession to measure, record and categorize things? We aim to preserve the species that already exist because we can observe them, so when a species faces extinction we care more about that one observable event than we do the possibility for new species to evolve and fill the gap in the ecosystem.