Tom Raftery's Library tagged "mass extinction" →  View Popular, Search in Google

It feels like reading a tabloid headline when we see reports about irreversible damage to ocean systems and the worldwide mass extinctions that could result. Unfortunately, it's an all too real possibility. Renowned marine scientists Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of The University of Queensland's Global Change Institute, and Dr John F. Bruno, an Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina, have completed a comprehensive study pulling together information from the most recent oceanographic research. Their findings show that we're very close to irreversible damage to the health of the oceans, which means we're "well on the way to the next great extinction event."

oceans mass extinction

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

anthropocene mass extinction venus syndrome greenmonktv