I will agree with you that it is debatable whether we are currently in a sixth mass extinction, however most biologists tend to be siding towards believing it is. I was mainly just stating that Thunderstruck was being narrow minded by claiming that the possibility of a mass extinction was "ridiculous"
narrow minded? The site you link also trys to say that anytime humans show up to a location it starts extiction events. from:The Sixth Extinction (ActionBioscience) so apparently we humans can't live harmoniously with nature anywhere on the planet. I'm sorry but I just don't buy into the whole idea that we have to preserve nature as it was before we came into contact with it as if we are some disease upon the earth. If a volcano erupts it's nature changing the local animal life but if we do it it's something evil? I'm all for not polluting and crapping where we live but I also think that we can learn enough about natural processes that we can, in essence, bend nature to our will so that we can still live as comfortable as we want and still have "natural" surroundings. look at: Plan B Updates - 35: The Sixth Great Extinction - A Status Report | EPI What really bothers me the most is that your site continually says that they have only a best guess at how many species there really are and uses a whole lot of estimates of how many animals are in a particular area and of those how many are dieing off or will die off in a particular amount of time. I don't have a problem with making a best guess when you know a majority of the data but we just don't know enough about how many species are really out there for anyone to be making these sort of guesses at what a normal rate of extinction is. Also let's not pretend that that site isn't biased toward conservation. Show me some actual research white paper's I don't have to buy to get the raw data. and no I'm not going to use google to search for them because I already think the idea is crap and my proof is that they (your site) made these claims in March 02, 2004 (for Plan B the update) and yet what are the 90,000 species that are suppose to be gone now? (30,000 species per year for 6 years) From: "estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year". I get that it's a guess but anything even close to the numbers they are talking about and anyone should be able to pull up a huge list of various species that have died off in the time since that article. Sure there is a problem but it's no where near the scale these people are trying to make it out to be. I require physical proof to back up claims, if that makes me narrow minded in your eyes, fine by me.