Animal Extinctions From Climate Rival End of Dinosaurs - Bloomberg

Animal Extinctions From Climate Rival End of Dinosaurs - Bloomberg: "Animals are dying off in the wild at a pace as great as the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago because of human activity and climate change.

Current extinction rates are at least 12 times faster than normal because people kill them for food, money or destroy their habitat, said Anthony Barnosky, a biology professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

“If that rate continues unchanged, the Earth’s sixth mass extinction is a certainty,” Barnosky said in a phone interview. “Within about 200 to 300 years, three out of every four species we’re familiar with would be gone.”

The findings, due to air in a documentary on the Smithsonian Channel on Nov. 30, add to pressure on envoys from some 190 countries gathering next week at a United Nations conference in Peru to discuss limits on the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

“We might do as much damage in 400 years as an asteroid did to the dinosaurs,” Sean Carroll, a biologist who leads the Department of Science Education at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, said in an interview. He was also interviewed for the documentary."



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