Weve Driven Extinction Rates Up To 100x Above Safe Levels Humanity has slapped nature in the face, Pope Francis said Thursday, and recent reports confirm just how hard the earth has been hit. A flurry of environmental studies released this week highlights how humans are broadly changing the earths ecosystems, leading to record temperatures and pushing the extinction rate as well as other so-called planetary boundaries. 2014 was hottest year on record, scientists reported Friday, beating out the previous highest global average temperatures in 2010. Its a continuation of a recent, alarming trend. Of the 10 hottest years tallied by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, nine of them occurred after 2000. And a warmer globe harms charismatic species, like polar bears, and little ones, like burrowing owls, and the perhaps less glamorous, like the fishes. Climate change is just one of four planetary boundaries — theoretical warning limits — weve exceeded, scientists say in a study published in the journal Science on Thursday. The extinction rate is also beyond what the scientists called a safe operating space for humans. Theres a normal, slow speed at which species go extinct. Humans have increased that rate by 10 to 100 times — or, depending on who you ask, even by a factor of 1,000. On its website, the Stockholm Resilience Center, one of the institutions involved in the study of planetary boundaries, notes that changes to ecosystems due to human activities were more rapid in the past 50 years than at any time in human history.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 21:36:17 +0000
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