human contribution to mass extinction

You might be familiar with a little something called the KT boundary impact crater. If not, this is from the massive asteroid that blasted the earth's crust famously eliminating the dinosaurs millions of years ago world-wide. This thing likely extended up to about 30,000 feet where you might see your average commercial plane shooting by overhead. It landed off the Yucatan Peninsula, sent fireballs everywhere, and basically destroyed the atmosphere that gives life for making earth unhabitable by just about everything.

This was not the only extinction the earth has had to deal with and then regenerate life. Current estimates are that 15 such extinctions have occurred and the worst of those, meaning those that have killed off the most life and created the most long-term damage, were not from such cataclysmic events. So without an asteroid, what happened? Some were due to massive volcanic activity; I mean massive such as in Asia long before dinosaurs.

Around 250 million years ago, the so-called "Great Dying" saw 70 per cent of species wiped out on land and 95 per cent in the oceans. A clue to what may have triggered this disaster lies in solidified magma from this time, which is widespread in an area of Siberia where coal is also abundant.

These mass extinctions have one common element: they all resulted from an overabundance of carbon and hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere.

The "great dying" was a result of an acute dumping of carbon and hydrogen sulfide in the air resulting in near irreparable damage. It was not due to a slow increase and release of these elements from burning the same materials that resulted in other mass extinctions. However, just because a change is slow it does not mean that what we do now is not participating in planetary damage that is likely accelerating another period of extinction from happening. As Dr. Peter Ward states:

In some ways it is very much like the dinosaur-killing event of 65 million years ago, when a biosphere already stressed by rapid changes in climate and sea level was knocked into mass extinction by the impact of asteroids, striking, according to new evidence, simultaneously in North and Central America. A very similar scenario is currently unfolding. Over 2 million years ago, giant glaciers began to cover large portions of the planet, changing climate and sea level on a global scale in the process. And then, 100,000 years ago, another great asteroid hit Earth, this time in Africa. That asteroid is named Homo sapiens.

Ward explains what he means by this last dire statement in another interview with Wired.

(W)e've had these mass extinctions [from hydrogen sulfide] when carbon dioxide has hit 1,000 ppm. We have not hit that [level] for 100 million years. But we are currently at 380 ppm — and climbing rapidly at 2 ppm a year and accelerating — and this is the highest CO2 I think in the last 40 million years. The only time [these extinctions] ever happened in the past is when these big flood basalts happened. But now we're making it happen far faster than the flood basalts ever did. This is a unique event in the history of the planet.

Yet numbnuts from the political right don't give a damn about science and the evidence that human beings absolutely are participating and accelerating a mass extinction. The worst culprit is the US which burns more of this crap in the air than anyone because the US is the greediest consumer of everything the earth has to offer.

To be sure this is a very long way off; as in thousands of years off. But has the environmental ethic of the political right boiled down to the fact that it not going to happen any day soon, we have a short time here, so let's make as much money as possible and screw the planet by denying these realities? Yes. If they cannot see it, it does not exist. If they choose not to see it, it does not exist. Just because it's "cold" or "hot" is not evidence for climate change. It's the chemistry and physics people.

What bothers me is that jerks on the Fox American Information Lie (FAIL) dictate the news cycle with the bile from asses like Hannity. Even the typically respectable CATO Institute creates blindness to buttress the absurdity. They get to be the first to spout off harmful bullshit while the others have to work hard to undo the damage. But by then it's too late. The increasingly ignorant American public has sucked down the beer and has already cracked open the next one; good domestic beer that represents America (but probably owned by a European company).

So this is the fact: our consumerism is slowly killing the planet like dropping one little grain of salt on a slug one grain at a time. But this earth is not defenseless. When events happen that threaten it, it kills those threats. It has done it several times before. Hope all the junk we keep consuming and will keep consuming at accelerated rates for the next millenia is worth it. The top 10% of the world that are making money off of it seem to think so. And this is why all that crap in Copenhagen was a useless excuse for politicians to grandstand and prop themselves up, nothing more.