Entering the Sixth Mass Hysteria

Meanwhile, Paul R. Ehrlich—notorious doomsayer and anti-Cassandra, predestined to be wrong but believed, famous for inaccurately foreseeing all manner of catastrophes, who predicted in the ’60s (in The Population Bomb) that “[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over” and that we’d all die of starvation in the ’70s—has co-authored “Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction”.

Hysterical, credulous, unsceptical journos naturally cover such stories as, for example, “Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Has Begun, New Study Confirms” [using the word “confirms” in its rare meaning of “asserts”]; note the cool, unemotive, scientific language:

This latest research tells us what we already knew.  Humans have in the space of a few centuries swung a wrecking ball through the Earth’s biosphere.  Liquidating biodiversity to produce products and services has an end point.  Science is starting to sketch out what that end point could look like but it cannot tell us why to stop before we reach it.
If we regard the Earth as nothing more than a source of resources and a sink for our pollution, if we value other species only in terms of what they can provide to us, then we we will continue to unpick the fabric of life. Remove further rivets from spaceship earth. This not only increases the risk that it will cease to function in the ways that we and future generations will depend on, but can only reduce the complexity and beauty of our home in the cosmos.

UPDATE (21 June):  the BBC has uncritically reported the alarmist findings of the “sixth mass extinction” paper—disingenuously describing it as “a study by three US universities”—and, of course, the awarmist, misanthracist, duplicitous misanthropes who infest the “progressive” movement are incoherently wishing that mankind perish very soon whilst simultaneously lamenting all the other species whose final days are supposedly nigh.