Witnessing The End of An Era, By Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee

Witnessing The End of An Era, By Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee

In March this year (2011) the science journal Nature announced what many people already knew, that there are clear indications that the world’s Sixth Mass Extinction is already underway. The last mass extinction came some 65 million years ago when a comet or asteroid slammed into the Yucatan peninsula, in modern-day Mexico, causing firestorms whose dust cooled the planet, and an estimated 76 percent of species were killed, including the dinosaurs. The four previous mass extinction of species were due to gradual global warming and cooling, and happened on a scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. What is particular about our present mass extinction is that it has happened so quickly over a few centuries, and most significantly, it is man made. “The modern global mass extinction is a largely unaddressed hazard of climate change and human activities.”