Human activities, ultimately, cause a sixth mass extinction? Do not panic, the problem is not there. In any case for ELON MUSK. According to SPACEX CEO, there are “100% chance” that all species disappear due to the expansion of the sun. We must see big and, to avoid the disaster, “make life multiplanetary”, in other words go colonize other planets.
That’s what billionaire wrote on Twitter on January 16 , in response to the publication a few days earlier, In the biological Reviews , a study entitled “The sixth mass extinction: reality, fiction or speculation?”. Benoît Fontaine, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, is one of the three authors. He admits to have been “stomach” by this reaction of Elon Musk – even if she is partly illustrating what he intended to demonstrate …
The starting point of this study is a statement: as the climate crisis has its skeptics, that of biodiversity has its own. Some discordant voices, very minority among scientists, a little less rare in the non-academic sphere, which can still have some echo. “There is a very clear scientific consensus on the fact that there is a serious erosion of biodiversity,” says Benoît Fontaine. But the skeptics say either that the numbers do not demonstrate and that the extinction rate was overestimated. , or that it is part of the natural evolution and that there is nothing to do, or that technology can save us. “
Take into account the invertebrates
To respond to these arguments, the researchers made a summary of the work on the extinction rate. They recall that adopting a strictly “accounting” approach, which would make it possible to know precisely the number of missing species, is simply impossible: on a little more than 2 million plants and animals known, only about 140,000 (less 6%) were evaluated by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
On the other hand, they explain that other approaches converge to show that the current extinction rate is well above the “natural” rate, and insist on the importance of taking into account invertebrates: they represent 95% of known animals, but only 2% were evaluated – compared to 77% of vertebrate species.
The three researchers looked at snails, their specialty. For 200 species taken at random, they identified all the dates to which specimens had been collected around the world. They also interviewed specialists on the likelihood that each species is off. These two methods led them to the same result: about 10% of these 200 molluscs have most likely disappeared. An order of magnitude online with those observed by other scientists. In its 2019 report, the Intergovernmental scientific and political platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services (IPES) estimates that the rate of extinction is “at least tens or hundreds of times greater than it has been on average during the last 10 million years.” / p>
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