Plants and animals came back much faster than thought, with plants spurring mammals to diversify, the team reports today in Science.
“These encouraging results suggest that not only are children increasingly engaged in advocating for their future, they are also effective advocates to their parents,” says climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe
In the 1980s, roughly 4.5 million monarchs wintered in California, but at last count, there may be as few as 30,000
Scientists have identified 2 million species of living things. No one knows how many more are out there, and tens of thousands may be vanishing before we have even had a chance to encounter them.
Current extinction rates are 50 times higher than expected background rates, suggesting that another mass extinction event is underway
Once a species dies out, it's lost to us forever. Or is it?
Researchers found that the combination of human encroachment with the warming contributed to the extinctions.
People had trouble trying to wrap their minds around how the Passenger Pigeon could disappear,. They came up with all kinds of theories to explain why it wasn’t human’s fault, like that the birds moved to South America and changed their appearance. There is a similar reaction now. There is a common human reaction that when confronted with an inconvenient truth to deny it, You can see it today with climate change.
A mass extinction caused by volcanic activity wiped out some of the dinosaurs' competitors, allowing them to assume ascendancy. Of course, another mass extinction, caused by a meteor impact caused their demise. Earth is not as hospitable to life as we might like to think.
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