(December 4, 2010 at 1:07 am)Chuck Wrote: The fact seems to be that the current climatological fluctuation in the last 60,000 years is not severe compared to what repeated transpired in the last 2.8 million years. Yet there were no major global extinction events between 2.8 million - 60,000 years, but there is what appears to be a fairly severe global extinction level event starting 60,000 years ago and rapidly picking up pace in the last 12000 years. The spread of modern Homo Sapiens seems to be one major global scale influence that coincided with this latest extinction event. To remove human as the most important agent of interest, one needs to identify another.
Of course, humans shouldn't be removed as a suspect in this mass extinction. Nonetheless, I think it is the scale of the extinction that we are to blame for, not the extinction itself. "Climatological fluctuation" is not the only problem here, either. Invasive species, over-hunting, etc. all have their place among the ways humans wipe out species. I'm actually not as concerned about climate change as I am about habitat destruction.
