Mass extinction – a growth industry by @BloggersRUs

Mass extinction – a growth industry

Now some good news. This time it isn't an asteroid. It's us:

The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history. Our analysis emphasizes that our global society has started to destroy species of other organisms at an accelerating rate, initiating a mass extinction episode unparalleled for 65 million years.

That is the conclusion of a study published Friday by scientists from Stanford, Princeton, and the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico. Climate change, pollution and deforestation are key factors. The Independent reports:

Scientists at Stanford University in the US claim it is the biggest loss of species since the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

“Without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," said Professor Paul Ehrlich, at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

“Species are disappearing up to about 100 times faster than the normal rate between mass extinctions, known as the background rate."

Unless the study authors, who describe their estimates as "conservative," were being too conservative:

Last year, a report by Stuart Pimm, a biologist and extinction expert at Duke University in North Carolina, also warned mankind was entering a sixth mass extinction event.

But Mr Pimm's report said the current rate of extinction was more than 1,000 times faster than in the past, not 114, as the new report claims.

Now, for the savvy VC investor, that kind of growth means profit. Yet even Business Insider missed the big scoop: climate-driven extinction is creating job opportunities in archaeology, anthropology, and paleontology. Warming temperatures and melting glaciers are uncovering "relics, debris – and corpses – that have laid hidden for decades, even millennia." Everything from mummies to plane crashes to "a massive deposit of caribou dung."

McClatchy reports on just one of the exciting, new growth businesses created by the prospect of centuries of mass extinction ahead:

Archaeologists are turning into unlikely beneficiaries of a warmer Earth, and several have started a new publication: the Journal of Glacial Archaeology.

Its editor, E. James Dixon, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, frets about the phenomenon of ancient ice melting after thousands of years.

“For every discovery that is made, there are thousands coming out of the ice and are decomposing very rapidly,” Dixon said. “In the ice, some of the most delicate artifacts are preserved. We’ve found baskets, arrow shafts with the feathers intact and arrowheads and lashings perfectly preserved.”

Wall Street is going to be all over this like stink on ancient caribou dung.

Mass extinction. It's not a global catastrophe. It's a growth industry!