Sixth Mass Extinction

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v471/n7336/full/nature09678.html

Ending some 443, 359, 251, 200, and 65 Myr ago, these mass extinctions were not a single event, but like most crises a series of vulnerabilities caped by a precipitating disaster. We now have a human biomass rivaling the dinosaurs and the same rise, even more so, of CO2 and a beginning ocean acidification that parallels the vulnerabilities of these ancient calamities. Additionally, we are loosing species to extinction at an even more rapid rate.

When is it not conservative to preserve the resource upon which our very lives depend? Is it fear that leads to political idealization and a disbelief in the obvious? In my youth I wondered how the German people could be taken in by Hitler and since, how political correctness comes to be correct. The suspension of disbelief in favor of a mass ideology seems truly a human phenomena. It must have had survival value in evolutionary terms, but the phenomena today poses a massive risk.