At What Rate Are Animals Around The World Going Extinct?

[Joker37]

I heard that animals are disappearing faster and faster thanks to global warming. But how fast is this extinction rate estimated to be? How many animals are going extinct because of global warming?

 

Anybody know?

[Turtle]

it isn't exactly global climate change doing the extincting, rather accelerated climate change is of the same ilk as the extinctions. deforestation, other habitat loss, and pollution of air, ground, & water are the culprits. (well, we're really the culprits & those nastys are just our means. :doh:)

 

...The Current Mass Extinction:

 

 

Is the biosphere today on the verge of anything like the mass extinctions of the geological past? Could some equivalent of meteorite impacts or dramatic climate change be underway, as humankind's rapid destruction of natural habitats forces animals and plants out of existence?

 

Increasingly, researchers are doing the numbers, and saying, yes, if present trends continue, a mass extinction is very likely underway. The evidence is pieced together from details drawn from all over the world, but it adds up to a disturbing picture. This time, unlike the past, it's not a chance asteroid collision, nor a chain of climatic circumstances alone that's at fault. Instead, it is chiefly the activities of an ever-growing human population, in concert with long-term environmental change.

 

The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria, and fungi, not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone.

 

The typical rate of extinction differs for different groups of organisms. Mammals, for instance, have an average species "lifespan" from origination to extinction of about 1 million years, although some species persist for as long as 10 million years. There are about 5,000 known mammalian species alive at present. Given the average species lifespan for mammals, the background extinction rate for this group would be approximately one species lost every 200 years. Of course, this is an average rate -- the actual pattern of mammalian extinctions is likely to be somewhat uneven. Some centuries might see more than one mammalian extinction, and conversely, sometimes several centuries might pass without the loss of any mammal species. Yet the past 400 years have seen 89 mammalian extinctions, almost 45 times the predicted rate, and another 169 mammal species are listed as critically endangered. ...

 

full article: >> The Current Mass Extinction

[Jorge1907]

This is as much environmentalism as it is science. The fossil record is hardly solid on this.

[Rade]

Estimates of the extinction rate due to changing climate for many different taxa have been published:

 

http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/83/1/thomascd1.pdf