Stark Warning From Red List & IUCN - "Life On Earth Is Disappearing Fast" - Independent

[hatrack]

Gorillas, vultures, corals, Asian crocodiles and even seaweeds are joining thousands of other species on the slide towards extinction, according to the latest edition of the Red List, the international catalogue of threatened wildlife, published yesterday.

In the past 12 months there have been nearly 200 to the list, which is published by the Swiss-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), taking the number of threatened species worldwide from 16,118 to 16,306. This means that one in four of the world's mammals, one in eight birds, one third of all amphibians and 70 per cent of the world's assessed plants on the current list are in now in jeopardy. "Life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken," the IUCN said yesterday.

The Red List is recognised as the most reliable evaluation of the conservation status of the world's species. It classifies them according to their extinction risk, through the categories extinct, critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable. Once an organism is classified as critically endangered, extinction is very close.

A grim statistic contained in the latest list is that the western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) has moved from endangered to critically endangered, after the discovery that the main subspecies, the western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), has been severely depleted by the commercial bushmeat trade, and the Ebola virus.

EDIT

http://environment.independent.co.uk/wildlife/article2956437.ece

[sam sarrha]

1. we are now in double jeopardy, a Herxheimer reaction, due to global cooling caused by pollution,

if we clean up the environment we will make global warming much worse.. during the week of 911 when planes were grounded in the usa, temperatures went up 1 degree due ot the absence of jet contrails in the upper atmosphere

[ladjf]

2. "Homo Sapient Exterminatus", the most destructive life form

ever to exist on Earth.