It is very unlikely we will get smart enough fast enough to avert mass extinction. Our best bet at this point is to prepare for catastrophic failure. At the very least, we should begin a global project to collect and store sufficient samples of DNA from all endangered and threatened species.

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." Aldous Huxley

will it really matter in the end?
species will always go extinct, and whether or not we are speeding up or slowing down the process, the earth will bounce back. it always has, and always will until it can't sustain life anymore

we just all better hope that there isn't a God that will hold us accountable.

gbabunovic,
of course it matters.
yes, species would have recovered before.

but what humans are doing now are damaging the earth, to the point that the earth will not be able to bounce back.
the destruction of coral reefs and logging is taking away key resources that endangered species need to survive.

I have to agree gbabunovic, some will perish, others will thrive to survive and yet others will ride the coat tails of the survivors...

251 million years ago, 96% if marine species and 70% of land species disappeared in The Great Dying. As long as Something survives, Nature will bounce back... eventually.

Hmmmm....... no mention of any peer review.???

Sombody wouldn't be worried about their funding now would they?????????

Enuf said, I'm not even going to waist my time researching who these Math Wizards are........
and which group is behind the "New" study

I kinda wish they didn't say 100 times more as that makes the entire model sound like bunk if they were that threatened they would already be gone.

Ruri, you are correct......and they wouldn't have doubled in Pop in the last 50 years

So someone tweaked a mathematical model on a computer and the results were different. Weird. I've never seen that before. Oh wait, I have. Every time someone makes a spurious claim about disastrous global warming it's because someone tweaked a computer model with different values. Even though the computer models correlate very poorly with what we measure in the real world, we still believe the computer models over real world measurements. Even weirder.

Someone fiddling with a mathematical model that didn't correlate with reality well in the first place and now correlates even more poorly is nothing to get excited about. Nature will keep on naturing while the mathematicians and modelers fiddle about. Yawn.