The Earth is presently in the same conditions as last existed during the Permian extinction, 270 million years ago, with regard to global average temperature and CO2, so its not surprising that the extinction rate is beginning to match that. Fiddling with the trivial amount of anthropogenic CO2 will do nothing to change that, because the reasons are primarily extraterrestrial. Unless someone can find a control to turn up the suns activity to warm the planet, and therefore increase CO2, matters will only get worse. The Earth is not ''HOT'' if it was, greenhouses would be unnecessary. They are not! What should be happening, is the re-greening of desert areas, a lot of which were produced by human activity, removal of 'prairie farming' for more ecological friendly and sustainable systems, that are beneficial to all life, but THAT would affect profits, so wont happen, until the system collapses, into desert, as has happened worldwide already.

Years ago I read an article about a colony of mice living in a self-contained biosphere. At first all was well. Eventually though, the population got too big and the biosphere couldn`t support them all and the mice went crazy and killed each other off.

Did the UN put enough guilt into you yet? If they can induce enough panic, you won't mind paying more and more taxes for Climate Hoax. Because that's what all of this comes down to: more and more of your money paid to them.

More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to have died out. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described.

The UN is looking for another money generating scam with this extinction report.
How can anyone take the UN seriously?
They said: - Canadians are sufferring from food insecurity. - the UK doesn't protect human rights. - most life on earth would end by 2015 due to global warming.
And they appointed Saudi Arabia to the UN womans rights council.

Very dramatic and frightening...until you realize that most of the creatures that ever existed on earth are now extinct.

The sky is falling. The sky is falling. I'm sick of this apocalyptic garbage. Not to mention that the UN has Zero credibility in my book.

Sometimes I find very insightful comments on articles on this website. This article is not one of them.

Agree with Rock 13 that it is frightening, but don't forget we are one of the species that might well become extinct, with many of the others that we are driving to the brink. The justifiable complaint is that the UN although commissioning studies like this simply does not have the courage to address the real problem, the gross over-population of humans whose growth has not slowed down and if anything is picking up. Malthus's observation, that given no control on population a species will run out of its resources, has been studied in miniature as Dalong suggests and comes to the same conclusion.
The UN needs look no further than land ruination caused by the need to increase food production, water shortages that underly one of the most insoluble situations in the Mid East, and the finding that rare earth metals are sufficiently rare for the concept of batteries for electrical storage on a large scale is fundamentally flawed. Also of course increasing pollution of all kinds goes hand in hand with increasing populations.
We tinker with solutions to the symptoms but turn blind eyes to the underlying illness, and do it at our descendants peril.

Industrial carbon dioxide, at 100 ppm, represents about 1% of the total greenhouse effect. Maybe this is enough to "flip" the climate, as Carl Sagan suggested. If this is true, the 4% due to industrial water would likely be enough, with the carbon dioxide minimized. The mean global temperature without water is about freezing. In an ice age, the air is very dry and most of the heat escapes from the equatorial desserts into space. In a warm era, the desserts shrink and the radiation is blocked by water vapor.