Over 38,000 species on IUCN's Red List

[ding]

But, hey, this has happened before - when asteroids hit or when huge volcanoes erupted for centuries or temperatures finally caused clathrate events - so it'll be okay. Nothing to it. And, we KNOW humans don't have anything to do with this. Right? Right? I said RIGHT?

Correct. Finally you are starting to get it. Yoar welcome.

 

[Grumblenuts]

On average, 18,000 NEW totally unrecognized plant and animal species are discovered every year. That is nearly 50 every single day.

I recall going to the Museum of Natural History back in 1975. We were treated to a session with the most acclaimed species researcher at the time who said much the same, only made sure we understood exactly wtf he was talking about. Students are sent out into rainforests to collect every kind of bug and strange looking thing they can possibly grab in a hurry, then haul it all back to their university. They must then count how many things they gathered. That's one number. Then they have to eliminate those that are already identified. Subtracting those yields another number: "On average, 18,000 NEW totally unrecognized plant and animal species".

The number found otherwise is not significant. So here's the thing -- "we’ve identified maybe 1.6 million of them." Many of which are now undoubtedly long extinct, hence the concern to begin with. What remains? The predicted "some 8.7 million species" is an estimate based upon how much of the crap the kids haul back generally turns out to be previously unknown. Translation: they haven't even looked at the vast majority of it yet. They have no real clue because eliminating the knowns from the unknowns requires a fuck ton of tedious work. Computers have undoubtedly speeded things up since then. But even way back then, the guy made very clear that they would never catch up with the the backlog and it was only getting worse. Because the raw samples being collected.. vastly from rainforests.. were piling up and decaying faster than they could be processed. I'd venture to say that, while rainforests are very important to our own continued survival, precious few of us actually reside in any and that we still have little idea as to how many species actually emerge (and disappear) from them yet.

"Nearly 50 new mammal species are discovered every year."
Zowie, powie! How many go extinct every year? Duh..

"Biodiversity on this planet isn't decreasing, it's increasing."
Bullshit.