World is on brink of unprecedented wave of extinction, says UGAs Farmer - The world is headed toward one of the greatest die-offs of animals and plants in the planet’s history, a University of Georgia professor said in the first lecture in a series about the impacts humans are having on the world. Rapid #environmental change underlies extinctions; habitat loss, pollution, temperature change, and the introduction of non-native plants, said Mark Farmer, an evolutionary biologist and head of UGA’s Biological Science Division. But the most worrisome change may be how humanity’s massive use of fossil fuels is changing the acid levels of the world’s oceans, said Farmer in the first lecture in a series on the Anthropocene, a term coined to describe the massive impact, like a geological force, humans now have on the planet’s life systems.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 13:33:21 +0000