We are not edging up to a mass extinction

I don't think I want to support this perspective... but it is novel, and seems to have some interesting data related to it.

Not quite sure what the motivation of this article is here, because the author (likely intentionally) dodges calling out that he's making a distinction between the pure definition of extinct meaning no more individuals of a species being left, and the more colloquial term referring to massive die-offs. Just because total extinction of a species may asymptotically take centuries doesn't mean there isn't catastrophic loss of life in the meantime. So it seems, at best, he's being disingenuous.

And for someone who should be intimately familiar with the subject, to call climate change "the most serious problem" we're facing, this to me suggests he either doesn't know what he's talking about, or he has other motivations here, or he's just an idiot.

Widespread pollution of our groundwater, rainwater, oceans and air - in many places now at toxic levels, collapse of ecosystems, massive habitat loss and destruction, global depletion of resources, all will affect us to a greater degree and sooner than climate change (to be fair, climate change will exacerbate these other factors).

And on top of everything else, he's completely ignoring that the pace of many of these trends are accelerating.

The fact that there is a tremendous diversity of life forms now, after the planet having clearly suffered past extinction events, is just plain obvious and makes much of what he says here about adaptation and evolution not very interesting.