Political Memes

Oh yeah, so it's not just a third of life we'll be wiping out, it's half according to your link.

The extinction of species by human activity continues to accelerate, fast enough to eliminate more than half of all species by the end of this century.

You are implying that basically we don't know anything about 80% of the life on the planet. That's not so. They're describing the part of the species which haven't been formally described, classified and given two-part Latinized names. It doesn't mean that we don't have an estimate of how many beetle species there are, but that we just haven't had the time to go through all of them. We still know roughly how much beetles there are, even if we're not exactly sure of how many types of them there are. And that's one of the hardest issues. For instance not knowing that a certain deer population on some continent might actually be two distinct but closely related species doesn't mean that we don't have an estimate of the population that those one or two species of deer live in. (That's just a hypothetical example, but I'm sure you get the point.)

And to reiterate, you're basically trying to justify that "it's not so bad if it's only a third of KNOWN life and that's clearly less than 20% of all life". Your math is really fucked up there, because it's "a third of life", not "a third of currently formally described and classified species". And even a third of a fifth of all life would be rather fucking significant.

Significant enough at least to warrant some action, when it's definitely possible to do so.