> we are in the midst of a new mass extinction event.
mischaracterises the reference they link:
> Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia.
'in the midst' != 'may be under way'
My point is not to nitpick, but to say, unlike climate change, we still have a fair bit of time on this one. If you read the relevant literature more closely, it says something like (from memory) "if current rates keep up for 500 years, it will be one of the largest mass extinctions ever".
This is a deeply important issue. If our species ends up responsible for a death-of-dinosaurs scale mass extinction its.. hard to overestimate how bad that would look, from any sort of, I dunno, galactic-UN sort of application-process-review sort of perspective.
But implying we are 'in the midst' aka 'approximately halfway through' might rob people of hope.
We are at the start of a mass extinction event which, like many other terrible potentialities ahead of us, we can very much avert.