RUSH: Well, a new study is out about another man-made crisis. This time the threat is mass extinction.

A handful of scientists say humans have damaged the Earth’s ecosystems so horribly that we’re headed for the biggest mass extinction since the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago. These scientists claim two species vanish every year, over 200 in the last century. Of the 177 species of mammals, 40 percent have experienced a serious drop in population.

A co-author of the study is the disgraced Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich. He says the asteroid that hit Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs, was not making a choice. But the coming mass extinction is the result of human choice: overpopulation, and overconsumption by the rich. Ehrlich complains that wildlife habitats have been plowed under and paved, replaced by buildings and strip malls. Of course, Amazon is gonna fix that.

Of course, this crisis comes with a deadline. The study gives us only two or three decades to straighten the problem out or else we’re done. Mass extinction will be so far gone we won’t be able to recover.

Let me turn back the hands of time to 1968. That’s when a young scientist named Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. He predicted the population would double and the Earth would not have the resources to sustain it. So we’d be wiped out 20 years ago by starvation.

Except there’s more of us here than ever, the population has doubled, and we’re here and we’re all fat. We have strip malls. Ehrlich is full of it.