Some people claim that we are living in the middle of another, man-made extinction event right now. However, humanity's effects are trivia compared with the extinction events shown in the fossil record.
Is that a fact? I've seen estimates on damage that are comparable to the smaller or intermediate sized mass extinctions, if nothing like the boundaries that end the Mesozoic and Palaeozoic eras.
Do a search for something like "current mass extinction" in google, and you will find a great number of hits, including articles in Nature and Science. It looks to me like the mass extinction view is closer to a consensus than to a minority of politically motivated views. At the very least there is enough here to remove the sentence from the article, which I'm doing.
This is obviously a controversial topic -- there is nothing like "consensus" in the scientific community -- and I am strongly on the side that says calling what's happening at present an "extinction event" to be listed with the Permian-Triassic extinction event is like calling a domestic quarrel a genocidal holocaust. It's bad, and should be stopped, but blowing it out of proportion is ludicrous. I will fully support and cooperate with presenting both sides of this issue, but please don't try to make it sound like "everyone (who is a true scientist) knows that we're murdering Mother Gaia."