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."
I said that it would be more accurate to say it is a consensus (why quotation marks?) then to pretend the data uncontroversially indicated the converse, as was done, not that it would be entirely accurate. We have had entire families of organisms (not mammals, things like molluscs) mostly depopulated over large areas if not actually rendered extinct, but I'm not interested in debating the point. Simply note that I never said we should make it sound anything like your terrible strawman, I simply said the partisan statement should be removed.