Tom, you jump on people who accept figures uncritically, but Ithinkit's almost as bad to reject figures uncritically.

I presume this is the figure you refer to:

A total of 784 plant and animal species are now recorded as Extinct with a further 60 known only in cultivation or captivity.

IUCN

But this is only the number of species CONFIRMED to be extinct.

Two points: 1. It is extremely difficult to confirm extinction.
2. Only a fraction of all species have been scientifically described - about 1.5 million out of anywhere from 2 to 100 million total, probably closer to 30-50 million, ie up to 97% of species are essentially unknown.

It's not that difficult to roughly estimate actual extinctions based on confirmed extinctions, which is where the 30,000 per year figure comes from. As an example, taking the total number of species as 50 million, 48.9 million of which are unkown, and multiplying the 800 known extinct species by this ratio gives about 24,000 extinct. And this is using only the KNOWN extinctions; I think you would agree that the actual number of extinctions even among known species its likely much higher, given the extreme diffuculty ofproving extinction, especially among the million plus known species of insects. It's hard enough with whales.

You're going to come up with something better than "Do you not see any problem at all with this?" - or all your pontifications will be questionable.