Extinctions Due to Global Warming Predicted 725
PizzaFace writes "A study being published today in Nature predicts that global warming will doom 15 to 37 percent of plants and animals to extinction by 2050, according to various news sources. The study looked at how predicted warming would affect the suitability of the areas that particular species inhabit, and whether displaced species would be able to migrate to suitable habitat. Many of the unlucky species are being caught between the hammer of global warming and the anvil of habitation destruction." The BBC has a story about climate engineering: long-range planning on making major changes in order to reduce the effects of global warming.
Low credibility (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Low credibility (Score:3, Insightful)
He has more than 30 years of dire doomsday predictions, none of which happened. Truly the epitome of the boy who cried wolf. But what's really baffling is how so many people still hang on his every word. Somehow he's st
Worst-case scenarios (Score:3, Interesting)
Color me unconvinced.
SHOULD we try to prevent it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Many recent studies have shown that humans may not be a significant cause of global warming.
If this isn't our fault do we have the right or the responsibility to alter the course of nature?
If we screw this up, the consequenses will be chatastrophic.
Re:SHOULD we try to prevent it? (Score:2, Funny)
Do you mean like a
Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Of course (Score:4, Informative)
We don't know how much rain they'll be next Wednesday, but we can estimate the total rainfall for February very accurately.
Write out 100 times: Climate is not weather.
Re:Of course (Score:2)
Rrrright.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Rrrright.... (Score:2)
In a slightly more productive sense, can anyone out there in the Slashdot community link to any solid, conclusive, and convincing evidence that global warming will actually occur?
Maybe a Normal Occurance (Score:3, Insightful)
Some certainties...
- the earth has been warmer in the last few hundred years than it is now,
- the earth goes through cyclic temp changes with a period of about 300 years
- it appears that we are now coming out of a minor ice age
Google if you want references.
So maybe every few hundred years 15% to 30% of living organisms die out. And likely 15% to 30% of new organisms develop.
So all normal, maybe?
Re:Maybe a Normal Occurance (Score:5, Informative)
About 100% of living organisms die off every few hundred years. From the Zoology course I just finished (I'm no expert), it takes a whole lot for a new species to develop. Just from your own experience - for wildly-reproducing fast-dying species, like say the common cold, you get one new noticeable strain every few years - and that's actually from a lot of sources, so the mutation rate there is actually much less often for a new true species to develop. A couple hundred years would not create 15-30% more species there.
For insects, the process would be slower - they only reproduce one to a few times a year, with an order of magnitude less reproduction, because they tend to live more successfully than bacteria. If you have ever studies fruit flies in a science class, it's not rare to see mutation - but to see a beneficial mutation is rare, and to have those build up to the point where groups grow so different they cannot reproduce together would take a long time. We don't tend to see completely new species of insects pop up in areas that have been observed... only shifts in populations. A couple hundred years does not create 15-30% more species there.
Mammals take MUCH longer to reproduce and live. In our own recorded history, we've never found groups of humans that could not inter-breed. In our history of dog breeding, it takes dozens of generations of carefully controlled breeding to even intelligently select one trait in one species of dog, often at cost. A couple hundred years would not even come close to 1% more species there.
I didn't study plants, but I don't believe they multiply or mutate at a higher rate than those animals.
Perhaps the study is wrong - but it's warnings ARE more dire than is gong to be fixed with natural diversification, from what little I know.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Maybe a Normal Occurance (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, it's possible they were on of those tribes that got wiped out by the diseases brought to america. Or I could have my facts messed up completly. Or maybe they were just to small to be physiclaly compatible. I do not have hard data.. hmmm,
gah.. to much data.. to tired to filter it. Maybe if some on
Re:Maybe a Normal Occurance (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only that, but we've been messing with dogs for what, about 15 thousand years? And yet they STILL interbreed with wolves.
Some even say that wolves and dogs are still the same species.
Re:Maybe a Normal Occurance (Score:3, Informative)
So pretty much everyone, not only some, now count dogs as a subspecies of gray wolf (Canis lupus).
Predict Extinctions, Blame Global Warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Now don't flame me that Global Warming exists, I'm not disputing there may be evidence that it may exist to some degree. But it almost certainly doesn't exist to the degree Global Warming zealots proclaim. To some degree all science and scientists are seen in a more skeptical light by the general public when Chicken Little prognostications don't come to pass.
We know species are stressed by man's activities on Earth (Global Warming or no). So if one makes predictions that species will become extinct due to Global Warming, and low and behold they become extinct, then perhaps the general public will suddenly get religion about Global Warming. Who cares if Global Warming is really to blame.
Re:Maybe a Normal Occurance (Score:3, Funny)
Oh thank you, now i can go back to driving my S.U.V, leave the lights on all day round, eat more meat products and alltogether act like an overfed energy wasting pig.
Google references say it can't have environemental impact.
Genetic Engineering (Score:4, Funny)
Re:FUD from the margins Re:Maybe a Normal Occuranc (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have to rely on voting patterns, you're not talking about science, you're talking about politics.
If you're talking about science, then you necessarily must have a falsifiable prediction to discuss, the truth of which can be objectively determined. "Majorities" are not part of the scientific method. Proof is.
20 years (Score:2)
And so comes the next doomsday (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And so comes the next doomsday (Score:2)
We need to see how horrible pollution can be firsthand before we really give an effort.
Maybe you getting a good dose of colon cancer will demonstrate to you that you need to eat less crappy food?
C'mon, your attitude is just plain dumb. What ever happened to 'prevention is better than cure'?
Catastroph of the first order? (Score:5, Informative)
It will be good for some species of reptiles and fish though. Though algea blooms might kill off even those fish that live, and a lack of prey may hurt the reptiles.
Ryan Fenton
Science or politics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Science or politics? (Score:3, Insightful)
> Is Global Warming a scientific concern or a political objective?
Is the denial of global warming a scientific concern or a political objective?
> I often ask that question because whenever the global warming scenario is painted, I only hear the bad effects, never the good. That makes me wonder about those doing the painting. A scientific discourse would show good and bad, and be objective.
So, would a scientific discourse about the effects of having a large asteroid crash into Kansas also show bo
Re: Science or politics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper (ISBN 0-415-27844-9). This will give you a foundation in empericism, which you seem to need.
Human-caused global warming has not been proven to the standard of strong inference, which is what science requires. It's how we seperate the corect theories from the incorrect ones. Until a theory has been shown to have satisfactory evidence, it should not be believed. That's differ
WTF (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
The plants have to be there first. If there is radical climate change, plant communities will not be able to pack up and skip north or even uphill at that kind of rate.
15-30 percent is probably conservative....
Re:WTF (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, my field is ichthyology, specificly the ichthyology of fluvial desert enviroments. The *main* limiting factor to a species distribution is not directly enviromental ( that is the organism can live in far greater range then it is found in), but competition from organisms more suited to the marginal enviroments. The study is flawed ( at least from cursory reading) because it does not take this into account. The other thing that the artical does not take into account is the introduction of organisms into new areas attributable to human activity. This is normaly concidered detrimental, but it can have positive aspects. An example is Ameca splendens, a fish well established in florida ( and the aquarium trade) but concidered extinct in its native waters.
The final problem is that the authors are relying on a meterological model that is not conciderd very likely by meterologists. In fact, most models show a wide variety of changes, most related to more dynamic weather. This makes sence as most of the extra energy will be goining into driving weather and not just increasing average global temerature. The earths climatic systems have a huge amount of negative feed back. I happen to be aware of this sort of thing becaus my last area of study was the effects of micro-weather on fish distributions.
I, for one, am much more concerned about the direct effects of human activity on animal populations. City heat island effect, ground water depleation, irrigation, river daming, deforestation, and deliberate non-native organisim introductions ( though the later is benificial to the introduced species, it can be hell on natives, especialy in areas severly modified by human activity) will do more damage in the next 50 years then incresed atmospheric CO2.
One more thing; Most of the models I have looked at indicate that the enviroment of the part of the world I am from, will actualy return to more historicaly normal conditions. This could include the expansion of a very special subtype of the sonoran that is rare in the US, though was not so 10K years ago. This would include the expansion of the range of some realy cool species.
It keeps going (Score:2)
Species go extinct all the time... and more keep poping up. Deal with it. Next they'll be saying that the global warming is heating the earth's core and eventually the entire planet will explode (uh oh... giving them ideas).
Funny how ALL this is going to happend around 2050. Anybody else notice that?
Clarification (Score:5, Insightful)
"A sweeping new analysis enlisting scientists from 14 laboratories around the globe found that more than one-third of 1,103 native species they studied could vanish or plunge to near extinction by 2050... Earth is home to an estimated 14 million plant and animal species" -- As published by CNN.
Very dramatic difference here.
Err no... (Score:3, Insightful)
The study looked at a defined population of species, and then extrapolated the results. This isn't unusual and is one of the reasons for the tolerance in the headline figures.
Or do you think they'd study everything on planet earth ?
Global Warming? (Score:3, Funny)
look on the bright side (Score:3, Funny)
What they don't say... (Score:2, Interesting)
The Bush administration . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Numbers sound like they are made up... (Score:3, Insightful)
While I'm all for protecting the environment and not doing things to dirty it or pollute it more than necessary, some credit has to be given to the shear will of life to continue living. It's worked for millenia, it's not gonna stop wholesale just yet unless it was going to stop without our interference.
-N
Bad News for Divers (Score:2, Interesting)
So far, the high rated comments are astonishing (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm stunned, though, by the response of the younger people here to the real threat posed by global warming. After all, it really isn't going to affect me too badly, I won't be here in 2050 -- but you will. Global warming, for whatever reason, is undeniably real. Especially in the higher latitudes, temperatures are many degrees higher in the winter than they have been even thirty years ago. Talk to anybody in Alaska or northern Canada about it -- there's absolutely no question about the fact of climate change.
The relexive denial that anything is wrong shocks me. I don't understand it.
thad
Re:So far, the high rated comments are astonishing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So far, the high rated comments are astonishing (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at the world situation with HIV. Is it any different? Most people in the world until they see someone die -- in front of them -- and the autopsy confirms it was HIV... they don't believe it exists.
We see today that HIV is once again on the rise in America... because young people don't believe it's real. And in the rest of the world, HIV is a global epidemic because their education isn't sufficient for them to understand reality.
It's no surprise that ignorant young Americans (and other young people) scoff at global warming. The education of the average young person is insufficient to understand reality, including the vast amount of black and white data that shows indisputable global warming.
I know it's a tough thing to accept, but most young people, even the geeks, are severely undereducated. And what they have been taught is mostly brainwashing designed to make them a good worker focused on the small picture. The literacy of young people is almost zero.
If you have the motivation to look into the matter, I would recommend reading "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" [zonalatina.com] by Paulo Friere --
The methodology of the late Paulo Freire, once considered such a threat to the established order that he was "invited" to leave his native Brazil, has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm.
Excerpted from The Catalyst Centre [catalystcentre.ca], a Canadian organization that promotes cultures of learning for positive social change.
Obviously things are going to get a lot lot worse before they get better.
Re:So far, the high rated comments are astonishing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So far, the high rated comments are astonishing (Score:5, Insightful)
So how come there are still articles about it being published in peer-reviewed scientific journals like the one cited? I don't see them printing articles about astrology or the healing power of crystals.
Certainty regarding the unknown is anathema to science. Environmentalists say "x and y may occur in the event of z." Critics of global warming theory say "x y and z will never ever happen." Which one sounds like a good scientist?
Re:So far, the high rated comments are astonishing (Score:4, Interesting)
The only people that seem to disagree a very small proportion of scientists, the US administration (even though their own scientific advisers agree that global warming is a real threat), some people in big business and a strangley large proportion of Americans who seem to think it is all some communist plot to take away their freedom. I've seen climate change in my lifetime in my country, 9 out of 10 of the hottest summers and winters have been in the last 30 years, with most of those occuring in the last decade. Considering the UK has temperature records dating back a couple of centuries I think this is fairly good empirical evidence, but hey what do I matter, I'm not some fat ignoramous in Ohio who wants to drive a 10 tonne SUV.
Re:So far, the high rated comments are astonishing (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. The proofs are there. The proofs are messy, and require actually learning things to understand, and aren't anything that can fit neatly and succinctly into a newsweek article or a slashdot comment. But the fact that you aren't willing to go out and *read* something so you know what the proof is doesn't mean you automatially the right to say that none exists.
There isn't some big smoking gun they found in the FBI basement or something. The "proof" is that information from a number of different disciplines of science, but mostly from atmospheric science, points in a consistent manner toward a certain conclusion. You want me to tell you what the specific evidence is? No. Either pay for your education like everyone else or go to a library. In the meanwhile I would like to respond to some specific misconceptions in what you have said.
First off, the issue isn't "it's raised 0.8 in the last 100 years". The issue is the *rate* of change. The issue is that if you look at a long-term graph, you find a lot of tiny, slow wobbles followed by a very sudden and sharp increase that begins at the beginning of the industrial revolution and continues steadily until now. We see the temperature fluctuating a LOT, and it's wobbled back and forth this point of warmth before. But it doesn't *seem* to have changed this quickly. This doesn't prove anything, but it should be the first indication something might be going on.
Second off, it doesn't have to be a large change to have radical and very unpleasant effects. Ever heard of El Nino? El Nino is a very, very, very small change in the temperature of the ocean out by California. Despite how small this is, though, it has incredibly dramatic effects on a huge variety of things, including the entire way in which rain systems move across North America. This is because the weather over North America is a very complex, touchy system where if you change one cause-- like the temperature of the pacific ocean-- just a little, you get drastically different behavior. The world is full of complex systems like this, and this is why global warming is worrying. It isn't like we're going to get suddenly up to 300 degrees and bake to death. But what we might get is something like the drought and fertile areas of the world rearranging themselves. Or, far more likely, a very small increase in world overall temperature would move the freezeline further north, allowing, say, malaria mosquitos to live in areas they never could before.
Third off, we do not *need* recorded records. We have recorded records going back 100 years, yeah. However, we have acceptably accurate proxy records from all over the world going WAY back from a variety of sources, and we have well enough to establish a solid baseline from. Now, given, the further back in this record you go the bigger the possible error gets, but it's still good enough for a number of things. This proxy data includes a wide variety of things from tree rings, to oxygen isotopes in fossils, to air trapped in glaciers. Each of these has a totally different and solid scientific reason why it can be trusted. And these different proxies are overwhelmingly in agreement about what the climate record looks like going back FAR, FAR further back than 100 years. You can say "oh, well how do we know the proxy data works". Well, we have different reasons to believe each proxy works, and if you want to say it doesn't you need to find some way to explain (1) why the scientific basis for that proxy is wrong and (2) if the proxies are wrong, for what reason do they agree?
Lastly, the ice age thing was based on an unreasonable methodology. It was basically certain people looking at a graph of the last really long block of time and seeing that the temperature of the earth got into a cycle of slowly rising, then falling abruptly, then slowly rising, then falling abruptly. They then said, hey, if it did this in the past, it will probably do it in the future. They then rea
Re:So far, the high rated comments are astonishing (Score:3, Interesting)
This one statement proves you do NOT understand science. Science does not provide reasons that can be called facts - it provides theories. Quantum mechanics is a theory in place until it gets disproved as classical mechanics was by
Re:Denialism is frankly depressing to witness. (Score:3, Informative)
Exercise: Take any small scale closed system, like the Biosphere project a few years back.
Pump in lots and lots of C02, as indeed did happen in Biosphere since they underestimated just how much the humans would respirate within.
Result: Bigger greener faster reproducing plants, and pretty much stable C02 levels. As, if you know any plant biology, really oughn't to be a terrible shock.
Contributory evidence that this obse
Before Drawing Hysterical Conclusions, Read This (Score:4, Insightful)
Excerpt:
The study is entirely a computer simulation, and as anyone familiar with this art knows, computer models can be trained to produce any desired result.
And:
The case for species preservation should be made on hard ground, not on computer-generated squish.
Anti-American? I don't think so (Score:5, Interesting)
This is stupid because there is no one (except perhaps /bin/laden and his ilk) who would find any joy in seeing Americans have to adjust their lifestyle a bit. Most of the rest of us either don't care or do our best to emulate it anyway.
No, the only people actually feeling the effects of the environmentalists' crusade are those of us living in "progressive" countries where gas has been $5/gallon for a long time already and where every conceivable form of energy is taxed through the roof "in order to save the environment".
Nevermind that we need that energy to go about our daily business whatever the cost so demand isn't reduced anyway, nevermind that those same progressive governments put exactly zilch of that tax revenue back into alternative energy research and nevermind that it doesn't make any difference anyway because the rest of the world is still polluting at least as much as they ever did, so....
You get the drift. It's enough to make a poor sod wonder if this global warming panic isn't a huge scam cooked up by politicians to allow them to tax the populace with impunity.
Not that I doubt that the climate is changing, but wouldn't it be a good idea to get everyone to agree on the scientific basis for claiming man is (at least partly) behind the change, what measures to implement and then to implement them globally? Reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases 1% globally must be better than reducing them by 10% in a just couple of medium/small countries.
Also, it wouldn't leave those of us living in those countries feeling like we're having to do all the lifestyle adjusting in a massive and costly gesture of futility while the rest of the world doesn't really give a rat's ass.
Note that I'm not saying that the claims that the climate is changing are a scam, but I do think it's prudent to wonder out loud about the global warming panic that, as far as I can see, has only ever resulted in raised taxes in some countries. Where is the reduction in emissions of greenhouse gasses? Where is the reduction of the ozone holes? In short, where did our money go?
So, my dear Americans. Be prepared for the day when you too have to pay $5/gallon for gas, only make sure that when that day comes your money will actually be used for something that makes a difference.
Re:Anti-American? I don't think so (Score:5, Insightful)
----------
That's a stupid thing to say. As an American, I want the rest of my countrymen to moderate a little more. There are some things that are just complete excess. Where I live, half the cars on the road are SUVs, and many people use them for nothing more than driving a few miles to work and dropping their kid off at school! I don't know about other Americans, but I think its sick that we consume 25% of the world's energy, while having only 5% of the world's population.
I think there should be laws to at least provide a monetary incentive to pollute less. In some industries, corporations pay to pollute. If they pollute less than they paid for, they can sell that excess capacity to other companies. That creates a competitive market for pollution credits, which has had dramatic results in driving down pollution. I'd like to see the same thing applied to individuals.
And before anybody bitches at me about liberty, let me tell you that I'm the first one to regret additional government oversight. But we live in a republic, not an anarchy. Our society recognizes that some government restrictions are necessary, and most importantly, our economic system (capitalism) recognizes that certain things are outside the bounds of the free market. These are things like national defense and a clean environment, things that everyone benefits from. A free market will produce less than the efficient quantity of these things because everybody will want to let somebody else pay for it, because they know they can still get the benefits. Government oversight is unfortunately required for such things.
I also think that the Republican party's stance on Kyoto is laughable. They ask: why should we cut more than Thailand? The answer: because we pollute more! Compare this to the answer they give when we ask: why should the rich get larger tax cuts? Because they pay more taxes?
Weather Prediction Science? (Score:3, Insightful)
How come you're willing to believe weather prediction of 50 to 100 years into the future?
Re:Weather Prediction Science? (Score:3, Informative)
Quick clue. If I watch one spin of a roulette wheel, I have a pretty ordinary chance of guessing whether the casino will win, or the dude betting against it.
If however I look at all the games in the casino, understand their rules and the associated probabilities, measure the number of people who come
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but Mars is warming too... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why?
Because Mars is experiencing global warming [nasa.gov] too.
Don't get me wrong, I think we are trashing the environment, and that if we don't do something about it, it will come back and bite us in the ass as a species, but I don't think it is a given fact that global warming is a direct result of our actions. There is simply too much we don't understand.
Upsides to global warming (Score:3, Insightful)
the places on the earth with (Score:3, Insightful)
Not the first time (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Little Ice Age of 1645-1715 where temperatures were 2 to 4 degrees colder?
Not to mention that many scientists doubt the fact that there is any significant warming and claim that when the samples tainted by local city hot spots are removed there is nothing that registers above the noise.
A message to the more viciously skeptic. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a message for you: There is a difference between a scientific study and a "raving" environmentalist.
I've lived here in Europe for 17 years now, and even here I can that climate is changing. The yearly winter and fall storms are getting worse, the summers are getting much hotter and drier (three of the last four summers have been far hotter than normal accompanied by droughts and flash floods) and the winters are much warmer than they were 12 years ago (When I got here there was snow for months in winter, now if there's snow for weeks you're lucky), and all that repeatedly, so please spare me the comments on sunspot cycles and freak seasons.
Mod this down if you wish, but I firmly believe that this demonising of the warning on climatic change is extremely counter productive.
QED (Score:3)
hogwash (Score:4, Informative)
By Iain Murray Published Tech Central Station
It seems that virtually every news organ in the English language has carried the story of new scientific claims published in Nature magazine that by 2050 over a million species will be doomed to extinction owing to the effects of global warming. Yet few of them realized how flimsy the story actually is. Writing on another claim of mass extinctions almost two years ago, I said, "This area of research is prone to wild exaggerations," and here we have another one.
There are several reasons this claim should be laughed out of the court of public opinion. First, the research doesn't say what the researchers themselves claim. They have extrapolated to all species a model that looked at only 1,103 species in certain areas (243 of those species were South African proteaceae, a family of evergreen shrubs and trees). For one thing, we don't know how many species there are -- estimates vary from 2 million to 80 million -- and have only documented 1.6 million. However, assuming the 14 million figure widely used in the press reports is anywhere near accurate, the sample size is a mere 0.008 percent of the total species population of the planet, with certain species vastly over-represented (there are only 1,000 species of proteaceae on the planet). All the researchers have demonstrated is that, if their model is correct, certain species in certain habitats will run a risk of extinction. Extrapolating to the entire planet from this small, unrepresentative sample is simply invalid. So when the lead researcher told the Washington Post, "We're not talking about the occasional extinction -- we're talking about 1.25 million species. It's a massive number," he was guilty at the very least of over-enthusiasm, if not outright exaggeration.
This problem would be devastating enough for the claims, if it wasn't the case that the model on which the calculations are made is itself suspect. It relies on the 'species-area relationship,' the idea that smaller areas support fewer species. A researcher at the evocatively-titled Golden Toad Laboratory for Conservation in Puentoarenas, Costa Rica, writing a commentary on the study for Nature, called this "one of ecology's few ironclad laws." The trouble is that there are many exceptions to this supposedly ironclad law. The wholesale deforestation of the Eastern United States, for example, seems only to have caused the extinction of one species of bird. While in Puerto Rico, the island's loss of 99 percent of its forest cover caused the loss of 7 out of 60 species, but after the deforestation the number of bird species on the island actually increased to 97. The species-area relationship (plotted as a linear function in 1859) seems to be a poor model on which to base extinction rates.
So the model is suspect and the extrapolation invalid. What about the link to global warming? The researchers assume that global warming will reduce habitat. Yet this isn't the case. The earth is not shrinking. The reduction of one area of habitat does not mean that it is replaced by void. Other habitats expand. And so far, all the evidence we have points not to desertification or other changes to less hospitable climates as a result of global warming. Instead, the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere seems to have led to a six percent increase in the amount of vegetation on the earth. The Amazon rain forests accounted for 42 percent of the growth. To model only reductions in habitats and not expansions accounted for by global warming stacks the deck. The researchers created a model that dictated that global warming will cause extinctions. Surprise, surprise! When they ran the model that's exactly the result they got.
Thank goodness for the New York Times, whose writer John Gorman was careful enough to note the limitations of the study. While others talked about millions of extinctions, he said, "By 2050, the scientists say, if current warming trends continue, 15 to 37 percent of the 1,103 species they studi
Fear no warming (Score:4, Interesting)
From the environments perspective, humans are a brief hiccup. The earth has seen drastically more damaging environmental disasters, and simply put, disasters are how nature changes and evolution is produced. Disasters are in fact a fine things to happen if biodiversity is your concern as they give rise to new and more exotic creatures with each passing. Even the most terrible of disasters, such as the comet that killed the dinosaurs, are not enough to put nature down and out. In fact, that disaster is what led to our rise in the first place. Humanity could probably rape and pillage this world with all of its might, and in the long term things would be okay. I am not suggesting that we do so, but I am not going to sweat much if biodiversity takes a short term fall.
So some animals die? New animals will replace them. Granted, it isn't going to happen on a time scale we can appreciate, but I think that is the problem. Environmentalist look at the world on their time scale which has the attention span of 50 years, when evolution and natural selection is far more concerned with a much broader picture in which sudden mass extinctions are not the end of life.
The other perspective from the human perspective. From the human perspective, this problem is more of a nuisance. There is absolutely nothing humanity could willingly do to the environment that could kill off humanity outside of all out nuclear/biological war (and even then). Humans force evolution upon themselves too damned quick to kill themselves. The entire ozone layer could vanish tomorrow in a single instance and humanity as a whole would go on. We can certainly make our selves struggle a little and rack up a body count in the process, but in the end, humanity will go on, even if it means we have to live inside or protect ourselves from our own environment. That isn't exactly a pretty way to live, but it certainly is not a sigh of the end.
More then the simple fact that we will cling to life and force our own evolution through technology to survive, we also can repair the damage we do in time. Already we have learned some powerful bioremediation techniques to clean up some of the more harmful things we have done. It would come as little shock if in 50 or 100 years we have the capacity to do nature's job and produce new creatures from scratch that can live wherever we please them to live. It might be that 200 years from now biodiversity has shot through the roof far beyond anything nature has ever seen simply because we wanted it that way. It also would come as little surprise if we simply expand our terraforming powers to include the entire earth. Instead of altering the environment to suit our needs immediately surrounding ourselves with clothes, cars, and houses, it is no stretch of the imagination to see humanity setting its goals even broader and altering the entire earth's environment to our needs. It might very well be that there comes a day when we simply decide that we want a thicker ozone layer and build machines to build more ozone and repair the damage we have done.
Our impact on the environment is no threat to humanity or the environment as a whole. Yes, we can shoot ourselves in the foot in the short term and that should certainly be avoided. I don't fancy the idea that I can't go to the beach without SPF 100 on. That said, we need to moderate how much we are willing to sacrifice for the environment and keep it in perspective that this is an issue of comfort and health, not life or death for humanity and the environment as a whole. Take steps to slow wanton destruction, but don't tie humanities hands in the process.
Easterbrook (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.tnr.com/easterbrook.mhtml
Basically we've had climate change of this type fairly recently, and no mass extinctions besides what we've caused by chopping up various creatures to make our gonads bigger. Actually Easterbrook didn't make that last point, but his article is well worth a read.
Cheers, Paul
are we dying too? (Score:3, Funny)
Any chance that the human kind is among those 15-37 percent? Because that would solve everything. At least for awhile - until next inteligent parasite would come.
Re:Evolution will take over (Score:2, Informative)
Evolution will fill in the gaps that are opened when those animals are extinct
Only over evolutionary timescales -- that is, millions of years. Over shorter timescales, the decline in biodiversity on Earth can only spell trouble for those species (like ours) which manage temporarily to stave off extinction.
Re:Evolution will take over (Score:5, Insightful)
Humanity is trying to solve the problems we've caused for selfish reasons: if we don't, we'll be taken down by them. It has nothing to do with keeping life going, and everything to do with the perpetuation of the species.
That fact is probably the only reason I'm able to look at the problem without passing out in terror: the knowledge that we can't fuck things up enough to destroy all life on the planet.
Re:Evolution will take over (Score:4, Funny)
That sounds like a challenge!
Styrophoam cups here I come...
Re:Evolution will take over (Score:5, Interesting)
The Giant Canada Goose was considered extinct decades...until some were found around Rochester, Minnesota. Why were they there? A power plant pond in the city was kept warm all winter, providing a haven which some birds rarely left. The flocks which now clutter suburban grasslands are probably from those Rochester city geese which were willing to live among humans and cars. The birds which stayed away from cities died.
Also remember that we've had several glacial periods recently on this planet. 15,000 years ago the land where I live was frozen. I'm living in an environment which appeared recently -- first after the glacier left. The most recent significant change has been from the grassland prairie to an urban forest. I've heard more complaints about preserving these trees than about burning them and restoring the prairie here as it was a mere hundred years ago.
Re:Evolution will take over (Score:5, Insightful)
you sound like deepak chopra...
Balance will be achieved. It is the way of things.
really? what makes you think that? there have been several cataclysmic ice ages that wiped out entire ecosystems. planet-wide waves of extinction have occurred before (the K-T [zoomdinosaurs.com] is only one of them). large chunks of some ecosystems have been entirely borked by foreign species introduction (the cane toad leaps to mind).
human beings have the power to completely decimate popualations of animals and level entire ecosystems and we use it. environments that took millions of years to evolve can be turned into a walmart parking lot in a week. of all the mammal species in the world nearly a quarter are threatened, endangered or critically endangered (i have a source [redlist.org]). did the "flux of nature" just decide to drive all these animals to the brink of extinction? or was it the continued destruction of habitat by human activity that did this? probably the latter.
oh yeah, "balance [hyperdictionary.com]" and "flux [hyperdictionary.com]" are kinda contradictory concepts too.
Re:Evolution will take over (Score:5, Interesting)
Balance may be achieved with 95% of all species extinct.
As far as it concerns global warming, there are many positive and negative feedback loops, but there are only two that really concern me.
The first is solubility of CO2 in seawater. As ocean temperatures rises, the equilibrium in the oceans will change such that the oceans become a source of atmospheric CO2 rather than a sink. This rate will increase as seawater temperature rises.
The second is the rising of the zone of methane hydrate stability. As seawater floor temperatures rise, this zone of stability rises and allows increased methane releases to the ocean. If sea floor temperature increases to some critical point (where the zone of methane hydrate stability has a depth of zero from the ocean floor), massive releases could occur. Considering that methane is a much more effective greenhouse gas than CO2 and that there are considerable deposits of methane hydrates under the ocean floors, this is probably the larger concern.
Since methane and CO2 take time to heat the atmosphere there will be a considerable delay time. By the time that significant results are seen, the global warming effect will have achieved enough power that cutting all human added greenhouse gases to zero will not be able to reverse the spiral of destruction that global warming will bring.
Re:Evolution will take over (Score:3)
The 'decrease in biodiversity' has been going on for as long as man has walked on two feet.
Not at the current rate, it hasn't. You offer some anecdotal evidence about horses being wiped out in North America by Native Americans (which I don't find inconceivable), but this has scant relevance to the present debate. What has far more relevance is the mounting evidence that Earth may be experiencing one of the largest mass extinctions [well.com] of all time. This has not been going on since Man first walked on two fee
save yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Evolution will take over (Score:3, Informative)
I'm also curious, how many extinctions would there be if there weren't humans around? I'd be willing to put my neck out and say that number is a lot more than we might think otherwise.
And does anyone remember (not from personal experience obviously) that during the Middle Ages, the average temp around the earth was 3-4 degrees (F, I believe) warmer than it is now?
I
Re:Evolution will take over (Score:4, Informative)
Re:And there... (Score:2)
The denials I've read were not the existence of global warming, but that humans are the cause of it.
Re:Yeah sure (Score:5, Insightful)
You're making the mistake of thinking that global warming must mean that temperatures everywhere must necessarily increase. But that isn't necessarily the case. When temperatures rise, the equilibrium the planet previously experienced is disturbed, periods of hotter temperatures are compensated for by periods of colder temperatures, but what is important is that, overall, temperatures are on the rise.
Perhaps the best evidence we've seen today, evidence that even a layperson should be able to understand, is when we watch Antartica give up huge chunks of the ice shelf that have taken millenia to form, and for which there can only be one reasonable explanation: the planet is getting warmer. And the consequences are dire.
Even the merest possibility of such a future should cause us to worry. Shouldn't it?
Re:Yeah sure (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it odd for us to thik this chage should lead to an ever stable temperature and perfectly preserved artic ice shelves..
Re:Yeah sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Which as you suggest, isn't possible.
If we're going to run out of oil anyways, and if the combustion engine is such a threat to our environment, then why wait? Why not deal with it now?
Re:Yeah sure (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that's not what I'm arguing for.
I do however like the idea of taxing it (it's one of the few kinds of taxes that make sense to me.) Tax it through the roof, and tell people that next year, the taxes will be even higher.
That's the way to encourage conservation and the creation of alternative energy sources. Make it clear that oil's days are numbered.
Re:Yeah sure (Score:3, Interesting)
Thankfully, most people don't see it that way.
Re:Yeah sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't mistake our skepticism to mean that we think nothing is wrong. Just because we aren't chicken littles doesn't mean we're ostriches with our heads in the sand instead. Just because we don't want to ban the internal combustion engine means that we approve of inefficient transportation.
To take the example of the recent blizzard, storms have happened since the beginning of the earth. It *may* have been caused by global warming, but it overwhelming odds are that the recent blizzard was caused by the same thing that caused all blizzards in the past.
About a decade ago when global warming started entering the public consciousness, I kept seeing weather reports saying that a record had been broken. I seem to recall a record breaking high or low temperature about once or twice a year. Surely that's evidence of global warming? A lot of people around me were saying it was. But simple statistics shows that it's hardly unusual. The average temperature in a location fluctuates. Since accurate temperatures were not recorded until recently, the probability is rather high that any particular day might break a recorded temperature. 365 days in a year, with temperature records for 100 years. Think about it. For example, a temperature of 98 on June 1st might break a record, but a temperature of 98 on June 2nd might wouldn't.
Basically what I'm saying is that I do not trust anecdotes. Neither do I trust sensationalist reporting. Heck, I can't even trust climatology models when the climatologists are still out looking for data to improve the models!
The average world wide temperature fluctuates. We have had ice ages in the past. We have had warm periods in the past. I'm not talking about ten thousand years ago, but only a few hundred. The temperature is changing, I have no doubt. What I do doubt is that mankind is causing it.
We shouldn't be polluting. We shouldn't be clearcutting rain forests. But we shouldn't be panicking.
Re:Yeah sure (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you'd find that if we weren't polluting and clearcutting rain forests, there wouldn't be this much controversy, let alone panic.
You know, what really perturbs me is that now we're hearing that all the oil is going to be running out soon. If this is the case, then doesn't it make sense to aggressively pursue alternative forms of energy, and do so now? Global warming isn't the only issue here.
I feel the same way about the trees. Do we stop clear-cutting before we run out of tree, or after? You would think that people would see the wisdom of stopping sooner rather than later, but that doesn't seem to play out as policy.
The issue is simple (Score:3, Insightful)
Screw the global warming angle. We haven't been keeping accurate measurments of temperature for very long. We don't know how temperature fluctuates with time or how it affects life. It's all hypothetical BS. And it's irrelavent.
We don't need to stop polluting because some animal has a 1 in a million chance of dying out if we don't. We need to stop polluting because it grosses up the planet. Whinning about poor little cut
Re:Yeah sure (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is, 30 years ago we were told we had 30 years of oil reserves left--now, we have >50 years of reserves, and yet we use much more oil now than then.
Certainly oil will run out eventually, but at it gets more scarce, prices will rise, and demand will fall, mostly due to alternative sources of energy being used. Let the market work.
This is all Paul Erlich vs. Julian Simon-type stuff (from nationalcenter.org [nationalcenter.org]):
Re:Yeah sure (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yeah sure (Score:4, Insightful)
What has increased dramatically is the number of people inflating the reserve numbers so that
a) they can pump more out of the ground, under OPEC rules
b) they can confuse the credulous that there is nothing to worry about - since there's not a damn thing they can do about it
Face facts. Oil supply is about to turn down, and when supply can no longer match the rising demand curve, the US way of life comes crashing to a halt. No amount of ostrich impressions is going to change that.
Re:Don't fall for the propaganda (Score:3, Insightful)
Logical fallacy (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF? Lots of things that are caused by things other than man can stopped (or adapted to, or modified) by man.
example: Dog bites man. This was not caused by man. But, clever tool-using ape that he is, man can devise a muzzle to stop it.
example: The river floods the village every spring. Not caused by man. But, clever tool-using ape that he is, man can build a dam or construct a levee so that the river does not flood the
Re:Yeah sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really think that climate change science is based on a few anecdotes? That there aren't statisticians working in this field?
There is significant work being done looking at global average temperatures, looking at global extreme weather events, looking at el nino/la nina incidence rates, looking at droughts, heat waves, etc. etc.
And certaintly for global average temperature, the evidence from land and ocean based measurements is very strong that the earth has been warming rapidly (oft cited statistic of 10 warmest years on record all coming since 1990 - http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2003
El nino/la nina incidence is certainly up (though possibly due to complex causes).
Data on extreme weather events vary: For examples, reported tornadoes are up, but we have better reporting, so who knows if actual tornado incidence is up. I believe that heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and floods are all supposed to have had measured increases, but I'm not as sure about this as I am about the rest of the post os don't quote me.
And the people who care like insurance agencies (who have really good statisticians) believe in global warming - do a search on Munich Re and climate change...
In any case: we increase the concentration of major greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 50 to 130% (CO2 + CH4), and you don't expect this to have any impact??? Yes, temperature changes naturally, and to a certain extent we have to adapt to it. The worry is that if we apply enough forcing to the system, the temperature will change so rapidly as to cause major disturbances to our way of life.*
*Actually, mostly disturbances to the way of life of the third world. With irrigation, dyke building, air conditioning, etc. the US will probably be able to adapt with only minor disruptions. Though we will probably lose much of southern Florida at some point in the next 150 years...
Re:Yeah sure (Score:2)
I mean he's a "Sir" so he must be special.
I wonder if he graduated from the same British bastion of learning that employs a professor who rejected an Israeli's application for a position because of Israel's policies.
I like the British people generally, but some of them are smoking some seriously good shit.
Re:Yeah sure (Score:5, Interesting)
fading away.
Our understanding of bio-history suggests that the cycle of evolution and extinction is the way things work and has always worked. This cycle is partly in response to events like global warming or cooling or cataclysms like, as a recent slashdot article suggests, when a supernova rips off the ozone layer andlets the sun barbecue a whole bunch of species.
However, in spite of this, looking at the life surrounding the volcanic heat vents on the ocean floor, the return of life to devastated area like Mt. St. Helens, it seems that life itself seem to be rather stubborn, versatile and adaptable. The planet as a biosystem seems to be able to recover from massive damage which can eliminate most of the life on earth.
Yet as a caveat, I wonder if we as a species have thrown a destabilizing factor into that robust bio-system by stressing it past its ability to recover. After all, who knows how the various forms of pollution and destruction of natural
resources will impact the ability of the planet to rebound from this bout ofglobal warming or ice age, whether or not it is natural or man made.
Re:Yeah sure (okay, I'll bite) (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not a climatologist. You are not a climatologist. The vast majority of the people engaging in this debate are not climatologists. Who am I supposed to trust? This is a big, big deal. Global warming or no global warming, we're in the middle of one of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth's history [well.com] and people are still bickering about politics. Why isn't this front page news? Why aren't we fighting tooth and nail to try and save our planet, our resources and ultimately our way of life?
Re:Yeah sure (okay, I'll bite) (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea.... yea we are...
Frankly, most humans don't care about what animals are dieing. All you have to do is appeal to the rich people by saying "hey, with global warming, you won't be able to go skiing in the alps anymore! now give me money and i'll see what I can do to fix that"
Re:Yeah sure (okay, I'll bite) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah sure (okay, I'll bite, too) (Score:3, Interesting)
I am sure the author has considered these ramifications, just like most opponents to draconian measures to save the environment. The perceived climatic changes will potentially have a great impact on our way of life, but so will many of the proposed countermeasures! It's hard to prove a negative, and thus we see fear and doubt instilled into the doubters' hearts in much the same way
Re:Yeah sure (Score:5, Insightful)
The analogy I have used in the past is what do you do if you notice that you are starting to gain weight? You never know for sure where that weight comes from. You could just note that a few of ancestors were fat, so it is probably genetic so there is no sense in doing anything. Or you could take a few measures like starting to go to the gym, switching to diet soda, cut back on junk food. There is no doubt that these would help, only a question of how much.
We are pretty sure that greenhouse gases cause the planet to get warmer. So we are contributing to the problem, we just do not know to what degree. So we might as well do what we can in case humans are a significant factor to the problem instead of looking back saying we could have done more. Unfortunately fixing the environment fix after a problem is probably not as easy as it is to loose that bit of extra weight.
Re:Yeah sure (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the usual strawman that the "global warming proponents" trot out. It's not true. Most anybody who doesn't buy into the whole global warming thing still believes in protecting the environment. There are lots of good reasons to reduce pollution and cut carbon dioxide emissions. There are very few people who would argue that reducing pollution is a bad thing.
However, that doesn't make it right
Re: Yeah sure (Score:5, Informative)
This is not true. You can look at the atmospheric CO2 concentrations before and after any major eruption in the last 50 years (the time during which CO2 has been continually monitored around the world) and see that the amount of CO2 you are talking about was not released into the atmosphere.
Over the past 100 years, fossil fuel burning has released somewhere around 170 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. If a volcanic eruption released this much carbon, it would increase the CO2 concentration from 360 parts per million to 440 parts per million. That didn't happen.
You can also go back 500,000 years using glacial ice cores and see that the CO2 concentration never approached its current value during that time, even though there were many portions of that time span during which volcanic activity was much greater than it is today.
Also, water vapor is a more effective greenhouse substance than CO2
But the concentration of water vapor is limited by the saturation vapor pressure. If I dump a whole lot of water vapor into the atmosphere, the excess will precipitate out. The residence time of a water vapor molecule is quite short.
On the other hand, CO2 is not a vapor at room temperature, it's a gas. Its atmospheric residence time is much longer, so CO2 emitted today will be around for 50-100 years.
Finally, becauee small warming caused by increased CO2 causes the saturation vapor pressure of water vapor to rise, the water vapor effect amplifies the effect of CO2, causing approximately double the warming we would see with CO2 alone. This has been experimentally verified in studies of the troposphere following the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.
Finally, I would point out that chemical analysis of glacial ice cores demonstrates that over the past 500,000 years, whenever CO2 concentrations were high, temperatures were high. Whenever CO2 concentrations were low, temperatures were low. During ice ages, CO2 concentrations were exceptionally low. During interglacial periods, CO2 concentrations were high.
Today, CO2 concentrations are about 30% higher than they were during any time in that 500,000 year record. Because the oceans take a long time to heat up, we will not see the full warming due to the current CO2 concentration for many decades, but it is a great stretch to assume that the mechanisms that regulated the ice ages will suddenly stop working and fail to deliver substantial warming over the next century.
Re:Dinosaurs (Score:2)
You may, however, be confusing the fact that land masses such as Gondwanaland (now Australia, South America, Africa, India and Antarctica), have drifted in and out of polar regions in the geological past (the afroementioned landmass having b
Re:Global Warming is Natural (Score:3, Funny)
Re: ECONOMICS (Score:5, Insightful)
> While environmentalism is not a bad thing by itself, most hard core environmentalists are much more interested in political-economic changes than they are in actually 'saving the earth'.
Did you discover this by reading their minds, or by reading their diaries?
Also, even if we suppose what you say is true, what do the political views of a "hard core" have to do with the reality (or lack thereof) of global warming?
> Once socialism and communism were widely regarded as failures, the leftists needed some other method of advocating their anti capitalist beliefs. What better way to bring down capitalism than through extreme environmentalism. Make it too expensive and too difficult to produce anything or even to go about our daily lives, and industrialized society will crumble.
FYI, neither socialism nor communism have historically been against industrialized society. In fact, communist countries tend to attempt brutal plans for catching up in industrialization. Surely you've heard of the "five year plan"?
> Once again, I'm not saying all environmentalists have this goal in mind, and I for one don't want corporations to be able to legally dump mercury in a river or anything like that, but many hard core enviro-freaks are also die hard socialists.
And many hard-core fuck-the-environment types are Republicans. Did you have a point?