The Sixth Mass Extinction Will Hit The Biggest Animals The Hardest, Says Stanford Study (gizmodo.com) 156
The sixth mass extinction will be an event triggered by people and will hit the biggest animals the hardest. "There is no past event that looks biologically like what's happening today," says lead study author Jonathan Payne of Stanford University. "Processes like warming and ocean acidification are not the dominant cause of threat in the modern ocean." Gizmodo reports: A paleontologist by training, Payne and his research group started compiling data on modern marine organisms several years back, in order to study how body size and ecological traits have changed over evolutionary time. Payne, who has studied the End Permian extinction event that wiped out more than 95 percent of all marine species 250 million years ago, soon realized that his dataset -- which included living and extinct members of nearly 2,500 marine genera -- could serve another purpose. By comparing the extinction threat faced by modern marine genera (as indicated by their official conservation status) with their ancestral counterparts, Payne and his colleagues discovered that modern extinction threat is more strongly associated with body size. Larger animals face a greater risk of disappearing than smaller animals. Today, the dominant driver of marine extinction is people, and people aren't terribly selective about which environments they pluck animals from. We go for the biggest game, fishing down the food web and removing top predators. Within species, too, we tend to hunt the largest individuals, which is why North Atlantic cod and Chesapeake oysters were historically much larger. "In a sense, we're driving evolution [toward smaller individuals]," Payne said. What's worth noting is that the Stanford researchers only looked at organisms whose extinction risk has been assessed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which creates a bias towards big, charismatic groups like fish, sea turtles, marine mammals, etc. The marine genera that were analyzed only had fossil counterparts, too. Gizmodo also notes that the study "excluded corals, which are currently in the midst of a catastrophic, global die-off."
The other exponential (Score:5, Informative)
We are all used to the relentless exponential growth of the human population.
But there is another exponential, the one with negative rate, the one of the things that decrease exponentially.
In the last 40 years, while the human population doubled, both marine and terrestrial wildlife halved :
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-16/half-marine-life-lost-in-40-years/6779912
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26290-worlds-wildlife-population-halved-in-just-40-years.html
Even the relatively protected Great Barrier Reef halved in less than 40 years :
http://www.scienceinpublic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Full-PNAS-paper-for-publication.pdf
Nature is being converted into humanity at exponential rate and it's getting worse :
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/world-population-will-soar-higher-than-predicted/
That's what TFA said (Score:2)
You just repeated the point that the scientists made: humans are consuming the larger forms of marine life at an unsustainable pace.
There is hope though. Whales have made quite a recovery since the Russians stopped slaughtering them. International agreements on fishing can make a difference.
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Nature is being converted into humanity at exponential rate and it's getting worse
Yep. At this point I'm just hoping that I get to die of natural causes before Soylent Green happens. Once we eat everything else...
Why will the computers want biological organisms? (Score:2, Interesting)
We are on the brink of a much, much bigger change than people realize. Computers will soon think. Not within 20 years, but certainly within 200 years. And they will end up much more intelligent than us.
What will they think about? And what will they think about us?
What makes us think the way that we do? Why do we care about extinction? Ultimately there is only one answer, Natural Selection conditioned us that way.
So, what will ultimately drive an artificial intelligence? Same thing. Natural Selectio
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I, for one, welcome our robot overlords. We're all dead in the long run anyhow, and an inorganic legacy has a better chance of survival than flesh.
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It's about as likely to get sentient as my computer is.
Don't forget that in the distant past, multicellular life which sentient human life is a branch of, evolved from eucariotic life. So it *is* possible, just takes a few billion years and a whole planet inhabited with bacteria to produce enough diversity so that this happens.
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I don't really see what feaces have to do with anything. They're not equivalent to a Turing machine with a limited length tape. Both the brain and computers are.
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They simply compute, albeit using ever more complex algorithms.
Whereas brains do what exactly? In order for them to do something that can't be run on a computer, they would have to be super-turing somehow.
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They simply compute, albeit using ever more complex algorithms.
Whereas brains do what exactly? In order for them to do something that can't be run on a computer, they would have to be super-turing somehow.
While I broadly agree with you, I was under the impression that there is absolutely no research whatsoever indicating that a turing machine can model a human brain. It's never been done and only been speculated in fiction.
IOW, what makes you think brains are not a product of a model better than the turing machine (super-turing?). 'Cos claiming that a brain can be modeled with nothing more than a turing machine is inaccurate at best: we don't know what model the brain uses. We barely know which areas light u
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While I broadly agree with you, I was under the impression that there is absolutely no research whatsoever indicating that a turing machine can model a human brain. It's never been done and only been speculated in fiction.
I'd say something of the opposite. As far as we know, all computing systems are essentially equivalent for various definitions of equivalent. I think at this point you'd want research to show they're not equivalent.
IOW, what makes you think brains are not a product of a model better than t
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Because so far every model of hypercomputation requires something non physical. I
Isn't that an argument from ignorance? You are saying we can't think of anything better than a Turing machine, so something better must not exist. Despite the fact that you admit we don't understand the brain either......your argument is based on intuition that the brain must be a computer. Which seems like a reasonable intuition, and it is a good working hypothesis, but don't confuse it with fact.
As far as we know, all computing systems are essentially equivalent for various definitions of equivalent. I think at this point you'd want research to show they're not equivalent.
No, this is not true. There are various types of computation machines: single stack machines, dual stack machin
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Isn't that an argument from ignorance?
No.
You are saying we can't think of anything better than a Turing machine, so something better must not exist.
Did you read about the bit about a physical hypercomputer meaning we can prove things with a machine which are mathematically unprovable? We can think of things better, and have done a lot. They're interesting mathematical constructs and we can prove all sorts of things about them.
In fact IIRC Turing even discussed super-turing machines which are essentially a
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For example, we perceive the world as being logical.....but our logic system is based on axioms, it isn't a proven thing. Perhaps our brains understanding of logic limits us, just as a being based on a finite automata would be limited by its 'worldview' to not even conceive things beyond.
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What you are saying is that we cannot simulate physical systems on our computers.
So, stop waffling and address that point.
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You can't, in fact, mathematically model the most basic system in full detail.
A computer is incapable of modeling a simple pendulum. It must model a greatly simplified version. No string mass, stretch, or break, point mass, no change in G force etc.
Accurately modeling a single nerve cell junction is still far beyond our capabilities. Statistical methods must be used to model synapse chemistry.
You can of course write down difference equations for all those factors, but you'll never get a closed form s
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A computer is incapable of modeling a simple pendulum. It must model a greatly simplified version. No string mass, stretch, or break, point mass, no change in G force etc.
You can model all of those things plus air resistance and thermal effects.
For the rest of the post you're confusing computability with feasibility. We can write PDEs and solve them with arbitrarily high precision too. They get intractable for large systems but that doesn't make the systems non computable, merely very difficult.
So, you've
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Once you get to a level of 'quite difficult' that amounts to 'can't do before the heat death of the universe if you turn the entire milky way into idealized quantum computers' you're not very far from 'impossible'.
More on point (and something I have professional experience with): The human brain is a chaotic system. You will never be able to 'model' it as it is non-deterministic. e.g. The best you can do is run multiple simulations of her brain and give you a best probability line of bullsht to feed her.
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What do you think brains broken down to neurons do? Magic?
Maybe. It's a sufficiently advanced technology.
Keep track (Score:2)
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... it's virtually guaranteed that we or something like us wouldn't happen again if life had to re-start from scratch on this planet.
How can you be so sure? There's no need to "start from scratch". Some animal below us on the ladder will take our place. 200,000 years ago we were animals, but we were just about the same in most respects. It seems there's plenty of time for some more cycles. I'm betting on the racoons, myself.
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Food chain.
It's jarring things like that that make me wonder if you know what you're talking about.
Conservation (Score:2)
The largest animals will be the best protected by humans. Witness the giant panda, which is no longer endangered [livescience.com] due to conservation efforts. The same will be true of elephants, giraffe, bears, gorillas, whales, and any other animals we care about, which includes pretty much all the large ones.
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The largest animals will be the best protected by humans. Witness the giant panda, which is no longer endangered due to conservation efforts. The same will be true of elephants, giraffe, bears, gorillas, whales, and any other animals we care about, which includes pretty much all the large ones.
The problem is that it only takes one dickhead to kill any of those animals except maybe a whale (you've got to get to where they are, etc.) and there are multitudes of dickheads shitting on world economies and motivating that dickhead to go out and get some ivory or what have you. It's dickheads all the way down. There's no salvation for these species there.
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And yet, in Western countries, animals such as bears are doing fine, and once-rare species like bison and wolves are recovering nicely.
Poaching of African wildlife is a major problem, but if central Africa manages to decrease its poverty and warfare the way the rest of the world has done, its animals will survive too. If not, they will still survive in zoos.
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And yet, in Western countries, animals such as bears are doing fine,
What? Who told you that? The polar bear is well and rightly fucked, and the Grizzly is also seriously boned — they're waking up early and hungry. Even the brown bear inhabits only a minuscule percentage of its former territory.
and once-rare species like bison and wolves are recovering nicely.
Wolves are doing OK since we're not poisoning them right now and there's no commercial demand for any wolf products. Bison are doing well because we've got a commercial use which involves preserving them, and because they can be treated more or less like a domesticated animal. T
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The Disappearing Birds (Score:1)
In my native language, the Milky Way is called "Bird's track." Anyone watching the bird migration today can see only few flocks here and there. At the time when the word was born, the migratory birds were filling the sky from the horizon to horizon, just like the Milky Way.
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I don't need to know your native language to know why it is called that (I rather like the term, Milky Way just makes me think of candy bars). It is because the milky way is mostly north-south overhead. Migration patterns of birds are mostly north-south.
Unlike the previous 5 (Score:2)
Unlike the previous 5 mass extinction events, which instead hit the biggest animals the hardest.
That's what mass extinctions do. If you are big, you die. If you live on the land, you'll likely die. If you are a specialized animal rather than a generalist, you'll die.
Go see a cheetah while you can.
Before it's too late!! (Score:2)
Will it kill off? (Score:2)
Doesn't sound good for America (Score:2)
If larger animals are going to be hit harder- it doesn't sound good for Americans. The African Pygmy tribe will inherit the earth.
The animals should be thanking us! (Score:1)
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Re:Why do people continue to believe alarmist crap (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure if you're trying to send up nutjobs or if you are one. Poe's law strikes again and if you are not serious, then I take my hat off to you sir, you have done an outstandingly good job. On the off chance you are serious...
Why is it that the "scientific facts" always seem to be twisted toward your liberal agenda? Our beer is bad, but your red wine is healthy.
u wot m8? Our beer? Your red wine? Wat.
Our cigarettes cause cancer
They do. Also it's not like all scientists are non smokers.
and are being banned
They are not.
but your marijuana cures cancer
yes, because providing pain relief is *totally* the same as curing.
and is being legalized
and I say this as someone with no interest in it, not fast enough.
Our SUVs are the spawn of Satan
I like to think that Satan has more panache. I figure they're the work of one of the lower orders of demon.
while liberals get to drive their effeminate Priuses in the HOV lane
Hee hee :)
My sense of "being a man" is not so fragile that it can be broken by driving the wrong brand/model of car. If yours is, then, well, you should probably fix it. Otherwise who knows what else might cause it to shatter at a moment's notice? The wrong grade of steel in your axe? The wrong brand of tools? The wrong type of beer? The wrong type of alcoholic drink altogether? The wrong toothbrush?
Life becomes much easier and cheaper when you don't have to rely on marketing teams to define your manliness for you.
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but your marijuana cures cancer
yes, because providing pain relief is *totally* the same as curing.
There is real, scientific evidence that even smoking cannabis reduces cancer risk. This is why the current classification is so very, very offensive.
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There is real, scientific evidence that even smoking cannabis reduces cancer risk. This is why the current classification is so very, very offensive.
Interesting. Got a link?
I also wonder if it's the smoking of it or simply the cannabis itself. It seems that smoking anything increases the likelihood of lung cancer (it's the smoke that does it).
But yes the current classification is insane.
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Yeah damn those scientists and their pesky "facts".
This has nothing to do with facts. We are sick of your "facts". Why is it that the "scientific facts" always seem to be twisted toward your liberal agenda? Our beer is bad, but your red wine is healthy. Our cigarettes cause cancer and are being banned, but your marijuana cures cancer and is being legalized. Our hash browns cause diabetes, but all you arugula chomping vegans are expected to live to 110. Our SUVs are the spawn of Satan, while liberals get to drive their effeminate Priuses in the HOV lane. So don't give us any more of that crap about "facts". You really think we are too dumb to recognize an agenda when we see one?
I'm sick of hearing bullshit about a "liberal agenda". It's a nice undefined catch-all people who identify as rightwing use to descibe any idea they don't agree with. I'm a left winger in a country where our most rightwing politicians are to left of your most leftwing. I like beer. I used to smoke, I liked it but it was fucking up my lungs too much. I'm sure there are medicinal properties to cannabis; there are to nicotine as well (there are indications it helps stave off Parkinson's for example). Smoking e
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translation: I reject science because thinking is hard. and scary.
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You're disputing that tobacco smoking/chewing causes cancer? Really?
Have you lost your mind?
You really think we are too dumb to recognize an agenda when we see one?
No, but I think the alt-right is dangerous, paranoid, and irrational enough to invent an agenda out of whole cloth while completely fucking failing to identify why the economy is about to collapse. You're so far gone to the alt-right, there is no point in arguing with you.
Remember, some of us gays have guns and fully intend to stand our ground when you assholes come for us.
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You're disputing that tobacco smoking/chewing causes cancer? Really?
Of course not. "Disputing" is my facts against your facts, and I am not going to descend to your level. We are living in a post truth [wikipedia.org] world. FACTS DON'T MATTER ANYMORE and it is about time that all you liberals accept that.
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ShanghaiBill, please say that you're trolling (or don't, *wink*-*wink*). You are truly hilarious and I intend to follow every one of your posts. Your comedy level is astounding.
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LOL. I thought you were serious for a minute. Now I see, you were really doing a "Stephen Colbert"
Re:Why do people continue to believe alarmist crap (Score:4, Funny)
The problem is those crooked scientists are using liberal thermometers and corrupt mathematics.
When I'm president, we'll have the greatest thermometers and mathematics you've ever seen, OK? It'll make your head spin, the mathematics we're going to have. American mathematics, none of that fruity foreign calculus and so-called "partial differential equations". Leave it to liberals. I'll get the best people to change all the partial differential equations to FULL differential equations, because we're Americans and we don't accept partial stuff. Sad!
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I'll get the best people to change all the partial differential equations to FULL differential equations, because we're Americans and we don't accept partial stuff.
I chortled.
Re:Why do people continue to believe alarmist crap (Score:5, Insightful)
I like George Carlin's "Save the Planet" commentary.
The planet has survived the ice age, volcanoes, meteorites and other "crises".
The planet will survive and has survived.
Mankind will not.
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Mankind has survived all those, too.
Whether we, or any species, survives is a matter of degree, not kind.
Re:Why do people continue to believe alarmist crap (Score:4, Interesting)
Mankind wasn't around when the Chicxulub one hit. As for the ice age, by some accounts it was a close-run thing.
The most dangerous thing of all is complacency.
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That's because the last one clashed with Procrastinators Anonymous. I'll go to the next one, really.
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But humans did not yet exist when the last mass extinction happened.
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if the species around us will survive, well, thats up to us...
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Just this: http://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
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Easily accomplished, since any record containing experience of a deity (and there are many), you will declare not historical.
Re:Why do people continue to believe alarmist crap (Score:5, Insightful)
My previous comment was acidently posted before I finished for some reason. Lets try again.
Yeah damn those scientists and their pesky "facts".
Anyway lets look at all the ways you are wrong
1) Is Mass Extinction happening? Yes. ( Barnosky, Matzki , et al. Nature, 2011) ..unless you subscribe to conspiracy theories, in which case you've already made your mind up and "facts" wont convince you. I suggest thorazine. HOWEVER! Lets go there.
2) Is the temperature warming? Yes. (IPCC authors, synthesis report, 2014)
3) People with financial interests buying off scientists? This IS a strange claim. I've spent a big of time working around climate scientists as a coder. Heres the reality of it;- Its bad for your career to actually follow science because governments are stacked with anti-science people who are absolutely insistent that theres something wrong with science any time science points out that Co2's infra red absorbsion properties is causing climate change, that evolution is real, or that vaccinations actually do save lives.
I've seen a number of collegues over at the CSIRO lose their jobs because the current conservative government has decided it doesnt want to fund climate or oceanographic reseach anymoer. Meanwhile there ARE scientists getting paid off by groups like the Heratige foundation and the Kosh brothers, and we know that because we've looked at the paperwork. As one workmate put it, if she REALLY wanted to get rich of climate change, she'd deny everything the data tells her, and pretend its not happening and make a mint on the right wing talk circuit. Double so if she throws in creationism and get to visit churches too. Unfortunately , she's a scientist, albeit one in a field where she gets death threats from anti-science stalkers, funding threats from conservative policy makers, and a world of disrespect from a media industry that thinks "balance" means matching every truth with a lie.
And just for the records, scientists have not been "crying wolf" for three decades, they've been pointing out the physics of the greenhouse effect for well over a century. And the predictions are not being pushed "farther in the future", they are being observed *right now* in the floods, hurricanes, droughts and rising sea levels that happening right before our eyes.
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QFTMFT:
As one workmate put it, if she REALLY wanted to get rich of climate change, she'd deny everything the data tells her, and pretend its not happening and make a mint on the right wing talk circuit. Double so if she throws in creationism and get to visit churches too. Unfortunately , she's a scientist, albeit one in a field where she gets death threats from anti-science stalkers, funding threats from conservative policy makers, and a world of disrespect from a media industry that thinks "balance" means matching every truth with a lie.
Props to her for her integrity.
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"And just for the records, scientists have not been "crying wolf" for three decades, they've been pointing out the physics of the greenhouse effect"
It's not the scientists who have been crying wolf, but the Greens. Time after time after time, every discerned environmental problem is going to kill us all: famine, exhaustion of industrial metals, acid rain, the ozone layer, the energy crisis. Small wonder, then, that the average person is having trouble grasping the carbon problem.
Can we all agree to two thin
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It's not the scientists who have been crying wolf, but the Greens. Time after time after time, every discerned environmental problem is going to kill us all: famine, exhaustion of industrial metals, acid rain, the ozone layer, the energy crisis. Small wonder, then, that the average person is having trouble grasping the carbon problem.
Can we all agree to two things: let the science work itself out to find the truth, and set the engineers free to implement any fixes that may be needed?
Largely, "the Greens" have been vindicated. DDT was a very bad thing, the green "alarmist" in that case being the author of "Silent Spring", so DDT usage got shut down, at least in the US. The scientifists answer has always been "dilution is the solution", guess what? Turns out that they were wrong, thus dead zones in the ocean (algal blooms), anthropogenic global warming, the great pacific garbage patch, mercury poisoning of fish in the ocean.
let the science work itself out to find the truth
You mean the science as brought to you by Monsanto and the re
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This is a technical forum. For the sake of us all, please go find yourself a religious forum.
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Nothing in my post was even in the slightest religious. Did I offend your religion of corporate sponsored "Science"?
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Kosh? Naaah, the Koch brothers are much more likely to be Shadows rather than Vorlons...
S,cnr.
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The scientists told us not to go digging up those crab ships on mars, but did we listen? noooo....
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My previous comment was acidently posted before I finished for some reason. Lets try again.
Yeah damn those scientists and their pesky "facts".
Anyway lets look at all the ways you are wrong
1) Is Mass Extinction happening? Yes. ( Barnosky, Matzki , et al. Nature, 2011) ..unless you subscribe to conspiracy theories, in which case you've already made your mind up and "facts" wont convince you. I suggest thorazine. HOWEVER! Lets go there.
2) Is the temperature warming? Yes. (IPCC authors, synthesis report, 2014)
3) People with financial interests buying off scientists? This IS a strange claim. I've spent a big of time working around climate scientists as a coder. Heres the reality of it;- Its bad for your career to actually follow science because governments are stacked with anti-science people who are absolutely insistent that theres something wrong with science any time science points out that Co2's infra red absorbsion properties is causing climate change, that evolution is real, or that vaccinations actually do save lives.
I've seen a number of collegues over at the CSIRO lose their jobs because the current conservative government has decided it doesnt want to fund climate or oceanographic reseach anymoer. Meanwhile there ARE scientists getting paid off by groups like the Heratige foundation and the Kosh brothers, and we know that because we've looked at the paperwork. As one workmate put it, if she REALLY wanted to get rich of climate change, she'd deny everything the data tells her, and pretend its not happening and make a mint on the right wing talk circuit. Double so if she throws in creationism and get to visit churches too. Unfortunately , she's a scientist, albeit one in a field where she gets death threats from anti-science stalkers, funding threats from conservative policy makers, and a world of disrespect from a media industry that thinks "balance" means matching every truth with a lie.
And just for the records, scientists have not been "crying wolf" for three decades, they've been pointing out the physics of the greenhouse effect for well over a century. And the predictions are not being pushed "farther in the future", they are being observed *right now* in the floods, hurricanes, droughts and rising sea levels that happening right before our eyes.
My previous comment was acidently posted before I finished for some reason. Lets try again.
Yeah damn those scientists and their pesky "facts".
Anyway lets look at all the ways you are wrong
1) Is Mass Extinction happening? Yes. ( Barnosky, Matzki , et al. Nature, 2011) ..unless you subscribe to conspiracy theories, in which case you've already made your mind up and "facts" wont convince you. I suggest thorazine. HOWEVER! Lets go there.
2) Is the temperature warming? Yes. (IPCC authors, synthesis report, 2014)
3) People with financial interests buying off scientists? This IS a strange claim. I've spent a big of time working around climate scientists as a coder. Heres the reality of it;- Its bad for your career to actually follow science because governments are stacked with anti-science people who are absolutely insistent that theres something wrong with science any time science points out that Co2's infra red absorbsion properties is causing climate change, that evolution is real, or that vaccinations actually do save lives.
I've seen a number of collegues over at the CSIRO lose their jobs because the current conservative government has decided it doesnt want to fund climate or oceanographic reseach anymoer. Meanwhile there ARE scientists getting paid off by groups like the Heratige foundation and the Kosh brothers, and we know that because we've looked at the paperwork. As one workmate put it, if she REALLY wanted to get rich of climate change, she'd deny everything the data tells her, and pretend its not happening and make a mint on the right wing talk circuit. Double so if she throws in creationism and get to visit churches too. Unfortunately , she's a scientist, albeit one in a field where she gets death threats from anti-science stalkers, funding threats from conservative policy makers, and a world of disrespect from a media industry that thinks "balance" means matching every truth with a lie.
And just for the records, scientists have not been "crying wolf" for three decades, they've been pointing out the physics of the greenhouse effect for well over a century. And the predictions are not being pushed "farther in the future", they are being observed *right now* in the floods, hurricanes, droughts and rising sea levels that happening right before our eyes.
When our food chain / supply disappears, so will we humans. Why, we may only be left with Himilayians, Eskimos and those who live in very high elevations.
Ei
Re: Why do people continue to believe alarmist cra (Score:2)
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Global Warming is causing major extinctions - citation: Gawker Media
Also in the study cited just two posts up from yours - Barnosky, Matzki , et al. Nature, 2011 [nature.com]. Talk about willful blindness.
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Gawkers dead already, got killed off by the Hulk Hogan lawsuit. Which is actually bit of a shame, occasionally it got some pretty important scoops, and regardless of how you look at it, independent media voices being slain by the rich and powerful is never a good thing.
Buzzfeed is waaaaaay to chickenshit to try that sort of thing while its making fat cash from cat pictures.
and I'm not sure why linkedin is on your list, being that its basically a resume/job site.
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Except that due to ice melt, we are about to unleash several large methane caches that have been trapped under ice or under cooler waters. Some are already escaping as oceans warm.
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Except that due to ice melt, we are about to unleash several large methane caches that have been trapped under ice or under cooler waters. Some are already escaping as oceans warm.
Interesting observation. So now comes the question. Do we utilize does gas pockets to our advantage and increase emissions, or do we let the gas pockets escape on their own and warm the planet by natural process? What to do, what to do?
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Yeah, I have fantasies too that someone should design this huge capturing dome that can be driven over the methane escape plumes to then capture the methane and compress it into cylinders for transport. The super cool part of that would be that the process would only require some initial energy to get it started and once on site could operate off of whatever it was capturing, even capture enough to move the ship to a new location or for station-keeping if needed. I'm apparently not motivated enough to mov
Re: Why do people continue to believe alarmist cra (Score:2)
Good point, and now we start with a similar processes to electric cars. The energy doesn't come from nowhere... Energy has to be used to gather energy in your example; people with electric cars forget (of course, those with a massive array of solar panels at their home or geothermal conv. homes etc) that electricity comes from somewhere.
Sorry but I can't help saying it... Met with a guy about a transmitter tower near the Ohio River valley. Dude has a kickin' electric car plan; plan to install socket in
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They don't take into account that there are other gases that do the same, AND WORSE, that we don't contribute to.
No, there is no such gas. We contribute to methane, CFCs, water, etc. Everything which could significantly contribute to global warming and is in our atmosphere has a human contribution to it.
Also, if the pressure in the crust weren't relieved by Human use, it would release itself, and probably follow pathways in the crust (as it does) and meet up with volcanic pockets.
It's not relieved by human use, volcanic pockets aren't a real thing, and the only reason there's less volcanism now is because the last glacial period ended 12k or so years ago and that triggered a bump in volcanic activity which is mostly done by now.
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Apparently you've been reading some pretty slanted crap if you think that volcanic pockets don't exist.
Google volcanic pocket [google.com]. All you'll get is hits on pistols and PDAs.
For starters, check out Yellowstone.
I live at Yellowstone. It's not a volcanic pocket. It's sitting on a tremendous surge of magma from deep in the Earth's crust. And humanity isn't doing a thing to depressurize that.
Humans don't amount tp shit when it comes to the planet's atmosphere. If we were to stop all gas emissions right now, the planet would be completely equalised within a year.
Some stuff that would take longer: CO2, methane, and the variety of CFCs.
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You are one of the typical ones who thinks that we Humans have a huge impact on the planet with CFCs and CO2. My god, you biased hands-over-the-ears people know and repeat the phrase "Energy is neither created nor destroyed..." and AT THE SAME TIME think that the world would be oh, so different without Humans. Uh, yeah. It would be. Built up energy would release itself in different ways and create different gasses and matter, and would consume that matter differently, releasing different gasses and capturing different energy.
We have yet to observe energy being created or destroyed. And the effect of humanity on the world is easy to observe with land usage, disruption of ecosystems, global scale redistribution of resources and organisms, and of course, even the chemistry of the atmosphere easy to observe. So yes, that phrase is correct.
If we stop all gas emissions, the planet sure would be different. It would get hotter during the days and colder at night. But that's completely different than global warming, right? THINK. It's so embarrassing to have people like you listening to whatever is shoved into your ears and eyes without THINKING about it.
Again, you're not considering the effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Gases and particulate matter which reduce heating of the Earth are not the only components of human air pollution.
Yup. Confirmed you're a biased yuppie. I'll have to keep this one in my joke book for future conversations. "That idiot on Slashdot that argues that volcanic pockets are a completely different than surges of magma."
And y
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I'm sure the French know when they are being boiled.
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I'm sure the French know when they are being boiled.
It is only in the last two or three years that this has become apparent to them.
Re:Why do people continue to believe alarmist crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Does a frog know it's being boiled?
Yes. The belief that a frog won't notice if the water is heated slowly is a myth [conservationmagazine.org].
Aren't frogs going extinct?
Some species are [wikipedia.org], but not all.
Another fact: Big animals were disproportionately exterminated in all mass extinctions. The survivors tended to be generalists (rats, cockroaches, humans, etc.) and geographically dispersed.
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Another fact: you're completely wrong! [washingtonpost.com]
"The researchers conducted the work through a statistical analysis of a 2,497 different marine animal groups at one taxonomic level higher than the level of species -- called "genera." And they found that increases in an organism's body size were strongly linked to an increased risk of extinction in the present period -- but that this was not the case in the Earth's distant past.
Indee
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The small therapods seem to have evolved into the birds we see everyday.
But where are the big sauropod's descendants ? I assume this jaded (erroneous) opinion is caused by the smaller animals
being a lot more numerous and uninteresting compared to the bigger ones.
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"The researchers conducted the work through a statistical analysis of a 2,497 different marine animal groups at one taxonomic level higher than the level of species -- called "genera." And they found that increases in an organism's body size were strongly linked to an increased risk of extinction in the present period -- but that this was not the case in the Earth's distant past.
Their claim is even stronger:
âoeWhat to us was surprising was that we did not see a similar kind of pattern in any of the previous mass extinction events that we studied,â said geoscientist Jonathan Payne of Stanford University, the studyâ(TM)s lead author. âoeSo that indicated that there really is no good ecological analogueâ¦this pattern has not happened before in the half billion years of the animal fossil record.â
The obvious rebuttal is the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event where almost every vertebrate animal over 25 kg went extinct (the few that didn't had a very particular niche - aquatic and cold-blooded). If they aren't seeing statistical evidence then they aren't doing it right.
Further, fossil species and genera are not directly comparable to modern species and genera. They are by necessity a far more coarse measurement since we only know about organisms that were fossilize
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Didn't even bother to look at the second link did you: "to be published in the Sept. 16 issue of the journal Science."
And the Washington Post is still a better source than absolutely freaking nothing, isn't it.
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amphibians are experiencing one of the highest if not the highest die off of any animal group, and due to their biology they are among the most susceptible most sensitive creatures in existence.
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That contention would be at odds with reports of a possible coming "Little Ice Age" [astronomynow.com] due to the current Maunder-type sunspot minimum.
It is also at odds with reports of no global warming since the late 1990's [dailymail.co.uk].
And on a macro scale, it's a bit odd to judge planetary data on merely human timescales. Technically, we're still in an Ice Age [wikipedia.org], and are merely between continental glacial advances.
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It is also at odds with reports of no global warming since the late 1990's.
Want to know how everyone knows you're an idiot? You cited the daily mail to "prove" there was no global warming.
Where's the "no warming since the 90s"?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist... [nasa.gov]
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist... [nasa.gov]
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You know why you're citing a 2012 article? Because in 2012 you could still cherrypick the strong 1998 El Nino year as your basis. If you stop believing that the world ended on December 21 2012, then you are no longer able to deny warming.
Picking cherries to support your preconceptions (Score:2)
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That contention would be at odds with reports of a possible coming "Little Ice Age" [astronomynow.com] due to the current Maunder-type sunspot minimum.
It is also at odds with reports of no global warming since the late 1990's [dailymail.co.uk].
And on a macro scale, it's a bit odd to judge planetary data on merely human timescales. Technically, we're still in an Ice Age [wikipedia.org], and are merely between continental glacial advances.
Your astonomy now link gives lots of good information, except for one thing: the magnitude of the cooling effect proposed. It also contains drivel, like someone claiming to be a serious scientist saying "There is no strong evidence, that global warming is caused by human activity" and "In the days of the Maunder minimum... Greenland was covered by glaciers”
A two year old article from the Daily Mail saying that there has been no warming since 1998, a year chosen in many of these stories because it was
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The amount of anti-scientific drivel on /. has become quite strange. Humans have carefully recorded the extinction events they have caused over the centuries (e.g., Steller's sea cow, the dodo, Tasmanian tiger, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, etc. etc. etc.).
http://www.biologicaldiversity... [biologicaldiversity.org]
http://science.sciencemag.org/... [sciencemag.org]
http://advances.sciencemag.org... [sciencemag.org]
We have been doing it for tens of thousands of years...
http://science.sciencemag.org/... [sciencemag.org]
http://science.sciencemag.org/... [sciencemag.org]
I have to assume that lots o
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Oh the Daily Mail is reporting on it, so it must be true.
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Let's feed him more just to make sure.
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Have we already heard about stopping giving preventively antibiotics to aquaculture fishes and shrimp, and to cattle, to keep them "disease and parasite free", and also in the latter case, to disrupt their guts for any shit they eat be able to fatten them to the maximum?
Despite now being much more difficult to buy antibiotics in the 1st world countries over the counter, nothing is done about the cattle indus
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The Sixth Mass Extinction...
The characterization that this is the 6th implies it is an event like the previous 5, but it's not. Unless humans catastrophically destroy themselves, there will be no recovery from this extinction event. And, assuming humans survive, it is not be an event but a transition. The ecosphere of the earth has moved into the human-controlled phase. Humans will determine (volitionally or not) how many humans exist and how many and what other animals exist.
BTW, god and Noah are fictional.
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Man driving massive numbers of animal species to extinction is mass extinction, obviously. You doubt that man can do it? He's already done it as he settled Australia and the Americas, for a couple of big well-documented examples, and that was much smaller numbers of people using much more primitive tools.