Humans, Not Climate Change, Wiped Out Australian Megafauna (phys.org) 176
"New evidence involving the ancient poop of some of the huge and astonishing creatures that once roamed Australia indicates the primary cause of their extinction around 45,000 years ago was likely a result of humans, not climate change," reports Phys.org. schwit1 quotes their report on new analysis of a prehistoric sediment core from the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia.
The core contains chronological layers of material blown and washed into the ocean, including dust, pollen, ash and spores from a fungus called Sporormiella that thrived on the dung of plant-eating mammals, said CU Boulder Professor Gifford Miller, who participated in the study... Fungal spores from plant-eating mammal dung were abundant in the sediment core layers from 150,000 years ago to about 45,000 years ago, when they went into a nosedive, said Miller... "The abundance of these spores is good evidence for a lot of large mammals on the southwestern Australian landscape up until about 45,000 years ago," he said. "Then, in a window of time lasting just a few thousand years, the megafauna population collapsed."
The Australian collection of megafauna some 50,000 years ago included 1,000-pound kangaroos, 2-ton wombats, 25-foot-long lizards, 400-pound flightless birds, 300-pound marsupial lions and Volkswagen-sized tortoises. More than 85 percent of Australia's mammals, birds and reptiles weighing over 100 pounds went extinct shortly after the arrival of the first humans, said Miller... "There is no evidence of significant climate change during the time of the megafauna extinction."
The article adds that last year Miller also identified the first direct evidence that humans preyed on Australian megafauna -- burned eggshells from a 400-pound bird.
The Australian collection of megafauna some 50,000 years ago included 1,000-pound kangaroos, 2-ton wombats, 25-foot-long lizards, 400-pound flightless birds, 300-pound marsupial lions and Volkswagen-sized tortoises. More than 85 percent of Australia's mammals, birds and reptiles weighing over 100 pounds went extinct shortly after the arrival of the first humans, said Miller... "There is no evidence of significant climate change during the time of the megafauna extinction."
The article adds that last year Miller also identified the first direct evidence that humans preyed on Australian megafauna -- burned eggshells from a 400-pound bird.
Land of the Lost (Score:3)
This reminds me of cheesy old movies and TV shows about primitive "cave men" constantly on the run from predatory dinosaurs -- Land of the Lost, Land That Time Forgot, etc. Except I think now we see that it would have been the dinosaurs doing the running, while the cave women back home got the BBQ pits warmed up.
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That would be The Flintstones.
Barbara Bach. (Score:2)
Huge hootered cavewomen! At least Ringo was a better actor than he was a drummer.
Zugzug you.
Ah, the noble savage (Score:5, Funny)
Serene, peaceful, in tune with nature, never takes more than he gives... And wipes out numerous complete (and unique) species.
Considering that Europeans still have to suffer demands for reparation for such things as slavery, colonisation, and the crusades, one cannot help but wonder if a demand for compensation for the irreparable damage to the ecosystem made by the aboriginals is also possible.
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Yes, yes, humans 45,000 years ago were "bad" for the big animals, who knows, maybe they're the ones that turned the Outback into a desert, too; we're certain that humans desertified the fertile crescent more recently.
However, modern man is so much more capable - we're scraping the oceans clean, and if we stay the course, we can bake the entire planet into the biggest and most thorough extinction event ever. 100 million years from now, the intelligent descendants of cockroaches will study our culture and ch
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Actually I've been told that humans were bad for any animal under 200 pounds, but beyond that it was a lot less interesting because the hunters had to carry the loot. So as humans expanded over the planet and moved into new areas you could see all the middleweight species in those areas declining sharply and even going extinct in a very short time.
I haven't looked it up though. I suspect that the case that comes to mind, of humans hunting mammoths, would only happen if humans were hunting in large groups. C
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There's some pretty old stuff in some of those deserts.
From (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Previousproducts/1301.0Feature%20Article32006)
Although all of the southern hemisphere deserts are long-standing features of the environment, and took shape during the Miocene (24 million to 5 million years ago), they have responded to global and regional climate change during the Quaternary (the last 1.8 million years).
Missing hypothesis (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe the noble savage really is "serene, peaceful, in tune with nature, never takes more than he gives", precisely because their ancestors learned such a hard lesson and taught their descendants "don't mess up like we did". (I'm not saying it is so, just that it is consistent with the observation of prehistorical extinctions.)
Re: Missing hypothesis (Score:2)
Re: Missing hypothesis (Score:2)
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In this case we have people being critical of a strawman with some sort of gold-plated noble savage thing going on. Meanwhile anyone who has heard of a boomerang knows of things like fire-stick farming where people changed the environment to better suit them.
So IMHO the people doing th
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Considering that Europeans still have to suffer...
Yes, when I think about the terrible suffering that French people...
Umm, I know you Americans are bad at geography but French people don't speak English so they're not actually Europeans..
By at least 2294 (sd 38325.3) they will make it so.
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The Achaemenid Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great was the first to abolish slavery. Even prisoners of war were paid for their labor. The Persians were the original Aryans, so you can say they were white, but they were decidedly not European. In fact, the Europeans they fought with were totally dependent on slavery, which was no doubt a significant factor to their opposition to the Achaemenids.
Their fault (Score:5, Funny)
They were probably delicious.
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Actually, I think they were scary, and delicious. Fear drives some really violent reactions, I was thinking that humans were starting to get a mastery of their fear, until just recently.
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Survival of the bitterest.
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Emu is certainly nasty.
Kangaroo isn't bad, as long as it's young. Croc tastes, more or less, like chicken.
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golfball sized versions of those fish that swim up your urinal tract
Ouch...
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This. Humans hunted almost all big, meaty, slow-moving animals to extinction. Starting with the woolly mammoth. Seriously, a TWO TON wombat (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Vombatus_ursinus_-Maria_Island_National_Park.jpg)? Something like _4000_ person-days worth of food (not to mention pelts, bones, etc.) with no natural defenses? Delicious, easy kill. All were slain.
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Humans probably hunted mostly juveniles, not adults. Juveniles are safer targets. And, killing off most of the juveniles easily leads to extinction.
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Humans probably hunted mostly juveniles, not adults. Juveniles are safer targets.
oh, dear, no.
Wombats are fairly placid creatures.. until you come between them and their babies. Then they turn into raging monsters.
"Ha, ha, what's it going to do? It's a herbivore!"
What's it going to do? Have a friend throw a sack of cement at your legs. The impact will be similar to what it's going to do
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Re: Their fault (Score:2)
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So you don't do that. You sneak up on the juvenile's side of the adult, throw a spear into the juvenile, and run away. Repeat until the juvenile dies. While you're running away, your colleagues in the ambush pop up and throw spear at juvenile or adult. Eventually one or other of the animals stops running, when you continue chucking spears at it until it dies. The other animal - probably t
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This. Humans hunted almost all big, meaty, slow-moving animals to extinction. Starting with the woolly mammoth. Seriously, a TWO TON wombat (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Vombatus_ursinus_-Maria_Island_National_Park.jpg)? Something like _4000_ person-days worth of food (not to mention pelts, bones, etc.) with no natural defenses? Delicious, easy kill. All were slain.
Plus they probably rotted up long before they could be fully eaten, and then you had to get another.
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human civilization has a lot of clever ways of preserving food, especially meat, that long predate refrigerators.
3 methods of preservation that predate civilization:
-sun drying
-smoking
-sealed packets in a mountain lake/stream (unsealed occurred too, but only as very short term storage as it tended to be eaten by critters)
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All labour intensive. Why bother in a land of plants plenty?
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you'd have to ask them, considering we know they put in the effort to do so.
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It did have birds however, and they had evolved into the ecological niches that mammals took in other places
That meant (among other things) 3.5 metre, 220 KG birds evolved to browse trees like deer do in Europe. They were wiped out so quickly that when Europeans came along 350 years later the locals had lost all memory of the super-chickens they had eaten.
I think it's just the way humans react to any
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I bet someone in Antarctica has raised a crop (of weed) in a closet. That should qualify as colonization.
McMurdo thunderfuck?
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Um, New Zealand mega fauna was wiped out by the Mauries.
But the Oz possums are doing great!
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They were probably delicious.
i kind of doubt it, if they ate Eucalyptus leaves. your taste may differ, if it runs to cough syrup.
This shouldn't surprise anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
We can look to our recent history and see the same extinction process created by man. The passenger pigeon, Tasmanian tiger, the Dodo, Great auk, Quaggas, Carolina parakeet and so on. Even today there are several species who are literally on the brink of going extinct, including the northern white rhino of which the last known male of its species is under 24 hour guard to protect it from poachers. Had it not been for Teddy Roosevelt, the American bison would most likely also be extinct, slaughtered by the literal tens of thousands as short as 130 years ago.
Man-made extinction also occurs in human populations. How many different Native American tribes were exterminated either because of Europeans or their Native American allies? How about those of Central and South America or those in the Far East?
We can see the same extinction process in places like Borneo where the habitat of orangutans is being wiped out due to illegal farming or clear cutting for palm oil trees, and similar processes under way in Madagascar where many animals exist in no other place on the planet, such as the ring-tailed lemur of which only an estimated 2,500 still survive.
Anyone who says man doesn't and can't have an effect on the environment is simply blind to reality.
literally on the brink of going extinct (Score:2, Redundant)
So there's species where there one last creature standing on the edge of a cliff ready to cast over the edge and with its own death rendering its species extinct?
No. "On the brink of going extinct" is a perfectly good idiom describing what I think you meant to describe. Adding "literally" to it makes it just silly.
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Make that "where there's"...
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If any of you want to read an amazing book about the passenger pigeon and how it became extinct, check this out:
https://www.amazon.com/Feather... [amazon.com]
Seriously, this is a great book and surprisingly, a crackling read. It is some story, and beautifully written.
Re: This shouldn't surprise anyone (Score:2)
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well done
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Re: This shouldn't surprise anyone (Score:2)
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There's gotta be a punchline with "endangered" here, I just can't find it.
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No, it means "person of the forest".
Re: This shouldn't surprise anyone (Score:2)
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Apparently we've got the wrong Orange Man in the Oval Office.
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"Climate is changing, and climate has always changed. There's archeological evidence of that. There's biblical evidence of that. There's historic evidence of that."
"The hoax is that there are some people who are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful, they can change climate. Man can't change climate."
Re: This shouldn't surprise anyone (Score:2)
Was this in question? (Score:2)
Nonsense (Score:2)
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The abos are not so innocent as the liberals want to portray them after all.
How long before people find a way to blame white males anyway?
No shit.
I remember all those wonderful stories back in elementary about Iroquois making longhouses and how every few year's they'd move to another one.
Those stories about the wonderful life of those Native Americans kinda left out the fact that the Iroquois had to move because they stripped the local area completely bare.
Oooopsie. We can't paint those noble savages as anything other than superior to white people - because only white people strip the world of its resources!</SARCASM>
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Those stories about the wonderful life of those Native Americans kinda left out the fact that the Iroquois had to move because they stripped the local area completely bare.
As long as it's a moderately small area that's affected, and it regrows after the humans have moved to a new area allowing people to return again after some years, that's a perfectly sustainable approach.
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Tell that to the mammoths and sabretooths.
Re: Not so innocent after all (Score:2)
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The Crusades were about rape, pillaging, burning, land-grabbing and money.
I know that.
Why don't you?
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The crusades were the response to muslim invasions of various christian holdings, in combination with an attempt at weakening the muslim hold over trade from asia, and also simultaneously gaining favor with Rome.
If any persecuted people were saved by the crusades that was purely incidental.
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Care to jive that with the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople...
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So do *you* care to jive the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople with your statement?
# Why they changed it I can't say ... (Score:2)
They knew it would eventually turn into Istanbul. They were just ahead of the curve.
Bizarre thing. Until a few years ago I thought it was Istamul. Nobody ever called me on it.
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Was that back when you were a Byzan-teen?
Thank you - you've been a great audience - try the veal.
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be gone bigot.
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The ideas behind "three strikes" laws have approximately nothing to do with the reasons doctors want patients to take an entire course of antibiotics, and I don't see what either has to do with the Crusades.
Re:Not so innocent after all (Score:4, Interesting)
Where the hell did you get that? Yes, there were people driven by religious zeal and whatnot, but for most of the European nobility the crusades were a chance to conquer a land for themselves, for as second born they had no claim to the land the firstborn got.
If you go down the list of noble participants of the various crusades, you will come up with a handful of landed leaders who wanted to ensure that the new "owners" will swear fealty to them and a huge number of landless nobles who wanted some.
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Where the hell did you get that? Yes, there were people driven by religious zeal and whatnot, but for most of the European nobility the crusades were a chance to conquer a land for themselves, for as second born they had no claim to the land the firstborn got.
If you go down the list of noble participants of the various crusades, you will come up with a handful of landed leaders who wanted to ensure that the new "owners" will swear fealty to them and a huge number of landless nobles who wanted some.
Yes, religion was just the excuse used. As Napoleon sad "A man does not get himself killed for a piece of ribbon or a petty distinction, you must speak to the soul to electrify him". Men fought the crusades in the name of god, but the benefit of a few leaders, of course people being people, if told the truth would never have travelled half way around the world to fight and die for a few rich arseholes who were just being greedy, so they turn it into a holy war to get the peasantry whipped up into a frenzy.
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I doubt it. To fear christ one would have to believe in him. And believe very strange things about him to boot.
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Pretty much my experience of having to go to church as a kid. There were a few fanatical true believers, and everyone else did it because of some variant of Pascal's Wager. I finally dropped out of the whole thing when I was sixteen, not for any noble reason but mainly because I wanted to smoke and have sex, but even at that age at least part of the reason for my rejection was that my family's church had absolutely absurd beliefs, in particular their view on evolution. I had secretly accepted evolution sinc
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My Dad never liked doing it, and when he figured out that I was strong enough, he asked if I liked church, which I didn't particularly, and the stories made no sense at all to me.
"Fine," he said, "you don't have to go then, but if you stay home you'll have to get that lawn mowed".
I really didn't mind, I've always liked doing that job.
Oh, and Rev. Johnston, if you're reading this, if you w
Re: Not so innocent after all (Score:5, Informative)
Yet, you got lied to and believed that climate change wiped out the Australian megafauna.
Lied to? By whom? Seems like Human impact has been the favoured explanation since before the turn of the century: Pleistocene Extinction of Genyornis newtoni: Human Impact on Australian Megafauna [esf.edu]. Largely on account of the fact that climate change was modest over the period of extinction: "More than 700 dates on Genyornis eggshells from three different climate regions document the continuous presence of Genyornis from more than 100,000 years ago until their sudden disappearance 50,000 years ago, about the same time that humans arrived in Australia. Simultaneous extinction of Genyornis at all sites during an interval of modest climate change implies that human impact, not climate, was responsible."
Most people were probably not aware of this one way or another before reading this Slashdot post. Those that looked it up on Wikipedia would have found that Humans are thought to be the cause: "Analysis of oxygen and carbon isotopes from teeth of megafauna indicate the regional climates at the time of extinction were similar to arid regional climates of today and that the megafauna were well adapted to arid climates.[5] The dates derived have been interpreted as suggesting that the main mechanism for extinction was human burning of a landscape that was then much less fire-adapted; oxygen and carbon isotopes of teeth indicate sudden, drastic, non-climate-related changes in vegetation and in the diet of surviving marsupial species. However, early Australian Aborigines appear to have rapidly eliminated the megafauna of Tasmania about 41,000 years ago (following formation of a land bridge to Australia about 43,000 years ago as ice age sea levels declined) without using fire to modify the environment there,[7][8][9] implying that at least in this case hunting was the most important factor. It has also been suggested that the vegetational changes that occurred on the mainland were a consequence, rather than a cause, of the elimination of the megafauna.
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There was some climate change occurring as a result of the widening gap between South America an Antartica at Tierra del Fuego. The increase in water flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current helps with the deforestation of Australia. There was a major event that widened the gap about 100,000 to 50,000 years ago which might have led to the migration to Australia. As the water flow increases, southern Australia will get drier.
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Politically incorrect facts like these are not taught at school. So they do not exist.
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Commonly accepted by who? The science has favoured Human impact as the explanation since before the turn of the century. Even Wikipedia shows this as the consensus view.
Maybe this is an Australian thing? This idealized view of the native community would probably be considered mildly racist elsewhere.
but wait; there are markings (Score:2)
Here's the thing: the upside of inventing a writing system is world domination; the downside is finally having to admit in public that you are a real ass (and always have been).
In the above, "you" is a set of nesting dolls, innermost being the fifty-year-old white male technocrats of western European origin who treat Wikipedia as their private, personal playgrounds (thence to aging white European males, white European males, white m
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Go have a look at some paintings by Australian Aboriginals. There are lots of stories there. There are pictures of people and animals, and other things, but also symbols and abstractions. It's not exactly a written language as we westerners like to think, but it's definitely communication laid down on durable surfaces. Tree bark is temporary, but the rock paintings are quite old.
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In this case the conclusion is both right and wrong. They are right to claim Native Australians (not the adjective people), did cause that extinction. However they were societies under stress due to the ice age onset and so, while they were once stable in their ecology, that stability was disturbed by an ice age.
Lets see how modern humanity copes with massive flooding or massive freezing before the judge members of the original Australian nations (not the adjective people).
Re:It may have been humans (Score:4, Insightful)
> It is possible that a short lived disaster could have caused the die off. Something like a nearby super volcano or an asteroid impact.
They found evidence of a constant decrease in populations over thousands of years, without a corresponding climatic change. It is possible, or perhaps likely that a event like that finished them off. But something other than climate change pushed these local populations to the brink first, and it started at the same time as humans showed up.
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But it should be noted that humans live in African for hundreds of thousands of years and Africans mega fauna survived
Not the same thing at all. Humans evolved alongside other fauna in Africa for millions of years; they arrived in Australia fully armed as a dominant predator.
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The difference being that the animals didn't know that the sensible thing to do was run away really really fast?
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Pretty much.
Plus the lack of thing that had evolved to kill humans in Australia. No tse-tse flies, for instance....
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Australia wildlife now being entirely care (bears/spiders/snakes)?
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So is that why everything left overcompensates in the killing humans department?
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but there is no prove that it was people.
(excited Arnold Rimmer voice) ALIENS!
Re: It may have been humans (Score:2)
Re: It may have been humans (Score:2)
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But it should be noted that humans live in African for hundreds of thousands of years and Africans mega fauna survived.
As someone else noted, humans evolving in Africa gave the local megafauna time to learn to avoid us. There's a direct statistical correlation between the percentage of megafauna driven extinct and the distance from the site of human origins. African megafauna suffered the least, European and Asian less so, but Australian, North American, and South American megafauna got hit really hard. The idea is very popular that those continents not explored until humans were fully modern explain why most of those megaf
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So all humans are a danger to nature, and what we call civilization only means being more efficient at it.
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Try this:
So two demonstrated, vaguely-defined groups of people have been shown to be a danger to nature. One of the groups is more civilised than the other (by some definition), showing that one of the side-effects of this definition of civilisation is possibly an increase in danger to nature.
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For this to work, gravity would have to be some kind of non-binding suggestion instead of a law. And that's just the tip of the ice berg why this won't fly.
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You don't see the problem with the ice shell and the other fantasy elements?
Why can't there be a God if the world is older than 6000 years old? Is your version of God really that puny?
Three of the four people who discredited the global flood fossil theory were ordained Anglican Priests FFS and they didn't think God was so puny that he would cease to exist just because some people were reading the Bible the wrong way.
Re: Groupthink misses the forest for the trees (Score:2)
Re: Groupthink misses the forest for the trees (Score:2)
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Volcanoes co2 emissions lessen as planet still cools, plants who depend on rich co2 die back, less o2 emitted, less breathable air, animals tend to have a small air inway, o2/fuel requirements to keep a 1000lb animal active > available resources = most don't make it
Plants are stupid. They should all die.
I laugh at the thought that some plants have suffered sub-optimal, even stunted growth in the run up to the Industrial Revolution. For many plants CO2 was almost down to 'gasping' level. It is funny to imagine plants gasping and panicking for breath. I am angry at volcanoes for helping to feed plants now and then, but at least volcanoes blot out the sun and lengthen Winter so you can imagine nasty plant things suffering in other ways too. Now Trump man comes along and
Re: FAKE NEWS (Score:2)
Re: People are so gullible. (Score:2)
Re: Demon Duck of Doom (Score:2)
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It is for horses, chickens, sheep, cows and pigs.....
If your species can not out run, out breed, out eat, or out live mankind, the best survival strategy your species can have is to be tasty or useful.