“On average, more than 50% of the increase in exposure projected for a species will occur in a single decade.”
In other words, expect extinction events to happen very abruptly and cascade across food chains.
Today people are generally not noticing the current global extinction event because of the way that your perception of “normal” diversity in species is set psychologically. If warming really causes rapid die offs on the order of decades however, the current mass extinction will suddenly feel very apocalyptic, by which time it will be too late to save any species that isn’t capable of radically shifting its own habitat range and food sources (i.e. raccoons will probably be okay, polar bears are toast).
An analogy I heard is of a slow motion train crash - our carriages somewhere in the middle of the train are so far seemingly unaffected, but already the first carriages are crushing, and people/animals/life is beginning to flee backwards on the train as best they can. For us in those middle carriages that will be the first first-hand indication of the catastrophe. Following this analogy, it is too late to stop the train crashing, though maybe we can slow it down and save as many of a carriages as we can.
The location of your specific carriage is also geographically and economically dependent on your personal situation. Your carriage crash will be studied, the results added to others, while we procrastinate and prostrate to capitalism, begging it to save us, when it's really the cause of the crash to begin with.
Yes. This is "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" but applied to climate crisis and mass extinction. Pakistan already feeling the train wreck, whereas US, Canada etc. are still somewhat insulated by wealth so they can ignore the obvious.
yes agree, but let's not be too broad. The way forward includes careful attention to detail, least we miss chances to act or mitigate. A trivial example is that "polar bears are toast" .. no actually, some recent good news about a remote polar bear population came through.. but how could a non-specialist know that? we have to value reliable networks of information. less drama, more reliable, right?
mass-media is not going to be useful for this, and actually counterproductive for emotional health..
I might be mistaken, but they could be referring to polar bears seen surviving for a long time without much sea ice, further south than usual in Greenland.
The thing worth noting here is that this means we’re seeing polar bears as we commonly recognize them still going extinct. What will survive will be an offshoot of them which survives by different means in different environments. So I’m not sure it’s actually good news about polar bears more generally.
I think if humans give up on the mistaken idea of species as a fixed concept rather than an evolutionary line, then it's fine. What matters is that a healthy ecology which supports the largest land predator on Earth persists.
The thing we're trying to avoid is a repeat of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, where afterwards Lystrosaurus composed 95% of land vertebrates for millions of years. Domesticated animals already compose a massive proportion of the bird and mammal biomass.
Polar bears without ice and snow will become brown bears. Polar and brown bears can cross breed. My guess is that the polar bears will merge and turn back into brown bears. But polar bears will be gone.
This was my intuition as well. The several-hundred year old populations haven’t become brown bears yet (not sure if they’re present in that eco system), but it seems likely that this would be inevitable on a long enough time scale. Having said that, I should also point out that I don’t know anything about any of this.
The barrier to this is dietary diversity. Brown bears are among the most omnivorous large mammals, whereas polar bears only eat plant matter in limited amounts / specific locales. A brown bear will get fat on food a polar bear starves on. You can’t reproduce if you’re not well fed.
A major interest of mine has been learning about the hydrology of British Columbia and all of the understood factors in its health, so to speak.
It has become evident to me that coastal hydrology is particularly precarious. Like in a lot of Oregon and California, we’ve got a lot of rain-fed streams which see little to no meltwater past May or so. It’s all water held in the mountain forests slowly descending, combined with additional rainfall through summer. A lot of these dry up in mid summer (totally normal), so the species living in them have very brief spawning cycles or live in the creek beds while waiting for rain to return.
But what we’re seeing is that there’s less rainfall in many areas, modifications to forests on a massive scale has reduced rain retention while increasing flooding events during rainfall, and so on — the drying occurs faster than before in these systems, the more-frequent flooding damages them, and the impeded hydrological systems essentially threaten to remove viable habitats for countless coastal species.
At first I thought I was being a doomer. Surely I’m being too narrowly focused and there are good things happening as well. It doesn’t seem to be the case, though… We’ve kind of taken the coastal rain and its multitude of lush and vibrant end products for granted. It turns out these eco systems were already quite precarious, and even mild drying beyond the odd draught might connote catastrophe for species with serious cascading implications.
Removing so many salmon from the streams and rivers has clearly eroded coastal forest development and biomass density in a very severe way. That has been its own silent disaster. But if we continue harming coastal hydrology through climate change and massive ecological interference like forestry, I think we might see something much worse.
All that is to say that once you look at the fragility of some of these systems and their species, ecological collapse almost seems matter-of-fact. We might be taking a huge amount for granted and seriously overestimating the resilience of certain systems, and how their collapse might devastate the apparent resilience of other systems. We seem to be kicking out the legs of the table.
The human race is playing russian roulette on a massive scale with species extinctions, habitat disruption/destruction, and climate change.
With every extinction, we are betting that an already stressed species network will not collapse. We do not know the keystone species, outside of things like "wow, algae sure are important to the production of breathable air" or, say, "wow without honeybees, we have no food supply".
There was a joke in the nuclear age that cockroaches would survive us, with the hidden notion that insect species are inherently hardier than us big mammals, but the entire "windshield" sampling where windshields simply don't get splatted by insects as much as they once were, I'd question even that.
In case you're wondering, yes, a huge amount of ocean microorganisms are threatened by warming seas (warming faster than the air) and ocean acidification, and honeybees are currently stressed due to colony collapse disorder.
The human population of 8 billion and its current global economy is a barreling train headed towards a cliff of unknown distance with unfathomable inertia. There is some hope of averting the cliff we know is ahead of that barreling train, but it still seems most likely that the "game theory" of current human economics is to simply drive the train into the canyon.
The coronavirus was very instructive. It was comparatively to "threats to humanity" in history very low, and took relatively small measures to counter. If one thinks in terms of political science and "the elites", what is most disturbing about "the elites" of leadership and business is that they do not care outside of maintaining position, earning more magical monopoly 100 dollar bills with pictures of old men on them, and if that will continue.
The human race failed spectacularly from a policy and coordination standpoint. Science worked wonders, and it is in science we basically have our only hopes.
But leadership of a capitalist world is going to be populated by people obsessed with competition and "winning", and very distantly "cooperating". Even the nation states, following centuries of harsh militarism, cannot openly cooperate because weakness leads to exploitation.
As a fan of science and scientific thinking, the area of climate change and environmental care in general really depresses me. There are real impactful things that can be done on an individual and national level, but the entire discourse is hijacked by alarmists, population-bomb doomers, and kids who haven’t even gotten to the point of understanding what they’re talking about yet. Currently it’s all theatre and politics, people who could care are detracted by the violent alarmism that’s obviously bs at the point or the political nature of this discussion. Real science has taken a back seat in this one for the last 50 years…
I think what has taken a back seat is action. We could have moved to more fuel efficient cars a long time ago (smaller, lighter more aerodynamic cars than we have today). We could have invested more in solar and wind and moved away from coal and oil. We could have built more nuclear power plants. We could have pushed for more video conferencing and less flying. We could have vacations in our own country or continent instead of flying to other continents.
Nothing of this would have required any new major technological advances.
The issue is politicians too afraid to take unpopular decisions. Voters who did not care or did not want any slight sacrifices themselves. Countries focusing more on growth and competing with each other than co-operating.
Unfortunately, politics (in the USA at least) are too broken to lead these types of changes. It would seem we need to first fix our political system (e.g. remove monetary incentives from politics, repeal Citizens United, etc.) before we can meaningfully tackle climate change.
Estimates suggest that 2/3 of the world's wildlife has died out in the past 50 years[1]. South America has lost more than 90% of its biodiversity. It's not clear what predictions you are claiming have failed. Are you arguing against making any effort to alter this trend?
Absolutely! We've killed 2/3 of the world's wildlife and losing biodiversity NOT through climate change. If anything it is a distraction from very real pollution and habitat destruction.
Your attention is constantly pulled to look at something, but the real problems are going neglected.
There is always someone with a vague reference to some undefined past prediction that didn't come true. This, "but why are the glaciers still here, what about the predictions" is really bogus. Rarely do I ever find that the predictions referenced are actually the predictions remembered by the denier.
Meanwhile, looking up past predictions, it easy to find them tracking. Even oil company predictions are tracking.
Yes, and it's provably happening but there's still an army of people willing to deny rapid extinction of many species. At what point will you be convinced?
In other words, expect extinction events to happen very abruptly and cascade across food chains.
Today people are generally not noticing the current global extinction event because of the way that your perception of “normal” diversity in species is set psychologically. If warming really causes rapid die offs on the order of decades however, the current mass extinction will suddenly feel very apocalyptic, by which time it will be too late to save any species that isn’t capable of radically shifting its own habitat range and food sources (i.e. raccoons will probably be okay, polar bears are toast).