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Extinctions Due to Global Warming Predicted
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.
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.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
It's too often global warming comes up, things are getting bad, but really whats a few species becoming extinct? at the same time many more will come about due to evolution. If anything I think the earth needs a good worldwide devestation caused by humans, all these reports mean nothing, we'll still build nukes, we'll still drive our cars, when most of our major cities (most major cities are on coastlines) are pretty much abandoned/sunken/destroyed after ice melts people will say "aww crap we sould be more careful" and then NOT drive our cars as much. No one cared about using nukes in japan, after they where used people had that "aww crap" attidude, they saw how horrible it was. We need to see how horrible pollution can be firsthand before we really give an effort. (I live in Queens, NY I'm not too exited about the idea of sea levels rising but sometimes a kick in the ass is what we need)
~50 years is a remarkably small time span to lose that many species, even in theory. It takes many, many generations for enough reproductive barriers to stabilize to make one recognizeable species... for this much genetic diversity to be lost would be a true catastrophe. If these theories are even remotely true, this is not something that should be brushed off with a "Life is just adjusting to new conditions"... this much "adjustment" to one life condition leaves what life that survives afterward vulnerable in their new monogenetic state.
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
Geologicaly we are in a cold phase. Some authorities even concider the modern era a mild ice age or the tail end or interglacial of the last series. This study apperantly ignors all the geological evidence of the last 1 million years. I grew up in a sonoran biotype. Two hundred kilometers from my home was an alpine enviroment. Animals that have trouble with the new enviroment will simply migrate. 15 to 30 % extintion is pretty silly.
basically humans can change the environment faster then the animal can adapt to it. Evolution takes thousands of years over slowly changing conditions. When conditions change is a short period of time evolution cannot adapt to it. For example a large catastophic change eliminated the dinosaurs. if that same change had occured over a long period of time, the dinosours would of slowly evolved to reach equibrium with the surroundings.
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
And you can't tell me whether this coin I flip is going to come up heads or tails, but claim that in if I do it 1000 times, I will get very close to 500 heads? Bah!
In 1000 tosses, you probably won't get close to 500 heads. This is because the standard deviation of the head count for N tosses varies as SQRT(N/2), centred on the mean of N/2. In absolute terms, therefore, more tosses will get you *further* from the current mean. Only in relative terms will more tosses get you closer. This is why the so-called 'law of averages' is wrong.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Link
There are already many scientists quickly refuting this studies numbers. Climate over time gradual shifts in temperature between ice ages. As we can see by the history of many of our planet's animals, life is quite resiliant and this is something the study doesn't take into account. What we should really be concerned with and talking more about is the destruction of natural habitats such as the rain forests. This issue is constantly becoming more serious and will surely cause more animal extinctions then the slow rate of global warming we are experiencing.
... before putting too much stock in tree-hugger predictions. :)
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http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speec
Yes, yes, it's just an opinion, but it's very interesting and thought provoking. It helped me understand (somewhat) the motivation behind the truly wacko environmentalists.
Things change and something we must all remeber is that we don't totally understand the Earth's cycles or how fast changes like the Ice Age kick in.
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Sudden warm spurts in the mid North America climate occurred during the last half of the Younger Dryas, a 1,600-year-long global deep freeze that suddenly developed about 13,200 years ago just as the Earth was warming and ice sheets were starting to melt. For years scientists have speculated on what could have caused average winter temperatures in northern Europe to plunge by up to 10 degrees Celsius within 10 to 50 years at the start of the Younger Dryas and then soar again just as abruptly 1,600 years later.
For the last 30 years people have been making wildly inaccurate guesses about extinction and climate change.
I'm living in Portland OR right now, and since Midnight on Monday they've been telling us a high from the Pacific is going to push in in 4-6 hours and melt the ice and snow we have on the ground. If they can't forcast the weather 6 in advance, how the hell can they tell us what's going to happen in 2050?
Scientists have been making crazy predictions based on "good science" for decades.
"In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergoe famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn't ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure."
"...in 1991, when Carl Sagan predicted on Nightline that Kuwaiti oil fires would produce a nuclear winter effect, causing a "year without a summer," and endangering crops around the world. Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that "it should affect the war plans." None of it happened."
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speec
I read an article a couple of years ago about global warming. The article was backed by very interesting data and graphs (although I am sure it was slightly biased).
Basically, what the article proved was that global warming isnt really an issue. The "global climate" if you will, will change naturally over time. Humanity has existed during a global "summer" and that summer, believe it or not, is due to end within the next few hundred years. The earth spends millions of years in ice age, and then returns to a brief summer that lasts a fraction of that.
Another good point that they had made in the article is that there was a higher global temperature in the middle ages, and that was the highest it has been in our history.
If you dont believe the stuff I listed above, perhaps you will find this next little point a bit more interesting. Humans result in
I dont really think that we have much to worry about. We are comming to the end of the fossil-fuel age anyways, perhaps none of this will really matter at all in the long run?
Neither House has ever voted on the final Kyoto agreement. Fact.
Evolution takes place every day. There are consistent reports of scientists being "surprised" at how fast individual species seem to adapt.
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 get tired of the doom & gloom predictions that always come out...and for some reason never seem to come true! How long have they been saying that we will run out of fossil fuels in 20 years? (It's a lot longer than 20 years, to be sure.)
Not according to these guys.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
So pretty much everyone, not only some, now count dogs as a subspecies of gray wolf (Canis lupus).
Strange that a science fiction author seems to understand the scientific method better than most scientists. Michael Crichton's lecture Aliens Cause Global Warming shows the potenital source of all these massive death and doom predictions, historically. Like Mr Crichton, I do not claim to say that man has no impact on the environment. But rushing to fix a problem that may only be caused by numerical modeling and financial politics is something we should think twice about.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
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.
No one credible has said there's 20 years of fossil fuels left, ever. In fact, anyone credible knows there's enough coal to choke us all for generations, if we spend $50:barrell to convert it to petroleum, and kill the sky with all the pollution. But the truth in your fantasy is that a very credible person, Dr. M. King Hubbard has the consensus of the oil economists. In the early 1970s, he predicted that the global peak oil production would come in 2012, after which it will only decline (eventually to zero). As demand increases, the decline will accelerate rapidly. Among other achievements, the economist had previously predicted (in the 1950s) that US production would peak in (I believe) 1973, a 100% accurate prediction.
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make install -not war
You say "humans might be increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere..." On this point you are correct, but it would be more correct to say "humans are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere..." because we are. If you go someplace like the middle of the Pacific, or Antarctic, etc., where local effects are relatively small, you too could directly measure the human added component of carbon in the atmosphere.
We are increasing the concentration significantly, so far by about 20% over just the last fifty years.
You are correct in your comment that "overall global warming might be a bad thing to happen," assuming the likelihood of the "might not" side of "might" is zero, and assuming some reasonable definition of "bad" that includes lots of people being displaced from their homes, their ways of life destroyed, many people starving to death, widespread ecological damage (and resulting economic damage), and general social & economic chaos world-over.
Global warming is the biggest environmental concern of the day because there's absolutely nothing that humans could do to our planet, short of full scale nuclear armageddon, that could wreak so much havoc over the next hundred years.
In my opinion, global climate change isn't a very good doomsday story because, although it will be terrifically expensive for human kind, it is happening slowly enough that a lot of people will never even believe it exists, and no single event can ever be pinned on it. Slow and seemingly innocuous changes over the course of decades don't make for very good shock "news" stories on FOX.
According to Sir David King, the British governments chief scientific adviser , the number of people in Britain at a high risk of flooding was expected to more than double to nearly 3.5 million by 2080, and damage to properties could run to tens of billions of pounds every year yet the UK is only responsible for only about 2% of the world's emissions. The US, with just 4% of the world's population, produced more than 20%. The UK has asked the world's developed economies to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60% of 1990 levels by about 2050, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate but despite declaring support for the UNFCC's objectives, the US had failed to ratify the Kyoto accord for emission reductions and "refused to countenance any remedial action now or in the future." Sir David also stated that global warming is a far greater threat to the world then global terrorism (and its easy enough to look at the deaths that have occurred in Europe over the last 10 years that are directly attributable to the unusually hot weather and make the case). We Brits (stupidly in my opinion) have supported the American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and continue to do so. It would be a good thing if you returned the favour.
Virtually Extinct
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
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
"human beings have the power to completely decimate popualations of animals "
I'll bet you don't know what "decimate" means.
Hint: It doesn't mean "destroy/wipe out".
It really means "kill one in 10"; the popular usage is incorrect. You should probably use a more exact term like "annihilate, exterminate, destroy, or devastate"
What are the effects of global warming ? The public opinion thinks it's only about a higher average temperature, but in fact, the effect is more extreme weather : more storms, higher maximum temperatures, lower minimum temperatures.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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 inside to play, it becomes exceedingly easy -- like high school math easy -- to predict whether or not the casino will win overall, and even by how much.
If you haven't understood from this why your post betrayed your ignorance then you've further proved my point. And you're modded insightful for that sort of reasoning? Bah. We call ourselves an intelligent community... faith in scientists as long as they're not environmental scientists...
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
Gregg Easterbrook has a good column (The 'EasterBlogg') on why this is nonsense:
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
Tell us please, where do al the CO2 we produce (that was not there to start with) go?
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 observable effect does indeed scale up to the larger closed system we generally refer to as "Earth" comes from the demonstrated halts and reversals in desertification over the last four decades, for instance. (Helps to be old enough to remember the '70s when desertification was the EcoDisaster Du Jour for the bunny-hugging crowd, here.) Meanwhile, the Chicken Little global warming models that everybody gets their panties in a bunch over completely ignore this, even though it's the most obvious first-order effect that shows up in an actual experiment.