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Megafauna Extinction Due to Climate
jvchamary writes "Most biologists believe that Earth is currently undergoing its sixth mass extinction. The cause? Human activity, either directly (e.g. the Dodo) or indirectly (e.g. the Amazon rainforests). The disappearance 30,000-45,000 years ago of the Australian megafauna, large animals such as the marsupial lion, is often attributed to hunting by Aboriginal settlers. However, recent research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that it was more likely a shift in climate, rather than hunting, that caused the over-sized organisms to die-out (via Nature and the BBC)."
Global warming will speed to extenction of many creatures, but it will also aid evoltion of many more.
sorry 'bout the mess...
I would better call that partial mass extintion, or how would they explain we're still here after five previous mass extinctions?
However, this is not an excuse for an "anything goes" attitude. We still need to work hard to preserve the earth; it is one of our greatest responsibilities.
"...humans will be irrelevant as Transhumans move off-planet..."
This off-planet stuff is confusing. If the population continues exploding, then even within my lifetime there will be a hundred billionish people on Earth. How the heck are we going to get even a million people off the planet, let alone billions of them?
Funny, yes, but also true. With a less diverse food source we're more subject to disease in our food supply. Jared Diamond makes a great point in Guns Germs and Steel that early man had hundreds of grain types available to him, and now we have something like 15. A single blight that affected a few key crops could do some real damage. I too envy early man and his many foods.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
What is truly arrogant is pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year without regard to the consequences. What is arrogant is blindly ignoring the continually mounting evidence that human activity is playing a role in climate change.
The polluters, whose millions of dollars are lining the pockets of arrogant presidents and congresscritters, are the most arrogant ones here, whose singular devotion to the bottom-line, consequences be damned, has the potential to create, extend and accelerate death on a tremendous scale.
At the risk of being modded troll, people who think that humans are NOT contributing signifigantly to climate change need to get their heads out of their asses and realize that even if there is the smallest probability it is true, doing nothing could not be more irresponsible.
Apologies for grammar. My brain shut off about half way through writing this post.
Yep. Read it quite some time ago. Researched it on my own, starting with his references. Reviewed the bogus hockey-stick data. reviewed the "arguments" trying (and failing) to prop it up. Then I slowly picked up on the pattern of "assuming its there" that seemed to be inherent in the pro-G-W articles.
I'm quite sceptical about Global warming. Near as I can tell, the phenomenon (if it exists at all) is so buried within greater natural, well-understood cyclic climate variations that NO ONE has been able to show that G-W is even present.
But I didn't comment on the above article because I figured I'd be deluged with flame.
G-W is like religion; you'll never change anyone's mind by arguing the facts, because the facts (or lack thereof) aren't what's motivating them to insist that it exists. Its a matter of dogma and faith. And a dose of liberal feel-good self rightiousness.
Go ahead; mod me to -1; I got excellent karma and a good track record of 4's and 5's, so I really don't give a shit. I'm just killing time - waiting for my roast beef in the oven to get done for dinner.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
the fact is that natural processes have killed off more animals than humans have.
This is very true, but you're looking at the wrong time scales. Most of those species that died had no effect on humans, because we're a relatively recent phenomenon.
If you're suggestion that we simply shouldn't care whether species live or die, I'll treat it in a self-centered fashion: we don't want to wipe out species if they could do something for us, or if their deaths would be a barometer for our own.
In the former case, there are many species on the planet who could be of utility to us. If not for medicine or food, at least as part of the total evolutionary record that we use to understand ourselves.
In the latter case, it may not matter if we wipe out the xebu by turning up the temperature, but if that temperature change presages worse changes that wipe out us, too, we care.
So extinction doesn't just suck for them. Potentially it sucks for us, too. I'm not going to tell you that every beetle is sacred, and I'm not one of those green-at-all-costs eco types. But extinctions do matter, and we should moderate our behavior to not actively cause them at least until we have a better idea of what the total long-term effect might be.
Sure, there are plenty of other ways for creatures to go extince, and we should keep an eye out for asteroids and such, but that doesn't mean that extinction isn't also a problem on scales less than 100 million years, too.
'Just how many times do people have to see the "humans show up, large animals die out" pattern before you start seeing the connection?'
How about this for an alternative; humans are running around the globe being 'chased' by climate change, trying to find a nice place to live?
It could still be purely coincidental, maybe the climate changes that don't favor the megafauna are attractive to humans?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
"If the population continues exploding, then even within my lifetime there will be a hundred billionish people on Earth. How the heck are we going to get even a million people off the planet, let alone billions of them?"
.agrippa.
The population of the world will continue to grow, then start declining midway through this century.
This is because of several factors:
1. The USA and Europe will go into population decline in about 20 years. Their birth rates have stagnated. EU will go faster if its member states don't start allowing more immigrants in to replace the dying population. The USA will be better off because of its immigration policies, but will still face population decline because there will be more old people than young workers to take their place.
2. As large nations (India, China, Brazil) transform economically, they will (and are) experiencing a declining birth rate. China already has reduced its birth rate rather substantially. This will dramatically slow down population expansion.
3. AIDS has killed off, and will continue to kill off, a substantial number of the younger population in Africa. Less young people = less kids = population decline over time.
4. Japan is already in the throes of population decline. In Japan there are regions almost devoid of children and schools closed down and turned into elderly care facilities. The birth rate in Japan is horribly low and they have more elderly than young. Their xenophobic culture restricts their resupply of young workers.
If you want a really good analysis of all of this, read The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas Barnett.
Means Someone's going to be pissed when He comes back. "What? Why aren't there any trees left? Did you really think 'dominion' meant 'destruction'? Silly humans. No eternity for you!"
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
After the idiotic ending of The Andromeda Strain, I learned to avoid reading anything by Michael Crichton. That also means I don't trust anything he has to say about scientific issues.
For a long time, because it's science. Science is speculative for a LONG time before it's accepted. Of course scientifically, the mechanisms behind the Green House effect are almost universally accepted. We know CH4, C02, and others trap heat in the troposphere. We know their emissions are increased. The question is - how long will the correlation between mean temp increase and increase in CO2 emissions continue? Now, of course, it's politicized, which means if you belong to one camp you have to believe there is a correlation, and if you belong to another you have to believe their isn't one. That only complicates things and lends itself to warped analysis of scientific findings.
Dude, this is slashdot... you had us at "pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere." I challenge you to find a single post that is anti-pollution/pro-Kyoto that has ever been modded as troll.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
The best way I've heard this expressed is Nature doesn't make waste. Nature makes food. (I'd love to claim this, but I can't remember for sure who said it. It might have been Bucky or Amory Lovins. At any rate, all the other species make food, and participate in the food chain and cycle all waste around.
We, as humans create waste that no biological process can deal with. Now humanure can be composted and reused, but there's lots of stuff that is good for no living thing.
That's the big difference. Waste not, want not.
i think climate change is the key but for different reasons, one of which made it easier for humans to hunt them, but they were going to die anyways.
the climate change and end of the ice ages caused the trees to start growing, blocking some of the migration paths. this combined with the warming trend reduced the amount of land the larger (especially wooley) beasts could live in for food. reduce available land and you reduce the population. The increased water flow from the thaw also changed the landscape in major ways (niagra, anyone?) that made additional geographic cuts in the migration paths.
THEN bring in species (like us) that have no problem with the warmer weather and you have competition for food supplies.
it was going to happen. it was inevitable. if it wasn't *us* moving in and taking advantage of the warmer weather, other species would have done it. the megabeasts were trapped: their lifestyle of migration physically impossible to maintain for new forests and newly-formed caverns from the massive water flow.
take them out and you start to take out some of the predators that fed on them. climate change is survived by either generalists (us) or those that can move to an area changing less drastically (the buffalo, for example).
australia is something like 90% desert. it probably wasn't in the past, but i'm not well read on its geological history beyond the basics of its connection with pangea and antarctica back in the triassic and jurassic eras. but extrapolating from how the geography of america changed i would surmise that just like northern america (with forests and rock caverns) and europe (with a lot more water like the baltic sea), the climate change helped create the desert which greatly reduced the amount of land that the larger animals could live off of. THEN bring in generalists like humans into the mix and see what happens.
again, it didn't have to be us and things would still have gone the way they did. we were the ones, but it could have been any species.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Actually, most climatology textbooks will tell you that 90% of the climate is based on the temperature of the oceans. Dig deep enough and they'll tell you that the deep ocean thermal transport runs on a 1000 year cycle, so that the heat of the ocean today is based on the input from 1000 years ago. This would mean that if we got rid of all technology today, that the change in temperature would occur in 3005.
Tell me again why I should listen to even one climatologist when they talk out of both sides of their mouth?
If Kyoto was enacted, full-force, today, we would delay the rise in temperature in the year 2100 by 280 days. At a cost of 50 Trillion dollars.
Anyone volunteering?
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.