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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)."
We Win!
That's too bad...I've always liked the idea of my ancestors storming across the land, exterminating entire species of giant animals with spears and rocks.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Interesting bit about the mega mammals. There's a diarama at the Chippewa Nature Center, Midland, Michigan, depicting a giant beaver. Stood about 6 feet tall, probably a few hundred pounds. (what kind of trees did this thing gnaw anyway, it'd need lots of them) Always wondered how they would have died off, I can't imagine too many bow-and-arrow or spear wielding humans able to take on something like that.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I envy early man and his wider variety of animals to eat
When you kill stuff, it stays dead. When you kill all stuff, it's all dead! Weather coming up, after the break.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Global warming will speed to extenction of many creatures, but it will also aid evoltion of many more.
sorry 'bout the mess...
What percentage of animals that once lived are now extinct? (this is sort of a trick question for the christian "scientists" who go looking for dinosaurs in Africa, but lets ignore those morons for a moment.)
Over 99%? Oh.
Yes, species die off. Sucks for the those animals, and makes us feel guilty if were are causing it, but the fact is that natural processes have killed off more animals than humans have.
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They died out because they were over-sized! If they were right-sized, they would still be alive! Everyone knows that obesity is the leading cause of anguish and suffering.
Or wait, I'm sorry, they were right. I forgot that climate shifts due to human activity are the cause of all evil.
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.
Taken From "http://www.exploratorium.edu/sunspots/"
Personally, I've always found it rather arrogant to believe we are the greatest cause of climate change on Earth. Lol, it could be that the Sun is literally causing us to use more energy...but thats taking the butterfly effect a little too literally - maybe.
Hmm. I know a relatively famous (in his field, at least) paleoanthropologist,and was just talking to him about this very thing. I asked him his thoughts about the two competing theories of large animal extinction.
He said that while it was currently fashionable to blame the climate and exonerate aboriginal hunters, he said it makes perfect sense that it was probably a combination of the two.
We modern humans have a definite tendency to underestimate the intelligence, resourcefulness and persistence of our forebears. A good example of this is all the mysticism and voodoo crackpot theories of how Stonehenge, the pyramids, etc. were built. The fact is that ancient people were quite -- sometimes ingeniously -- resourceful at accomplishing what they wanted to do.
Along that same vein, I have no doubt that they became quite expert at killing such things as mammoths, which would feed a whole clan for months (esp. if you dry some of the meat, etc) and provide ivory, bone and fur besides. Mammoth hunting would also have been a great opportunity for clan members to show their skills, bravery and dedication to the tribe -- something of great importance in many aboriginal societies.
Paleoanthropologists are a pretty interesting bunch to talk to.
- Alaska Jack
When will these "scientists" (who are obviously biased liberals) realize that it's not megaflaura extinction, it's that the megaflaura are experiencing their rapture?
"...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?
Have any /.ers read it?
Well, there are three possible ways to look at this:
1. We're the product of evolution. We're the greatest and most interesting species evolution ever produced. We owe nothing to anyone but ourselves for our success and if we want to wipe out a few other forms of life so be it. We rock! And of course in the grand scheme of things if we did wind up wiping ourselves out, nobody will be around to care.
2. We're the product of intelligent design. If the Christians are right, the whole world is here for us to fill, subdue and use for our benefit. If we need to knock out a few species, its no different than me knocking out a wall in my house to make room for a pool table. We're the pinnacle of creation, We ROCK! And after ragnarok, there will be a whole new creation anyway.
3. We're either created or evolved, but we're adaptable enough that if the need arises we'll find a way to create new species to replace the ones we eliminated. Heck maybe we'll make whole new worlds. In this case, I guess the Mormons would be right. In any case, we're the smartest and most adaptable. We ROCK! In any case, we can always clean up the mess later.
Who am I to suggest I have the right to wipe out whole species? I AM MAN!
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
I'm not quite sure why. I'll have to check democratic underground to find out.
"Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea."
-George Carlin
I wasn't a fanboy when Sega was around, and by god, I'm not one now.
Increase in weather fluctuation and intensity. Shifting of the greenbelts north and south, desertification in the old greenbelts, add in increased population density, assuming population growth continues it's general pattern right now, and you're going to see more communicable diseases spring up. Basically, I'd say it's a good time to buy land in Southern Canada and start growing soy, wheat, and corn.
Will it impact us a whole lot? Eh, who knows. It certainly won't be a completely benign situation. Seeing as the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is between 70 and 130 years, the sooner we stop sending that crap out at ever quickening rates, the less severe the situation will be...but i'm pretty sure we're screwed as far as halting anthropogenic global warming. The only thing left is to ride the heatwave, baby.
Everyone knows SUV's got way worse mileage 30 to 50,000 years ago. What did they expect?
Personally, I beleive that all the carbon dioxide we've released in the last 100 years must be having some effect.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"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.
The first linked article's author, at least, could use a cold shower. Every time an interesting and insightful fact was revealed, it seemed that the author took a moment to wallow in polite hatred for all things human, who are, in fact, wreched abominations engaged in widespread destruction of this fragile little blue and green ball of dirt. Apparently I'm supposed to feel guilty.
Fuck that.
Earth activists love to envision a world where we all can live in peace and harmony with mother earth; never stepping out of bounds; preserving the earth as it is ( or was ) for all time. It is a beautiful ideal, and I can at least applaud them for having ideals. It also happens to be completely impossible.
The universe is self-destructive by it's very nature, always building and destroying and reworking atoms on a scale impossible for us to comprehend. The systems of this planet, too, are constantly in flux. This is normal folks. We are supposed to have self-corrections in the ecosystem, as evidence of these corrections date back much farther than our existence.
"But Corbin, the difference is that we're the ones causing it! We're destroying our home, not some giant asteroid!." Heh. How arrogant and presumptuous of a human to suggest that they operate outside of the ecosystem, outside of the natural ways of the universe. We as a species are not capable of knowing the correct course for this planet any more than a dog. As smart as we think we are, humans are still pretty stupid when it comes to the workings of the ecosystem, the way it ties in with the planet's activities, and the infulence of celestial bodies. Even if preservation was the right course of action, we do not know the correct balance of actions that would be required to reverse current trends and restore "balance". And even if we did know, what if it means cooling the oceans, or changing solar activity? Do we really have that kind of power? ( That was retorical, by the way. )
Let it ride. We're already hip-deep in this mass-extinction, we can't stop it even if we wanted to. People inclined to recycle and ride bikes to work should do so, by all means. It will make a small difference, but a difference none the less. Could this cycle kill humans? Very possibly. However, as most people would agree, the earth is over-populated with humans anyway. This can only be a good thing. Could the human race die? Yeah, that's possible too. If we did, then at least there's historical evidence that a better species would evolve in our place. Plus, as an added bonus, we wouldn't be around to screw up the planet anymore. That should make the environmentalists happy. Right?
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
You will fit right in with this group...
http://www.vhemt.org/
It's actually a pretty good cause if you ask me.
Meh.
"I'll have my lunch now. A single pillow of shreaded wheat, some steamed toast, and a dodo egg"
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
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.
In 10 million years, perhaps all primary terrestrial life will be descendents of Homo Sapiens. Perhaps we are just in the process of a morphological gene renormalization.
We will have human-derivitive predators, human-derivative herbavores, human-derivitive sea mammals, etc..
Sound strange? It shouldn't. Every once in a while, a specific set of genes shows so much ability to dominate that it completely overwhelm all others and then slowly specializes in the ecosystem, taking on the familiar roles we see. The first Dinosaurs were all morphologically identical with differentiation only occuring as the other species in the ecosystem were driven to extinction and leaving room for the different ecological niches to be filled through evolved Dinosaur morphology. Same with Mammals.
I suppose this vision could require a collapse of civilization such that humans actually had to fill all the various niches in the ecosystem, but given 10 million years, I'd say that is pretty likely. It would be pretty gruesome in the beginning, with canabilism and whatnot being fairly common, but after a few hundred millenia it should shake out to a variety of different predators and prey subspecies quite readily.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Humans are very good at just sneaking up on things and making friends with them, and then later exploiting them shamelessly.
Month 1:Human walks up to group of horses and tosses them apples something that they have difficulty getting normally.
Month 2:Horses are used to humans and actually approach them for apples.
Month 3:???
Month 4:Profit!
We don't really have many large animal species in aus. I ride a kangaroo to work every day but just imagine if I had a wombat as big as a car or a man eating lizard. I think having giant drop bears would mean even more tourists get eaten though. :-)
If you want some more info check out:
Some aussie megafauna
Reasons For Extinction
Well, at least I still have my books. And the best thing is, there's time now... all the time I need.
<<Picks up a book, but glasses fall off and break.>>
That's not fair! That's not fair at all! (source)
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
The CO2 concentration was 7000 ppm during the Cambrian period, 500 million years ago. Was this a time of mass extinction? Not at all. During the Cambrian Explosion, your relatives started having sex, and evolved into animals at a tremendous rate.
What is the carbon concentration now? A measly 350-380 ppm.
What does this low rate mean. MASS EXTINCTIONS!
Or does it?
Let's recap:
350 ppm CO2 = MASS EXTINCTIONS!
7000 ppm CO2 = A pretty good time for evolution.
Because in other parts of the world, the megafauna survived. For intance, in Africa: Elephants, Lions, Giraffes, Rhinos, Hippos, and Gazelles; in Europe: Cows, Deer, and Reindeer; in Asia: Pigs, Sheep, Yaks, and Water Buffalo.
In North America, which is the part of the world that I know best, Mammoths, Mastadons, Giant Armadillos, Giant Beavers, Sabre Tooth Tigers, and numerous other species all went extinct between 11 and 9 kBP (those are radiocarbon years -- I don't recall right off where that calibrates in calendar years -- about 15 kBP, maybe), about the time that a sizeable group of anthropologists think that humans first made it into the New World.
I happen to come from a school of thought that is somewhere in between. There were climate changes at about the time that megafauna went extinct (about 40 kBP in Austrailia, about 11-9 kBP in North America -- both global changes, however there were still megafauna in the Americas after 40 kBP). The climate probably put pressure on the large animals, but I think what finlly killed them off was over hunting. In a more hospitable climate, the animals might have survived. Without humans, the animals might have survived. With both, there was no chance. xander
Rhapsody in Numbers
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.
"What would happen if the Earth was hit by a giant asteroid? Well, judging from realistic simulations invilving a sledgehammer and a common laboratory frog, the result will be pretty bad."
Well, at least I still have my books. And the best thing is, there's time now... all the time I need.
[Picks up a book, but glasses fall off and break.]
That's not fair! That's not fair at all! (source)
[skips a few lines]
Why should I believe you? You're Hitler!
You can't take the sky from me...
We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet?
I'm getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day, I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!
We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilowaia, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed u
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.