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Empty Landscape Looms, If Large Herbivores Continue to Die Out
From the BBC comes this depressing excerpt: Populations of some of the world's largest wild animals are dwindling, raising the threat of an "empty landscape", say scientists.
About 60% of giant herbivores - plant-eaters - including rhinos, elephants and gorillas, are at risk of extinction, according to research. Analysis of 74 herbivore species, published in Science Advances, blamed poaching and habitat loss.
A previous study of large carnivores showed similar declines.
Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University, led the research looking at herbivores weighing over 100kg, from the reindeer up to the African elephant.
"This is the first time anyone has analysed all of these species as a whole," he said.
"The process of declining animals is causing an empty landscape in the forest, savannah, grasslands and desert." Here's the study, published in Science Advances, on which the BBC article is based.
Credible citation needed. This claims otherwise:
The basis of this argument is that the sun must be causing global warming and in fact, warming throughout the solar system. There are several flaws in this line of thought. Firstly, the characterisation that the whole solar system is warming is erroneous. Around 6 planets or moons out of the more than 100 bodies in the solar system have been observed to be warming. On the other hand, Uranus is cooling (Young 2001).
Secondly, the theory that a brightening sun is causing global warming falls apart when you consider the sun has shown little to no trend since the 1950s. A variety of independent measurements of solar activity including satellite data, sunspot numbers, UV levels and solar magnetograms all paint a consistent picture. Over the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been moving in opposite directions.
That's what happened here.
What was the largest large mammal, that existed in high population densities, in most of the landmass of the lower 48 in 1850?
Probably the Buffalo. There were others of course -- we had a presence everywhere, and high population density East of the Mississippi, there was a scattering of bears and other large carnivores, there are some pretty big herbivores as well -- but the one you'd have to mention is the Buffalo. Now there's very few Buffalo, and very very very many Home Sapiens.
Same with most of the other large mammals. In Ohio or Michigan it's very unusual to see anything larger then a white-tail deer (lighter then us, averaging 100 lb.). Yeah you can find animals like Black Bears, or Moose, or Elk; but you really have to go looking for the damn things. Even in more rural/wild areas if you're just going down the highway the largest mammal you're likely to see is a fat guy whose having car trouble. The Ecosystem only has room for so many large mammals, and we crowd them out.
Now what's the one region of the world where large herds of wild mammals (who are bigger then us) roam free? Africa, particularly Central and Southern Africa. What's the continent with both very low population density (Congo, for example, has a population comparable to Germany and land area comparable to Western Europe, it's northern neighbor has a population comparable to a third of the Paris Metro area and more land then all of France), and extreme population growth? Africa.
So it's quite predictable that the Rhinos, Elephants, and Lions are under pressure. The people who live in Africa need the land for agriculture, and there's no cheap way to solve the problem of feeding said African people except destroying the ecosystem that supports those animals.