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Study: Sixth Extinction Event Is Underway
garyisabusyguy writes: We've heard proposals in the past that a new extinction event is underway. However, a new study takes into consideration many other factors that may be tilting the data, and still comes to the inevitable conclusion that we have triggered a large die-off, and that we may become victims of it as well.
From the paper's abstract: "Even under our assumptions, which would tend to minimize evidence of an incipient mass extinction, the average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is up to 114 times higher than the background rate. Under the 2 E/MSY background rate, the number of species that have gone extinct in the last century would have taken, depending on the vertebrate taxon, between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear. These estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way."
The authors suggest that rapid work to avert the worst of the die-off is still possible. The question may really be whether we can get past paid trolls, FUD, and finger pointing in order to act wisely in a timely manner.
From the paper's abstract: "Even under our assumptions, which would tend to minimize evidence of an incipient mass extinction, the average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is up to 114 times higher than the background rate. Under the 2 E/MSY background rate, the number of species that have gone extinct in the last century would have taken, depending on the vertebrate taxon, between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear. These estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way."
The authors suggest that rapid work to avert the worst of the die-off is still possible. The question may really be whether we can get past paid trolls, FUD, and finger pointing in order to act wisely in a timely manner.
Funny you should mention FUD in the summary, considering the entire premise is a textbook demonstration.
We can have an intelligent and productive movement towards a clean, ecologically healthy world without the fear mongering bullshit.
And between the pecuniary interests, the people who cannot imagine anything beyond 3 months, and the folks who actually want the world to end, via either religion outcome, or just wanting to see the world burn - I suspect we're going to drive the bus off that extinction cliff while singing happy days are here again.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Is this the same Paul Ehrlich who became famous for predicting that overpopulation would kill off humanity long before we would see the 21st Century? Of course environmentalists, in bestowing upon us their latest set of apocalyptic "predictions" would pick someone who has been spectacularly wrong so often in the past.
Considering that most of Earth is overrun by humans and that many species are in minority and located to small shrinking areas it's a cause for concern. Only species that benefits humans or live in areas inhospitable for humans have a better chance of survival.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I've been trying to trigger the extinction of scorpions out of my desert mountain yard for four years now. These things won't go anyway and they love the hot weather.
Lets say that we'll probably survive eating bugs.
Served just fine nearing on 20 years, slowly pushed to extinction by the rise of soulless, repulsive Dice Holdings now known as DHI.
The question may really be whether we can get past paid trolls, FUD, and finger pointing in order to act wisely in a timely manner
In other words, "the question is whether we can get past people who don't agree instantly with me. We just need to put aside our differences and agree with me. "
No environmental issue is a concern for humanity anymore. The rich survive, we all die. Nothing short of a planet killer would be an impact for humans as a species.
Flowers By Irene
So, last time I checked (a couple of days back, when this first appeared in the news), "background extinction rate" is a great deal of SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess).
We don't know the total number of species alive now or at any particular time in the past. We never have, and it's likely we never will (until that number is 1). Which makes any estimate of the rate of extinction now or in the past more guess than science.
Without an accurate guesstimate of number of species at any given time, "background extinction rate" is an even less accurate guesstimate.
And with the denominator of (current extinction rate/background extinction rate) a guesstimate, the number produced (114 in this case) is another guesstimate (we don't even know the number of species going extinct now, much less the average number - what we know is the number of species that we notice going extinct).
So, I'm less than excited by this particular prediction. Maybe in a century or two we'll know enough to make this a major concern (note that 114x background rate translates to ~225 species going extinct per million years - it's hardly going to be a swift extinction, except in geological terms).
Or not....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Big whoop. Nobody lives in the desert or in arctic tundra.
Barely populated but still heavily manipulated by humans.
It only takes a couple of people to run a 3,000 acre farm but the entirety of that 3,000 acres is strictly for human purposes and quite hostile to most animals (a monoculture alone will cause numerous issues).
Horses do. The ones with no names.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This paper talks about the background rate, averaged over 350 million (with an M) years, since the Cambrian Explosion. In the middle of that "background" we have had tidal shield volcanism, planet-killer asteroid strikes, the utter destruction of the global ecology by graminoids, and the nearly complete extinction of all anerobic life by cyanobacteria.
Now, compare this against the "current time frame" -- 100 years. 100 Years! That's insanely short. The analogy is comparing the overall murder rate of people attending church, averaged since we had statistics, to the single two hours in Charleston and then making the claim that "Church Murders are 500 Time Higher."
Comparing rates is tricky stuff. The data curve is hugely noisy, with one event causing a spike, other times things average out. In mathematical terms using the derivative of a function over short periods to extrapolate a long term event is suspect at best, and an exercise in blithering ignorance at worst. 100 years sounds like a long time to humans, but in geological time it's not even a clock tick.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
"Overrun" can mean more than just someone having a house covering a spot. In that 3/4 of the world that is ocean, look at how several of the commercially important fisheries have collapsed. And the big whales? They had all those oceans to live in and it didn't do them any good once technological humans decided they had useful oil and parts. Just because an area is big and no one has a house there doesn't mean it hasn't been effectively "overrun". As it is now, we need a lot of open land, water, and air to provide the resources we want and to take back the trash we create. Those areas are "overrun".
Big whoop. Nobody lives in the desert or in arctic tundra.
Also, very few people live in the rain forests, the taiga, the steppes, etc. The population is becoming more concentrated, as the world is becoming more urban. Big areas of Siberia have been emptying out. Many small towns on the American prairie are dying, as young people head off to the cities. If you want to preserve wild habitat, the best thing to do is to encourage even faster urbanization, especially in the third world. Urban people have a smaller ecological footprint, and also have fewer children.
Okay. If we want to start with the ocean, which is 3/4 of the world: marine fish biomass has dropped by 80% over the last century.
Not anymore, it isn't. We now have the ability to snag the DNA of these animals and recreate them by injecting it into fertilized donor eggs from a similar species, and then release them into a habitat that is better suited to their continued existence, assuming that we choose to do so. Before the rise of technology, extinct was extinct. Now, extinct is more like "resource temporarily unavailable". :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Over fishing, petrochemical spills/pollution, and indirectly raising the temperature...
So sad to see cute, cuddly and some magnificent animals die off. But they are of little significance compared to small and microscopic life forms. When they die, we die. Poison the ocean, the air and the soil and we are killing vast, unimaginable numbers of critical life forms that make our planet livable. Who is measuring our losses of algae and bacteria, the providers of oxygen that made all the rest of life possible?
You've heard about the dying honeybees, now consider the rest. You may not care for cockroaches, amoeba, bacteria or fruit flies; but they matter. And it's not just the external ones. Inside our bodies are critical critters that digest our food and symbiotically live with us. They too are at risk as we experiment with chemicals, radiation, genetics, nanotech and other fun stuff.
We all love lions, tigers and bears. Who can resist adoring a panda, koala or even an ordinary baby kitten? But are these things critical to human survival? Human emotions are fascinating but they often lead us astray.
...omphaloskepsis often...
They're still not the same species. There's things like the mitochondrial DNA that is lost as well as other things like the intestinal fauna and even the cultural parts that get passed on by example from parent to child may be important.
A Mammoth born to an African Elephant is not going to the same as a Mammoth born to a Mammoth on the Arctic steppes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
So because the world you live in hasn't changed significantly ('Still got chicken and cities!'), the idea that biodiversity is on a fast decline is wrong... even though the article asserted it started long before the 1970's. So yes, it did "come to be". Please give us some references that there hasn't been a massive loss of biodiversity over the last 100 years. You can't because there has been. Are you really naive enough to think we can't have any effects on the biosphere, because look we're all still here? We do have finite resources and an ever expanding population.
we can always make soylent green
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Because if you want to preserve nature, you hate humans....
With one key difference. The crowding out is being caused by humans and humans alone; die-offs as a result of "extinction events" are unavoidable natural catastrophes. There is absolutely nothing "unavoidable" or "natural" about the way mankind is butchering this planet.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Paul Ehrlich is a famous doomspeaker known for his predictions of imminent doom and gloom.
He's not famous for being right though.
He may not believe in the easter bunny but he certainly believes in The Great Demise despite its consistent failure to materialize in any shape or form.
Well, I got it from this XKCD. And he got it from this report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The trouble is, the AAAS seems to have changed around their website since then and the report is either no longer available or is just no longer findable by me.
So there you are. I'm willing to trust the XKCD guy, he's always been pretty diligent, but you can go hunting for the original document if you'd like.
If most of earth's animal species die off, as long as the food chain is preserved for the plants/animals that directly benefit us, then most people will not care.
The "food chain" is actually a complex food web, and the more we prune it back, the less resilient it becomes. If it actually turns into a chain, we are one broken link away from disaster. That is one of the reason why diversity is good. Another is that plants and animals provide an enormous amounts of services, many of which we don't even understand. We know about mangroves protecting coasts and filtering water, trees reducing soil erosion and landslides, earthworms improving soil quality, legumes (or rather their symbiotic Rhizobia) providing nitrogen fixation, and most plants photosynthesising to provide us with oxygen and most of the biosphere with complex carbohydrates. But we are far away from a full understanding - we couldn't even keep Biosphere 2 running for a few years.
In this situation, allowing the biosphere to degrade is like a man cutting firewood from the frame of his house - sure, maybe that one piece is not crucial.
Stephan
Tell that to the residents of California, and the grain farmers in the Midwest. it isn't just water, it is soil loss and increased salinization of the soil from fertilizing, and drawing from low aquifers. As the aquifers delete, the water gets more saline. It is hard to motivateele to change behavior, especially if there is money involved. Sustainability takes the backseat to short term profits
Paul Ehrlich is a famous doomspeaker known for his predictions of imminent doom and gloom.
He's not famous for being right though.
He may not believe in the easter bunny but he certainly believes in The Great Demise despite its consistent failure to materialize in any shape or form.
You are right about Erlich (and Malthus and others) in as much as thier predictions of doom and gloom are highly exagerated in terms of time-scale. However I would question the intelligence of anyone who doesn't understand the basic thermodynamic argument against infinitely sustained growth. The question is when do we reap what we've sown; 100 years? 1,000 years? 100,000 years?
That we are in the midst of a great extinction event is not news. Might there be a significant reduction in the size of human population in the coming centuries? Probably. However we are a highly adaptable species, barring a massive asteroid impact or a massive nuclear exchange I suspect that humans becoming extinct is highly unlikely.