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The Sixth Mass Extinction Will Hit The Biggest Animals The Hardest, Says Stanford Study (gizmodo.com)
The sixth mass extinction will be an event triggered by people and will hit the biggest animals the hardest. "There is no past event that looks biologically like what's happening today," says lead study author Jonathan Payne of Stanford University. "Processes like warming and ocean acidification are not the dominant cause of threat in the modern ocean." Gizmodo reports: A paleontologist by training, Payne and his research group started compiling data on modern marine organisms several years back, in order to study how body size and ecological traits have changed over evolutionary time. Payne, who has studied the End Permian extinction event that wiped out more than 95 percent of all marine species 250 million years ago, soon realized that his dataset -- which included living and extinct members of nearly 2,500 marine genera -- could serve another purpose. By comparing the extinction threat faced by modern marine genera (as indicated by their official conservation status) with their ancestral counterparts, Payne and his colleagues discovered that modern extinction threat is more strongly associated with body size. Larger animals face a greater risk of disappearing than smaller animals. Today, the dominant driver of marine extinction is people, and people aren't terribly selective about which environments they pluck animals from. We go for the biggest game, fishing down the food web and removing top predators. Within species, too, we tend to hunt the largest individuals, which is why North Atlantic cod and Chesapeake oysters were historically much larger. "In a sense, we're driving evolution [toward smaller individuals]," Payne said. What's worth noting is that the Stanford researchers only looked at organisms whose extinction risk has been assessed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which creates a bias towards big, charismatic groups like fish, sea turtles, marine mammals, etc. The marine genera that were analyzed only had fossil counterparts, too. Gizmodo also notes that the study "excluded corals, which are currently in the midst of a catastrophic, global die-off."
My previous comment was acidently posted before I finished for some reason. Lets try again.
Yeah damn those scientists and their pesky "facts".
Anyway lets look at all the ways you are wrong
1) Is Mass Extinction happening? Yes. ( Barnosky, Matzki , et al. Nature, 2011) ..unless you subscribe to conspiracy theories, in which case you've already made your mind up and "facts" wont convince you. I suggest thorazine. HOWEVER! Lets go there.
2) Is the temperature warming? Yes. (IPCC authors, synthesis report, 2014)
3) People with financial interests buying off scientists? This IS a strange claim. I've spent a big of time working around climate scientists as a coder. Heres the reality of it;- Its bad for your career to actually follow science because governments are stacked with anti-science people who are absolutely insistent that theres something wrong with science any time science points out that Co2's infra red absorbsion properties is causing climate change, that evolution is real, or that vaccinations actually do save lives.
I've seen a number of collegues over at the CSIRO lose their jobs because the current conservative government has decided it doesnt want to fund climate or oceanographic reseach anymoer. Meanwhile there ARE scientists getting paid off by groups like the Heratige foundation and the Kosh brothers, and we know that because we've looked at the paperwork. As one workmate put it, if she REALLY wanted to get rich of climate change, she'd deny everything the data tells her, and pretend its not happening and make a mint on the right wing talk circuit. Double so if she throws in creationism and get to visit churches too. Unfortunately , she's a scientist, albeit one in a field where she gets death threats from anti-science stalkers, funding threats from conservative policy makers, and a world of disrespect from a media industry that thinks "balance" means matching every truth with a lie.
And just for the records, scientists have not been "crying wolf" for three decades, they've been pointing out the physics of the greenhouse effect for well over a century. And the predictions are not being pushed "farther in the future", they are being observed *right now* in the floods, hurricanes, droughts and rising sea levels that happening right before our eyes.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I like George Carlin's "Save the Planet" commentary.
The planet has survived the ice age, volcanoes, meteorites and other "crises".
The planet will survive and has survived.
Mankind will not.
Does a frog know it's being boiled?
Yes. The belief that a frog won't notice if the water is heated slowly is a myth.
Aren't frogs going extinct?
Some species are, but not all.
Another fact: Big animals were disproportionately exterminated in all mass extinctions. The survivors tended to be generalists (rats, cockroaches, humans, etc.) and geographically dispersed.
I'm not sure if you're trying to send up nutjobs or if you are one. Poe's law strikes again and if you are not serious, then I take my hat off to you sir, you have done an outstandingly good job. On the off chance you are serious...
Why is it that the "scientific facts" always seem to be twisted toward your liberal agenda? Our beer is bad, but your red wine is healthy.
u wot m8? Our beer? Your red wine? Wat.
Our cigarettes cause cancer
They do. Also it's not like all scientists are non smokers.
and are being banned
They are not.
but your marijuana cures cancer
yes, because providing pain relief is *totally* the same as curing.
and is being legalized
and I say this as someone with no interest in it, not fast enough.
Our SUVs are the spawn of Satan
I like to think that Satan has more panache. I figure they're the work of one of the lower orders of demon.
while liberals get to drive their effeminate Priuses in the HOV lane
Hee hee :)
My sense of "being a man" is not so fragile that it can be broken by driving the wrong brand/model of car. If yours is, then, well, you should probably fix it. Otherwise who knows what else might cause it to shatter at a moment's notice? The wrong grade of steel in your axe? The wrong brand of tools? The wrong type of beer? The wrong type of alcoholic drink altogether? The wrong toothbrush?
Life becomes much easier and cheaper when you don't have to rely on marketing teams to define your manliness for you.
SJW n. One who posts facts.