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Era of 'Biological Annihilation' Is Underway, Scientists Warn (theguardian.com)
Tatiana Schlossberg reports via The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled, alternate source): From the common barn swallow to the exotic giraffe, thousands of animal species are in precipitous decline, a sign that an irreversible era of mass extinction is underway, new research finds. The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calls the current decline in animal populations a "global epidemic" and part of the "ongoing sixth mass extinction" caused in large measure by human destruction of animal habitats. The previous five extinctions were caused by natural phenomena. Dr. Ceballos emphasized that he and his co-authors, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo, both professors at Stanford University, are not alarmists, but are using scientific data to back up their assertions that significant population decline and possible mass extinction of species all over the world may be imminent, and that both have been underestimated by many other scientists. The study's authors looked at reductions in a species' range -- a result of factors like habitat degradation, pollution and climate change, among others -- and extrapolated from that how many populations have been lost or are in decline, a method that they said is used by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They found that about 30 percent of all land vertebrates -- mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians -- are experiencing declines and local population losses. In most parts of the world, mammal populations are losing 70 percent of their members because of habitat loss.
Can we stop posting the exaggerated climate change and mass extinction crap that causes scientists to lose credibility with the public because of a few irresponsible people?
TFS lost all credibility with me when it described Paul Ehrlich as "not an alarmist". This is the guy who famously predicted that human civilization would collapse in the 1980s, and that was the "best case" scenario.
Since this is all about habitat loss, which is mainly caused by people clearing land to make way for farmland, we already have a well known proven effective solution to minimize the need for all of that: GMO.
There's another solution: Population control. Growth cannot be sustained indefinitely, and yield increases in food is only postponing an inevitable, and ensuring it is worse when it happens. Until we stop breeding as rabbits and depending on population growth to pay for our debts, GMO and similar "solutions" are like peeing your pants to keep warm.
And if you had bothered to read TFA, you would have realized that GMOs kills biodiversity. We end up with fewer and fewer plant species, and fewer and fewer animals who can survive as other plant species have to give way. That's putting all your eggs in one basket. There's nothing to fall back on if the crops fail due to e.g. new diseases. Because all we have are a few GMOs, because it's the only thing profitable. Potato Famine 2.0 will happen one day. And it will be worse, because we have no biodiversity to fall back on.
Quotes from Paul Ehrlich:
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“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollutionis certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
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He's awesome. Please give him more grant money for the comical art value alone.
it's in my head
> Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Y
"Instinctively develops" such a relationship? I'd say "no". Many mammals, introduced to new environment, have no means to make such accommodation and devastate ecosystems. A very classic example is the introduction of rabbits to Australia's ecosystem: others include the introduction of goats almost anywhere, since goats are notorious for cropping plants much closer to the root and destroying the plant parts of ecosystems.
The idea that all mammals "develop a natural equilibrium" ignores the cycles of population growth and decline of simple predator/prey relationships, like the well analyzed one between wolves and rabbits described at https://stanford.edu/~ajspakow... . These equilibria don't require instinct, nor does there seem to be "insinct" involved. They only require negative feedback from the environment.
Until we stop breeding as rabbits
We already did: http://data.worldbank.org/indi...
The continued population growth is because people are living longer, but it's levelling off. We are on target for about 10-11bn by the end of the century, which is sustainable with modern farming methods. The main issues now are all to do with the politics of handling the increase.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Can you grow seed crops slightly cheaper yourself? Probably, but that is also one field that doesn't create any profit for you. It is cheaper to grow crops for consumption on every field, and buy seeds from someone who specializes in growing seed crops.
That someone else is making a profit on the same activity in which they would engage. It doesn't use any more or less land when someone else does it. Maybe their farm is so small they don't have room for that activity, in which case if they're not already making a value-added product from their crop, they might as well bend over and kiss their own ass goodbye because their days as a farmer are numbered, and the number is small.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"