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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.
They haven't decided whether to call it the "Holocene extinction" or "Anthropocene extinction".
How about the Covfefecene extinction?
Table-ized A.I.
Humans = the ultimate form of pollution.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet, you are a plague.
Ah, thank you. Amongst Ehrlich's funny predictions
"By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people." ..."
" I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate
in 1970, he warned that "[i]n ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."
In 1968 he wrote "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." Well, you can argue about that one, since the population hadn't grown by 200 million in that timeframe, but now the populationis 800 million greater and don't look worse off than back then..
So great, in the opinion of his co-author Ehrlich isn't an alarmist. I'd call; him a hysterical headline grabber with a predictiveusefulness of zero.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet, you are a plague.
(Agent Smith then proceeds to make billions of copies of himself)
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.
This isnt a mass extinction event, it's "just a period of massive flux"?
That's exactly what a mass extinction is, you're just rewording things to make them sound more pleasent.
"It's not a tax cut for the wealthy, we're just reducing their taxes". How in keeping with the the times you are.
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Again this idiocy. There is no shortage of food. There is an excess of population growth and rampant capitalism. GMOs only solve the cash problems of some corporations.
Quotes from Paul Ehrlich:
***
“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.”
***
He's awesome. Please give him more grant money for the comical art value alone.
it's in my head
Any ancestors we had with 4-color vision were probably before we became mammals. Most mammals have 2-color vision; only some primates (including humans) have 3-color vision, due to duplication and later mutation of one of the genes that support 2-color vision.
While we can't say for sure why mammals went down to 2-color vision, the standard explanation is that nocturnal animals do not need the extra color channel, and may be helped if they lose it (e.g. by having more space for rod cells). This explanation is supported by studies of modern mammals, and how one of the two common mammalian cone cells are absent or non-functional in strongly nocturnal mammals. If mammals did not have such a long small-nocturnal-animal phase, we would probably have retained more capacity for color vision.
> 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
I'm unsure whether you meant to claim that the numbers you gave supported him, but no, they really don't. Saying he's right on "principles" while being horribly wrong on the actual facts is the whole point. He claims the number X will happen REALLY SOON NOW - BE SCARED!, and X doesn't happen. ... and that's been the case throughout his whole career.
1) He did not mean soot from wood burning stoves in India/Africa with "smog" btw, that's where the millions of deaths due to pollution comes from. Electrify now! Doesn't matter if it's coal plants or solar for this.
2) Food supply has outstripped demand. Vitamin A deficiency is a real threat though, so make sure to hit the nearest anti-GMO protestor on his/her head since they're blocking golden rice.
3) DDT hadn't reduced life expectancy to 42 years. Neither has anything else. You can't be right "on principles" when you're so horribly wrong on the facts.
it's in my head
I'll just cut and paste my responce from a post just like yours posted above.
Well none of that rediculousness changes the fact that the population counts of most large mammals are crashing globally.
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