Giant African Baobab Trees Die Suddenly After Thousands of Years (theguardian.com)

Some of Africa's oldest and biggest baobab trees have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, according to researchers. From a report: The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and in some cases as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated. "We report that nine of the 13 oldest ... individuals have died, or at least their oldest parts/stems have collapsed and died, over the past 12 years," they wrote in the scientific journal Nature Plants, describing "an event of an unprecedented magnitude." "It is definitely shocking and dramatic to experience during our lifetime the demise of so many trees with millennial ages," said the study's co-author Adrian Patrut of the Babes-Bolyai University in Romania. Among the nine were four of the largest African baobabs. While the cause of the die-off remains unclear, the researchers "suspect that the demise of monumental baobabs may be associated at least in part with significant modifications of climate conditions that affect southern Africa in particular." Further research is needed, said the team from Romania, South Africa and the United States, "to support or refute this supposition."

Comments

Re:I hope most of humanity is next

[Notabadguy]

.We are due for a reckoning and frankly if mankind goes extinct, nothing of value will be lost. We live as wasteful parasites on this planet that we rape relentlessly. You have to settle the score sooner or later, it's just how things go. Don't think of me as hateful, just hoping that we can either be humbled, or perish so something better might come later

I never understood this mindset.

How do you live with yourself? If you're the ultimate parasite that deserved extinction as a wasteful, raping, relentless parasite....and you don't kill yourself, you're immoral.

Don't get me wrong; the world has plenty of immoral people in it...but most of them don't so readily identify themselves as immoral; they think they're justified in what they're doing.

Why haven't followed through with the sentiment of your post?