You're reasoning in isolated abstractions: "biodiversity is good for humans"
That's pretty well accepted.
The argument you see in textbooks is that the interdepedence of ecological systems is such that at it is difficult to know what species are key to our own survival. so dropping biodiversity is like playing Russian Roulette. (Of course the rich will be able to supplement, but I mean key to our own cheap survival).
But more importantly to me is the intellectual resource. Each species comes with it's unique proteins and biological processes. Losing them without studying them is a permanent loss to our knowledge, and future study is more likely to have useful results than current study, as our understanding of the biochemistry allows fuller understanding and so utilization of the processes observed.
"tigers dying reduces biodiversity"
I linked to a paper with this (generalized) result: reduced genetic diversity withing species reduces biodiversity of other species in the ecosystem.
"ice sheets move slowly and allows migrations"
The species in current existence have survived the repeated glaciation cycle of the holocene. The current warming is more rapid, and in the wrong direction.
With that kind of superficial reasoning, you can "prove" anything in any complex problem by just picking out the right abstractions.
I think you're ignoring the proofs. If you think one of them is wrong, we can delve into it. But read the paper linking genetic diversity to biodiversity first.
Large predators are usually already evolutionary dead ends, candidates for natural extinction
That seems like an isolated abstraction. Do you have any science-based evidence of this claim?
Humans have killed off many apex predators in many environments over the past few millennia.
Can you give a few examples?
Generally, the main effect has been that human livestock and humans have become safer.
Do you have any science-based evidence of this claim? I think that it is wrong. When you remove an apex predator, biodiversity crashes.
Historically speaking, were in the "colder than usual" range of the bell curve today, and thats with using ice cores to detect CO2 levels and temperature histories.
This is not true, using the data set [s]he mentions. We're much warmer than normal, according to the ice core record.
This is not, as you seem to have been suggesting that the Earth is less than a million years old, but that Ice Cores don't go back further than that.
It could be the epigenetics of a growing economy. If its not, that's 4.5% less girls born that average: 1 in about 22. (Probably more aborted than murdered.)
If his intention is to spend his ill-gotten gains to the benefit of humanity, he should put a humanitarian at the helm. Gates was very good at bullying governments and businesses, and illegal attacks on competition to drain the profits from businesses all over the world, but he's no manager.
> The government more often makes the political decision to fund their research?
By which you mean the National Academy of Science? If you think that they're not being sufficiently unbiased in their awarding of grants, would you mind naming the people there that are corrupt?
Species don't adapt to ice sheets that are a mile thick.
Yes they did. They adapted by migration, generally.
The glaciations are recurring ecological disasters by the standard of global warming alarmists.
I'm not familiar with "global warming alarmists". Could you point me to a link where one calls the reoccurring glaciations ecological disasters?
The reason that glaciations are less disastrous than the current warming, is that the species involved had co-evolved with that climate, the change was a few orders of magnitudes slower than the current warming, and the species involved weren't already under pressure from habitat loss, over exploitation and pollution.
So what? What is your point?
The point is that your claim "There is no "state" to return to" is not really true. The aspect of the climate defined by that atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses is a state of the global climate that defines it in many ways. And that state doesn't suit existent species.
Help us? In what way do you imagine the loss of tigers hurts humans?
Loss of an apex predator in particular has a devastating effect on biodiversity. Do you know why dropping biodiversity hurts humans?
They are going away because their ecological niche has been filled by us.
Indeed no. They are suffering habitat loss and having their parts being valuable for TCM in china.
Futhermore, if we really wanted to fill that ecological niche, we could easily do it on human time scales.
The politics is therefore intense for the limited slots.
If there are almost no slots, then this politics will arise almost never.
And tenure is no sort of guarantee of a job - it only means you can't be fired "at will".
It's meant to be a guarantee against holding unpopular opinions. It means you can't be fired without "just cause". Which means that if you do your teaching and don't commit academic fraud, you do have guarantee of a job.
You bet you need to publish, and bring in those grants
No, that's precisely what you don't have to do.
(And if you think "academic freedom" is common on campus these days, you really haven't been paying attention.)
I think its common and I've been paying some attention. What specifically would I have paid attention to to conclude that academic freedom is rare on campus these days?
Half the northern hemisphere covered in thick ice sheets was "relaxing"? Are you kidding?
The 10-12 degree temperature drop took that 100,000 years, so ecosystems could migrate at a leisurely pace.
They were like that 100,000 years earlier too, so the species on the planet had co-existed with that climate.
OP: "And won't be nobody to write it by then if mankind loses."
OP is samzenpus.
The way you phrase that just shows that you have no concept of the massive swings in climate the planet has experienced over the past couple of hundred million years. There is no "state" to return to.
The carbon in fossil fuels is from that time. A time of far greater CO2 concentration than the Holocene.
Tiger-like species have evolved many times independently, and they can evolve again, from other felines or other vertebrates.
The species that we lose today are lost with respect to humanity. Cats won't speciate again on human time scales. Depending on the climate in 10 million years, a mammal or reptile might fill that niche, but that won't help Homo sapiens.
Historically speaking, were in the "colder than usual" range of the bell curve today, and thats with using ice cores to detect CO2 levels and temperature histories.
So we should warm the earth much faster than it warms naturally, and upwards from the top of an interglacial when all the existent species on the planet, plus all our infrastructure have never co-existed with the new temperature?
Surely we can do a bit better than "Earth's temperature isn't stable, so everything might be all right". Why don't we use that science thing that has been so good for our species? We can look at what will happen to which species, and what will happen to regional climate under global warming and ocean acidification.
And for all those who argue we are burning too much fossil fuels, those carbon atoms weren't created into existence in the ground as they were today, unless you believe the earth is 6000 years old!
So you're saying that if we return those carbon atoms to the biosphere, then because they were there in the carboniferous era, current species will be all right?
Do you have a little bit more evidence or detail, or (god forbid) a scholarly paper that supports your claim that "because carbon is in the ground it must be safe to burn it"?
Great.
They were a part of the global carbon cycle, and buried during mass extinction events and processes that sequestered them to where they are today.
Not generally, no. The Carboniferous had about 50 million years of build up of wood, because nothing could break down the newly evolved bark. Not a mass extinction event. Just a lot of dead trees lying on the ground. It's not cyclical, and it won't happen again until trees evolve Kevlar coating.
Its not OK to attack the character of an individual when they are skeptical of your conclusions.
How the hell did you get "attack the character of an individual" from the GP post?:
"However, the researchers say that no obvious ocean mechanism is known that would trigger rises of 10 to 15 ppm over a timespan as short as one to two centuries."
We're way, way, way beyond 10 to 15 in 200 years.
There's no attack there. There's the observation that current atmospheric CO2 concentration rise is an order of magnitude faster than rapid increases at the end of the last interglacial.
It didn't mention people, much less attack them. If your income was based on the proportion of climate change denial comments on slashdot, then you might feel personally attacked by it, but that's not the same thing.
As for the problems associated with climate change, it will happen.
It's not a step function. The lower the peak atmospheric CO2 is, the fewer the problems.
Why are your weasly qualifications ("currently exist") relevant?
Because climate change is going to affect the species that currently exist.
The fact that the we are returning the climate to a state is was a couple of hundred million years ago is bad because the species that exist now aren't the ones that can survive in that climate.
Humans are one of the most adaptable species around.
Yes. That particular mammal is not threatened, and will probably outlast all the others barring Rattus Rattus and Rattus Norvegicus.
Fact is that complex vertebrates have been around for a long time and were doing fine with CO2 concentrations greater than 2000 ppm.
Why are your long extinct vertebrates relevant?
The question is: Can existent species survive?
Furthermore, in the past 100000 years alone, humans have survived far more devastating climate chnage than any predicted from global warming: the last "ice age" (glacial period).
The current climate change is faster and in the wrong direction to conclude that the end of the last glaciation was "far more devastating climate change". Certainly the long descent into the glaciation wasn't devastating. That took the lions share of the 100,000 years. It was relaxing.
There is simply no plausible way in which climate change could reasonably be claimed to cause human extinction as the OP implied.
OP didn't imply that. The book is written from the perspective of a non-extinct human 300 years after the collapse.
A "drop in genetic diversity" (even if it existed) doesn't mean "absence of internal variation".
Low genetic diversity means low internal variation, because the variation is caused by genetic diversity. (Plus epigenetics also that are also genetically determined for given environmental factors).
The fact that there are no tigers in the ecosystem of my home doesn't mean that tigers have gone extinct.
I didn't say that they had. However the drop of biodiversity in Tigers in the taiga will mean that taiga species vulnerable to the particular genetic configuration of existent taiga Tigers will suffer, and others will be under selection pressure in only one direction from Tigers, and that will tend to reduce their genetic diversity. (And with it their capacity to evolve in response to changing environment, and to speciate).
The government more often makes the political decision to fund their research? If you're going to claim that "ability to write grant proposals that get funding" isn't the key to success in academia, then, clearly, you're an idealist.
Name all the scientists you can who had great ability to write grant proposals that get funding.
Now name all the scientists you can who made great advances in scientific knowledge, or who were great scientific communicators.
I didn't go to school for ten years studying engineering and CS so I could deal with politics more than designing new software. Yet that is what I do anyway, despite working for a highly successful engineering company.
What does it mean for an engineering company to be highly successful?
What does it mean for an academic to be highly successful?
Primates were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than any predicted by the IPCC.
I don't think you could say that with confidence. Geocarbsulf is already pretty rough by 55 million years ago.
But certainly, no species of primate that is currently existent were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than we're going to be seeing.
Your idea of speciation is wrong; speciation happens when ecological niches open up; "reduced gene pools" and "habitat loss" don't prevent it, they encourage it.
I don't see how speciation could occur without internal variation in a species. There's nothing to differentially select for.
Moreover, within an ecological system, a drop in genetic diversity of a species can result in a drop in species biodiversity of the system, and vice-versa
The experimental results, combined with natural observations, show that in this system, the maintenance of species diversity is dependent on sufficient genetic variation, because without this variation the system would become dominated by B. nigra (if sinigrin levels are uniformly high), or by other species (if sinigrin levels are uniformly low). - Mutual Feedbacks Maintain Both Genetic and Species Diversity in a Plant Community Lankau and Strauss, NATURE, (2007)
Extinction due to climate change? What science is that based on? During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum there was a great diversification of terrestrial life
They're not antithetical. Warm periods are associated with and increase in both speciation and extinction. Speciation is a bit limited at the moment due to greatly reduced gene pools from habitat loss, pollution, over exploitation and climate change. So this particular one will hit hard.
You bring up a good point about much higher levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
Most of the fossil fuel that we burn today comes from the Carboniferous period, when the newly evolved bark bearing trees were laid down in large numbers because the capacity to break down or digest the lignin had not yet evolved.
That carbon has been taken out of the biosphere and buried deep these past 300 million years. We are in a very real way returning the climate to the one that is was by digging up the dead: It is the same carbon that we are returning to the atmosphere.
It's not a good point about the much higher levels of greenhouse gasses in the past. That's why what we're doing now is dangerous.
The 1937-1937 were FAR hotter than today, across almost the whole United States. (I'm not claiming it was global.) While that might not be "global climate change" it puts any of today's "extreme weather events" to shame.
Slashdot Mirror
You're reasoning in isolated abstractions: "biodiversity is good for humans"
That's pretty well accepted.
The argument you see in textbooks is that the interdepedence of ecological systems is such that at it is difficult to know what species are key to our own survival. so dropping biodiversity is like playing Russian Roulette. (Of course the rich will be able to supplement, but I mean key to our own cheap survival).
But more importantly to me is the intellectual resource. Each species comes with it's unique proteins and biological processes. Losing them without studying them is a permanent loss to our knowledge, and future study is more likely to have useful results than current study, as our understanding of the biochemistry allows fuller understanding and so utilization of the processes observed.
"tigers dying reduces biodiversity"
I linked to a paper with this (generalized) result: reduced genetic diversity withing species reduces biodiversity of other species in the ecosystem.
"ice sheets move slowly and allows migrations"
The species in current existence have survived the repeated glaciation cycle of the holocene. The current warming is more rapid, and in the wrong direction.
With that kind of superficial reasoning, you can "prove" anything in any complex problem by just picking out the right abstractions.
I think you're ignoring the proofs. If you think one of them is wrong, we can delve into it. But read the paper linking genetic diversity to biodiversity first.
Large predators are usually already evolutionary dead ends, candidates for natural extinction
That seems like an isolated abstraction. Do you have any science-based evidence of this claim?
Humans have killed off many apex predators in many environments over the past few millennia.
Can you give a few examples?
Generally, the main effect has been that human livestock and humans have become safer.
Do you have any science-based evidence of this claim? I think that it is wrong. When you remove an apex predator, biodiversity crashes.
Historically speaking, were in the "colder than usual" range of the bell curve today, and thats with using ice cores to detect CO2 levels and temperature histories.
This is not true, using the data set [s]he mentions. We're much warmer than normal, according to the ice core record.
This is not, as you seem to have been suggesting that the Earth is less than a million years old, but that Ice Cores don't go back further than that.
Hmmm.
1.12 males to every female at birth, compared to the world average of 1.07
It could be the epigenetics of a growing economy. If its not, that's 4.5% less girls born that average: 1 in about 22. (Probably more aborted than murdered.)
That's what I thought, but the link he gives only shows a 400,000 year window.
The link to the ice-core temperature reconstruction data from the Vostok Ice cores?
They only go back 400,000 years. EPICA cores go back a bit further.
How many posts until someone finds a way to still hate on him, despite the fact that he's done more for the poor than all of us put together?
Are you counting creating poor as doing something for the poor?
His management of the Gates Foundation is not great for the poor. He is maintaining the unaffordable costs of medicines.
Doctors Without Borders criticizes Gates-backed global vaccine strategy
If his intention is to spend his ill-gotten gains to the benefit of humanity, he should put a humanitarian at the helm. Gates was very good at bullying governments and businesses, and illegal attacks on competition to drain the profits from businesses all over the world, but he's no manager.
UHA, (which uses the same satellite data) gets about 1.4K per decade since 1978
> The government more often makes the political decision to fund their research? By which you mean the National Academy of Science? If you think that they're not being sufficiently unbiased in their awarding of grants, would you mind naming the people there that are corrupt?
Yes, there are a half-dozen names most geeks know.
I would hope most geeks could name a few of the nobel laureates from the past few years.
That has nothing to do with day-to-day work in the field.
It has everything to do with what is considered successful in science.
Species don't adapt to ice sheets that are a mile thick.
Yes they did. They adapted by migration, generally.
The glaciations are recurring ecological disasters by the standard of global warming alarmists.
I'm not familiar with "global warming alarmists". Could you point me to a link where one calls the reoccurring glaciations ecological disasters?
The reason that glaciations are less disastrous than the current warming, is that the species involved had co-evolved with that climate, the change was a few orders of magnitudes slower than the current warming, and the species involved weren't already under pressure from habitat loss, over exploitation and pollution.
So what? What is your point?
The point is that your claim "There is no "state" to return to" is not really true. The aspect of the climate defined by that atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses is a state of the global climate that defines it in many ways. And that state doesn't suit existent species.
Help us? In what way do you imagine the loss of tigers hurts humans?
Loss of an apex predator in particular has a devastating effect on biodiversity. Do you know why dropping biodiversity hurts humans?
They are going away because their ecological niche has been filled by us.
Indeed no. They are suffering habitat loss and having their parts being valuable for TCM in china.
Futhermore, if we really wanted to fill that ecological niche, we could easily do it on human time scales.
How?
Almost no one will get tenure these days.
How many is "Almost no one"?
The politics is therefore intense for the limited slots.
If there are almost no slots, then this politics will arise almost never.
And tenure is no sort of guarantee of a job - it only means you can't be fired "at will".
It's meant to be a guarantee against holding unpopular opinions. It means you can't be fired without "just cause". Which means that if you do your teaching and don't commit academic fraud, you do have guarantee of a job.
You bet you need to publish, and bring in those grants
No, that's precisely what you don't have to do.
(And if you think "academic freedom" is common on campus these days, you really haven't been paying attention.)
I think its common and I've been paying some attention. What specifically would I have paid attention to to conclude that academic freedom is rare on campus these days?
The Earth is only 400 thousand years old?
No, the Earth is over 4.5 billion years old.
> The idea that being a professor isn't a job fraught with politics (both internal and federal) is a bit silly.
If you hold a tenured position, why would you bother with politics. The idea of tenure is to give as full as possible academic freedom.
Half the northern hemisphere covered in thick ice sheets was "relaxing"? Are you kidding?
The 10-12 degree temperature drop took that 100,000 years, so ecosystems could migrate at a leisurely pace.
They were like that 100,000 years earlier too, so the species on the planet had co-existed with that climate.
OP: "And won't be nobody to write it by then if mankind loses."
OP is samzenpus.
The way you phrase that just shows that you have no concept of the massive swings in climate the planet has experienced over the past couple of hundred million years. There is no "state" to return to.
The carbon in fossil fuels is from that time. A time of far greater CO2 concentration than the Holocene.
Tiger-like species have evolved many times independently, and they can evolve again, from other felines or other vertebrates.
The species that we lose today are lost with respect to humanity. Cats won't speciate again on human time scales. Depending on the climate in 10 million years, a mammal or reptile might fill that niche, but that won't help Homo sapiens.
CO2 hasn't proven to increase temperatures.
The greenhouse effect?
Remember that "hockey stick" graph. The only part of that we haven't seen is the increase in temperature.
Some of these ones? It looks like an increase to me.
Points to GOP: The Earth's temperature is volatile such that man-made changes to it are not really anything new or unique*.
It's unique in the past several million years.
While correlation doesn't in statistics imply causation, in this case we do have an understanding of the physics of the causal mechanism.
It's called the greenhouse effect.
I'm surprised you haven't heard of it.
Historically speaking, were in the "colder than usual" range of the bell curve today, and thats with using ice cores to detect CO2 levels and temperature histories.
*sigh*
Using ice cores, we're much warmer than usual.
Earths temperature isn't stable.
So we should warm the earth much faster than it warms naturally, and upwards from the top of an interglacial when all the existent species on the planet, plus all our infrastructure have never co-existed with the new temperature?
Surely we can do a bit better than "Earth's temperature isn't stable, so everything might be all right". Why don't we use that science thing that has been so good for our species? We can look at what will happen to which species, and what will happen to regional climate under global warming and ocean acidification.
And for all those who argue we are burning too much fossil fuels, those carbon atoms weren't created into existence in the ground as they were today, unless you believe the earth is 6000 years old!
So you're saying that if we return those carbon atoms to the biosphere, then because they were there in the carboniferous era, current species will be all right?
That's a bold and unproven claim that goes against current estimates of extinction risk.
Do you have a little bit more evidence or detail, or (god forbid) a scholarly paper that supports your claim that "because carbon is in the ground it must be safe to burn it"?
Great.
They were a part of the global carbon cycle, and buried during mass extinction events and processes that sequestered them to where they are today.
Not generally, no. The Carboniferous had about 50 million years of build up of wood, because nothing could break down the newly evolved bark. Not a mass extinction event. Just a lot of dead trees lying on the ground. It's not cyclical, and it won't happen again until trees evolve Kevlar coating.
Its not OK to attack the character of an individual when they are skeptical of your conclusions.
How the hell did you get "attack the character of an individual" from the GP post? :
"However, the researchers say that no obvious ocean mechanism is known that would trigger rises of 10 to 15 ppm over a timespan as short as one to two centuries."
We're way, way, way beyond 10 to 15 in 200 years.
There's no attack there. There's the observation that current atmospheric CO2 concentration rise is an order of magnitude faster than rapid increases at the end of the last interglacial.
It didn't mention people, much less attack them. If your income was based on the proportion of climate change denial comments on slashdot, then you might feel personally attacked by it, but that's not the same thing.
As for the problems associated with climate change, it will happen.
It's not a step function. The lower the peak atmospheric CO2 is, the fewer the problems.
If we discontinue all industry and revert to barbarism then we definitely cause the collapse of civilization.
If we put a price on carbon, and let the economy decarbonise, the economy continues to grow just fine, thank you very much
.
Why are your weasly qualifications ("currently exist") relevant?
Because climate change is going to affect the species that currently exist.
The fact that the we are returning the climate to a state is was a couple of hundred million years ago is bad because the species that exist now aren't the ones that can survive in that climate.
Humans are one of the most adaptable species around.
Yes. That particular mammal is not threatened, and will probably outlast all the others barring Rattus Rattus and Rattus Norvegicus.
Fact is that complex vertebrates have been around for a long time and were doing fine with CO2 concentrations greater than 2000 ppm.
Why are your long extinct vertebrates relevant?
The question is:
Can existent species survive?
Furthermore, in the past 100000 years alone, humans have survived far more devastating climate chnage than any predicted from global warming: the last "ice age" (glacial period).
The current climate change is faster and in the wrong direction to conclude that the end of the last glaciation was "far more devastating climate change". Certainly the long descent into the glaciation wasn't devastating. That took the lions share of the 100,000 years. It was relaxing.
There is simply no plausible way in which climate change could reasonably be claimed to cause human extinction as the OP implied.
OP didn't imply that. The book is written from the perspective of a non-extinct human 300 years after the collapse.
A "drop in genetic diversity" (even if it existed) doesn't mean "absence of internal variation".
Low genetic diversity means low internal variation, because the variation is caused by genetic diversity. (Plus epigenetics also that are also genetically determined for given environmental factors).
The fact that there are no tigers in the ecosystem of my home doesn't mean that tigers have gone extinct.
I didn't say that they had. However the drop of biodiversity in Tigers in the taiga will mean that taiga species vulnerable to the particular genetic configuration of existent taiga Tigers will suffer, and others will be under selection pressure in only one direction from Tigers, and that will tend to reduce their genetic diversity. (And with it their capacity to evolve in response to changing environment, and to speciate).
The government more often makes the political decision to fund their research? If you're going to claim that "ability to write grant proposals that get funding" isn't the key to success in academia, then, clearly, you're an idealist.
Name all the scientists you can who had great ability to write grant proposals that get funding.
Now name all the scientists you can who made great advances in scientific knowledge, or who were great scientific communicators.
See which list is longer?
I didn't go to school for ten years studying engineering and CS so I could deal with politics more than designing new software. Yet that is what I do anyway, despite working for a highly successful engineering company.
What does it mean for an engineering company to be highly successful?
What does it mean for an academic to be highly successful?
See the difference?
Primates were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than any predicted by the IPCC.
I don't think you could say that with confidence. Geocarbsulf is already pretty rough by 55 million years ago.
But certainly, no species of primate that is currently existent were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than we're going to be seeing.
Your idea of speciation is wrong; speciation happens when ecological niches open up; "reduced gene pools" and "habitat loss" don't prevent it, they encourage it.
I don't see how speciation could occur without internal variation in a species. There's nothing to differentially select for.
Moreover, within an ecological system, a drop in genetic diversity of a species can result in a drop in species biodiversity of the system, and vice-versa
The experimental results, combined with natural observations, show that in this system, the maintenance of species diversity is dependent on sufficient genetic variation, because without this variation the system would become dominated by B. nigra (if sinigrin levels are uniformly high), or by other species (if sinigrin levels are uniformly low). - Mutual Feedbacks Maintain Both Genetic and Species Diversity in a Plant Community Lankau and Strauss, NATURE, (2007)
Extinction due to climate change? What science is that based on? During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum there was a great diversification of terrestrial life
They're not antithetical. Warm periods are associated with and increase in both speciation and extinction.
Speciation is a bit limited at the moment due to greatly reduced gene pools from habitat loss, pollution, over exploitation and climate change. So this particular one will hit hard.
You bring up a good point about much higher levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
Most of the fossil fuel that we burn today comes from the Carboniferous period, when the newly evolved bark bearing trees were laid down in large numbers because the capacity to break down or digest the lignin had not yet evolved.
That carbon has been taken out of the biosphere and buried deep these past 300 million years. We are in a very real way returning the climate to the one that is was by digging up the dead: It is the same carbon that we are returning to the atmosphere.
It's not a good point about the much higher levels of greenhouse gasses in the past. That's why what we're doing now is dangerous.
The 1937-1937 were FAR hotter than today, across almost the whole United States. (I'm not claiming it was global.) While that might not be "global climate change" it puts any of today's "extreme weather events" to shame.
Nope, hotter now.