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Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

theguardian.com

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Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#31

Post by nervousvarun »

pingec wrote: post #9

When I was a child about 20 years ago, I remember going snorkelling near my home in the North Adriatic Sea quite often. I could see crabs, starfish, sea urchins, sea horses, octopuses under rocks and loads of fish. I went back there recently and was shocked to find the water looked clear but there were no animals left inside except for a few fish and a crab here and there. This makes me really sad and pessimistic abo…

My equivalent of this is frogs. Frogs and the rhythmic noises they made at night were the "white noise" of my childhood.

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#32

Post by CogitoCogito »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #13
montenegrohugo wrote: post #10

Human Population has more than doubled in the same timespan (from 3.7 billion to 7.7 billion today). This is not sustainable. We only have one small planet to live on, and we are destroying it. We are overfishing the oceans, cutting down entire forests to make way for pastures, warming up the planet and acidifying the plastic-filled ocean. Even insect populations are plummeting. The consequences of this will not be f…

What’s not sustainable? The human population doubling again? Or maintaining the current population? Clearly we have to address climate change but it’s not a growing population that is unsustainable, if anything the progress over the past 50 years has indicated the exact opposite.

> if anything the progress over the past 50 years has indicated the exact opposite.

Which progress are you referring to? The original article is claiming that 60% of animals have been wiped out in the last 50 years. Does that not at least call your claim into question?

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#33

Post by Theodores »

montenegrohugo wrote: post #10

Human Population has more than doubled in the same timespan (from 3.7 billion to 7.7 billion today). This is not sustainable. We only have one small planet to live on, and we are destroying it. We are overfishing the oceans, cutting down entire forests to make way for pastures, warming up the planet and acidifying the plastic-filled ocean. Even insect populations are plummeting. The consequences of this will not be f…

> I implore you to be politically active, to consider support for candidates that at least acknowledge that there is a problem. Consider a carbon tax. Consider big, international efforts to clean up our oceans. Consider sexual education efforts in developing nations. Consider carbon re-capture efforts. There's a ton of things we can do, but we have to start doing

It has all been said before.

None of this is going to be easy when we have our governments frittering away money on the arms trade. It is violence and the threat of violence that enforces the current economic order. Therefore it is the trade in arms that needs to be addressed if there is going to be progress in other areas. The arms trade isn't just bullets, the business is also about 'cyber warfare' which means planting the post-truth news stories in the media that enforces the status quo for the arms trade.

People laughed at Martin Luther King for wanting to combine the rights he wanted for all people at home with the anti-Vietnam War, pro-peace ideas. They thought he would set back both causes and confuse people. History was not kind to those critics, we only know of Martin Luther King, the others were just shills anyway.

It may seem a bit of a stretch of the imagination to think that the acidification of the oceans or the fact that there are less than 7000 cheetahs left is going to be solved with things like nuclear disarmament and global treaties to abolish the arms trade. There will be those that think these issues shouldn't be confused and that things will not get better for the likes of the cheetah if focus is shifted over to the steps needed for a more peaceful planet. But why not give peace a chance? Every one of those billions of single use bullets could have been made into a reusable and recyclable rechargeable battery and you could have an extremely large wind farm instead of the F35 programme. We could go fully carbon neutral in a generation to make this planet a beautiful garden for all. But, for this to happen the arms trade has to be made extinct first.

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#34

Post by ahje »

pingec wrote: post #9

When I was a child about 20 years ago, I remember going snorkelling near my home in the North Adriatic Sea quite often. I could see crabs, starfish, sea urchins, sea horses, octopuses under rocks and loads of fish. I went back there recently and was shocked to find the water looked clear but there were no animals left inside except for a few fish and a crab here and there. This makes me really sad and pessimistic abo…

Butterflies in my case. There used to be lots of them around here when I was a child. Luckily, there still seems to be enough bumblebees around to keep plants pollinated. I hope it lasts.

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#35

Post by ifdefdebug »

cbkeller wrote: post #15
betageek wrote: post #3

Is this true? It is hard to believe that killing off 60% of animals on the planet would leave us with a functioning ecosystem. It's also very hard to work out what the facts are here without finding yourself in climate change denial land, a place I do not want to visit.

Geologist here! The report in question [1] and supplement [2] seem pretty think-tank-y, but I would say they pass the sniff test to first order (if we have a biologist or ecologist around, they could probably say better). The focus on animals makes it relatively plausible -- these are charismatic and easy to observe, but a lot of the ecological heavy lifting / biogeochemical nutrient cycling is really carried out by…

>> Many scientists believe the world has begun a sixth mass extinction.

>This is pretty well accepted among geologists and paleontologists

Do they believe humanity will be one of the survivors?

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#37

Post by shoo »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #30
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock. Climate change will cause famine, natural disasters and mass migrations. Poverty, overpriced health care and a lack of common social structure (every man for himself) will lower the life expectancy again after decades of increase.

But does that fix it? Isn't it a vicious cycle once methane is released from the melting ice. And a collapsed civilisation won't have the budget to fix it.

from a sufficiently misanthropic perspective that global human over-population is "the problem" , both methane release, civilisation collapse, and lack of budget to maintain or build infrastructure and systems like healthcare all sound like they are part of the "fix".

I don't really think it's helpful to talk about "the" problem, there's a big mess of coupled systems and most "moves" available to us have unpleasant side effects or unknown side effects on global or long-term time scales. we have a limited time and resource window where moves are still available.

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#38

Post by cbkeller »

betageek wrote: post #28
cbkeller wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geologist here! The report in question [1] and supplement [2] seem pretty think-tank-y, but I would say they pass the sniff test to first order (if we have a biologist or ecologist around, they could probably say better). The focus on animals makes it relatively plausible -- these are charismatic and easy to observe, but a lot of the ecological heavy lifting / biogeochemical nutrient cycling is really carried out by…

Thanks for at least trying to answer the question, just to be clear, I'm 100% convinced in climate change and some kind of extinction happening, just querying the '60% of all animals' headline.

It also looks like the claim here is something like "the total animal population has decreased by 60% on average over all studied localities since 1970" rather than the more dire "60% of all animal species have gone extinct since 1970" so we're not anywhere near the 90% species extinction of the Permo-Triassic yet!

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#39

Post by ahje »

montenegrohugo wrote: post #21
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s not sustainable? The human population doubling again? Or maintaining the current population? Clearly we have to address climate change but it’s not a growing population that is unsustainable, if anything the progress over the past 50 years has indicated the exact opposite.

Human population by itself is not the measure we should worry about. With enough technological progress, the earth could reasonably sustain 100+ billion people. The problem lies in the doubling of human population in little more than a generation. The problem lies in that we are not being sustainable with this. We are depleting resources whilst polluting and rapidly changing our environment. For the moment, we only h…

Once that technological progress has been made, and we have implemented those new technologies on a global scale, then sure.

Right here and right now, we're still largely relying on fossil fuels and machinery up to several decades old in order to produce food and considering it seems to be hard to even get up to modern standards, hoping for future tech to save the day seems far fetched.

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#40

Post by cbkeller »

ifdefdebug wrote: post #35
cbkeller wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geologist here! The report in question [1] and supplement [2] seem pretty think-tank-y, but I would say they pass the sniff test to first order (if we have a biologist or ecologist around, they could probably say better). The focus on animals makes it relatively plausible -- these are charismatic and easy to observe, but a lot of the ecological heavy lifting / biogeochemical nutrient cycling is really carried out by…

>> Many scientists believe the world has begun a sixth mass extinction. >This is pretty well accepted among geologists and paleontologists Do they believe humanity will be one of the survivors?

I haven't seen much of a consensus on that one yet!
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