Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 380 posts

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

#81

Post by travisoneill1 »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #41
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.

> I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock[...] I wouldn't call WW3 a fix (short term anyway). Even a small nuclear exchange would have devastating ecological consequences [0] [0] "Radioactive fallout from these weapons’ debris clouds would reach the stratosphere, where it would travel worldwide, potentially contaminating crop…

This has been tested and disproven by the very large nuclear exchanges that have already taken place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo

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

#82

Post by chrisweekly »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #48
thelastidiot wrote: post #36

More rats and cockroaches in New York, more mosquitoes in Hawaii, more seagulls in Boston, more pigeons in San Francisco, more crows in the bay area, what is this article talking about?!

I don't know if the population of these species is increasing globally but it seems the ones you listed are very unique in the way they relate to humans – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosis . I wouldn't be surprised to learn that human overpopulation and profligate consumption make a few species' population to thrive (e.g if they feed on human waste, share habitats, etc) while still causing a mass-extinction…

> "strive" (try) -> "thrive" (succeed)

Not nit-picking, rather trying to help readers for whom English is a second language. :)

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

#83

Post by cbkeller »

titzer wrote: post #62
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…

> a lot of the ecological heavy lifting / biogeochemical nutrient cycling is really carried out by microbes What really worries me is what is going to happen when all those millions of tons of microplastics become nanoplastics and are spread far enough to become part of the foodchain, even down at the microbial level. The dark end of that space is pretty terrifying for life on Earth, IMHO.

Interesting point. It looks like there may be negative consequences for eukaryotic algae / phytoplankton [e.g., 1], but on the plus side some prokaryotes are able to usefully metabolize plastics and "bioremediate" the problem a bit [e.g., 2]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166445X1... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00253-018-9195-y

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

#84

Post by pvaldes »

False statement. In any case would be 60% of vertebrates, not animals.

Big animals are being systematically wipped, but smaller animals had probably increased in total number. With the same amount of grass you can have 1 cow, or lets say '50' rabbits, or '1000' voles, or "1billion" of nematodes. I we could really measure it, I bet that we would find a big increase in number, and a big decrease in diversity.

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

#85

Post by Fiahil »

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 firmly look toward the end of humankind. Extinction events are full of opportunities.

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

#86

Post by neetdavid »

Rotareti wrote: post #47
nervousvarun wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My equivalent of this is insects. My family and I made a lot of trips with our car in the 90th. The front of the car was full of squashed insects when we arrived. There was a constant knocking on the windshield. The amount of insects that I find on my car today is far less. I think it's about 10-20% of what it was in the 90th. I'm worried.

This has to be one of the funniest takes I've seen

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

#87

Post by stephengillie »

Fiahil wrote: post #85
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 firmly look toward the end of humankind. Extinction events are full of opportunities.

At one point, there were hundreds of thousands (millions?) of horses in the world, owned as transportation vehicles. Then the horseless carriage was invented, and now horses are somewhat rare.

The same could happen to humanity, if AI and general purpose robots become viably robust.

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

#88

Post by infinite8s »

pvaldes wrote: post #84

False statement. In any case would be 60% of vertebrates, not animals. Big animals are being systematically wipped, but smaller animals had probably increased in total number. With the same amount of grass you can have 1 cow, or lets say '50' rabbits, or '1000' voles, or "1billion" of nematodes. I we could really measure it, I bet that we would find a big increase in number, and a big decrease in diversity.

I think the collapse of insect populations argues against that.

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

#89

Post by afishisafish »

drb91 wrote: post #60
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.

The earth definitely has a carrying capacity. Our ability to push our food production further doesn’t change this fact. I’ve seen around 10 billion people floated as a food production limit in several places. Crossing this with climate change, particularly our love of beef and pork, is not easy to disentangle. We may also never hit that carrying capacity if something else other than food supply limits our population…

Assuming that life expectancy will remain the same and that the number of children will also not change Hans Rosling predicted our world population never will exceed 11 billion people.

He was a very passionate and entertaining public speaker.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_...

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

#90

Post by montenegrohugo »

code_duck wrote: post #58
montenegrohugo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With ‘enough’ technological progress, anything is possible since that’s the definition of enough.

No, technology is constrained by physical and logical laws. No amount of technological progress can make 1+1 = 2. Similarly, it can reasonably be stated that no amount of technological progress will make earth be able to sustain X population
Post reply on HN