We are not edging up to a mass extinction
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Re: We are not edging up to a mass extinction
#2It seems to me the author is arguing against a point nobody is making, and conflating numbers that are not the concern. I've never heard the arguments that the author is trying to refute, and I consider myself at least mildly educated in the area.
I understand the author is using 'currently threatened species' which are well-counted and well-understood, at least to the best of our ability. But that is not the concern.
The concern is that runaway climate change, precipitated by corrupt governments and corporations worldwide via cheating emissions, lying to the public about CO2 effects, etc. The concern is the radical future uncertainty about how quick changes in future climate may alter ecosystems in a cataclysmic way from which they may not be able to adapt in time.
That this has happened on a small scale already is a telling sign that things could escalate quickly if the world does not get a handle on climate change. The author points to optimistic evidence on local scales but ignores the larger unknowns of backwards progress on climate change, such as trying to bring coal back to US production at scale, etc.
Edit: The author has this to say on the topic, which is unsourced and I believe so wildly optimistic without reason that it discredits most of the work:
> My own prediction is that climate change will be deemed intolerable for humans long before it speeds up extinction rates, and even if radical steps have to be taken to head it off, they will be taken.
The steps have not been taken, nor is there visible evidence they will be taken soon. In fact much evidence supports that steps are being taken to speed up climate change.
Re: We are not edging up to a mass extinction
#3Well, there’s almost no fish left in the second largest river in Europe, the Danube. I mean, there is some still left, so you could say that the species are not extinct by definition, but we are at best at 5% numbers in terms of body mass compared to 40-50 years ago and more. Source: me, whose parents live in a village on the lower Danube. I’m sure similar stories can be told about countless other ecosystems which are not island-based, like those mentioned in the article.
Re: We are not edging up to a mass extinction
#4That money chart might say that a) we’re not currently in the middle of an extension event on geological time scales, but also that b) having another one at some point, is also inevitable.
Re: We are not edging up to a mass extinction
#5It seems to me the author is arguing against a point nobody is making, and conflating numbers that are not the concern. I've never heard the arguments that the author is trying to refute, and I consider myself at least mildly educated in the area. I understand the author is using 'currently threatened species' which are well-counted and well-understood, at least to the best of our ability. But that is not the concern…
This is, very unfortunately, been increasingly typical of Brand over recent years.
Re: We are not edging up to a mass extinction
#6I though we are not so much edging up to mass extinction as we we are squarely in the mass extinction with both feet. We changed environment so much that it's unavoidable.
Re: We are not edging up to a mass extinction
#7I would love to reflect back on this article in the year 2119 after we have broken through 3-4C of warming and see how accurate it was.
Re: We are not edging up to a mass extinction
#8> The fossil record shows that biodiversity in the world has been increasing dramatically for 200 million years and is likely to continue. The two mass extinctions in that period (at 201 million and 66 million years ago) slowed the trend only temporarily. Genera are the next taxonomic level up from species and are easier to detect in fossils. The Phanerozoic is the 540-million-year period in which animal life has proliferated. Chart courtesy of Wikimedia.
The fossil record is incomplete, of course. We keep finding new fossils, of new species, many of which are very incomplete. It can be hard to determine if two fossils are the same species or not, depending on what you find. Plus, not all organisms leave fossils, like animals with soft bodies (no bones) or hard shells.
If anything, that first graph looks pretty fishy to me, just with the rapid explosion of growth in the last 200 million years. Of course, those are the fossils that are also on top.
When stamp collecting (or fossil finding) you're at the mercy of luck and statistics.
Re: We are not edging up to a mass extinction
#9It seems to me the author is arguing against a point nobody is making, and conflating numbers that are not the concern. I've never heard the arguments that the author is trying to refute, and I consider myself at least mildly educated in the area. I understand the author is using 'currently threatened species' which are well-counted and well-understood, at least to the best of our ability. But that is not the concern…
I agree that it's uncertainty of what the climate will do that's why it's serious. But alarmists don't say that. They're somehow certain there will be a disaster. There might not, and we're not sure, but they're don't dare express that uncertainty because either they're fooled themselves or they're afraid the common people who believe and vote for whatever the media tells them might use it as an excuse to not worry. That's perhaps reasonable for their goal because people generally can't handle uncertainty and convert it to a simple yes or no instead. But it's also wrong.
As for people taking radical steps, of course we will - when it affects us. We'll move our cities and farms, build sea walls for the most valuable locations, etc. That's not a big challenge because almost every building on earth was built within the last century and most of them won't last another century regardless of the climate. So even if we somehow have to rebuild all of them, that's what we would have already done anyway. Infrastructure of cities is mobile on a time scale of 100 years. The CBD of my hometown was under water in the 1800s but now it's the capital city, all dry and well functioning because of massive civil works.
As for nobody making those extinction arguments. Myley Cyrus said she wouldn't have children "until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water".
Re: We are not edging up to a mass extinction
#10I'm a bit skeptical about this article. If you graph estimated species extinctions during the past 200 years instead of the estimated numbers of species for the past millions of years, then the current species extinction event does look troubling.
So it depends a bit on the perspective and what numbers you choose. Of course, nature is robust. However, as we know from dead lakes, ecosystems have a tipping point. I would be especially worried about the oceans, because they seem to play an important role in earth's ecosystem as a whole.
The connection to climate change in the article also seems a bit sensationalist. I always thought that the current species extinction has been caused by industrialization in general, not by global warming in particular, which is just one of many effects of world-wide industrialization.