Does anyone else > 40 years old remember there just being lots more animals around when you were a kid? I don't know if it's just age blinders or paranoia, but in particular I remember there being way more birds pretty much everywhere.
Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
41–50 of 298 posts
Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
#42From the details in the article it seems that the best thing you on an individual level can do to help is stop eating meat.
Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
#43When the effects of global warming and extinction finally will hit us hard, people will die of in billions and life will begin to come back. Of course a lot of species will be extinct forever, but so is the natural cycle of life. Almost all species that ever existed has already gone extinct and it's foolish to think that we won't have the same destiny, especially how we're treating our food chain.
Assuming some negative feedback mechanism kicks in. There is a chance a positive feedback occurs, global warming spirals and Earth becomes uninhabitable. See Venus for an example.
You realize that all of the carbon in fossil fuels was once in the atmosphere right? The earth spits out a little bit of CO2 naturally, and the sun is a bit hotter than it was 100 million years ago, but we aren't turning into Venus anytime soon.
Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
#44Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1338/ That was a real eye-opener when I first saw it. Talk about Anthropocene...
I doubt that includes insects, bacteria and krill Krill biomass alone is significantly bigger than humanity's. Insect's and bacteria too. This article discusses a study that claims humanity is ~1/10000 of total biomass, including plants. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000... In general large animals have been already devastated by the last ice age and then changes resulting from that. Even w…
Well, it's written right in the title: "Earth's land mammals by weight". So no, it doesn't include bacteria, insects, other invertebrates, or anything living in the sea, but the point it's trying to make about the impact of humans on the planet is still important...
Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
#45Does anyone else > 40 years old remember there just being lots more animals around when you were a kid? I don't know if it's just age blinders or paranoia, but in particular I remember there being way more birds pretty much everywhere.
It seems to be the opposite at my house, not that I can do any actual numbers. We have more deer, tons of squirrels that we never saw growing up. Turkeys that didn't even exist in the state. Flocks of geese that land in fields like never before. We live in a very rural area but not a crop farming one, mostly just cows.
Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
#46In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twil…
I think about this aspect of the book all the time when I see kids (and increasingly adults) invested in games like Pokémon during our ongoing mass extinctions. The book doesn’t cover the intermediary steps between its barren world and our own, but it’s a pretty easy to draw a through line between the digital ecosystems we’ve built in the past 40 or so years and the synthetic life of Blade Runner.
Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started to change my bevahiour. I stopped buying fruit and vegetables in plastic wrapping. I buy milk in glass or paper containers. In my household I pay super close attention to how much water is running when we do dishes. We fill up the sink and wash it there. We turn off lights wherever possible and use energy efficient devices. I only bought A++ electrical kitchen appliances, we invested in a new energy efficie…
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, my guess is the reference to COVID. The earth is currently overpopulated for the system we have in-place to feed it. We are very inefficient in resource usage and waste over 1/2 the food we produce each year. COVID isn't the answer to this problem, but your point is valid.
It's definitively the reference to COVID. Telling people to die from a preventable cause is conflicting with the rest of the message.
Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
#48Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1338/ That was a real eye-opener when I first saw it. Talk about Anthropocene...
I doubt that includes insects, bacteria and krill Krill biomass alone is significantly bigger than humanity's. Insect's and bacteria too. This article discusses a study that claims humanity is ~1/10000 of total biomass, including plants. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000... In general large animals have been already devastated by the last ice age and then changes resulting from that. Even w…
[deleted]
Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
#49I saw a figure[1] the other day that blew me away. If you exclude pets and livestock, then human beings comprise ~90% of all mammals (by weight). All wild whales, bears, lions, deer, moose, mice, rabbits, wild horses, camels, beavers, buffalo, elephants, tigers, rhinos, chimpanzees, pandas, goats, etc... are in that remaining 10%. [1]: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/29/17386112/al...
A kind of similar xkcd diagram of Earth's Land Mammals by Weight https://xkcd.com/1338/ - there's hardly any wild animals, comparatively.
Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
#50Does anyone else > 40 years old remember there just being lots more animals around when you were a kid? I don't know if it's just age blinders or paranoia, but in particular I remember there being way more birds pretty much everywhere.
No I remember the opposite. I'm over 50 and when I was young in the 70's the water in ditches and canals was so polluted that nothing lived in it anymore but algae.
In Amsterdam, where I moved to after leaving home, you had to be suicidal to be willing to take a swim in the canals.
Nowadays fish are back everywhere, even in the canals in Amsterdam. There seem to be salmons swimming in the big rivers, this was unthinkable in my childhood. Species higher in the food chain such as otters are slowly returning to the Netherlands as well.