Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse • Hacker News Board

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#211

Post by vonmoltke » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

hdjdbtbgwjsn wrote: post #16

ecmascript wrote: post #14

When 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.

> There is a chance a positive feedback occurs, global warming spirals and Earth becomes uninhabitable.

There is virtually no chance of this happening on Earth until the sun gets significantly larger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect#Eart...

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#212

Post by effnorwood » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

It didn’t and it isn’t.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#213

Post by buran77 » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

kortex wrote: post #80

x87678r wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were always problems. Would you rather be living through the World Wars? Or even Vietnam/Korean wars. Slavery. Nuclear Cold war. Acid Rain. Crippling economy and crime in the 70s. 80s crack crime epidemic. Covid sucks but otherwise things are pretty good right now.

This is dismissive in the form of "Other people suffered, why are you complaining?" Nuclear war is still possible. Acid rain is still bleaching forests and marshes near me. Our economy is kinda hosed at the moment. Endless conflict in the Middle East/SW Asia. Uiyghurs are enslaved. And of course resource depletion and climate change. It's not sunshine and lolipops.

A big difference is that now you learn (faster or at all) about issues that 30-50-100 years ago would have been completely obscure to most of the world, and you're getting the news hammered into your head on so many channels until you can only see them as important. So most issues today hit people far harder than they used to because the world used to be a bit more (unwittingly) ignorant and what you didn't know couldn't hurt you. Knowing about every bad thing everywhere, and knowing the impact of that can hit harder than the actual issue. It takes a huge emotional toll.

If issues command more attention time each day they feel more important. Generalplan Ost might have killed twice as many people at the same time as the Holocaust but most people never heard of it because it didn't get that much prime time. And the Bangladesh or Indonesian genocides flew under the radar for most people around the world.

Lots of things are possible but the likelihood, and the fact that this is hammered into your head via every channel make all the difference. Nuclear war is possible but if FB would throw this possibility at you every day I can guarantee you'd see it with very different eyes and feelings.

Just going back a few decades you had things like AIDS or the hole in the ozone layer. So each generation had their own burden to bear. And things like global warming aren't something that hit one particular generation (unless it triggers a catastrophic and quickly unfolding event), it just erodes away the niceties of life with each generation.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#214

Post by throwaway0a5e » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

michael1999 wrote: post #156

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because we've spent several millennia figuring out how to live more and more densely and we do the same with our livestock. If beavers invented a lifestyle that enabled them to live at densities up to thousands per square mile they'd compromise a hell of a lot of biomass too. The fact that there's more humans doesn't imply anything about the other animal population (though I suspect that it's not good for the…

You need to include our food production spaces when talking about population density for that to be a fair comparison. Our urban density is mirrored (and supported) by the sparseness of our farmland.

a) Counting areas where resources come from get complicated quick. Are you gonna count the ocean because the grizzly bear eats the salmon? Do Nile crocodiles get their population density counted based on the entire watershed they depend on?

b)There are about 50 people per square kilometer of land. Even adjusted for farmland humans are still gonna blow every other large predator out of the water. Even if you include commercial fisheries that still blows every other large predator out of the water. Maybe there's a couple seasonal localized concentrations of certain predators that are higher but nothing else comes close to that number.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#215

Post by grogenaut » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

codemk8 wrote: post #131

perfunctory wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“What we are facing now is a person whose crime dwarfs all of the crimes ever committed in human history. We were unable to find a single law applicable to his crime. So we recommend that the crime of Extinction of Life on Earth be added to international law ...” — Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest

Expecting the Netflix show of this book though.

Mild Spoilers:

I think that'll be a pretty hard book to adapt. The story goes off the rails in the later books. Especially the 3rd, it's just a random tour of interesting scifi ideas.

I'm also wondering if the de-emphasis of individual will make it harder to make a show. There is no through line of character.

While the book has some great ideas, I personally wasn't a huge fan of how they were strung together. First book was great detective noir book. Second book had the great concept of the wallfacers and one amazing badass. And then you can just see disaster coming with the change of the guard, the story is just as bad as the end of the rama series from there.

Or to say it another way, if it makes it to the screen it will be heavily altered imho, but that's par for the course, and I've come to enjoy other people's interpretations on things I've already read when they bring new stuff.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#216

Post by squibbles » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

The wolves eat the deer. The deer population collapses to the point that the food supply for the wolves cannot support the wolves. The wolves starve and the wolf population collapses. Without pressure from the wolves, the deer make a comeback and flourish.

The population cycles occur in both large and small ecosystems. The process is slow and steady. Often it seems like the embers of life have gone out. However, something always comes back from the ashes.

Humans are just another animal in the food chain.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#217

Post by jelliclesfarm » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

We are past carrying capacity. If we don’t bring down population to 1-3 billion, when the natural trend of depopulation happens, there won’t be enough resources to feed the population on the spoils of a collapsing eco system.

When the apex predator gets hungry, everything gets eaten. Not only are we a super apex predator, we are also the most hungry and are outbreeding all other species and devouring eco systems.

It will never be enough. We will just eat the planet and perish hungry. And likely vulnerable to all kinds of natural disasters and disease. Better to control population to manageable levels for the future of the species than make way for nature to cull us.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#218

Post by zip1234 » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #82

nemo44x wrote: post #18

I guess it was alluded to in the article but my main concern is the amount of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides we use. As we clear more land for Ag we are of course limiting habitat for animals but also zapping them constantly with these chemicals. Fertilizers get into water and decimate the life in there. Herbicides coupled with pesticides decimate insect ecosystems. The development of land gives larger anima…

The rich “we” typically don’t clear land for agriculture anymore ( https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.ZS?end=2016... ) Also, forestation is going up in many rich countries ( https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS?end=2016... ) That doesn’t imply we aren’t killing the world, though. Agriculture in rich countries often needs fertilizer to get the higher yields it gets, newer forests aren’t as…

Forestation may be going up but what about fragmentation of wild land? It seems like because of cars, people can and do build houses all over, scattered about. This causes habitats to be broken up by busy roads, which kills animals, messes up migration patterns, and more. A lot of those people will kill or drive away all the animals surrounding their house. They spray for insects, trap all the animals, block their food sources, etc. Sure, they have trees since they are not using the land for agriculture, but I'm not certain that it is ultimately better for animals.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#219

Post by disown » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

wubbert wrote: post #87

There's really no way of stopping or reversing this without billions of people dying. Since the end of WWII, killing others for the survival of your own kind has become extremely taboo (outside of Israel, that is), so nothing is going to be done until it's way too late.

Well the world population is expected to stabilize around 10 billion or so for a long while. So that new normal may also stabilize the wild animal population. The exponential population growth of the past 100 years seems to have stopped so that is one good news.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#220

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

rob74 wrote: post #44

nn3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]