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

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

#151

Post by waynecochran »

cultus wrote: post #84
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the worst case projections I’m aware of, global warming won’t kill people in the billions. This kind of frankly fearmongering is a large part of why it’s so hard to get consensus on environmental issues in the first place.

I am a former geophysicist, and credibly we could see on the order of an 8C rise this century. It's much worse than the general public thinks, and the picture keeps worsening as understanding of the system and its feedbacks increase. A rise of 5-8C make large parts of the Earth uninhabitable and would collapse food production and global civilization. Billions dying is not scaremongering, but is a very probable outcom…

5-8C is much higher than most scientific projections. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

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

#152

Post by bjr11 »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #92
alangibson wrote: post #41

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.

Just over 40. I live in Minnesota. I used to take trips in high school to the boundary waters area. The water was so clean, you didn't need a filter, you could drink right out of the lake. We didn't have to carry a ton of water, we just had cups that hung on the inside of our canoes. Thirsty? Just dip your cup and have a drink. Nighttime was always an adventure. The bears and other animals out there were always vocal…

I haven't herd this opinion about the boundary Waters from anyone else. Memories are often effected with the emotions associated with them

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

#153

Post by feralimal »

Unfortunately, these sorts of claims are impossible to verify. Did they measure like we do? Have the numbers been adjusted? Because everything is politicised, I have low levels of trust in any of these voices that self-purport themselves to be authorities. It seems so far away from my personal, anecdotal experience.

It seems clear to me that rural areas are far less populated nowadays - small rural farms the world over, are being run by parents (or now, grandparents!) in their 80's it seems - the younger generation are in cities. From my school class no one has more that 3 children, and most have none. That should bode for a crashing population, but instead we are told it is increasing drastically.

So, while cities may feel busy, I tend to think the population is in decline. And that if lots of rural areas are in decline, that animal populations are probably on the increase, only there's no one there to see it.

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

#154

Post by dorchadas »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #150
alangibson wrote: post #41

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.

Remember fireflies? I myself almost don't believe that there were insects that would light dark fields in summer, and that children would fill jars with the these creatures because they were so plentiful you could grab a handful of glowing insects! I honestly feel that if I were to have grandchildren they would not believe me describing them or at the very least thing that I was greatly exaggerating. I know they stil…

I live in a decently rural area. This summer had a lot, for some reason, but overall I can't remember seeing many in recent summers. Same with earthworms coming out after a rain

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

#156

Post by michael1999 »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #107
slavik81 wrote: post #36

I 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...

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.

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

#157

Post by badestrand »

christiansakai wrote: post #118
macspoofing wrote: post #56

One of the issues of plunging headlong into solar and wind (and bio-fuels) is that those sources require huge land-areas around mining of rare metals, deployment, and finally waste. As our global population and energy needs grow, this problem gets bigger and bigger and therefore place stress on existing, and already stressed, ecosystems. On the other end, nuclear is energy dense, and requires tiny amount of land for…

I was surprised that ESGV (Vanguard Index for responsible environmental friendly investing) does not include nuclear power there. I wonder what's the stigma bout nuclear?

> I wonder what's the stigma bout nuclear?

I am sure you know the answer but because you ask for it: Radioactivity is nasty. Example Germany: When I grew up my parents couldn't pick mushrooms and I couldn't play in a sandbox because a few thousand kilometers away there was a reactor incident and the wind blew it over. Today people living near a power plant receive free jodium tablets in case there will be an accident. The government spends endless years looking for places to store the nuclear waste because nobody wants it in their backyard, obviously. The waste in the old starage, designed to last 10000 years, leaked already and noone knows how to handle it. France built most of their power plants directly at the border so that hopefully we will receive all the fallout. Uranium mining is said to be desastrous for the environment. Probably there's a lot more.

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

#158

Post by burlesona »

SamBam wrote: post #94
alangibson wrote: post #41

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.

I'm interested in the fact that almost every comment replied to your anecdotal comment with anecdotes of their own about how, in fact, there are so many more animals and the world is so much cleaner. Yet, clearly, the statistics in this article and elsewhere show that this is plainly not the case. We are killing off wildlife at an unprecedented speed. Why the disconnect? Are all our efforts really directed towards fe…

As a sibling poster said, I think one of the issues is that the first world countries have significantly improved in many environmental metrics (litter, air, and water quality most of all), so people there have a lived experience which includes things getting better. Meanwhile it’s really hard for us to grasp how much the population of places like Africa, Indonesia, and India have exploded in the last fifty years, nor how much environmental damage has occurred there. Not to mention China.

This is going to be increasingly difficult part of dealing with environmental damage. It will not be enough for North America and Europe to decarbonize. Somehow we have to bring the rest of the world along with us. But they haven’t enjoyed the benefits of all the environmental destruction over the last 200 years, as we have, and (understandably), they are trying to catch up.

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

#159

Post by bb101 »

holografix wrote: post #123
the_af wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think instead of "remake" you meant sequel, because there is no remake. If it's any consolation: I'm an absolute fan of Blade Runner but hated the sequel. In my opinion, it fails to capture the neo-noir feel of the original, has no interesting characters, Jared Leto's acting is distracting, and the villains/antiheroes... compare Roy Batty's "tears in rain" dying speech with Luv's "I'm the best!". It makes me cringe…

One of the biggest cinematographic disappointments I’ve ever witnessed. Harrison Ford’s involvement in the movie was tragic. He acted lazily, his character had very little to add to the storyline. Inexplicably he was into Elvis can you imagine your grand children, when old, being huge Elvis fans? It was all so lazy. The only saving grace was the concept that creation of life is a continuous, inescapable circle, that…

I couldn't agree more. After the original's nuanced characters and landscape, the harsh sterility of the sequel was so disappointing.

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

#160

Post by baron_harkonnen »

itsoktocry wrote: post #27
echelon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For us, not really. The generations that come after us? Probably. And therein lies the problem. The people making the rules and pulling the strings don't have a bleeding, burning pressure to change course. And they won't until it's too late. Complain all you want about climate and biodiversity and pollution, but nothing is going to be done until we've stunted the lives of the people at the top. That's just how the sh…

> but nothing is going to be done until we've stunted the lives of the people at the top Do people honestly believe "nothing" is being done? We are chipping away at these problems, otherwise you wouldn't be reading about it in a mainstream newspaper article. People (especially younger people) are more conscious about these issues than at any time in my lifetime. It's not like you can flip a switch and change a societ…

> "nothing" is being done?

What is being done? Nearly every "green" initiative is much more marketing than reality when you look at the details. Renewable energy sources are widely supplementing not replacing hydrocarbons. Decreased emissions are largely from a financial switch from coal to natural gas and offloading your CO2 production to somewhere else. Global emissions are still rising.

Consumer capitalism is the largest driver of our CO2 usage and we have done worse than nothing about changing the way our economies operate. Consumer spending has been a perpetually increasing part of the US GDP. Currently 70% of the US GDP is consumer spending. We have a pandemic which has forced that to drop and everyone with political power is doing everything they can to get that back up.

> It's not like you can flip a switch...

Well unfortunately we don't have time. Historically every major sudden climate change period seems to have reached a tipping point where positive feedbacks initiated rapid temperature increases. We don't entirely know what these feedback are (we have some guesses that they might be methane hydrates and melting permafrost) but once we hit these it's over, it doesn't matter if you reduce CO2 emission to 0. It's worth noting that IPCC projections typically do not include feedbacks, which may explain why 'faster than expected' is the new norm.

We might see a blue ocean event before the decade is out. That will have immediate impact on the entire global climate.

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