1/3 of Amphibians Dying Out 467
Death Metal sends in a Scientific American article reporting that 2,000 of 6,000 amphibian species are endangered worldwide. A combination of environmental assaults, including global warming, seems to be responsible. "... national parks and other areas protected from pollution and development are providing no refuge. The frogs and salamanders of Yellowstone National Park have been declining since the 1980s, according to a Stanford University study, as global warming dries out seasonal ponds, leaving dried salamander corpses in their wake. Since the 1970s, nearly 75 percent of the frogs and other amphibians of La Selva Biological Station in Braulio Carrillo National Park in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica have died, perhaps due to global warming. But the really bad news is that amphibians may be just the first sign of other species in trouble. Biologists at the University of California, San Diego, have shown that amphibians are the first to respond to environmental changes, thanks to their sensitivity to both air and water. What goes for amphibians may soon be true of other classes of animal, including mammals."
*squish* Just like grape. (Score:2, Insightful)
The rule for species survival is simple: adapt or die. There are historical events of much greater scale and effect than this global climate change will be. If a species can't adapt, then it will die out. A species that can't adapt to a minor change in environment was probably doomed to extinction anyways regardless of Man's contribution to global climate change.
Nature rule, Danial-san.
Pollution/Habitat loss, not global warming! (Score:0, Insightful)
Global Warming is a giant scam. Plenty of Ice core samples going back half a million years ago in Greenland and Antarctica confirm wild swings, often in very short spaces of time (decades) in global temps. No connection either btw to CO2 levels either.
Duh, it's SOLAR OUTPUT that determines temps. Which does indeed vary (we may be in for some real cooling too).
Amphibians are terribly sensitive to pollution, including precipitates from air pollution, particularly mercury and sulfuric acid from the Coal that China burns like crazy, and drifts over most of the US. Habitat loss is also terrible.
We have serious problems with pollution and habitat loss, none with "Global Warming" which is nothing but a scam to take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools.
Re:mmmm... mammals... (Score:3, Insightful)
True, we all went along fine before that... o_O
Well, we act as though we are above nature (Score:1, Insightful)
Correlation does not imply causation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego, have shown that amphibians are the first to respond to environmental changes, thanks to their sensitivity to both air and water.
So maybe we're seeing why the dinosaurs died out. They were too sensitive to environment change. They couldn't adapt to the changes in climate and died.
The article starts out blaming man and herbicides, but then has to conclude that even areas free from herbicides, such as national parks "provide no refuge." So that is blamed on global warming (no doubt man-made), causing the ponds to dry out. Neither of these are supplemented with facts, but is all speculative. Frogs and salamanders are dying, so we must be causing it.
Even though we may want to, there is no way we can save every species from extinction. We talk time and again about survival of the fittest in science class, yet we can't seem to acknowledge that species must adapt or die. Animal species that are hardy will thrive. Those who are not will not. We could have the perfect ecosystem for frogs and salamanders, and that would threaten some other species that found the weather too damp or warm to thrive. We blame ourselves for everything, when in fact there's no evidence that, if we all vanished tomorrow, animals wouldn't continue to die out as they always have.
Re:*squish* Just like grape. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That doesn't make any sense (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the point of evolving amphibious capability if not for greater environmental tolerance?
Who said evolution has to make sense?
Re:Correlation does not imply causation... (Score:5, Insightful)
If we cause the climate and environment to change too quickly, no species gets a chance to adapt. It takes at least thousands, probably millions of years for species to actually adapt.
So, it's more likely we will kill off almost all species leaving just the small number that by sheer luck can cope with widely diverse conditions... like cockroaches.
I don't see what there is to argue about. Clearly, species are going extinct in great numbers, it's largely due to us, and most species are not adapting.
Re:Bullshit! (Score:3, Insightful)
99.999% of all the species that have ever existed are extinct!!!
IT IS NATURAL FOR PLANTS AND ANIMALS TO GO EXTINCT!
Re:Correlation does not imply causation... (Score:3, Insightful)
If the die-offs of amphibians like salamanders and frogs indicate trouble ahead for mammals, as a mammal I feel it's important to pay attention to what's going on.
It's not about blame, it's about survival. You seem to think that we humans are above that - the causers, not the victims. I'm not really that interested in vanishing tomorrow, frankly, so maybe it's worth exploring how we can keep that from happening.
Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say you had a group of tool wielding apes who had advanced to such a high level of technology that their activities changed the environment, and upset millions of years of evolution and balance. Despite detecting this early on, they failed to adapt the way the transport themselves, the amount of natural resources they needlessly consume, and did nothing to change course.
Let's say those apes did not survive the correction that the environment made to re-establish equilibrium. Wouldn't that be a tragedy.
You can make all the excuses you want for yourself, but your children don't exist on rhetoric, they exist on planet earth. If you're even willing to take a chance on continuing the path that has led to the decline of every single system of life on earth since the industrial revolution, you're mad, or a fool, or both.
The epidemic of cancer is certainly proof that something that we are doing to the planet it making it and us very ill, let alone the undeniable evidence, built up over the last fifty years, that wherever industrial developments are, vibrant ecosystems are not.
Re:Pollution/Habitat loss, not global warming! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's incredible what kind of nonsense gets modded insightful. A scam by whom? By the national academies of science of all developed countries: http://royalsociety.org/displaypagedoc.asp?id=20742 [royalsociety.org] Why would they take part in a scam? What would just about all major scientific organizations and a vast majority of individual scientists involved in climate research have to gain by putting their reputations on the line in order to "take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools"? What would they have to gain from it?
Re:Global warming and not disease huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
This is the kind of ignorance that will kill us. Just so you know, the incidence of disease is not independent of climate.
Re:Pffft... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:*squish* Just like grape. (Score:5, Insightful)
The rule for species survival is simple: adapt or die.
Yep - simple rule, and it applies to us as well. And compared to other species, our adaptation is simple and very easy. Yet we don't seem to be able to accept the necessity, let alone commence the process. Does our own apparent inability to adapt mean that our extinction should be treated with the aplomb with which you dismiss the amphibians, the coral reefs, the oceanic plankton?
There are historical events of much greater scale and effect than this global climate change will be.
Probably not. This extinction event is shaping up to be unprecedented. I'm wondering actually how you arguments will fit with the conversations we will have with our kids about all those animals in kids books that we killed off. I suppose we could burn all our copies of Finding Nemo.
A species that can't adapt to a minor change in environment was probably doomed to extinction anyways regardless of Man's contribution to global climate change.
I guess in the same way, it doesn't matter if I run over an old man in the street, because I couldn't be bothered steering. He would have died anyway, right?
Re:Bullshit on Bullshit! (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I wouldn't take advice on the law or public policy from two jokers who make a living from misdirection and yelling profanity at reasoned arguments.
Furthermore, I wouldn't cite as evidence of how horrible the ESA is a video that builds part of its argument around the notion that there is no mass extinction event going on right now in an article about a mass extinction event going on right now.
Good Lord, give me back the past 30 minutes of my life. What an irritating mishmash of profanity, name-calling, and irrational conservative talking points. Lindy's story was kind of sad, but the impact of the story was blunted severely by all the smug, sneering, venomous, and immature posturing that overlay it.
Re:Bullshit! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is perfectly natural for plants and animals to go extinct.
But there ought to be cause for concern when so many are about to go extinct at once. Whether or not it's a natural disaster or a human-caused disaster can be debated until the cows come home, but the planet is changing right now, causing irreparable damage.
From the article you linked. (Score:5, Insightful)
But even the containment of Chytrid might not be enough to save amphibians, which face a barrage of other threats including pollution, the introduction of alien species, habitat destruction, over-collection, and climate change.
Gosh, I guess we shouldn't worry at all then! I mean, if Chytrid is screwing them over, it's not like we should bother with climate change. I mean, why put out a cancer patient on fire? The cancer's going to kill 'em anyway.
Re:Correlation does not imply causation... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but there is evidence that since humans came to the scene, and especially since the industrial age, the species are going extinct at a rate from 100s to 1000s of times greater than before.
It's both! (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition to what the previous person responding to your post mentioned, it's worth noting that some researchers think the most likely origin of the spread of this fungus to a wide range of habitats is due to widespread use of a research frog species from Africa, though there is some evidence that puts some doubt on that. [cornell.edu]
Another prominent theory is mentioned in the article you linked:
In Costa Rica's Cloud Forest Preserve of the Tropical Science Center, biologist J. Alan Pounds and his colleagues recently reported the total disappearance of the Monteverde harlequin frog, along with one golden toad species -- caused, he said in the journal Nature, by their increased susceptibility to chytrid disease as rising global temperatures have weakened their ability to resist the toxin.
In other words, chytrid is likely to either be an invasive species introduced around the world by human actions or a species that amphibians were previously able to resist before rising temperatures weakened them. Or both. Either way, saying "this time its [sic] not our fault" is disingenuous at best.
Re:Pollution/Habitat loss, not global warming! (Score:5, Insightful)
the Fierce Creatures effect (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a pretty green-leaning person and the last thing I want to do is deprive people who have devoted the best years of their life studying herpetology from getting grant money to make a living, but I think amphibian decline research is bordering dangerously on public relations BS pseudo-science.
Amphibian populations are notoriously hard to measure accurately. Populations rise and fall wildly. When you go out to do your first sample, if you're not careful there's often a heavy bias to picking the area with the highest population, so when you do your followup study and that pond has returned to a normal population, it looks like you've detected population decline. That's not to say amphibians aren't wildly vulnerable to all the usual things humans do to an environment: drain it, pave it, spray it. But rather than get half the environmentally-sensitive population panicking randomly about crisis, I'd rather see 1% or 0.1% of the population deeply educated in field biology as serious hobby, keeping long-term consistent records of observations and measurements.
( by the way, the best way to completely destroy a long term population study of a pond is to dredge it and add fish to make it "look more natural" )
Re:Correlation does not imply causation... (Score:2, Insightful)
If humans could live for a dozen of million of years, maybe it could be normal to see 1/3 of a big subset of the species disappearing because of natural selection as you point, but for our minuscule time lapse it is a total artificial catastrophe.
Re:Bullshit! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Correlation does not imply causation... (Score:3, Insightful)
The article starts out blaming man and herbicides, but then has to conclude that even areas free from herbicides, such as national parks "provide no refuge."
What areas free from pesticides? Maybe you didn't read the article:
"Atrazine is one of the more mobile and persistent pesticides being widely applied. In fact, residues have been found in remote, nonagricultural areas, such as the poles."
Places that are "protected from pollution" are not free of it. You'd be surprised just how much pollution there is in national parks.
So that is blamed on global warming (no doubt man-made), causing the ponds to dry out. Neither of these are supplemented with facts, but is all speculative. Frogs and salamanders are dying, so we must be causing it.
Two problems with these statements:
1) A problem may have multiple causes.
It's a widespread mental disease of today that people demand that experts must find THE source of the problem and fix IT. The three problems identified in the article are all major, separate contributors to amphibian decline. Each one may affect different species in different proportions. Fixing one will not solve the problem for all species, but it is not pointless for the species that it will save. (They do leave out habitat destruction, though.)
2) What do you mean "all speculative" and "not supplemented with facts?"
For crying out loud, the article references specific scientific studies. I decided to go searching for them:
Personally, I would like to have seen links to those studies in the article, but what more would you like to see? What is your standard for "speculation" v. "facts?"
We could have the perfect ecosystem for frogs and salamanders, and that would threaten some other species that found the weather too damp or warm to thrive. We blame ourselves for everything, when in fact there's no evidence that, if we all vanished tomorrow, animals wouldn't continue to die out as they always have.
Of course, they will continue dying out. That's nature. The issue is that they'll die out *much slower* than we're *currently* killing them off, and new species will evolve to fill the gaps. If you want to know what environment would be perfect for the frogs and salamanders, the answer would be the one they evolved to be adapted to. We're changing the world far faster than evolution can keep up.
The fundamental problem with this (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this type of reasoning is that we have evolved to a stage where we can "beat" any other species. Human-level intelligence has transformed evolutionary competition into a straight out massacre. We also have the ability to change the environment in ways which are effectively catacylsmic from the point of view of evolution - if you radically alter the environment over the course of a few decades or even centuries, then there is nowhere near enough time for a typical vertebrate to adapt via natural selection to a hostile environment.
If we are indeed affecting the climate, as seems likely, then I find it plausible to think that we could quite easily end up wiping out most species on earth, save for a few super-hardy ones. Unfortunately we will probably survive ourselves, which hardly seems fair. If you want to compete until the end, I hope you like the sound of a future filled with cockroaches, feral cats, rabbits, rats and flies because those are the types of animals which will thrive in a man made environmental apocalypse.
I would like to think that if we are intelligent enough to realise that we have the power to exterminate the other varieties of life on earth, then we are also intelligent enough to realise why we shouldn't (including both cold rational reasons and aesthetic/moral reasons).
Do you really believe that it is ok on any level if, say, every last tiger dies as a result of human impact on the environment? What if we go out and shoot them all? Because we could, and it sounds like you're saying that would be good and proper, or at least 'evolutionarily correct' in some way.
Re:Pollution/Habitat loss, not global warming! (Score:1, Insightful)
So, a global scam to undermine some small ridiculous minority religion? I think not, Pinky.
Hey now, let's not complicate letting a joke go over your head with hyperbole.
Variations of Christianity make up 33% of global religious belief, making it by far the most populous family of faiths, with Islam in second at 20%. Furthermore, it's a very powerful and influential religion, practiced by the majority of people living in First World countries.
Now, the segment of it that's obsessed with the idea that global warming is a lie perpetuated by people motivated by self-interest to seek grant funding is a relatively small portion of Christianity, but it's a very powerful one, because it has a huge influence on US politics.
By no means, should you marginalize climate change deniers as members of a "small" "minority" faith. You risk underestimating a very powerful adversary if you trick yourself into thinking them inconsequential.
Re:The real question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Heres an idea.. give me a reason why a specific species is worth protecting, and then if you convince me, I'll even fucking help you to save it.
You should qualify that one. Here is a species for you: Homo sapiens. Gotcha. (Wink)
How about this one: wheat. Gotcha again.
Diversity? Thats crap. There are so many species on this planet that we can't even count them.
Here is a question for you: What is the bare minimum number of species you might be comfortable with?
Here is another question for you: If you whittle down the biodiversity of this planet to only a few "essential" species--what will be the consequences? Please cite your sources when you answer. The biased speculation of a non-scientist doesn't count.
Re:Bullshit! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't challenge the sacred chants (Score:4, Insightful)
Since you apparently don't understand the difference, I'll spell it out for you:
You put your hand on the hot plate. It burns.
Experimental variable: location of hand
Extraneous variables: none
Valid conclusion (if it's reproducible): Moving your hand to the hot plate caused it to burn.
Amphibians are dying out.
Experimental variable: "Global warming"
Extraneous variables: f***ing everything
Valid conclusion: none
Now, this isn't a perfect argument: you can do things like argue that all the extraneous variables are obviously not really important given what we know about ecology or whatever -- but it certainly demands a more reasoned response than ignorant mocking.
Re:Correlation does not imply causation... (Score:5, Insightful)
For the life of me, I don't see what the controversy is all about... you can listen to FOX News or the scientific leaders of the planet who almost to a person (that means for the most part any scientist not working a for a major fossil fuel producer), that the world is in the throws of monumental change. In fact, the question is no longer if, but how much, and by when will it be something capable of dirrupting human existence.
The changes map almost precisely to the amount of greenhouse gas there is in the atmosphere. The system is complex, and once you pass the tipping point change will amplify. Global albido has changed. The chemistry of the oceans has changed. The chemistry of the atmosphere has changed. There are more cloud, more water vapor (itself a greenhouse gas), and less ice on the planet. There are more floods, stronger hurricanes and tornadoes, more droughts, and the weather is becoming more irratic. All of these changes are hostile to higher life forms. Ultimately these changes will prove most hostile to a sustainable humanity.
We have not yet transcended our biological base. When we loose the ability to irrigate fields, feed livestock, then feed ourselves, billions of us will go away. We are at the top of the food pyramid, we are an apex species, and it is always the apex species which go away first in a mass die-off. Of course our big brains may help us cope with the change, it might even save us from extinction, but I can tell you now, it won't be a world as nice, or as benevolent as the one we have today. That and all the species that we rely on for everything from pollination, to pleasing our eyes and ears are going to be gone. It would be as easier to live on mars than to live on the planet we are in the process of making, and we won't have the means to live on mars any time soon.
This isn't about loosing one species. We are already now disappearing thousands of species a year. Most of these are invertebrates. But once we get to higher life forms we need to be concerned about where homo sapien falls on that list of threatened species. There are maybe 1,500 cheetahs in the wild left on the planet. A few hundred tigers. Several dozen snow leopards. Once you turn 10,000 acres of rainforest into dessert sand, everything that lived there from the microbes in the soil up are gone forever. We are biotic. We cannot escape the destiny of life disappearing if we allow virtually all higher life to disapper from the planet, we will amost certainly be one of the species to vanish.
Being we are an engineering race, we may still have time to fix our mess. However the time is slipping fast and we haven't shown much proclivity for wisdom or awareness on a global scale. We need to address the issues that face us now. In very much the same way America has turned itself into a financial vaccum, we are on the verge of turning the world into a vacuum for life. Leaders asleep at the wheel, a populace so intranced by the day to day process of making a living, and fulfilling ever growing wants, that one hardly notices that we are using up the world, and are on the verge of making the world unfit for consumption by humans or any other higher life form.
The information is freely available. The science at this point in the game is virtually incontrovertible. The politicians and the pundits can debate all they want. The conservative and liberal can fight. The religious can pray endlessly. None of that will alter a single leaf falling. We have now a vanishingly small window of opportunity. The wise man would act now.
Re:It's both! (Score:2, Insightful)
Humanity is just a big boulder rolling along. Changing course can be done, but it costs enregy. That includes standing up from TV and use the windows to regulate room climate and not the air con. Humanity is lazy.
Many people claim that environment friendly technics will destroy employment. Yes it will. On the other hand it will provide many more new jobs than it will destroy.
Funny how we say 'adapt or die', but WE don't adapt ourselves.
It is like fishing quotas in europe. The quota is higher than the quota that could be sustained by the environment so there are less fish every year. Why is the quota higher? Because we can save jobs this year in an expense of even more jobs next year.
ac
Re:Bullshit! (Score:3, Insightful)
You are dead on, but the human race can't really see past its nose as a whole, especially when things are going well--and if you have time to type drivel on /., things are going well.
I'd be amazed if any of the self professed "conservatives" who spew ignorance and misinformation in this thread realize the extent and long-reaching consequences of something even as concrete as the current credit crisis--and this hits them (and me) right in the pocket book.
But take comfort in the fact that humans will eventually suffer the same fate as the rest of Earth's creatures, opening the door for a biological rebound in 50 million years that brings with it a whole plethora of cool new critters.
Re:Pollution/Habitat loss, not global warming! (Score:3, Insightful)
We have serious problems with pollution and habitat loss, none with "Global Warming" which is nothing but a scam to take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools.
It's fairly clear that the main issues involved with recent amphibian declines are pollution, habitat loss, and disease. Global warming is at most a distant fourth, and the reason is not hard to find: temperatures just aren't changing that much in most places, yet amphibian decline is extremely widespread and includes nearly every habitat. The places where temperature changes have been most extreme are in high mountain regions and the high arctic, neither of which are prime amphibian habitat - not that there aren't a few there, but most of them live at lower altitudes and latitudes.
Blaming global warming for every bad thing that happens reminds me of the old saying that when your only tool is a hammer, the entire world looks like a nail. It is a terrible oversimplification to a single issue which can hardly be the cause of everything that goes wrong in the world. Pollution - especially the acidification of the aquifers in many parts of the world - is too often overlooked by many people who want to blame everything on global warming.
That said, "global warming" is hardly a scam, although the data are extremely difficult to analyze and the precise degree of man's involvement in it is still open to some debate; but it appears very likely that both natural cycles and man-made causes have been at work. However it certainly makes sense to do what we can to limit its effects, especially since we only have one planet we can call home.
The real world is rarely simple.
Re:The real question... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the real question is.... ...why the fuck should we care?
Diversity? Thats crap. There are so many species on this planet that we can't even count them. The loss of even hundreds of thousands of species is statistically insignificant.
Heres an idea.. give me a reason why a specific species is worth protecting, and then if you convince me, I'll even fucking help you to save it.
Biodiversity is very important. Aside from the fact that losing an entire species forever is an extremely sad thing to happen there are practical implications. For example many of the medicines we use today were discovered by people going into the Amazon, brining back everything they could find, and seeing which of the weird things they found could fight different illnesses on a petri dish. Lose the diversity and you lose all those undiscovered opportunities. In a more general sense loss of diversity within a species leads to increased susceptibility to stressors, this may impact upon economically important species (known as well as unknown) as well as rare frogs.
Also, you don't know what statistically significant means so don't use that term. While the loss of hundreds of thousands of species is important is itself, but is more significant as a marker of the loss of environment leading to the losses of all those undiscovered species and damage to an ecosystem that we rely on but don't really understand.
Re:Correlation does not imply causation... (Score:2, Insightful)
So maybe we're seeing why the dinosaurs died out. They were too sensitive to environment change.
Not likely. Dinosaurs roamed the earth for over 160 million years. It is illogical to assume that no significant climate change took place over that long a period.
Re:Pffft... (Score:4, Insightful)
The overwhelming scientific consensus it that the warming is proceeding much faster than in the past and that this caused at least in part by human activity.
The earth has experienced many periods of warming and cooling even within historic times, let alone during geologic time. Many of these warming and cooling periods were actually fairly rapid; the earth's climate could be called a metastable system that often experiences fairly rapid change between a number of more stable states. It's just simply untrue that the speed of recent climate change is unprecedented.
That said, what I think you meant to say is that warming is proceeding much faster than in the recent past - and with that minor edit, that's quite true. The prevailing scientific opinion is that human activity is at least partly to blame, possibly helping to accelerate and amplify a natural cyclical change into a warmer state.
But on the other hand, global warming has not yet had a major effect on most temperate and tropical habitats (as opposed to arctic and alpine habitats). For most amphibian loss, it's necessary to look at other causes - which, FWIW, is all that the parent article was saying.
Please explain (Score:2, Insightful)
Will someone please explain to me how global warming is causing mass extinctions? I believe that the average temperature has gone up something like one degree in the last several decades, which is no more than the amount of variation you would see from year to year anyway.
So say the average temperature in some amphibians environment is 70 degrees F. During the last several hundred years, the temperature could have been anywhere from 60-80 degrees and the amphibians were fine. Now the average has gone up to 71 degrees and they're dying out? I don't buy it.
Re:*squish* Just like grape. (Score:5, Insightful)
The rule for species survival is simple: adapt or die. There are historical events of much greater scale and effect than this global climate change will be.
The idiocy of this statement is beyond belief. Oh yes, it is very natural that species die out, just like it is natural for people to die when they get a nuclear missile in the head. That doesn't exonerate us from being the main if not the only cause for the current mass extinction. Amphibians have been around far longer than both mammals and reptiles - they have lived through several mass extinctions already, so they are clearly able to adapt. Which means that when they can't in the present situation, there may be cause for concern.
And your idea that historical events can be more significant than climate change and the collapse of the ecosystem reveals a staggering lack of insight. Do you think that humanity isn't part of nature, somehow? That we can breathe without air and eat without food? Ecosystems are intimately connected, and when crucial parts disappear, they collapse. And then we lose out too.
The sad truth is that we humans throughout our existence have have had a major, negative impact on nature. Just compare the diversity of species in areas where no humans live, with what we find in cultivated fields. Or look at what happend in the fall-out zone around Chernobyl: People evacuated, and suddenly the bio-diversity shoots up dramatically; there's even wild boars there now - and that is in an area with high levels of radioactive pollution.
To sum it up: we are fishing the seas dry, we are shaving the rainforests away, we pollute and waste resources like there is no tomorrow - and I suppose there isn't likely to be one either, the way we go about things - and one day we won't be able to do it any more; I wonder how muc comfort people like you will find in your words about "adapt or die". Right now there is enough food to feed everybody, but that depends on being able to maintain the current levels of fishing, and the current intensity of agriculture - which in turn depends on massive amountds of synthetic fertiliser, insecticides, growth regulators, herbicides etc. Which in turn depends on our access to cheap energy.
We can choose one of the following: we can continue as usual, steadily increasing our numbers and our use of resources. When they run out, we will probably be living in a world where there are little other than our unsustainable, energy intensive agriculture; few fish in the seas, few animals on land, no natural forests etc. But lots of people, who are now facing starvation. Or we can change our ways, preserve nature, stop wasting resources on stupid crap, reverse population growth etc; and maybe we won't end up in quite as grim a situation.
Re:Bullshit! (Score:0, Insightful)
We produce megatonnes of material toxic to all known organic life every hour of every day. Irreprable damage is being caused by this, as is evident by the massive increase in endangered and exterminated species. Once lost, it will never be regained. There is no remedy for these damages.
Re:The real question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Global Warming is real. The only questions are:
How much of it is really caused by us?
And
How much of it actually harmful?
So far, what I see in the media isn't really convincing. I still believe that what we see today can and did happen in earth's history and is therefore rather natural.
Cutting back on our production of harmful and questionable stuff and especially cutting back on what of it we release into nature is surely a good thing. Common sense dictates that just dumping anything in too big quantities anywhere can't be good. But we must be careful not to confuse useful behavior with what this blatant reactionism demands of us. Reactionism and outcry are ALWAYS easily abused tools to sell stuff. Be it a political agenda or newspapers.
Re:Bullshit! (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple: people here dismiss anything that makes them feel uncomfortable: the idea that there may be an omnipotent, omniscient God makes them uncomfortable, so they dismiss anything that relies on that idea (creationism, afterlife, absolute morality, etc.); likewise, the idea that a materialistic, consumerist lifestyle may be destroying the planet makes them feel uncomfortable, so they dismiss anything that relies on that idea (global warming caused by pollution, USA being the world's worst polluter, importance of biodiversity, etc).
Re:The real question... (Score:2, Insightful)
If it were that simple (Score:4, Insightful)
If only it were that simple.
1. Evolution takes time.
If you don't have damn good DNA repair mechanisms, different cells in your body change randomly to do different things than what's needed, and you die. (E.g., of cancer.) So there's an upper cap on how often mutations can happen, which puts an upper cap on how fast you can evolve. Heck, even small-ish evolutions in tens of thousands of years are called accelerated evolution.
We're talking about "since 1970" here, which isn't even a blip at evolution scales. _No_ species ever evolved in 38 years.
2. Evolution really works like in the joke about the guys camping, and one of the guys putting on his sports shoes when they see a pissed off tiger: you don't have to outrun the tiger, you have to outrun the other guy. You don't have to be the fastest gazelle, you just have to outrun the slowest when the lions drop by.
What I'm indirectly getting at is that it worked in situations where there was a slow changing equilibrium between hunter and prey, or between species and environment. On the whole, the species still has to be survivable in the short run. It doesn't work for "bang, you're dead!" situations. And normally they do get that short term survivability. Even a species whose become relatively unfit, gets breaks as its lowering numbers also causes the predator population to drop, and buys the prey some more time. Or viceversa, a relatively unfit predator gets a break as the prey over-multiplies and eventually it gets enough of a meal even from sick prey or corpses.
The natural selection will then keep culling from the lower end, and over millions of years, the species gets better.
No species can evolve into something better if you keep hunting it into extinction within decades, or dump poison into its water, or cut down its habitat and replace it with a parking lot. Or if you keep hunting it past the point where predator-prey equilibrium would have allowed it to rebound, that's it, really. Game over.
3. While I sorta see your point about climate change,
A) it doesn't apply for situations when we pollute a place overnight, or when we cause an eutrophication and the algae bloom suffocates everything else
B) you also have to remember that climate change is a bit over-sold these days. It's the #1 best selling sin, and _everything_ gets blamed on it first. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but that it does get blamed for more than it actually caused.
In this case, we don't _know_ whether these frogs died because of climate change or, say, because of pollution. As more and more third world and developing countries industrialize, they pollute more and more. And again, let's not forget that while the carbon cult is obsessed with CO2 only, early unregulated industry puts out a lot more immediately poisonous stuff. Both in the air _and_ in the water, which, as mentioned, is the amphibians' problem: they depend on both.
Seriously, half the world still doesn't have any filters on their factories, or any other environment protection, or still uses lead in its pipes and gasoline. You start worrying about the quality of air when you already have other more stringent QOL components covered. When you're dirt poor, you care more about getting food, clean water, medicine, and a job. As long as even those are hit and miss, or in a lot of places more miss than hit, you don't give a fuck about that factory dumping toxic stuff into the air or water. Lead in the air (e.g., from leaded gasoline) might affect you later, while lack of food will kill you right now.
As little as a new factory starting production, can poison the water of several species over night. Sure, someone out there will scream about all the CO2 from it, as if that were all that could possibly ever matter, and in the long run maybe it even is, but it will be the other chemicals that kill in the short run. Or if that factory produces fertilizers, again, you _could_ worry about the CO2 it produces, but that's an eutrophication event waiting to happen,
Re:Correlation does not imply causation... (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems unlikely to me that we can have proper estimates on the number of species going extinct prior to the start of the industrial age. How can one use fossil evidence to distinguish between species. And if we are using eye-witness testimony, surely before Darwin, we did not have anything close to the right idea about the true number of species. So what am I missing?
Re:Ok, I'll bite (Score:5, Insightful)
Temperature measurements just in California are worthless anyway -- too small of an area. Do you know how many measurements they're averaging those with? How big of a temperature shift you'd expect from a misplaced thermometer? Whether the standard deviation of the global temperature average those measurements were included in shifted significantly?
No, I'll tell you what you did. You came to a conclusion, and then looked for evidence to support it. Then you had the gall to question scientists, who at least use much better reasoning.
Re:Bullshit! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that's a classic example of missing the point.
What is a species after all? Depending on how you define it you can manipulate the numbers. A species by itself isn't very important.
What is going on is a loss of genetic information in the natural world. Does it matter? Depends on your timeframe. Over the long term, of course it doesn't matter, where the long term is on the million year scale. Over the short term, say the next thousand years, it will matter a great deal.
Why does diversity matter?
You don't get an efficient, flexible ecosystem by stocking it with aggressive, weedy species. Even if the individual species is flexible, the system becomes less flexible. The net genetic information in a place represents the ability of the system to adapt. I remember a study described in Science News a few years back that showed diverse patches of prairie adapted more efficiently to annual variations in temperature and rainfall than less diverse patches.
Diversity is information and information is wealth. It's just wealth we take for granted, and therefore we don't bother to count it. It therefore doesn't show up on corporate balance sheets and GDP calculations, but that doesn't mean it isn't wealth.
We could dam the Merced and turn Yosemite into a reservoir; we could turn the Grand Canyon into an endless trash pit for the refuse of the nation. These moves would probably give us a net gain in GDP, because the kind of wealth these places represent is not tracked by standard accounting.
Re:Ok, I'll bite (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>we can be some 80% to 99% sure that the bigest part of it is man-made.
And what about the previous warming events of circa 3000 BC and 300-1200 AD? Those were not man-made and yet they happened. What caused them? How do you know it's not the same cause now?
Re:The real question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The real question... (Score:2, Insightful)
the fact that losing an entire species forever is an extremely sad thing to happen
Extremely sad! Remember guys, losing an entire species is entirely IRREVERSIBLE! There is no undo if we fail to act on biodiversity! One day, maybe millions of years from now, the earth's climate will be back to normal cycling. If we destroy the biodiversity, we can NEVER EVER get that biodiversity back. New species originate at an extremely slow background rate, a rate which has been decreasing since the Cambrian (the time of the Burgess Shall fauna). True, mass extinctions are generally followed by a burst of recovery, but there is also usually a delay of millions of years (see stuff by Dave Bottjer, Peter Ward, Doug Erwin...).
Re:Ok, I'll bite (Score:3, Insightful)
I do know how many are used for the surface record. Its well documented and the data is available online. What isn't well documented is the placement of those thermometers. The scientists harping on climate change simply don't give a shit, which is obvious since they dont even bother visiting these sites to see what problems may exist.
Not as much as if there were hundreds of misplaced thermometers just in the USHCN. Didn't expect a big problem with the quality of the surface record, did you? The problems the scientists say do not exist are now well documented with photographic evidence. This is a classic case of garbage in garbage out. Maybe its warming significantly, maybe it isn't. We don't know because the data we have just plain sucks.
I suggest you begin your research at http://www.surfacestations.org/ [surfacestations.org]
The biggest pusher of the "climate change" scare is the IPCC, a political organization trying to heavily regulate industry on a global scale. If it looks like an attempt at a power grab, it probably is.
Re:The real question... (Score:1, Insightful)
So, the earth was truly flat prior to approximately 2300 years ago? You advocate that discovery of a thing causes it to spontaneously exist, such that prior to human discovery it did not exist, or was something else entirely?
This is your support for the statistical insignificance of special extinction? You correlate human discovery of new species with human ovservation of lost species and claim that significance of one grants you accurate knowledge of significance in the other. This calls into question your understanding of the term (which I'm sure you'll look up right now and finally present a well-founded retort), as well as your entire decision-making methodology.
You play fast and loose with your support arguments. If you are unwilling to ground and source your claims, then it is obvious that the conclusions you spout are more important to you than their factuality. The only conclusion to be drawn from your arguments is the existance of your own emotional ass-primate.