We are not edging up to a mass extinction | Hacker News Reader

We are not edging up to a mass extinction

aeon.co

46 pointshirundo16 comments

Well, 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.

I 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.

The article points out that most extinctions happen on islands which are tiny compared to the world, and that it's mostly over because we've finished importing rats/etc to those islands and started protecting them. It might be a large number of species recently gone extinct but it's a small number of individuals and they're the least important ones because they're not part of the global ecosystem so nothing in the rest of the world depends on them.

I guess you could consider North and South America, together, an island.

Eliminating all the megafauna there (leaving only bears and, depending on how you count, moose and bison) should count for something.

The article is correct that these extinctions and near-extinctions are not themselves a disaster for the natural world, which after a million years would hardly differ, so much as indicators of criminal mismanagement of our own behavior.

It 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.

This is, very unfortunately, been increasingly typical of Brand over recent years.

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".

There will be a disaster, we just don't know what kind.

Will it be mass starvation, desertification, warfare, migrations, lack of water? Monsoons and tornados, or other inclement weather? People dying from heat?

We don't know. There will be a disaster.

Moving farms? Laughable and does not scale. Do you want to invite a few million Spanish into your backyard? I bet you won't and you would shoot the immigrants instead as is the trend. People will try to move and there will be a lot of misery involved.

If you ever worked with refugees, you'd know.

I 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.

I'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.

> 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.

Do you really think that plot is complete bs though? Sure it cant be 100% accurate, but it seems to me if the "stamp collecting" effect were so strong you wouldn't see such clear trends. Also, wouldn't you think that such macroscopic analysis would account for the records incompleteness without necessarily destroying the truth of the trend? I tried to see how they derived that plot from the original article but I cant say for certain yet I know. Here's the link though https://muller.lbl.gov/papers/Rohde-Muller-Nature.pdf

I guess it's not to the point of an asteroid impact, but humans seem to be destroying habitats, introducing species invasions, changing climate, and reducing wild lands much faster than I would think the processes of adaptation could possibly handle. And impavtors are a couple years of bad winters... We are a hammer that keeps striking

I just think the disruption and extinctions are a game of Russian roulette. Did the elimination of that species collapse our ecological balance? No? How about that one? No?

Guess we'll just keep trying

I used to respect the author, not anymore. This is a very weak argument when you consider the rate of species loss is much, much greater than 'normal'.

Yes, 99.99% of all species to ever exist are extinct but we are pulling species out that would have continued if not for us. Denying this will only make it worse in our soundbite culture.

Just moving things around the world introduced plants and animals better adapted to their surroundings than their native species (as the article mentions). I'll write about the very noticeable effect on just my small area of the world.

I walk around the grounds I live at, it's a small mixed-use farm in western NJ surrounded by a nature preserve that's left to go wild. My landlord holds a PHD in ag science, so we have some unusual trees (stuff like metasequoia, which was thought to be extinct until getting discovered in one valley in China) and plants that grow here. When I get stressed out, I walk around and forage and note the types of plants.

One of the more remarkable trees that grows along the back is a lone American chestnut, it's actually large enough to produce chestnuts. I tell people, this is a tree that made up something like 25% of the trees in the Appalachian region, they numbered in the billions up until the time of our great-grandparents. Now there's just a few hundred, that's it! A fungal blight that gets carried by oak trees will prevent survival of 99.9%+ American chestnuts. There's also a Chinese chestnut here, they are resistant to the blight. However, I've heard they don't taste the same, so I'll do battle this year against the squirrels in hopes of collecting a harvest of the chestnuts the world forgot.

A short walk away a prickly vine with triangular leaves covers around an acre of forest undergrowth. It produces brilliantly blue berries. I learned about it a week ago when I spotted it for the first time at a place I used to frequent as a child. I searched for it since it has such a distinct look. It's a tearthumb. Edible, but highly invasive from China. I could never hope to pull all of it out since it's so fibrous and named after what it does to your hands if you grab it. Where it doesn't spread by growing, birds and rivers carry the berries miles away. Freshwater boaters seem to have been highly efficient at moving them around the region (I theorize the vines grow onto boat trailers, then the boaters drop them in lakes... and the berries float off to take root on a nearby shore)

I think of the place I saw the tearthumb for the first time, it was covering a forest clearing that had been created in 2012 by Hurricane Sandy. There had been ash trees there, but the emerald ash borer and the invasive undergrowth have ruled out replanting ash and made it tough to plant new native trees. So no more ash in the future, going the same way as the chestnut.

Coyotes couldn't cut it in NJ, but they evolved/adapted into something else that could take down larger prey and live closer to people. A large coywolf was gulping down peaches a few weeks back just a few hundred yards from my house. I ask the landlord (he's 88 with 84 years spent here)... "Should we think about shooting it?". The answer is pragmatic, "So long as they don't linger around people, they are good to have to regulate the deer population." I'm OK with this, the whitetail population is out of control here and there simply are not enough predators (or hunters).

I drove out to Pennsylvania today to go to a viewing. A spotted lanternfly landed by my feet in the parking lot. Girlfriend stomped it with her boot and we end up killing 5 or 6 before realizing this is a futile battle. These hitched a ride somehow and live on another invasive tree called the Tree of Heaven (or Hell, or ghetto palm). They have ruining the vinyards in the region but haven't made it out to where I live yet. I begin to wonder if Pennsylvania brought China any such comparable natural calamity, or if it's just the tear gas they send to HK causing enough misery.

Fall will come soon, and with it a new round of camel crickets will emerge from basements and wells. The brown marmorated stinkbug will try to force its way into my house to overwinter, and by Halloween numerous asian ladybugs will suddenly appear one day. It's a new, unbalanced reality we live in that the native species haven't fully adapted to.

But it doesn't mean the native species won't adapt. I mentioned that our landlord is very old, but just the other day he speaks of a black walnut tree that he planted years back. Now it must be understood, we have legions of squirrels that live here: from grey to red and even flying. Apparently, they wouldn't touch this tree for over a decade. We're at the edge of its natural range, so maybe they didn't consider it food? At some point, they changed behavior and now eat it. I've thought the same about the stinkbugs: The first years we were inundated with thousands entering households (I want to say it was 2013 or 2014 that were the particularly bad years). I've wondered if birds and other animals figured out it was food since there's maybe only a dozen that will make it in the whole season now where it had been hundreds before. I even trained my parent's dog to eat them by pointing them out!

That 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.

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