Or to rephrase in terms that George W. Bush could understand, lots of plants and animals will be “smited.” From the pages of Scientific American (online edition):
Forester Jay Malcolm of the University of Toronto and his international team of conservation professionals looked at the changes to vegetation types, or biomes, in 25 so-called hot spots–unique ecosystems with a wide range of endemic species. The researchers modeled what would happen to the plants in these areas if the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide doubled in the next 100 years.
Under a number of scenarios–ranging from broadly defined biomes in which species were able to spread away from impacted areas to highly sensitive biomes whose species could not move at all–anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of plant and animal species were lost. “Climate change is rapidly becoming the most serious threat to the planet’s biodiversity,” Malcolm says. “This study provides even stronger scientific evidence that global warming will result in catastrophic species loss across the planet.”
To anyone who says “Yawn — Big effing deal . . . ” let me just say that it is species diversity which supports the vast array of life on this planet. The fewer species, the more tenuous life becomes for all the ones who remain, including the dominant life form, homo sapiens.
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What’s even worse news, is that areas where bio-diversity is greatest, such as Australia, South Africa, South America, et al, are considered to be most at risk.
To give just one example of the impact this will have on human life, consider that 25% of all pharmaceutical drugs are derived from plants located in tropical rain forests. Yet pharmaceutical companies have only done research on about 1% of of the plant species that reside in those rain forests. Meanwhile, an average of 50,000 species there are going extinct each year. Who knows what miracle drugs are being lost even as we speak?
Indeed, it will be difficult to predict all the potential consequences that could arise from a mass extinction event, but a less diverse environment is also one which is more susceptible to degradation, pollution, and an increase in disease vectors moving from their isolated ecological niches into human populations. Societal disruptions are also likely, as communities dependent for their livelihood on various species would be faced with loss of jobs, and in the developing world, starvation, in the event those species die off.
Can we prevent such a massive extinction if we begin to act now? Frankly no one knows, but failing to act to limit our greenhouse gas emissions will only make matters worse sooner rather than later.
Seems to me that anyone should be able to grasp the concept of global warming and that it is a reality. In MI, the winters have been getting milder/shorter, and the summers are ungodly hot and too damn humid.
In light of some of the diaries that I have written re: rx prices, the following really caught my eye:
(Thanks!)
And it just blows me away–companies will provide coffee from the rainforests, but, live saving pharmaceuticals are being destroyed????
Damn coffee probably makes more of a profit, and the expenses are lower!
RRRRR!!!
Is there any possiblity of limited “think globally, act locally” by communities or states or small countries will make a difference?
I heard yesterday (I think) the mayor of Seattle talking about his various proposals and processes of implementing the Kyoto protocols without the Federal government.
Is it possible that these protocols a few at a time, around the world will help?
On the cynical or Mother Earth perspective, my answer is that if we destroy ourselves then “Mother Nature bats last”. We will slowly but surely destroy ourselves – but nature will ultimately reclaim this small blue orb as her own.
Yes, if it’s widespread enough. Remember that the unsustainable power companies, agriculture firms, etc. only continue to do business because people buy their products. Their business models are inherently poor, and are already on the knife’s edge, profit-wise. If enough people switch to green alternatives, they fall over. (Barring government support, of course.)
It was actually only thanks to previous mass extinctions that humans exist today. Compared to the period of millions of years before that big rock hit the Yucatan and killed off the dinosaurs, this planet is still a blighted, blasted place with far less biomass than it had back in the day (and also much colder, even with global warming). But it works for us: our ancestors adapted to the massive climate change of that period, and thus upset the old order. In fact, many evolutionists believe that without mass extinctions, what you get is evolutionary stagnation.
Of course, another climate change could be devastating to us this time–but I don’t really think so. The way I see it, there will be negative consequences in some places (coastal cities), and more benign ones in others (my former hometown of Duluth, Minnesota might become prime real estate). Overall, humans will adapt as they always have. Other species, as noted in the diary, may not be so fortunate, but over the long run the shakeup of ecological niches will cause evolutionary change to flourish.
Let me be clear: I am not on the side of Big Oil or polluters. I don’t have a car, and walk everywhere (as I write this, I just walked three miles home from teaching school). I use a flashlight (on a radio powered by a hand crank) to navigate through my apartment at night. I bundle up in winter and turn down the thermostat. I put a high priority on preserving green space with initiatives like Portland’s UGB, and I think there should be strict limits on what chemicals can be released into the environment. And I am religious about recycling and reusing things.
It’s just that global warming in and of itself strikes me as more “hmm, this should be interesting” rather than “oh no, we’re doomed!”. I’m much more concerned about other environmental issues like mercury and arsenic contamination, childhood asthma epidemics caused by dirty air, waste runoff from huge factory farm operations, and the erosion of green space due to urban sprawl.
-Alan
“I’m much more concerned about other environmental issues….” I’m glad you are! Concerned that is. Whatever tips the scale will not matter after the fact. We have enough environmental concerns to go around. Take your pick. For example,the increasing acidity of our oceans is enough to get anyone/everyone concerned, or it should be.
Respectfully, Slacker, you’re wrong. For the next couple of decades, effects may be localized and apparently modest (though devastating to thousands of people, and perhaps millions, in specific places.)
But if the greenhouse gas curve continues upward, the next century will see catastrophic global changes, as the earth could be irretrievably on its way to becoming Venus. We could be starting over with microbes and maybe insects.
Species losses are invisible to us now because we live apart from most other evident species. But every year the species of fish we eat change, as species we used to eat crash. Soon we’ll notice less seafood on the menu altogether, and that’s just the beginning. The crash of keystone species of plants and animals will lead to many other extinctions. We cannot conceive of how our lives depend on them. We depend on the interactions of plants and animals for the very air we breathe, which affects the water supply and the soil for growing. We can stave off disaster only so long with chemicals and technology.
The climate crisis is only one factor in species extinctions, now at the highest levels since the dinos. But it could very well be the coup de grace. Our responsibility is not just to our cities or even our species. It is to the planet we have inherited. It’s always going to undergo change, some of them very big changes. But we only have to look around to our solar system neighbors to see the consequences of a few key things going very wrong. The only reason planet Earth is as it is, is because of the life on it.
Venus is, after all, a lot closer to the sun than Earth is. And again: in the era of the dinosaurs, even Antarctica was green and lush (though a tad chillier than other areas). No climatologist that I’ve read about has predicted that we’ll get warmer than we were at that time, a time when life was almost unimaginably more abundant than it is now.
I also don’t, frankly, buy into the “keystone” idea, that if you upset a few fragile species’ ecological niches, the rest of us will go down the drain. The meteor collision that killed the dinosaurs caused the entire planet to go dark for years, and spread fire and ash far and wide. We’re not even capable of that level of devastation if we tried! (Well, okay: maybe an all-out nuclear war might compare.) All evidence (including the worms and other life living in crushing pressure, utter darkness, and intense heat near “black smokers” on the ocean floor) shows that life is tenacious and not easily dislodged. Species may die, but if you look at the entire ecosystem as a Gaia-esque entity, these are generally filled in by the adaptations of other species so that extinctions are really a form of Gaia-wide adaptation.
Now, this isn’t to say that I don’t feel sad about extinctions. But I recognise that these feelings are more sentimental than anything. And there are some cases (like the giant panda, or the California condor) where I wonder if certain species happen to be facing extinction at the point in history where humans are trying to avoid any and all extinctions (especially of birds or mammals) and thus are tinkering with natural mechanisms. The two species I mentioned in particular strike me as being much too averse to adaptation and too slow in reproduction for their own good.
I tend to think similarly ambivalent thoughts whenever I read of intense (and likely futile) efforts to protect native species from non-native “invading species”. Clearly, by aiding species in crossing oceans to far flung locales, we are aiding the process of “survival of the fittest”. I mean, think about it: if you accidentally let a couple koalas loose in California, it’s not likely they’d multiply like crazy and drive out other species. But rabbits and cats totally kicked the asses of their native Australian counterparts, seeming completely unfazed by finding themselves in an evolutionary (and geographical) island they had not evolved to adapt to. They are the winners, the native species are the losers, simple as that. We ought to keep a few specimens of these genetically weak oddities around in zoos, but we shouldn’t fight a quixotic battle to protect them from competition with other animals, for chrissakes!
Whoops, I guess I rambled a bit away from the original topic of global warming, but what the hell. 🙂
-Alan
At this point I’d need to search out stuff to cite, but as a general comment on your comments I’d say that one important difference is the whole of human interventions, such as the cutting down of forests, the pollution of water, air and land, that add to the massive degradations of global heating and species crash. They all affect the systems that make earth the planet it is now. Earth=Venus is a metaphor, but the other planets do suggest how vulnerable we are.
It took millions of years for life on this planet to recover from the dinosaur extinction era. There’s no proof that humans could exist in that interim. There’s plenty of indication they couldn’t.
Thanks for your challenging comments.
Not that much closer. Please read up on the subject matter before making claims about it. Note that Venus’ greenhouse effect raises its surface temperature by 400 degrees, making it hotter than Mercury. It was likely very similar to Earth at the start of its development, and had the water necessary to support life, except that early developments there lead to a runaway carbon-based greenhouse effect, rather than the nitrogen-and-oxygen heavy atmosphere we enjoy here on Earth, with just enough carbon to increase the surface temperature 30 degrees from what it would be otherwise through global warming.
Venus’ bizarre rotation also probably contributed, but the apparent main cause of the difference between the two worlds’ atmospheres is their carbon content.
In Biologic terms, diversity is not only good, it is essential in order for the ecosphere to stay in balance. The rate of extinctions is going up at a geometric rate. Have we crossed the line of no return?? Hard to say. We are certainly a dammed sight closer to doing that than this time last year. How much more time do we have?? Perhaps the fundies are right, and this is the beginning of their long awaited “end times”. If so, I doesn’t seem very rapturous to this observer.
Great points–looks like you and I are largely in agreement on this.
-Alan
One hopeful point in all of this is that global warming speeds up the pace of evolution, so even though the loss of species (that may include us – there seems to be a bit of denial going on in this thread tonight) is a terrible thing, in the long run Nature will fill in the gaps – perhaps faster than we think. (I’d recommend you read “The Beak of the Finch” if you’ve not done so – evolution can sometimes be observed happening over the space of just a few years.)
Not to minimize the disaster in any way, but if there’s one thing all my reading of science tells me is that Life is more resilient than we know – and over the very long arc of geologic history, it becomes even more resilient: Just look at how microbes in the sediment of the Hudson River are adapting to use chemical wastes like PCBs as food. Does this mean PCB pollution is OK? Of course not. It just means life is goddamn amazing, even as it is merciless on species that refuse to play nicely with the rest of their ecosystem.
But I’m wandering from science into my personal worldview that keeps me hanging on (a mix of Taoism and Deep Ecology) so perhaps I should just leave it at that.
Thanks again Steven D for not letting up on this issue!