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Sixth mass extinction 'already underway': Study (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Faust
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Bob Magaw
Footballguy
GroveDiesel
Footballguy
I notice that Paul Ehlick is one of the authors. You'd think he'd have some shame after all of his previous doomsday predictions proved false.
Thunderlips
Footballguy
Meh. I always see these mofo videos about some jabronis in America wanting to save tigers and #### like that in India and Asia. How would those mofo's like it if dudes in Mumbai or other Indian places start spending all this money to save the American Mountain Lion. I bet all them wide assed soccer moms would be pissed that there was a chance they could get eaten on their way to their car in the morning. Stupid white people.
TripItUp
Footballguy
I've been fortunate enough to travel the world, 46 countries and counting. I've seen mountains of uncontrolled garbage throughout third world countries. I've seen men armed with rifles protecting mountain gorilla habitat from deforestation. I've seen water bottles and other litter all over the Great Barrier Reef and on and on and on.
There is no question we are destroying the earth.
Population control and alternative energy are the only answers but neither will happen until they benefit capitalism which may not even be feasible.
What we are doing to this earth is a very sad thing.
There is no question we are destroying the earth.
Population control and alternative energy are the only answers but neither will happen until they benefit capitalism which may not even be feasible.
What we are doing to this earth is a very sad thing.
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Clifford
Footballguy
ChainsawU
Footballguy
How do they know that 54 species became extinct between the years 1500 and 1600?
eta okay, in the Stanford article they cite that they used "fossil records and extinction counts from a range of records" to figure that out.
eta2: It's still all based on assumption, and to justify their assumptions they hedge their bets by saying, "Oh well we used conservative estimates."
By the way this "peer-reviewed journal" has only been around for less than six months..
eta okay, in the Stanford article they cite that they used "fossil records and extinction counts from a range of records" to figure that out.
eta2: It's still all based on assumption, and to justify their assumptions they hedge their bets by saying, "Oh well we used conservative estimates."
By the way this "peer-reviewed journal" has only been around for less than six months..
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ChainsawU
Footballguy
The researchers say the average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last hundred years is 114 times higher than the normal or "background" rate of loss. That's a really, really weird time period to base their research on.
Check it out, this is paraphrasing, but in 1982 Raup and Sepkoski did a study of the distribution of the major extinctions over the past 250 million years. They investigated using statistics and time series analysis and based their research on the variation in extinction intensity for fossil families of marine vertebrates, invertebrates, and protozoans. The research contained 12 extinction events that showed a statistically significant periodicity (P less than 0.01) with a mean interval between events of 26 million years. link
Come on, man. You're trying to use data from the last 100 years to make an arguement when the scope of what you are talking about spans literally hundreds of millions of years. That's ridiculous.
Check it out, this is paraphrasing, but in 1982 Raup and Sepkoski did a study of the distribution of the major extinctions over the past 250 million years. They investigated using statistics and time series analysis and based their research on the variation in extinction intensity for fossil families of marine vertebrates, invertebrates, and protozoans. The research contained 12 extinction events that showed a statistically significant periodicity (P less than 0.01) with a mean interval between events of 26 million years. link
Come on, man. You're trying to use data from the last 100 years to make an arguement when the scope of what you are talking about spans literally hundreds of millions of years. That's ridiculous.
Rohn Jambo
Footballguy
I am doing my best to keep one of the unicorns safe. 
ShamrockPride
Footballguy
Earth will reset everything should it get bad enough. And that's not even considering that the Sun will inevitably scorch then actually eat us at some point in the distant future. I just read a few days ago that Earth isn't even halfway through its habitability period yet...there's much more to come after we're gone.
TripItUp
Footballguy
This is correct, we'll eventually destroy the earth to the point to where our own species is seriously threatened or goes extinct. At that point, the damage will begin to be repaired and the earth will reset. We just may not be around to see it.
Basic population/extinction studies all exhibit the same tendencies. Strong environment = population boom = environment eroded = population extinct/severely curtailed. It's just how it is.
Unfortunately, a major difference for us vs. several other species population studies is that we're a global species and not localized which means we bring down every other apex species across the globe with us. Nothing pisses me off more when you see the videos of rhinos being evacuated and the like.
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cstu
Footballguy
65 million years ago a six mile asteroid wide hit the Earth - guess what, it survived. It's also survived massive earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.TripItUp said:
We aren't destroying the Earth, we're making it a ####ty place to live in.
Population is not out of control in developed countries - only in Africa/ME is it a problem. As standards of living rise, people have less children.
Alternative energy is coming despite what capitalists want - besides they'll find a way to make money off renewable energy regardless.
Solar already has costs comparable to non-renewable energy and the efficiency of panels is only increasing:
http://www.sunwindenergy.com/photovoltaics/juwi-builds-solar-park-39-mw-capacity-south-india
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Rohn Jambo
Footballguy
"Quaternary Park" will have a bunch of monkeys and genetically re-engineered timchochets running around.
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There are a great number of capitalists that desperately want alternative energy. Capitalism is driving a lot of the innovation...
PatsWillWin
Footballguy
NCCommish
Footballguy
Yes they are lots of people who are in the business and working hard to become succesful. With that said the power companies and oil companies are doing everything they can to stifle those innovations or to make them more expensive for the consumer. And they are succeeding in a lot of places.
NCCommish
Footballguy
Planet is destroyed when it no longer sustains life. We are quite capable of bringing that about.
NCCommish
Footballguy
We also work to save mountain lions. A soccer mom or two is a small price to pay. Really addition by subtraction often.
NCCommish
Footballguy
He may have been early and somewhat over the top but he got a lot right. He essentially predicted AGW. There are estimates that over 300 million people have died of malnutrition since his book was published. And most scientists seem to be thinking the southwest is only going to get drier. It may become essentially unlivable. And you don't even want to know how many toxins are in our air and groundwater. So he wasn't perfect but he was pretty good.
I disagree with this. We've found living things in environments on this planet that are extremely hostile to life forms such as ourselves. While we might be able to make the planet uninhabitable for a lot of species, it is unlikely we could kill off everything. It might take a hundred million years to get back to the levels it's at today, but life would resume on this planet after we've done our worst and killed ourselves off. But considering the planet's been around for 4.5 billion years, that's not very long.
ChainsawU
Footballguy
I disagree with this also. Some anaerobic bacteria live within submarine volcanic habitats. Check this out:
We ain't gonna kill no bacteria that thrives at temperatures near 212 degrees Farenheit, bro. Do you know how hardcore you have to be in order to survive on nothing but inorganic redox reactions? Come on, man.
Todd Andrews
Footballguy
ChainsawU
Footballguy
The Cosmic Calendar tries to put into perspective the history of the universe in which its 13.8 billion year lifetime is condensed down into a single year. If the Big Bang happened on January 1st at midnight, primitive humans and stone tools would have made their debut around 10:24 PM on December 31st. Another perspective is that if the Cosmic Calendar was scaled to the size of a football field, the span of human history would occupy about the size of someone's hand.
Buck Bradcanon
Footballguy
TripItUp
Footballguy
Bob Magaw
Footballguy
Won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unnatural_History
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unnatural_History
Apple Jack
Footballguy
"It's just cloudy you business-hating libtards!" - Triceratops11
Funkley
Collar: Up
William Munny
Footballguy
Better get Wayward Pines going.
CletiusMaximus
Footballguy
Not in my neighborhood. They'd be out in force looking to get eaten - probably be the first time in years for most of them.
Doug B
Footballguy
Humans have a collective survival instinct, I think, that will kick in. Pundits in the year 20,000 may look back on the works of Asimov and consider him prescient.
beer 30
Footballguy
To me this is natures way of weeding out the chaff from the wheat. Darwinism at it's best yet we have multi-billionaires doing everything they can to sustain unsustainable communities by supplying them with handouts. People need to die off, this planet can't sustain the populations being generated today. There is a reason why a good portion of Africa is uninhabitable without mans intervention, nature wants it that way. When man finally leaves, nature will begin to heal the land.
There are a lot of harsh realities coming our way. Not in my lifetime but soon enough that make the human race look back on decisions made now and scratch their head wondering, "wtf did they do that?"
Apple Jack
Footballguy
AI will do us in before we get there, so whatevs.
E Street Brat
Footballguy
So you're against fences at Disney?What's a two year old really worth in the big picture.
cstu
Footballguy
The planet can easily sustain our current population. This doomsday stuff is ridiculous.
Bob Magaw
Footballguy
1) I haven't read the book cited above (2015 Non-Fiction Pulitzer Prize Winner). I'm not sure if some form of Malthusian human exponential population explosion is a central tenet, though it could be related. I have no idea how many more billions of people the planet can support.
2) A bigger concern is the pollution even the current human population is causing. Also rapacious, short-sighted practices like deforestation (see the eco-catastrophe of Madagascar as a kind of microcosm of problems that we could be faced with writ large in the future).
3) There seems to be disconnect between existing political structures that look no further than the current election cycle (or for that matter, people in general, it is seemingly human nature to not look very far beyond our individual lives), or national borders, and the need for more far sighted conservation and sustainability efforts.
4) The book cites estimates ranging from 20%-50% of all species being wiped out in the next century. How much are people cool with - 75%, 100%? How much is too much? Who decides? Is ANYBODY informed to make those kinds of decisions? In some cases medicines comes from nature. We aren't close to mapping all the genetic possibilities, that science is still in its relative infancy. Is it wise to squander that biodiversity genetic inheritance in a few generations?
5) The eco-system is highly interconnected. Some species are interdependent on others in a symbiotic fashion (bees and certain plant life, for instance). If algae were to become extinct, that could have unfortunate repercussions for the atmospheric oxygen cycle, and ultimately, human survival. What kind of impact losing a massive number of species could have on the eco-system is probably at best dimly understood. How many cross-impacting variables would that entail - millions, billions, trillions, higher? It is likely we don't have the kinds of math/logic/computer languages and programs capable of modeling that kind of complexity, which would put us in the position of flying blind, as it were. The concern is, we reach a point of catastrophic, irreversible eco-damage BEFORE our ability to recognize it, and thus, by definition, to have any chance of correcting it (some think we are approaching the point of no return, if we haven't crossed the threshold already).
* The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth by Kenneth Boulding (interdisciplinary/systems theory economist), 2016 is the half century anniversary of its, imo, prescient original publication - 14 pages
http://arachnid.biosci.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Boulding_SpaceshipEarth.pdf
2) A bigger concern is the pollution even the current human population is causing. Also rapacious, short-sighted practices like deforestation (see the eco-catastrophe of Madagascar as a kind of microcosm of problems that we could be faced with writ large in the future).
3) There seems to be disconnect between existing political structures that look no further than the current election cycle (or for that matter, people in general, it is seemingly human nature to not look very far beyond our individual lives), or national borders, and the need for more far sighted conservation and sustainability efforts.
4) The book cites estimates ranging from 20%-50% of all species being wiped out in the next century. How much are people cool with - 75%, 100%? How much is too much? Who decides? Is ANYBODY informed to make those kinds of decisions? In some cases medicines comes from nature. We aren't close to mapping all the genetic possibilities, that science is still in its relative infancy. Is it wise to squander that biodiversity genetic inheritance in a few generations?
5) The eco-system is highly interconnected. Some species are interdependent on others in a symbiotic fashion (bees and certain plant life, for instance). If algae were to become extinct, that could have unfortunate repercussions for the atmospheric oxygen cycle, and ultimately, human survival. What kind of impact losing a massive number of species could have on the eco-system is probably at best dimly understood. How many cross-impacting variables would that entail - millions, billions, trillions, higher? It is likely we don't have the kinds of math/logic/computer languages and programs capable of modeling that kind of complexity, which would put us in the position of flying blind, as it were. The concern is, we reach a point of catastrophic, irreversible eco-damage BEFORE our ability to recognize it, and thus, by definition, to have any chance of correcting it (some think we are approaching the point of no return, if we haven't crossed the threshold already).
* The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth by Kenneth Boulding (interdisciplinary/systems theory economist), 2016 is the half century anniversary of its, imo, prescient original publication - 14 pages
http://arachnid.biosci.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Boulding_SpaceshipEarth.pdf
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