World's largest plant survey reveals alarming extinction rate
nature.com
nature.com
"Kolbert then explains that global trade and travel are creating a virtual "Pangaea", in which species of all kinds are being redistributed beyond historical geographic barriers. This furthers the first chapter's idea that invasive species are a mechanism of extinction."
So since 1900, that's 357 species disappearing, out of 330,000 (~0.1%)
How did they arrive at the conclusion that this is an "alarming rate"? Also, "up to 500 times higher" means, the expected rate is less than 1 plant going extinct out of 330,000 species, which sounds way too good to be true.
Speciation does not occur in human timespans. If 3 species of seed bearing plants out of 330,000 went extinct per year, we could expect to live on a barren planet within 110,000 years. This is a very rapid rate, given that plant life has existed for 5,000 times longer than that.
Who knows what chemical and medicinal discoveries we shut ourselves away from as species are dying out. Consider a single poppy species that gave medicine 4 or 5 chemicals that turn out to be the basis of the vast majority of medicine's strong pain relief repertoire.
This is far more of a problem than a solution.
1) Many of the bred/GMO cultivars are sterile and/or unable to survive in the wild. They actively work against biodiversity.
2) Many of the bred/GMO strains are used in monocultures either in agriculture or gardens. These both displace the native plants, steal resources, and are also far more vulnerable to pests, disease, etc. Again, not improving, but destroying biodiversity.
3) Much of human activity in addition to breeding new species/cultivars is also deliberately or inadvertently moving species into new ecosystems. Some of these become rapidly spreading invasives that damage or destroy the local ecosystem, both plants and insects, animals, and birds that feed on the now damaged ecosystem (& no, they usually cannot just eat the new plant, nevermind if it's not toxic).
4) Many of the bred/GMO variants, even if planted in their native habitat, are incapable of providing sustenance to native insects & birds. While they may still have the external characteristics to attract them (odor, UV spectrum colors, etc.), they lack the actual nutrients, e.g., because they are sterile. So, not only do the human breeding/GMO activities damage biodiversity in plants, they are also damaging the other ecosystems.
So, if you are going to count human bred/GMO'd cultivars, they need to be counted against biodiversity.
Between these disruptions of the plant ecosystem, pesticides, habitat destruction, climate change, and other effects, we are much more dangerously close to breaking the food chain than people imagine.
This is invisible because of ignorance, normalcy bias, and the fact that these are enormously complex ecological webs, and they are very resilient until they aren't -- at which point the system collapses and it is too late to repair.
Numerous civilizations and indeed ecosystems have collapsed because of this sort of problem (see e.g., Permian Extinction which nearly extinguished life on the planet).
We are now causing this on a global scale and, except for the asteroid ~65MM years ago, at a pace unprecedented in geologic history.
The problem from a mass extinction of plants is that we don't know what the reverberating effects of those eradications can mean. There are many animal, insect etc species which may be reliant on said plants for primary nutrition which then percolates all the way up the food chain and potentially decimating other animal populations.
It is not hard to imagine the potential side effects of say, the resulting plant extinction resulting in massive bee population losses for example. But that's just one prominent example of what lost biodiversity can potentially cause. This lost biodiversity can then further contribute to the rise of invasive species and the result is a destabilization of multiple biomes which have been relatively stable for a long period of time.
However, that's unlikely. Well before that, human society and population will likely collapse, due to climate change.
GMOs and cultivars grown in labs not only have no positive effect on biodiversity, they have significant negative effects. See more detailed post above.
I'm no biologist, but surely that is a Pandora's Box of a claim. There isn't even one clear definition of what a 'species' actually is [0].
I can't find a source, but I'm guessing most species are small, short lived creatures with a lifespan of ~1 year; such as mice or insects. That is 70+ generations per human lifespan - 70 generations probably is long enough to get a new species if there is evolutionary pressure.
It's a subjective description of a factual conclusion of the study. Extinction rates that are "500 times faster than they would naturally [be]" are certainly alarming to me as well.
Why do you think that sounds too good to be true? Why would a species become extinct naturally? Nature seems pretty good at maintaining a species once its evolved to be viable. Obviously things do die out naturally, but to me (a non-botanist) it seems like something that would be very unusual without external factors (eg meteorites, global floods, climate change..)
Also, there are diseases that can target specific plants, when unchecked, can wipe out an entire plant population (see Panama disease for bananas for an example)
Extinction level blights similar to these are not often found in the natural world. They're only a thing because we (humans) eliminated genetic diversity from crops through grafts and clones. If the plants reproduced naturally its likely that a range of genetically diverse children would have been resistant to the fungus.
Based on what?
Why would I expect that? Because of all the "sky is falling" rhetoric. I don't expect that to mean the sky is falling over the next 10,000 years; I expect it to mean that the sky is falling now.
[Edit: Note that I am not saying that this is good news - just that it is considerably less bad than I expected.]
10 000 years is a lot of time. Compared to other climate issues, with consequences expected in decades, this deserves at best a "cool, we'll fix that in a century or two, if technological civilization still exists by that time".
On the other hand, I do agree with your practical assessment:
> "cool, we'll fix that in a century or two, if technological civilization still exists by that time".
Because, if for no other reason, it probably won't.
And there's also the fact that it's a human impact that can't likely be mitigated in any other way than collapse of the human population.
Take a break. Take a day off. Or two. Go see your friend you haven't seen in a long while. Go for a walk in a park. Good for climate, endangered species and your mental health.
Leisure is a commodity that is out of the reach of many people now. It is no longer a part of life. This will not change through individual choice, it requires a coordinated reorganization of our society.
Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/othe...
I also believe many people would be happy to consume less or at least consume in a more sustainable fashion but the option to do so is often not available to us. The system favours business that produces disposable things that don't last and promotes a fashion of always having something new and different.
So the change really needs to happen on a systemic rather than an individual level. We need to change the incentive structures under which we are all living and operating. Unfortunately, those with the most power right now have the most to gain by keeping things the way they are, so they would have to be deposed in some way first.
I'm not saying this is a good thing by any means, but it's interesting to see that novel forests of invasive species are still maligned even if they contain a greater number of species/area than what was displaced. If anyone is interested in this comment, I can unearth at least one paper that examines these values.
In the end, I suppose we value the total number of different species in existence, and as that number decreases, there is a Great Loss. Yet I do like to mull over why conservationists favor native species that are struggling to survive over the introduced that are flourishing, often at great economic cost to control said invasives.
Note: this comment only considers plant species, which probably makes it very uninformed and bad. Take it with a grain of salt.
But these two things are not directly comparable. On the one hand, you have species that have gone extinct -- no individuals of these species are known to grow in the wild anymore. This does not count species that are declining towards extinction. On the other hand, most lists of introduced plants for Hawaii only count species that are invasive. These are plants that not only grow and reproduce in Hawaii, but whose populations are increasing.
While species diversity as a whole in the Hawaiian islands is likely increasing, due to introduced species, the diversity at smaller spatial scales is likely decreasing as endemics become rarer.
Correct. You simplified my comment nicely here (though I'm trying to find papers about smaller scales):
> While species diversity as a whole in the Hawaiian islands is likely increasing, due to introduced species, the diversity at smaller spatial scales is likely decreasing as endemics become rarer.
How do conservationists make value judgements in cases like this?
But we don't seem to have the political will to fix any of these areas. Pushing ineffective solutions that require effort from consumers is an unfortunately effective trick to keep people distracted.
If the conservative talk radio is right that humans aren't causing a shift or that there isn't a shift at all, great! We'll still want to be able to study the DNA of these extinct species to improve our understanding of living systems.
There have been other times when plants have gone extinct at the current rate. They usually involved city+ size asteroids.
> Most extinctions have occurred in the last 114 years (that is, since 1900; Table 1).
> modern extinction rates for vertebrates varied from 8 to 100 times higher than the background rate
> for example, that under the 2 E/MSY background rate, 9 vertebrate extinctions would have been expected since 1900; however, under the conservative rate, 468 more vertebrates have gone extinct than would have if the background rate had persisted across all vertebrates under that period. Specifically, these 468 species include 69 mammal species, 80 bird species, 24 reptiles, 146 amphibians, and 158 fish.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253?utm_sou...
It doesn't matter if the climate is or isn't shifting.
It doesn't matter if humans did or didn't cause this.
It doesn't matter if the species will go extinct or will evolve to survive in some form.
Depends on how you define legitimate. Also, given today's research "climate", I imagine publishing a dissenting opinion is tantamount to career suicide. Good luck getting funded to prove anything. Particularly considering how politicized climate science has become.
Which is unfortunate, because skepticism should be a part of healthy scientific practice - and I think it'd be a stretch to say that climate science isn't subject to the same problems, like p-value abuse and selective publishing, that plague other non-experimental, purely model and statistics based fields. No one is going to publish negative results when they can tweak any of hundreds of model variables to force agreement with data.
I think a valid proxy for bias is the relative lack of publications discussing possible benefits of climate change.
Opinions are not publishable. It is so damaging to propagate the idea that some guys over there have one opinion, and then some other guys have a different opinion, and there's really no way to tell which is correct, and that this is what science is about. Discussions about climate science in the public sphere are politicized, but only because of massive disinformation campaigns by those who stand to profit less if reasonable countermeasures were implemented.
> I think a valid proxy for bias is the relative lack of publications discussing possible benefits of climate change.
We might go extinct but if we don't, it might be pleasant to vacation in the arctic? Is this the sort of scientific claim you have in mind?
I think GP means things like "all that potentially fertile land that will thaw off" that sometimes show up, e.g. wrt. Siberia. Personally, even if true, I suspect it doesn't compensate for the farming land lost - and even if it did, we won't be likely to survive the effects of mass migration and conflict for these lands.
This is the sort of hysteria that results from one sided science, and makes it less likely for laymen to take climate science seriously. The worst case models predict extinction and so called tipping points. But, if you read the IPCC reports, the further you move down the chain of journalism->IPCC summary->literature, the less certain these catastrophic interpretations become.
>Opinions are not publishable
Sure, perhaps a poor choice of word. Let's call it dissenting literature.
>Discussions about climate science in the public sphere are politicized
You don't think that the same politicization could play at least a small role in the direction that climate science is being taken? These scientists are human beings, after all, and the problem space is broad enough to easily ask only questions that align with certain popular notions.
Not to mention, as someone who has dealt with geoscientific (though not climate) models, given a sufficiently complex model it's generally possible to obtain any desired (consciously or otherwise) result while simultaneously fitting historic and calibration data.
Meaning that it -should- be career suicide. Because the evidence in favor is so large, that it's incredibly unethical to give climate change deniers more credibility
Over a longer time horizon, the strategy we're employing might backfire on us. As every other species, we'll have to adapt or perish. Overpopulation and the destruction of our own habitat are not viable. I'm hopeful because solar energy and battery storage technology is improving rapidly, while also getting cheaper. We are definitely causing some damage, but ecological awareness is also improving. We have a decent shot at reaching some kind of equilibrium where we take better care of our planet, so that it can sustain us.