Abrupt expansion of climate change risks for species globally

“On average, more than 50% of the increase in exposure projected for a species will occur in a single decade.”

In other words, expect extinction events to happen very abruptly and cascade across food chains.

Today people are generally not noticing the current global extinction event because of the way that your perception of “normal” diversity in species is set psychologically. If warming really causes rapid die offs on the order of decades however, the current mass extinction will suddenly feel very apocalyptic, by which time it will be too late to save any species that isn’t capable of radically shifting its own habitat range and food sources (i.e. raccoons will probably be okay, polar bears are toast).

A major interest of mine has been learning about the hydrology of British Columbia and all of the understood factors in its health, so to speak.

It has become evident to me that coastal hydrology is particularly precarious. Like in a lot of Oregon and California, we’ve got a lot of rain-fed streams which see little to no meltwater past May or so. It’s all water held in the mountain forests slowly descending, combined with additional rainfall through summer. A lot of these dry up in mid summer (totally normal), so the species living in them have very brief spawning cycles or live in the creek beds while waiting for rain to return.

But what we’re seeing is that there’s less rainfall in many areas, modifications to forests on a massive scale has reduced rain retention while increasing flooding events during rainfall, and so on — the drying occurs faster than before in these systems, the more-frequent flooding damages them, and the impeded hydrological systems essentially threaten to remove viable habitats for countless coastal species.

At first I thought I was being a doomer. Surely I’m being too narrowly focused and there are good things happening as well. It doesn’t seem to be the case, though… We’ve kind of taken the coastal rain and its multitude of lush and vibrant end products for granted. It turns out these eco systems were already quite precarious, and even mild drying beyond the odd draught might connote catastrophe for species with serious cascading implications.

Removing so many salmon from the streams and rivers has clearly eroded coastal forest development and biomass density in a very severe way. That has been its own silent disaster. But if we continue harming coastal hydrology through climate change and massive ecological interference like forestry, I think we might see something much worse.

All that is to say that once you look at the fragility of some of these systems and their species, ecological collapse almost seems matter-of-fact. We might be taking a huge amount for granted and seriously overestimating the resilience of certain systems, and how their collapse might devastate the apparent resilience of other systems. We seem to be kicking out the legs of the table.

As a fan of science and scientific thinking, the area of climate change and environmental care in general really depresses me. There are real impactful things that can be done on an individual and national level, but the entire discourse is hijacked by alarmists, population-bomb doomers, and kids who haven’t even gotten to the point of understanding what they’re talking about yet. Currently it’s all theatre and politics, people who could care are detracted by the violent alarmism that’s obviously bs at the point or the political nature of this discussion. Real science has taken a back seat in this one for the last 50 years…

Some argument of this form has been posited since at least the 1970s. 50 years of failed predictions from the Neomalthusians