The Year the Monarch Didn’t Appear
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Just one example: somewhere around 1995 a nursery in California, most likely in Marin or the North Bay, imported some plants from Asia. What they didn't know at the time was the leaves of those plants were infected with the fungus-like organism Phytophthora ramorum. That organism would eventually escape and infect tanoak and coast live oak throughout central California. A few years later it was found in Oregon. That organism causes the disease called sudden oak death. While it is difficult to make predictions, the impact on oaks in California will likely be profound. One study predicted that 90% of the coast live oak and black oak in California will be dead within the next 50 years. Animals that use acorns from these species for food will probably experience a decline, and one could imagine further ripple effects throughout the ecosystem.
If you live or work in Silicon Valley, and you look to the west at the coast range, most of that green stuff that you are seeing on the mountains is coast live oak woodland. Now imagine 30%, 60%, 90% of those trees dead.
(The above information is based on a talk by Matteo Garbelotto, a plant pathologist at UC Berkeley.)
By the way, you may of heard of California's "golden hills"? Non-native annual grasses. Brought to California by the Spanish when they first explored the state. Over time, the non-native grasses crowded out most of California's native perennial grasses. If you had lived in California 700 years ago, many of the hills wouldn't be golden, they would have been tinged green.
During the second half of the 20th century, the Elm effectively became extinct in the wild, both in Europe and North America, due to the Elm disease.
More recently the Hemlock came under attack from the hemlock woolly adelgid, an accidentally introduced Asian insect. The next generation will not be able to imagine what a mature hemlock looked like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event
We moved West eventually, and I've rarely seen monarchs since. I figured it was just because of the different habitat (no milkweed), but apparently it's not just that.
All insects are amazing in their own ways, but monarchs just have that extra curbside appeal to humans. Sad to hear they are in decline.
Regardless of the link-bait/fear-mongering at play in any environmental journalism these days... I have genuine concern about growing the impact of humans on the earth. It's hard to remain optimistic sometimes, even as a technology-positive person.
I bet you that every single one of us here that like outdoors and are 20+ can remember some animal that we can't find anymore as easy as we used to. That must means something! I am not sure what, but it doesn't look good.
For me the marker are sea horses. I been diving since very young and I can remember seeing them close to the south of my country like a pest. Several at once. Now it's been more than 10 years since I saw the last one.
The thing is... Humans will survive. Nature made us way to good at that. The problem is that we will probably be living in a blue and green empty desert.
Another point it that Earth will also survive us... So in the long run, Life as a entity is mostly safe. We are just going to be another event of mass extinction in the history of this planet. Evolution must be so proud :D
But this is just my IT/Biologist point of view.
A couple of million years is piss from the planets point of view. And in those millions of years we will evolve (despite what certain religions say). Even the mass extinction of the dinosaurs resulted in birds (among other things). We are all part of this world. And life goes on. No matter what.
The question is what will our impact have on a future us? What will life be like say in 10,000 years? Hell, even 5,000 years?
It is possible that we will do much more than just evolve. Normally organisms change over extremely long periods of time through 'natural' processes but humans uniquely have insight into the mechanism of how this happens. We may, in the future, develop the ability (and desire) to take things into our own hands.
Just starting it out nice and slow, we could 'finish the job' in a few cases. Knock out wisdom teeth once and for all (somewhere between 9 and 30% of people are missing some or all of them anyway). No real reason to wait around a few dozens to hundreds of thousands of years for those to finish disappearing if we can do it ourselves.
Nope, we're pretty well boned. Cold, hard truth.
I find it more likely that we will eventually all kill ourselves in some more direct manner than "humans kill ecosystem, humans die without ecosystem". My money is on something along the lines of "increasingly deadly war combined with logistics induced famine kills humans".
You're betting on deadly wars and induced famine to kill humans and I agree, however most wars are over land or natural resources. So if WW III happens at some point and we exterminate each other, you can bet that the continued destruction of our ecosystem will have something to do with it.
What seems far more likely to me is that humanity will survive, but for a few generations it will be a survival in a food desert, until our population rebalances to the resources available, and, much like what happened in the aftermath of the wars of the Khans, our environment starts healing. I don't think this will happen within my lifetime (and I'm in my early 20s), but I'd be surprised if, in my lifetime, humanity's quality of life, purely in terms of our ability to feed, clothe, and treat ourselves, didn't noticeably drop.
Growth must not be humanity's end goal. If that's all we work towards, then we literally are cancer of the environment: abnormal creatures with uncontrolled growth.
Environmental issues will change our course. We'll have no choice really. Hopefully I'm dead when the "water" wars begin.
Some are strained, and wars may be started over some, but Egypt and the Sudan starting a war over the Nile really doesn't have many implications at all for people who get their fresh water elsewhere. It won't make water more expensive in North Dakota; wells in Australia will still produce fresh water as Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers burn on the battlefield. Fresh water isn't like oil, it is not a traded commodity (and if we consumed it in small enough quantities to ship around like we ship oil, then there would be no shortage concerns).
There are plenty of concerns, but they are regional concerns with regional solutions. Some of those solutions may be "Find somewhere else to live", or even "Wait until enough of the population in this area dies, so that the water supply is sufficient for the survivors". These possible resolutions are not pleasant resolutions.. but the world seems to have a knack for being less than pleasant.
My point here is that there is no reason for these regional issues and their potentially horrific resolutions to threaten the survival of the species itself. We are too resilient for that. Should that be comforting? Who knows. Probably not.
I also think that, more likely than not, the standard quality of life will continue to rise. It has been getting better for a very long time now, and we seem to have some significant momentum in that regard.
EDIT: Don't mistake me; I'm actually deeply concerned about the planet. But it, and life, will survive pretty much anything we could possibly do, and most things the universe at large could, too. Not us, though, and if we aren't around to appreciate this place, its continued support of life, while consolation, is only academically such.
I don't see us colonizing other planets, the timescale required for us to start colonizing other planets, is probably hundreds of years with presumed prosperity (you don't see African countries launching that many spacecraft). We are looking at 50-100 years of prosperity at best, assuming we get out of the financial crisis.
Also, please don't confuse my thoughts on ecology, with thoughts on economy.
I wish I was just terribly pessimistic.
Humans are now the primary "shapers" of the earth (e.g. [1]).
We likely move more sediment than natural processes. More than glaciers. More than rivers.
For me, that's simply mind-blowing.
[1] Hooke, R. L. (1994). On the efficacy of humans as geomorphic agents. GSA Today, 4(9), 217.
That is to say, if we don't check our approach to resource exploitation now, I don't think we'll be in a position to exploit another planet, ever.
The only question is how long we're in for the ride. The most pessimistic but fact-based theories speculate thirty years before the increase in methane and CO2 emissions produces a 4+ degree increase in temperature and begins the truly profound changes that could result in the death of billions.
The rest is just speculation; depending on how big the exponential curve is (that's the problem with exponentials, small variations in the parameters have huge long-term impact), it's anywhere between 30 and 300 years.
Now, if we get the more drastic theories out of the way or if we pretend that the melting of the Siberian peat bogs won't matter (that is, nothing that I wrote about is particularly outrageous scientifically), then we're looking at 80 years before the ocean's Ph drops to the point where a substantial amount of molluscs simply die off because of their inability to incorporate calcium to their shells.
The thing is, the only thing that can save us at this point is incredible developments in energy technology (10x battery storage capacities, fusion power, more politically acceptable nuclear) coupled with a global reduction in per-capita consumption on a massive scale.
None of the superpowers in the world are willing to drop the current model of the consumer society, and fusion is, thus far, just a dream, so in most ways we're at the mercy of the climate now.
There is a very real possibility that we'll be the last generation before the Earth becomes a profoundly different, far less ecologically diverse, desert planet, at least as far as the tropics go.
The scientific case for this is stronger than the case that climate change is caused by CO2, since we have multiple natural experiments rather than simply one (specifically, multiple large volcanos).
Maybe we should stop using our collective IQ developing web/mobile apps and start thinking about saving this world or how to delay doomsday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doomsday_Clock_graph.svg seems to disagree.
The phenomena of modern times are exponential in nature and difficult to predict, but past success is no guarantee of future survival. Nuclear war is peanuts compared to climate change; this is an issue several orders of magnitude worse.
Hyperbole undermines veracity.
There's really no telling what CO² will do to the planet, even though we can guesstimate the result. What about the jellyfish boom? The consequences for that are pretty straight forward. What about the immunization of various diseases? We're already resorting to burning crops and land.
Sure it is unlikely that humanity will be wiped out by anything else than ourself. Still life could become a lot harsher.
Of course, even a few billions less people is not big deal. They were going to die anyway and it solves overpopulation in one shot. From a high level perspective, with enough time spent after the events almost everything is no so bad after all. Look how good was WW2 for the US.
Still at some point you have to take a step back. We pretend we are above animals. Consuming all your resources without planning, survival of the fittest, don't care and see what happens is what animals do. We can design wonderful piece of technology, think in abstract math, understand the intricacies of the universe, but somehow our legacy for the next few hundred years will a destroyed environment and much later be labelled in history book as a clever monkey.
Animals don't consume more than they need. We as humans, no matter how much we have, always crave for more, a hunger that will never be satisfied. No, we are not animals. We are worse.
Interestingly enough however, Canada are one of those areas that is getting warmer more than average.
now i know explicit answer why GMO is bad. You never know before-fact, yet can always be sure that whatever good at first look thing appear it will ultimately be turned into real bad one.
What the...
Does anyone else know what I'm talking about? I can't find any titles or clues on the web.
it's definitely going to be _way_ too late...
and when awareness hits like a ton of bricks?
humans don't act or think too well in a panic.
-bowerbird