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Wildlife collapse from climate change is predicted to hit suddenly and sooner
- samizdis 7y agoHow did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly. ― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
- Glavnokoman 7y agoYeah. But the bankruptcy of the ecosystems make me sad.
- cosmic_shame 7y agoIt's going to make all of us a lot worse than sad.
- hyperman1 7y agoThese articles scare me. Another one with exactly the same message: Things are worse than we thought, it was already bad, we are not coming close to doing enough to save us, there isn't even much of a plan. And then I see most of the west handling covid-19 just like we handle everything: No clear direction, minimal effort, leaders asleep at the wheel, politicians trying to get the better of each other, rich people get richer. Climate was an important theme in our last elections, but even the green party had no clue whatsoever, and the voters made it clear they did not even remotely care. Now Covid-19 is easy stuff compared to the climate. I was hoping Covid-19 could serve as a wake up call for the cost of incompetence in our organisations. But that does not seem to happen. Covid-19 has a pattern I also see in the climate: First, nobody cares for some theoretical crisis far away, then its in our countries but still not personal, and by now everybody knows about a specific person who died. Climate is a theoretical crisis far away for now. So how do we proceed from here?
- sixQuarks 7y agoThe book Collapse by Jared Diamond is frightening. It shows that throughout history, civilizations have collapsed with eyes wide open. Unlike today, those civilizations faced local collapse, now we have the potential of global collapse and we haven’t changed a goddamn bit
- perfunctory 7y ago> So how do we proceed from here? Like we always do when our leaders fail us. Organise and rebel.
- yters 7y agoSo on top of environmental collapse we can have social collapse as well? Sounds like a recipe for success.
- perfunctory 7y agoRebellions are sometimes the only recipe for success. Think about Women's suffrage movement, civil rights movement, anti war movements etc.
- yters 7y agoI agree civil movements and bloodless revolutions through the political process are good. Violent overthrows are bad, AFAIK almost always resulting in a much worse regime than the one being overthrown. The USA's founding is a fortunate divergence from the norm. More recently, look at the Bolshevik revolution, resulting in over 100 million dead.
- pasquinelli 7y agoYeah, how many are dead from the american revolution? And how many were lifted out of poverty by each revolution? Since you can apparently trace all of history following a revolution to that revolution, how do you add up these numbers? While we're at it, how many deaths do you pin on the british empire and the russian empire?
- throwaway888abc 7y agohttp://archive.is/Odrte http://archive.is/Odrte
- loopz 7y agoThe emperor have no clothes!
- swsieber 7y agoThere seems to be a huge assumption that when a species is exposed to higher than usual temperatures they'll be a collapse of said species. Certainly this holds true for some species, but all species? I'm a little skeptical. Basically the paper says that large groups of species will encounter higher temperatures than they have before (1850-2005, going by mean annual temperature, and higher defined by 5 years all above the previous high mean). And because of that, they'll be a huge ecological disaster. I get the temperature part. That makes intuitive sense (the whole planet is getting hotter, duh), and doesn't seem like anything new. What does seem new is the seemingly (I'm up for explanations about why they make sense) arbitrary threshold they use. Is this a good paper, or just an appeal to fear? (That's a real question, but to me at first glance, it seems like an appeal to fear).
- dpau 7y agoIt's not whether or not individual members of a species can survive if it's a little hotter. The problem is that climate change is destroying entire ecosystems in which these individuals exist. A polar bear can do ok in a zoo in San Diego, but polar bears will go extinct once their habitat in the Arctic disappears.
- sebazzz 7y agoAnd don't forget the food chain. Everything at the top is dependent on below.
- surge 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883616 This comment does a good job of showing how the journalist is sensationalizing the conclusions of the paper.
- stephc_int13 7y agoThe original paper is talking about "abrupt ecological disruption", but the NYT article title is "Wildlife Collapse From Climate Change Is Predicted to Hit Suddenly and Sooner" I've read the paper, and if I understood correctly the hypothesis is that because there are less usual seasonal variations of temperatures near the equator, ecosystems in this area are more susceptible to be disrupted by global warming. Talking about disruption seems safe from a scientific point of view, but collapse is almost synonymous with extinction, this is quite a leap...