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As climate warms, a rearrangement of world’s plant life looms
- seph-reed 5y agoAt one point I really took it upon myself to have some idea of what climate change would be. What I found was: 1. The greenhouse effect is very real 2. What that's going to do to ecosystems is largely unknown Having been made to believe that it was going to cause the next mass extinction event, I found #2 fairly underwhelming. Never-the-less, this isn't a gamble worth messing with.
- zpeti 5y agoI don’t know why you’re being downvoted. We simply don’t know. Experts couldn’t even predict COVID waves correctly (UK) but we think we can predict the entire planets ecosystem changes? I also think we need to seperate out how humans are driving species extinct, and climate change. These two can be very different things, yet are always conflated in the media for hype. Most species are going extinct because their habitats are actively destroyed by humans, or are fished to extinction, not because the planet is warming.
- jeffbee 5y agoPredicting aggregate impacts of a warm climate decade into the future is far easier than predicting the short-term process of an unstable system hypersensitive to initial conditions.
- darkerside 5y agoOnly in that you don't know you're wrong for a much longer period of time.
- throwaways885 5y agoAs a layman, can you explain to me why a very accurate (i.e. small error) model wouldn't still lead to catastrophically incorrect results when projected across a long timespan?
- jeffbee 5y agoThere's a difference between a fairly simple linear model of the climate and trying to guess whether the initial conditions of an unstable disease propagation model are < 1.0 or > 1.0. Think of climate modeling as saying that for a given species of trees, half of them will be dead at a given latitude in 50-100 years, not pointing at a specific tree and predicting that it will die on July 7th, 2047.
- jbay808 5y agoWhat do you consider to be catastrophically incorrect? If the model predicts that a glacier disappears in 2050 and it disappears in 2070 instead? Or if the lack-of-model makes a lack-of-prediction about glacier disappearance, and then it disappears in 2070 by surprise? Error accumulation makes sense to worry about if you're planning a voyage and worried that dead-reckoning navigation will leave you kilometres off course. But if you're on the voyage already, out on the open ocean, you can argue with the navigator's math but you still need to navigate -- you won't do better by just blindly insisting the boat never left the harbour.
- adamrezich 5y agoever since I read this article titled "Clouds May Be the Key to a Climate Modeling Mystery"[0], I've come to understand that all climate models are basically useless for predicting anything. anyone who claims such-and-such will happen as a result of climate change, because a model said so, is speaking nonsense. the planet is massive and its climate is an infinitely fractally complex system. if we can't even model clouds with anything remotely resembling accuracy, then why do we put any stock in predictive climate models at all? basically everyone agrees that the climate is changing, has always changed, and will always change. there is debate over how much of climate change is anthropogenic, but this is irrelevant to the point that predictive climate models are functionally useless, due to the complexity of the thing it's modeling. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clouds-may-be-the-key-to-a-climate-modeling-mystery/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clouds-may-be-the... downvoters: I would appreciate an explanation as to how my understanding of this situation is inaccurate. my views are never set in stone, I'm always open to learn new things. I just don't see how, short of a complete holistic Matrix-style simulation of the planet, one can obtain meaningful predictions from a data-driven climate model. I'm wrong about a lot of stuff all the time and I'd like to know where my understanding of this situation is incomplete or inaccurate.
- vegetablepotpie 5y ago> climate models are basically useless for predicting anything That is false. Although you’re correct that climate is very complex and it is impossible to model every detail. The notion that you cannot make valid conclusions from modeling because a set of observations do not match models is fallacious because it discounts the correct conclusions that climate models have achieved. For example, the first climate models from the 1960s predicted that the mesosphere will contract and cool as a result of increasing co2 concentrations, and this conclusion has been backed by empirical observations. Furthermore, modeling from the 1970s by scientists at Exxon Mobile found that by 2020, net warming would reach an average of 1 degree centigrade, which we’ve since exceeded.
- adamrezich 5y agohow is this different than a broken clock being correct twice a day? by this I mean to say, just because some predictions made using some models turned out to be correct, why does this validate those or all climate models as accurate predictors of the future? the system is so complex, poorly-understood, infinitely fractal, with endless variables depending upon each other in ways that we mostly don't understand... the models are so varied, based on different data sources, some omitting entire classes of data entirely... I would be more surprised if some predictions some models made didn't end up being true after several years. but that doesn't mean they're useful at predicting things going forward, by any means.
- mustafa_pasi 5y agoUnknown is bad in itself, both for farming and for wildlife, both of which depend on predictable seasonal weather patterns.
- ves 5y agoWe’re already in the middle of a mass extinction event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction And regarding your second point, we know it won’t do anything good, but we don’t know exactly what (nor could we ever!).
- slibhb 5y agoHow could climate change possibly not cause anything good? There will be some positive outcomes associated with climate change.
- dependsontheq 5y agoNo - since even warming areas will experience weather and climate instability which is very hard to manage. We as humans like plants are good at adapting to certain conditions, if these conditions are volatile we can't adapt. Plants and animals can't adapt. So no, there is no possibility of anything positive in this.
- seibelj 5y agoPlants love carbon dioxide. That’s why it’s called “greenhouse effect” - greenhouses artificially increase the amount of carbon dioxide in order to increase plant growth. Trees and plants will grow faster and larger as CO2 ppm increases, and we have already observed this.
- adrienthebo 5y agoThe greenhouse effect is due to radiation being trapped by the environment, atmospheric or otherwise - not the increased CO2. And while greenhouses may have artificially increased CO2 to improve plant growth it's accompanied with nitrogen fertilizer. The global increase in CO2 will only see a minor increase in plant growth but will be capped by limited nitrogen, and the hotter environment and associated increase in water evaporation will lead to reduced plant growth.
- jbay808 5y agoSomething to keep in mind about making unknown changes to a landscape: it's not by coincidence that most changes would be for the worse. It's not because the status quo is globally optimal, but because humans have invested a lot in the way things are. We happen to have built cities on coastlines, put farms where food grows, put bridges where the rivers are, and so on. We can shake things up and get unknown results, but most random changes will be for the worse because we've molded our civilization to the planet we already have. And this goes not only for humans, but even moreso for other species, who are much slower to adapt to changes.
- ericd 5y agoRight, we've invested a lot in the idea that specific people and specific countries own specific pieces of land, we're really not well set up for fluid changing circumstances, as a civilization. The mass migration and the strains that will cause seem like they're going to be rough.
- matthewdgreen 5y agoClimate change includes a range of outcomes ranging from “terrible for agriculture and many species but possibly survivable” to “mass extinction”. We’re already seeing some of the “mild” effects in the form of crop underperformance in the Middle East and wildfires all over the world. Many of the worst outcomes have to do with tipping points that we don’t fully understand, some of which seem to be breaking against us. TL;DR climate change isn’t necessarily an extinction-level event. It is just possibly an extinction level event. I would argue that if you’re looking at it and saying “meh” then you’re not assessing risks properly.
- goatlover 5y agoIt's hard to imagine humans going extinct. An extinction level event for organisms which can't adapt fast enough, sure. But humans have existed in all sorts of climates from the stone age, while colonizing most of the planet. Our ancestors survived ice ages.
- blooalien 5y agoIt's actually pretty easy to imagine humans going extinct, and taking a huge portion of the other life on this planet out with us. As the level of human "crazy" in the world grows (seemingly exponentially), I find myself worrying more and more about the fact that some of the craziest people on the planet (political "leaders" and their militaries) have access to nuclear weapons, and that's only one potential concern among far too many.
- goatlover 5y agoTo wipe humans out, you would have to make the entire planet unlivable, which includes high altitudes, polar regions, remote locations, islands, etc. I don't see that happening short of a gray goo scenario.
- blooalien 5y agoI wouldn't totally rule out any doomsday scenario really, as long as humanity continues to put the greediest and power-hungriest humans in charge.
- SinParadise 5y ago> 2. What that's going to do to ecosystems is largely unknown This is true, but is also a bit of a red herring. All hierarchical organizations from the individual to the country is optimized to the environmental condition they are situated in, and any level of uncertainty at that scope should alarming in of itself. Just two examples of our optimization and as a consequence, our lack of resiliency to disturbance: Suez Canal and the Ever Given, chip shortage, cargo container mis-allocation in shipping that is happening at the moment. If the poster boy of efficiency, the market is so easily impacted, what do you think will happen to lumbering and lethargic political institutions that we like to rail about so much?
- yongjik 5y agoApparently, when scientists say "we don't really know what is going to happen," a lot of us subconsciously interpret it as "even the scientists can't say it will be bad, we will probably be fine." Turns out, when scientists say that, they literally mean it. Cue 49°C heat wave at Canada. "We don't really know" should be considered an absolutely terrifying phrase out of the mouth of a climate scientist - and we'll be hearing it for years to come.
- blondie9x 5y agoA bit more info on the baobab die off. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/11/giant-african-baobab-trees-die-suddenly-after-thousands-of-years https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/11/giant-african-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_grandidieri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_grandidieri Heart breaking.
- debacle 5y agoThe trees are rotting from the inside. That's a complex issue and doesn't sound like it's from warming. Old live oaks can suffer a similar fate, and the issue is usually caused by stress on the tree impacting the tree's immune system. Trees are really good at managing stress from heat, however stress from moisture much less so.
- blondie9x 5y agoYou're wrong. They rot from the inside as they die. The soil moisture is falling and the trees can't store enough water. The insides die first. Stress comes from climate change. Imagine in extreme conditions with high variance in water availability or temperature shifts how an organism will survive. This is part of the larger Holocene extinction humans are causing now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- mark-r 5y agoMy first thought when seeing the Baobob picture was I wonder if you can still travel to see them before they're gone? My second thought was how much CO2 would such a trip generate?
- yosito 5y agoI'm really puzzled by the belief that the world's plant life was ever fixed at all.
- justinator 5y agoAs with changing temperatures, I don't think it's the fact that they're changing, but the velocity of these changes that's particularity worrisome. If a 1,000 year old tree suddenly can't survive in the now new climate in the same location, that's a little bit more than curious.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoExactly. All life has a capacity to adapt, but it is mostly[0] constrained by lifespan. Individual organisms don't adapt - their type does, over time, through generations breeding and dying. But if the environment is changing faster than that - faster than what it takes to cycle through a couple generations - then the organism type won't ever be able to catch up. -- [0] - Excluding shenanigans like horizontal gene transfer, that are mostly relevant to bacteria and archaea.
- snek_case 5y agoThat's true. There's been multiple ice ages over the eons, not to mention shifting continents, and new species radically changing the landscape (the land used to be dominated by giant mushrooms, before plants came along). That being said, although climate and the makeup of life on earth changes on its own, and can greatly change over time, the big difference here is how fast this is happening. I feel quite confident that humans will never kill all life on earth, because life is very adaptable and resilient. However, rapid climate change could result in the loss of a huge amount of the biodiversity that exists now. Many species will die, and be replaced with more resilient ones. I think what we're also likely to see, is that some of the most adaptable animal species are small animals (eg: rodents) and insects, things that are typically considered invasive species. Larger animals don't reproduce as fast, and there aren't as many, so they have a smaller gene pool that doesn't recombine as rapidly as with animals that can produce large amounts of babies every year. That makes them way more vulnerable to being killed off by climate change. So, yeah, I hope you like cats, rats, possums, mosquitos and cockroaches.
- ThomPete 5y ago99.999% of all species ever existed are extinct today. Climate is always affecting nature, we are the first species who have a chance of not joining that statistics.
- justinator 5y agoWhat % of species that have existed in the last 300 years are now extinct because of us? Is the rate of extinction graph linear, or is it trending up logarithmically?
- ThomPete 5y agoHow are you going to find out?
- justinator 5y agoI'm here asking, not here answering.
- titzer 5y agoVery poor reasoning here. 90% of all humans that have ever lived are dead. Therefore jump off a bridge right away?
- ThomPete 5y agoThat's not the reasoning. The reasoning is that climate kills with or without humans.
- lancemurdock 5y agothe sooner we move to nuclear the quicker we will get to clean energy
- mrtesthah 5y agoClean energy alone is not nearly enough to solve ecological collapse. You also need to stop the conversion of wild areas into monocrop agriculture and confine metropolitan development, to stop the loss of further carbon sinks. And even once you can stop all new greenhouse gas emissions, there’s still the massive task of removing all the excess CO2 currently in the atmosphere, which would otherwise remain for thousands of years and continue to drive carbon-releasing feedback loops in the permafrost, ocean, arctic ice, and rainforests.
- mellavora 5y agoyou forgot to mention cleaning up all of the plastic and other poisons, also it would be nice to preserve some of the aquafiers. Oh, and also the dirt (at current erosion rates, the US runs out of dirt at the end of the century). I'm probably forgetting a few things myself.
- Milkman128 5y agonuclear as a tech is great but its still managed by humans.
- Milkman128 5y agodowvotes? so whats the disagreement? Chernobyl? Fukushima? aren't humanities failures?
- rm_-rf_slash 5y agoA friend of a friend recently planted pecan trees. In 20 years when they mature it might be warm enough for them to produce pecans. She lives in New York.
- i_haz_rabies 5y agoMaybe I can one day achieve my dream of home grown olive oil... living in zone 6b. Also, what is up with all the perfectly relevant comments getting downvoted here?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tamaharbor 5y agoPea-cans or pick-kans?
- Milkman128 5y agothe only problem is how its not just about global warming but overall erratic weather patterns. Like Canada recently
- fatsdomino001 5y agoAnthropogenic Global Warming is great for plant life. The world is greening right now, and that's great for food production and lowering world poverty.
- mklingen 5y agoAnd here we see the bad-faith rhetorical goalpost shift happening in real time. 1. deny that change is happening. -> 2. deny that we have anything to do with climate change. -> 3. deny that what we're doing to the climate is bad. -> 4. actually, amazingly, claim that what we're doing to the climate is good. (you are here)
- fatsdomino001 5y agoI agree, we are starting to see the bad-faith posters here not engaging in real discussion. These trolls generally setup strawmen arguments instead of engaging with the real points made, terribly unfortunate and not a good sign of healthy democracy. The reality is that yes Anthropogenic Global Warming is happening to a certain degree, but even without AGW our climate was warming. And thank god for that because we're coming out of an ice age... can you imagine if we were cooling?! Yeesh, then we'd have a real problem on our hands. Instead we have an earth coming out of an ice age, getting slightly slightly more warmed by anthropogenic causes. The main end result of which is a more green earth, more agricultural production and less poverty. Btw, in case you didn't clue into it, you're the bad-faith poster in this scenario.
- titzer 5y agoExcept it isn't. The Western US is experiencing the worst drought in over 1000 years. And that's on top of the vast reduction in wild spaces, logging and burning of rainforests, urbanization, and conversion of prairies and grasslands to agriculture. This is probably the least "green" the world has been for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, modulo ice ages.
- useragent86 5y agoIt's well known that North America has more and larger forests today than it did a few hundred years ago.
- dleslie 5y agoThe impact on flora and fauna from human development isn't simply from climate change; our localized ecological impacts can be quite severe, as well. I feel like our discussion of conservation and reasonable limits on development have been lost in the last few decades, with environmentalism having become dominated by climate change.
- MarkLowenstein 5y agoHard to believe that the most important effect of humans on plant health wouldn't be invasive species. The article doesn't acknowledge that at all.
- i_haz_rabies 5y agoThe gypsy moth problem where I'm from seems like it could become genuinely catastrophic in a few years. That or we figure out how to seed clouds with BTK /s
- LeonenTheDK 5y agoRecently moved from a town with an infestation. Returned a week later, and no exaggeration, 90% of the leaves in my neighborhood had been chewed away. Even ones where residents had taken steps to protect the tree. I'm not old but I haven't seen devastation like that from an invasive species here in Ontario before.
- i_haz_rabies 5y agoI saved my beech tree by wrapping the trunk in burlap starting mid-may, and then burning it/squishing all the (thousands of) caterpillars under it on a weekly basis. It has been traumatizing, but my tree is fine. I also sprayed BTK on my small fruit trees and they have been unaffected. So it can be done... but it is time consuming and disgusting.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoHumans being the invasive species?
- PicassoCTs 5y agoIn my eyes, the best thing we could do, to help plants "migrate" is to take whole pieces of eco-systems and transplant them, with the ability to escape. Like a greenhouse, that is artificially cooled or heated, but a trapdoor that allows plant off-spring to "escape" if the conditions are good enough. The idea, that we can protect the world from change is misguided.All that we can do, is save a maximum of Eco-diversity, by offering it transport from closing niche to opening niche - or storage, if all niches should vanish.
- dmingod666 5y agoThere was a time when humans were not the dominant species. There will be a time when we will again go lower in the ranks or disappear. In the arrogance of being higher than all things we forget, we are but a line item in the larger excel sheet of planet earth. The threat is not to mother earth - worrying about her is above our paygrade. The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine. It will evolve and thrive. What will happen to humans, well, that's another story, we'll have to live with the seeds we sow.
- 7952 5y agoYes, if you use wishy washy terms like "mother earth" then everything can treated as abstract and distant. I care about humans and want them to survive and prosper. I care about wildlife and don't want species to be killed. And as humans we can use culture to go beyond our in-built programming. Ideas can spread. That does make us different to other species. That is not arrogant, it is just the truth.
- titzer 5y agoLiterally thousands of species, from coyotes to whales to crows, teach their young survival behaviors and have "culture". The more we look at our fellow DNA-based creatures on the planet, the less special we are. Personally, I think if you really cared about humans, you'd be interested in understanding and valuing the complex and fragile lifeforms that are being trampled by our current prevailing societal attitude of consumption and perpetual growth and preserving those fragile things for future humans to enjoy, instead of being mindless consumers disconnected from nature. Jeesh, as if no humans in history had fulfilling lives without potato chips, bottled water, and endless online entertainment.
- 7952 5y agoHumans can spread ideas massively better than other species. Our phenotype is distinct among extant species. Just like plants are distinct from animals. I say that as a matter of fact rather that trying to suggest any particular moral implications of that. Our distinctness does not automatically mean we are special. And our lack of genetic specialness does mean that humans are worthless. I absolutely agree that understanding life is amazing and even essential to our future. That in itself is an idea that couldn't possibly have existed without the distinctive ability to communicate I mentioned above.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoEven small changes can move an ecosystem e.g. change altitude at which a plant thrives; change depth at which ocean life survives. Coffee plants are currently moving - the traditional mountain fields are no longer optimal so planting has to be done elsewhere. Reefs of course are dying/dead and regrowing in deeper water. Who cares? Folks who depend on food from these ecosystems. They have to eat every day/year. They cannot wait for reefs to regrow in 100 years, etc. We can probably react. But will we? We let Cambodian people die in the '70s rather that lift a finger. Our track record is very poor. Hard to care about people dying halfway around the world. But politics is very affected. The Cambodian famine created the Khmer Rouge for instance. Imagine refugees from starving countries, looking to settle elsewhere. First thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions. The outcry from 1000's of Syrian refugees rocked nations. Now multiply that by 100 thousand.
- 1970-01-01 5y agoFungi too!