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On record meaning 142 years of history. Sometimes people conflate "on record" with "ever since humans were around" but on a species scale 142 years is basically
by qqtt 5y ago
On record meaning 142 years of history. Sometimes people conflate "on record" with "ever since humans were around" but on a species scale 142 years is basically no history at all.
Not to say that climate change isn't a very serious issue, but we will likely have to live with the realities of where we are headed, and life has adapted in the past to much larger swings of temperature.
- ajross 5y ago"Life" will adapt. Ecosystems won't. It really sounds like you're expressing your feelings about a likely mass extinction event as "shit happens, what're you gonna do?"
- xwdv 5y agoEcosystems are just a large collection of “Life”.
- ajross 5y agoI don't know where you're going with this. No, that's wrong, they are separate concepts. There was "life" 320M years ago just like there is today. But the carboniferous forest mats that we saw then spanned the globe, with trees growing on tens of millions of years of their undecomposed ancestors. It was an entirely different environment, and we'll never see it again now that bacteria evolved the ability to digest lignin. Closer to home, there is "life" on the deep ocean floor today. And most of it has evolved to exploit the oxygenated water of the environment, which is fed by an arctic downwelling off of Greenland (yes, all deep ocean water is fed from a "spigot" in just one place). Well, guess what, with the reduction in ice cover over the last decade or so and the increases in temperature expected to accelerate that process, that downwelling is collapsing. All those ocean floor ecosystems are going extinct within the next thousand years, and it's probably too late to save them.
- splittingTimes 5y agoYes it has adapted to larger temp swings, but these other swings occurred over 10ks or 100ks of years, not 0.15k years. Life cannot adapt over the span of single or low double digit generations.