3 ms·

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

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.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
The human race is playing russian roulette on a massive scale with species extinctions, habitat disruption/destruction, and climate change. With every extinction, we are betting that an already stressed species network will not collapse. We do not know the keystone species, outside of things like "wow, algae sure are important to the production of breathable air" or, say, "wow without honeybees, we have no food supply". There was a joke in the nuclear age that cockroaches would survive us, with the hidden notion that insect species are inherently hardier than us big mammals, but the entire "windshield" sampling where windshields simply don't get splatted by insects as much as they once were, I'd question even that. In case you're wondering, yes, a huge amount of ocean microorganisms are threatened by warming seas (warming faster than the air) and ocean acidification, and honeybees are currently stressed due to colony collapse disorder. The human population of 8 billion and its current global economy is a barreling train headed towards a cliff of unknown distance with unfathomable inertia. There is some hope of averting the cliff we know is ahead of that barreling train, but it still seems most likely that the "game theory" of current human economics is to simply drive the train into the canyon. The coronavirus was very instructive. It was comparatively to "threats to humanity" in history very low, and took relatively small measures to counter. If one thinks in terms of political science and "the elites", what is most disturbing about "the elites" of leadership and business is that they do not care outside of maintaining position, earning more magical monopoly 100 dollar bills with pictures of old men on them, and if that will continue. The human race failed spectacularly from a policy and coordination standpoint. Science worked wonders, and it is in science we basically have our only hopes. But leadership of a capitalist world is going to be populated by people obsessed with competition and "winning", and very distantly "cooperating". Even the nation states, following centuries of harsh militarism, cannot openly cooperate because weakness leads to exploitation. Man, now I'm depressed.
- deleted 3y ago
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AtlasBarfed 3y ago

The human race is playing russian roulette on a massive scale with species extinctions, habitat disruption/destruction, and climate change. With every extinction, we are betting that an already stressed species network will not collapse. We do not know the keystone species, outside of things like "wow, algae sure are important to the production of breathable air" or, say, "wow without honeybees, we have no food supply". There was a joke in the nuclear age that cockroaches would survive us, with the hidden notion that insect species are inherently hardier than us big mammals, but the entire "windshield" sampling where windshields simply don't get splatted by insects as much as they once were, I'd question even that. In case you're wondering, yes, a huge amount of ocean microorganisms are threatened by warming seas (warming faster than the air) and ocean acidification, and honeybees are currently stressed due to colony collapse disorder. The human population of 8 billion and its current global economy is a barreling train headed towards a cliff of unknown distance with unfathomable inertia. There is some hope of averting the cliff we know is ahead of that barreling train, but it still seems most likely that the "game theory" of current human economics is to simply drive the train into the canyon. The coronavirus was very instructive. It was comparatively to "threats to humanity" in history very low, and took relatively small measures to counter. If one thinks in terms of political science and "the elites", what is most disturbing about "the elites" of leadership and business is that they do not care outside of maintaining position, earning more magical monopoly 100 dollar bills with pictures of old men on them, and if that will continue. The human race failed spectacularly from a policy and coordination standpoint. Science worked wonders, and it is in science we basically have our only hopes. But leadership of a capitalist world is going to be populated by people obsessed with competition and "winning", and very distantly "cooperating". Even the nation states, following centuries of harsh militarism, cannot openly cooperate because weakness leads to exploitation. Man, now I'm depressed.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]