"Climate change is already causing widespread local..." Topic

… extinction in plant and animal species.

"Climate change is predicted to threaten many species with extinction, but determining how species will respond in the future is difficult. Dozens of studies have already demonstrated that species are shifting their geographic ranges over time as the climate warms, towards cooler habitats at higher elevations and latitudes. The new study, by Professor John J. Wiens from the University of Arizona, used these range-shift studies to show that local extinctions have already happened in the warmest parts of the ranges of more than 450 plant and animal species. This result is particularly striking because global warming has increased mean temperatures by less than 1 degree Celsius so far. These extinctions will almost certainly become much more widespread over time, because temperatures are predicted to increase by an additional 1 to 5 degrees in the next several decades. These local extinctions could also extend to species that humans depend on for food and resources…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Dawghouse bait…

The earth has been 2 to 5 degrees warmer than it is now before. Here we are. And here are all these species. How did they survive the last "heat wave" then?………….

The earth has been 2 to 5 degrees warmer than it is now before. Here we are. And here are all these species. How did they survive the last "heat wave" then?………….

I know this was a rhetorical question and you probably have absolutely no interest in the answer. But it is because the rate of increase in CO2 and the subsequent increase in temperature is unprecedented. This doesn't allow the same time for ecosystems, plants, sea life and animals to properly adapt.

All these species. Do you even know if biodiversity is increasing, decreasing or staying the same? I doubt it.

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I am in agreemnt with Bowman. Especially on the second point.

But it is because the rate of increase in CO2 and the subsequent increase in temperature is unprecedented.

Can you prove that this hasn't happened before.

Plus how do you know that it is unprecedented?

Do you have data that covers the last 5000 years on just what the CO2 levels were?

You don't do you, so you say it is UNPRECEDENTED and that makes it true.

Plus what is killing off more species is the Brazilians burning thousands of acres every day.

How about 800ky?
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Yes, it is an unprecedented spike in CO2 concentration (were currently at aprox 403ppm – in other words, off the chart). Also, since CO2 behaves as a well mixed gas in the atmosphere, Antarctica is as good a measuring stick short of having a Tardis as we can get for global concentrations of CO2.

'The earth has been 2 to 5 degrees warmer than it is now before. Here we are. And here are all these species. How did they survive the last "heat wave" then?………….'

Some didn't. Like anyone that stayed in Doggerland when the waters rose. Main trouble now is that so many cities are built near the sea on low lying land.

'But it is because the rate of increase in CO2 and the subsequent increase in temperature is unprecedented.'

Not relevant. It's where we are now that matters. In the past the planet was at a certain temperature with a certain amount of CO2. Less CO2 temperature falls seas go down. More CO2 temperature rises seas go up. People move to live where the new coast is if they can – could be fun trying to translocate New York or London.

'Plus what is killing off more species is the Brazilians burning thousands of acres every day.'

Things like that tend to add to the problem. Having one cause like that doesn't make the other causes goaway.

Martin with his charts that over time the results are basically a flatline and gee we had spikes before…

Actually looks like many times before.

Mithmee, I think what we've got here is failure to communicate.

In what mathematical world is 300 [the highest value on the chart for CO2] or even 350 [the height of the graph's vertical axis] LARGER than than 403ppm?

It would seam to me that the levels are literally off the chart…

Care to try again?

Care to provide real numbers.

Oh you can't so you use assumptions.

So go out create a Time Machine and than go back in time and get some actual real data.

Mithmee, those are direct measurements, since they measure the amount of CO2 in gas bubbles trapped in the ice…

Ice. Ice Age. We are still in the last one. What about before that? The four, five "great die offs". They had nothing to do with CO2, I wager, not directly or lethally.

What a stupid thing to worry about. A fluctuating, rapid or slow, it doesn't matter, natural element in the ground and atmosphere. "Off the charts". Okay, so what? Things DIE, over time, or rapidly. It happens all the time. 99% of all living things on this planet have died out. Do you really ever think about that?

We are a puny plaything in the cosmos, with control freaks always looking for excuses to control the rest of us. This is a natural. Science is the new priesthood of faith. We will place ourselves in its capable, manipulative hands.

Some won't. And not doing so will not doom the planet. An asteroid or enormous EMP caused by the sun might destroy stuff on it. Eventually a supernova or dead sun will kill the earth. It won't be our fault………

Ice. Ice Age. We are still in the last one. What about before that? The four, five "great die offs". They had nothing to do with CO2, I wager, not directly or lethally.

Permian-Triassic extinction event would disagree since that one WAS full-on global warming. Something set off a large spike of atmospheric CO2 that warmed the planet to the point that methane caldrates melted off putting the cycle into high gear and killing about 96% of marine species 70% of terrestrial vertebrates becoming extinct.

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Eventually a supernova or dead sun will kill the earth. It won't be our fault……

Sol is too small to go super-nova. It's going to end up as a red giant and then a white dwarf.

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Great War Ace. Are those who hold ideas like those you espoused here going to permit the millions that will have to leave their domiciles due to the negative consequences of climate change to move in on the areas that suffer little, or even gain from it? Because if you are not, those people are not going to be dying because things die. They will be dying because the border guards will be shooting them. People running away from a destruction that might had been aver-table but for libertarians, skeptics, and denialists.

The negative consequences of climate change can only been seen as normal and passable by those who either live in places which will not suffer the negative consequences, or who can keep out the people who do suffer the negative consequences. Otherwise they are very serious and need to be dealt with. Of course violence junkies, those who like killing, would prefer to do nothing . They see millions of possible victims and legal sanction of killing in a un-mitigated climate change future.

Then again considering the age of the average person more likely to oppose action on climate age (http://thebulletin.org/climate-change-generation-gap9351)

I think most of them do not give a damn, because they hope they will be dead before they will have to deal with it. Let the young uns pay the price. There you go.

Can you prove that this hasn't happened before.

Plus how do you know that it is unprecedented?

Do you have data that covers the last 5000 years on just what the CO2 levels were?

You don't do you, so you say it is UNPRECEDENTED and that makes it true.

Is 800,000 years good enough? Just two examples of all the research that you can easily Google.

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Plus what is killing off more species is the Brazilians burning thousands of acres every day.

Yes that is a problem. But just how do you know it is "more"?

I see. Dismiss skepticism and suspicion as the reaction of murdering violence freaks.

Or "I don't give a damn, I'll be dead."

Neither of those applies to me.

I have faith in the universe organized, intended, to promote life. Humans are one species. 99% of all species are extinct. Maybe we can learn to become cockroaches.

I distrust governments, all of them. They will take the science and run with it to seize more control.

There is literally nothing we can do to stop the oceans from rising. The current ice age is finishing up.

From the amount of bleating, you'd think that Glacier Nat'l Park's lost feature attraction is a calamity. That somehow humans are to blame for the ice age finishing up.

From the amount of vitriol leveled against modern industrialization, you'd think that our species having an influence on climate is somehow going to kill us off.

What is a real problem, to those who like "Wild America" and other wildlife habitats, is the increasing number of people. We need to specifically address that single problem, which we ARE the cause of.

When inside a hundred years, wild animals go from c. 90% of all life to less than 10%, that is a piece of data that alarms me greatly. Migrating toads won't save themselves if there are no places to migrate to………..

@KT:

Are those who hold ideas like those you espoused here going to permit the millions that will have to leave their domiciles due to the negative consequences of climate change to move in on the areas that suffer little, or even gain from it?

That is a dire, imaginative picture, worthy of a disaster movie.

Nothing is going to happen that fast on a global scale.

Coastal cities will creep inland behind their dikes and levies. At the most, their inland city limits will move as far as the coast gives up. The shape of cities will change, not their size: unless population drops considerably for other reasons than coastal shift.

There will not be worldwide "millions" migrating inland or to other climes, being met on the borders by armed locals shooting them down!

You are again imagining a 1st world scenario. Coastal cities in America are not what we are talking about. We are talking about cities in africa and asia. And you ignore that other consequence of climate change which will be massive, the desertification of land used for agriculture and animal husbandry. Or is the free market quickly going to make up for the loss of that land in a way that does not force millions to migrate? (btw migration is part of the way the free market works).

As for "There will not be worldwide "millions" migrating inland or to other climes, being met on the borders by armed locals shooting them down!" the bloody border between India and Bangladesh shows this happening already even in the absence of the worse consequences of climate change for agriculture and animal husbandry. link .

We will see, some of you will be alive when the consequences come, and will be held accountable both in the public sphere and were appropriate in courts of law. As for those who will have died , Damnatio memoriae.

since they measure the amount of CO2 in gas bubbles trapped in the ice…

That only shows what amount of CO2 was in those bubbles not what the level of CO2 was in the open air.

Permian-Triassic extinction event would disagree since that one WAS full-on global warming. Something set off a large spike of atmospheric CO2 that warmed the planet to the point that methane caldrates melted off putting the cycle into high gear and killing about 96% of marine species 70% of terrestrial vertebrates becoming extinct.

You Global Warmers/Climate Changers are trying to figure out a way to blame that on mankind as well.

Just shows that living on this planet can suck at times.

That only shows what amount of CO2 was in those bubbles not what the level of CO2 was in the open air.

Sorry, but they are one and the same.

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You Global Warmers/Climate Changers are trying to figure out a way to blame that on mankind as well.

"The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position."

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From the amount of vitriol leveled against modern industrialization, you'd think that our species having an influence on climate is somehow going to kill us off.

Uh, it very well could…

I distrust governments, all of them. They will take the science and run with it to seize more control.

AH, the everlasting tinfoil hat again…

Permian-Triassic extinction event would disagree since that one WAS full-on global warming. Something set off a large spike of atmospheric CO2 that warmed the planet to the point that methane caldrates melted off putting the cycle into high gear and killing about 96% of marine species 70% of terrestrial vertebrates becoming extinct.

You Global Warmers/Climate Changers are trying to figure out a way to blame that on mankind as well.

Just shows that living on this planet can suck at times.

It's a fascinating puzzle, with multiple actors involved – none human btw.

There's the giant rock from space – it would explain the presence of certain types of shock quartz in P-T layer and a plausible cause for setting off the Siberian Traps and adjacent coal fields, but we don't have a crater (not a big knock against it, since if it hit ocean, its long gone via subduction), and some of the earlier evidence from Australia and Antarctica isn't as robust as once thought.

Next up is the Siberian Traps – a formation of lava flows in Northern Siberia. We know that volcanism is associated to CO2 emissions (and the Traps are huge). What's even more interesting is that there's intriguing circumstantial evidence (via C12/C13 isotope ratios and soot in the geological record) that the volcanoes touched-off a coal formation, burning it all in a few hundred years and shooting CO2 into the atmosphere – which triggered the Clathrate gun hypothesis.

The Clathrate gun hypothesis, states that if ocean and polar temperatures reach a certain threshold, they start melting naturally occurring methane that would otherwise be sequestered in ice in the polar tundra and deep ocean. Once they start melting – it starts the feedback of more warmth = more melting of clathrates = more CH4 = More warmth … This kick the greenhouse effect into high gear. Some evidence via O16/O18 ratios would indicate that ocean tempeatures could have reached as high as 42 degrees C, but that number is more of a "high water mark" than anything else.

The next line of evidence is from cyanobactera blooms causing apoxic oceans. Proposed mechanisms include warmer climate putting more moisture in the atmosphere, which means more rain on continents, which leads to more rock weathering and sedimentation on the continental shelf, which lead to more dissolved phosphates in the water which leads to a massive algae bloom that kills off much of the ocean's wildlife.

Right now, there appears to be a concillience of evidence pointing towards a domino effect in which one or more of the factors in sequence made the P-T extinction event the biggest one in Earth history by a long shot.

I do believe I have been a bully. I apologise for my behaviour.

You know what Martin, you used a good word there-concillience. Perhaps we should start using that more often (it is a word I like epistimologicaly) then agreement etc. I sometimes despair when I meet freinds who are Material or Biological Science PhDs and I talk about consilience and they look blankly at me because their grad schools never forced them to take an epistimology class (Engineers are far far worse).

Oh and siberian traps is swedish trap is swedish/norwegian/Danish for stairs. Because the formations look like stairs.

So really Siberian Stairs.

Right now, there appears to be a concillience of evidence pointing towards a domino effect in which one or more of the factors in sequence made the P-T extinction event the biggest one in Earth history by a long shot.

And it's the lack of consilience of the evidence against AGW that the deniers still have to explain. Just like there is a lack of consilience of the explanations against Darwinism, to pick another contentious topic.

KTravlos,
My grad program has a mandatory philosophy of science as well as a mandatory research design course for masters students. While quite a few of my fellow grads just punched their tickets and moved on, I found myself in the category that nerded out on the topic :-)

I have always thought that a graduate student that does not find epistimology even a bit intriquing should not be a grad student, and most assuredly not a PhD.