Cartoon: Fighting Global Warming

[hereville.livejournal.com]

Comments

[hazardous-filth.livejournal.com]

Try as I might, I can't find any consensus on that rate.
Well of course, cause it's not even possible to find consensus on global warmings existence, cause and consequence. Then again Global warming has been said by even it's previous supporters to be wrong and Climate Change is the band wagon now.

Climate Change: For when the cause(global warming) you were previously touting to try and scare people and get what you want(more green environmental hippyness), can't hold it's own weight and needs to be altered to cover the huge wholes(things not getting warmer).

Hmm that could work for the war in Iraq -
Bringing Democracy: For when the cause(weapons of mass destruction) you were previously touting to try and scare people and get what you want(less arabs, more more money & oil), can't hold it's own weight and needs to be altered to cover the huge wholes(no WMDs). ... oops slight tangent and by slight I mean huge. Sorry.

[head-splitter.livejournal.com]

... What on earth did you just say?

[minimal-effort.livejournal.com]

What it will come down to is a very large lack of connecting wilds for animals to migrate in order to escape the changes to each unique environment. What we have now are islands with pockets of interesting animals that simply cant survive going through a hundred miles of city or highway in order to get to a home. Its a little different in boreal forests where it stretches pretty far with connecting pathways for large scale movement, but in areas where the habitat is already fairly small unique and protected theres no room to move.

We then get in to the debate where these changes to the climate will make some animals explode replacing the large number of dieing out species and completely dominating an ecosystem. It wont be diverse but it could be even more lush. Biodiversity is a very interesting topic if you ever feel like looking at a few papers about fast changing climate papers you start seeing a larger picture of what happens to these quick changing areas with no natural bridges to the next.

Also what happens to that one dominating special after the climate change comes, when a specialized fungus that decimates it comes along? Biodiversity is one of natures only real defenses to some of these changes, without it everything is vulnerable.

All of this is Imho :P

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

You're quite right. The rate is anywhere from "maybe some" to "ZOPMG! ALL OF THEM!" depending on who you ask, over anything from centuries to years to "it's already too late". It's all very well for the doomsayers-de-jour to claim scientific consensus, but it's not really *much* of a consensus, is it?

[r0n1n.livejournal.com]

I tend to side with EO Wilson, myself, whose estimates on extinction are pretty conservative.

[r0n1n.livejournal.com]

The problem I have with that argument is that we don't know how many species have already gone extinct. This isn't something we've even been capable of charting for very long, as a species. We can suppose the number of extinctees and we can certainly assume that anything we've got bones for that isn't still around is extinct, but that doesn't tell us how many species were out there and living and going extinct before we started noticing. So to say that species are going extinct "faster" now...? Faster than what? Faster than the Victorian era, when biology was in its infancy? Faster than it was before Darwin? Faster than before Watson and Crick? Faster than before Gould and Dawkins?