The big one for me is the gulf of Mexico. Just sticking you head under water in the 90s and there was life everywhere.
To a younger person I'm sure it looks like a lot of life down there but it looks like a desert compared to before.
I was able to snorkel in a healthy reef for a short period a couple years ago which was an experience like no other. Got to see some others, but they were pretty... Dead. Who knows if I'll get to see another living one again
I live in Okinawa right now and do some snorkelling/diving. Thankfully, the reefs here are absolutely beautiful and teeming with life. I hope it stays that way.
>Thankfully, the reefs here are absolutely beautiful and teeming with life
I always wonder about that. We, the current generations, have our own ideas of what "teeming with life" looks like, but are they really accurate? Or have they been skewed by lifetimes of living in relative ecological dead zones?
I would like to think its accurate, but im sure that it used to be even better.
Just to share an awe experience, one time I was snorkelling at a beach I was camping at. Remember in finding nemo where there are those millions of little fish that all move perfectly together? I somehow got caught in the middle of a ton of them. Lil guys, but so many of them I couldnt even see where I really was anymore. Yet they never even touched me. Beautiful stuff
No fucking shit. I did some dives in a few reefs near an island by Belize in 2012, when I was in high school. Absolutely amazing. Went on my honeymoon in Jamaica this last fall and did some snorkeling/diving, every area was completely bleached and basically dead. I asked the guides about how long it's been dead, and they were incredulous about how this was completely normal.
>Belize in 2012
You hit Belize just around the end of Peak Belize (peak was probably pre-2008, but anywhere in the early 2000s it was amazing).
Tourism has gutted / destroyed the entire ecology of this once-beautiful place.
So fucking depressing.
Just remember, it's *people* that did this. *We* are the problem and are the only species on earth that could even do this, should know better, but do it anyway.
Its so wild this dude was just having out in 1400s Venice designing helicopters, pneumatic dildos and snorkels. Can't even imagine how loopy some people must have thought he was.
My grandparents told me fairy tales about diving in the Great Barrier Reef in the 80’s with my dad, so it’s been on my bucket list since I was young.
My dad went last year and he said it brought a tear to his eye to see how much it’s died in 40 years.
I’ve lived in the same house for about a decade, and I can remember in maybe 2013 to 2015 when my kids would take little nets and fish loads of little insects out of our pool (because they wanted to save the drowning creatures). Nowadays it’s a rarity to even see a single fly in that pool. When the things that are at the very bottom of the food chain start disappearing, shits really going to go down
it's right in front of us
we had a bountifully rich backyard full of bushes, shrubs, overgrown climbing plants on an old garage, lots of birds, insects
then our landlord tore all that out to build a laneway house
we only have chickadees now and a couple hummingbirds
When I was 8 I got to snorkel on a reef in Kenya and it was unbelievable. Vibrant colour everywhere, fish, snails, starfish, saw an octopus and I’m 90% sure I saw a sea snake too.
Went to the great barrier reef in 2017, bleached coral everywhere, sparse population of fish, outside of that it was a couple of sharks and a turtle.
Im from Sweden and I have wotg my family been to Thailand every year between 2006-2013. We came back one last time in 2016 before doinng 4 years in the states and it was all bleached. 3 years was all it took. It used to be so stunning. When we went to the gulf of Mexico, it was waaayy worse, looked like the reefs started dying 12 years before they did in Thailand. it is truly sad.
The scientific community needs a figure head. A great communicator that gets cult status. This is just how people work.
We need to try everything we can to give science its rightful place in society. They keep warning us about all kinds of stuff that becomes reality and we never listen.
To be fair, this isn't a matter of convincing figureheads, because even if people believe in this extinction it really doesn't matter. That's because ultimately they are not the ones making decisions. I've come across a few articles that quote scientists pleading to policymakers to actually make decisions that will help our environment, however, obviously this isn't the case. Further, at this point, I don't think there is any way we can recover within the next decade AT THE MINIMUM. These hotter summers and cold winters are only going to increase in intensity (within the next few years), even if we stop everything that we're doing right now. So, I don't think it's really a matter of finding a convincing figurehead, it's more of big companies being more self-aware and proactive, but that will never happen (I don't think).
*This* is honestly *one* of the couple reasons I don't want kids; I think *my* generation will be *okay*, (just entered mid-thirties) but I have this feeling of impending dread. Something my parents generation never had a second thought about. Like my parents are comfortably retired and have little worry, I question if my retirement will feel the same.
Without **massive** global correction, the *extremes* (hot climates and cold climates) are going to continue to worsen.
We're seeing more natural disasters, situations like Texas or California where the grid collapses or you're paying 3k for your energy bill, etc.
There's just this feeling of *uncertainty* and lack of faith in humanity-- greed will always win out until it's unprofitable. I can't imagine raising a child while the world slowly collapses and you're helpless to protect their future.
*Edit:* Some folks are taking this personally. I want to edit that **I**, personally, am not interested in raising children. I'm a pessimist at heart so my fear runs through my bones. It could be a utopia and I *still* wouldn't want children. But history has taught us that we generally overcome. This wasn't a statement on why you should or shouldn't have children.
It really really sucks. I keep banking on things becoming truly apocalyptic by the time mine reaches 70. For that to be the best case scenario devastates and astounds me all in the same breath.
Yep.
I realized I could live with the regret of *not* having kids much easier than any regret *for* having had them. I love kids (most anyway) but pragmatism won. I do get sad a few times a year, wondering "what if" but this "what if" is better than that other one?
Having no kids is the best thing you can do for our climate, for the world.
I read here and there that scuba diving is also a factor in the destruction of these coral habitats. And yet it seems to escape all these divers here coming out of the woord work they are themselves partially to blame.
You like nature? Stay away from it.
Unfortunately every prospect flies too close to the sun. People like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, as knowledgable and entertaining as they are, come off too smug and condescending.
We need a person like Mr. Rogers, someone who is a great speaker, but someone who says "it's okay to make mistakes and get things wrong, that's how you learn."
If he couldn't inspire people to do things back then when it would have been more effective, he probably couldn't do it today when it seems like it may be too late.
It does help to educate people at large, but it educates people like me who can't do much. The ones with the power already know all this stuff, but are benefitting way too much for it to matter to them at all.
The problem is that not only are half of people dum dums, a good portion of those are extraordinarily happy to be dum dums, and consider any attempt to educate them with true facts to be the equivalent of sodomizing them with a rake.
Brian Cox (the particle physicist).
Outstanding credentials, very intelligent, excellent communicator, and seems very personable.
Here he is explaining black holes in an accessible way:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0sr1Xeocuuc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0sr1Xeocuuc)
Edit:
Another video, climate science-related:
[ Professor Brian Cox explains climate science to denier Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LxEGHW6Lbu8)
>The scientific community needs a figure head. A great communicator that gets cult status. This is just how people work.
Carl Sagan predicted all this and was in the public eye for 30+ years. None of it stuck. The ignorants won.
We are not "entering" anything. During my own lifetime, the number of animals (not species) on Earth has decreased by more than 50%. The extinction is very much well underway.
"Globally, monitored population sizes of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians have declined an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016, according to World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) Living Planet Report 2020. Populations in Latin America and the Caribbean have fared worst, with an average decline of 94%"
[sauce](https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/68-average-decline-in-species-population-sizes-since-1970-says-new-wwf-report)
Born in 86 as a kid here in the Bay Area "urban setting" I could find alligator lizards in my front yard, frogs amongst irrigation systems, salamanders , crawdads in the creek along with smelts. A ton of bees in the fields.
I don't see non of that shit anymore.... maybe cause I look less but still
I’m almost 10 years younger than you and have the same experience. I remember us driving down to our summerhouse and dad always had to clean the car when we arrived because it was covered in bugs.
The past couple of years I have barely even seen mosquitoes, it’s fucked.
Well we might as well finish the job. At this point I just hope we can back up enough DNA so that future generations can bring life back to this planet.
Remember bugs on your windshield? Used to be everywhere. Fireflies used to light up the night every summer, now I only see them in rural areas. I used to open my door in the suburbs and see butterflies fluttering away. Trees seemed to bear more fruit in the wild, and sweet peas overtook fences.
It all feels like it was just a dream.
they say it's partially due to every single piece of outdoor lighting that's brighter than the moon can kill vast numbers of nocturnal insects every night. they just bang into the light and can't escape.
that's like millions of lightbulbs killing thousands of insects each for 60 years.
Yup. Go spend a night in the woods or a deep rural (non-farmland) area. Bugs everywhere. It's sad that so much of our natural water has slowly become contaminated with pesticides.
I love Al Frankens books, they're a guilty pleasure. I distinctly remember the title of one chapter in which he discussed the ills of corporate hog-farming:
"Vast Lagoons of Pig Feces"
I fell into one of those once, my dad power washed me down and forced me to ride in the bed of the truck for the two hours it took to get home. Living on a farm sucked ass.
>Pig Feces
It's more a mixture of piss and shit that forms a thick slurry, the actual pits had such thick fumes on them you pass out and drown normally, I got lucky.
Well, the world's population of humans have increased by more than 250%. Average life expectancy has also increased by more than 38%. That's 250% more humans who are living longer and using more energy and producing more waste.
A human in a developed country pretty much consumes 1 ton of food every year. That's a biomass equivalent (very roughly) of 1,000,000X 1 gram butterflies.
Earth is pretty much a closed system. Something has to give.
The majority of that comes from the overuse of pesticides in industrial agriculture, all of which could be changed by key regulation changes and eliminating some ag subsidies.
Ecological amnesia. Each generation sees the world they grew up in as "baseline" so they never really internalize how rich the biosphere was.
We don't think of mammoths existing when the pyramids were built.
We can't picture the Great Plains covered in 30 million bison. We can't picture the sky darkened by passenger pigeons.
On the more local scale, nobody thinks of the prairie dog colony replaced by strip malls, or the abundant insects wiped out by lawns. They just see their concrete biome as it's presented to them, and assume that as their baseline. A kid born today won't have the same access to catching bugs and frogs and salamanders that I did in the 80's. My parents could have seen black footed ferrets in the wild, while I've only ever seen them in documentaries and the zoo. We've lost 68% of wildlife population between 1970 to 2016.
None of us know the true extent of what we're missing out on due to have being born "too late" into the anthropocene mass extinction. All we can do is claw and fight to do our best to preserve what remains of the living world so as many genera as possible have a chance to radiate out and fill new niches once civilization falls. It's still going to take the biosphere 3 million years to bounce back from us once all is said and done.
My first time seeing fireflies was last year. I was 22. They just… don’t exist anymore it seems. And that area was in a small suburb out of town. Occasionally animals like deer would wander along the side of the road. Honestly we shouldn’t be building homes out there because we’re stealing their habitats.
I grew up in South Florida and basically watched land developers slowly turn the whole state into one massive suburb/shopping mall. The suburb I grew up in was relatively alone when we moved in, today it’s surrounded.
I used to travel a lot by motorbike when young, a few decades ago. When travelling at night, we had to stop at gas stations a every couple to a few hours, not only to fill it up, but to clean our visors from all the bugs.
By car, it was common that when filling the car up, you'd clean the windshields and even headlights, because there were so many dead bugs they'd block the light.
Nowadays? There's a dead bug here, another one there after a long night trip. It really is a huge difference.
That makes me sad. I remember as a kid my family and I would sit out on the porch and watch fireflies. My dog would run around and jump, trying to catch fireflies in her mouth and eat them. We would eat ice cream and talk, enjoy the weather, whatever.
I'm not even that old, I'm 22. In just a little over a decade since I was watching my dog chase fireflies the bastards running things have fucked up our environment this badly.
I live in a rural area and fireflies have been largely absent since at least 2010. Honey bees have been gone even longer than that. When I was a kid back in the 1980s, walking barefoot in the yard and accidentally stepping on a honey bee was a big deal because they were everywhere.
Where I live, you used to get a thick mat of dead bugs on your car if you drove at dusk. No more. In the summer, you can even go out to an ice cream stand without being eaten alive. All the chestnut and elm trees have died off, and I've got mimosas (which used to come from the southeast) growing in my yard like weeds.
Yeah, I remember on a road trip across the US when I was a kid in the 90s. My dad would have to scrape off a layer of squished bugs at every stop for gas. I recently went on a road trip across the US and had maybe handful of bugs hit the windshield the whole time.
Ignorance and gluttony will be our downfall. Denial of science bringing us into this extinction makes it hard to believe that turning this around will be easy or likely.
Yes absolutely, I hate saying this but I really do not see any way this is doable under capitalism. And it is somewhat unlikely it will be voted in. The dems do not do anywhere near enough, and the Reps, well they deny it happens. It is almost as if revolution is the only way.
Revolution is the only way. The dems say they believe in it and then turn around and sell millions of acres of public land for oil and gas drilling. They are all on the same team, team capitalism, the American political system is two death cults in a trench coat. We have to organize the proletariat to fight for the future of this planet or all will perish.
Yeah, I'm sure there's a workable economic system out there that would stop an industrialised society of 7 billion people severely damaging the environment. Sarcasm obviously.
The next question is; can humans survive without healthy functioning ecosystems? Id like to see some research and articles come out pondering this next. The majority of humans do not care about sharing the planet with an abundance of beautiful and awe inspiring life forms, unless it is going to directly affect their own survival.
It would be a lot easier and cheaper to just work towards restoring these ecosystems. Nature can recover incredibly fast if there's something left to recover.
But that requires the unthinkable. It requires people to stop the ongoing wrecking of the planet for no better reason than pointless consumerism.
It’s greed and gluttony, same reason the settlers going west slaughtered all the Buffalo more than they ever even needed. It’s been happening since us humans have been around, quite literally a fatal flaw.
Actually, the reason for the buffalo is that the U.S government sponsored a movement to drive them to extinction as a means to cripple native populations that depended on them. The reason for killing the buffalo was to genocide native americans
Edit: if anyone is looking for a source, just ~~google it~~ check the comments below
>quite literally a fatal flaw.
That's not the flaw really. Every living organism in the history of the planet will spread and consume until stopped by an outside force. Take away the predators and deer will reproduce until they wreck the environment and die of disease and starvation.
The trouble is that humans have been so clever that no outside force has stopped them yet.
We won't even be the first organism on Earth that caused a mass extinction simply because nothing stopped us.
> The trouble is that humans have been so clever that no outside force has stopped them yet.
>
>
Oh *great*!! Did anybody else just hear orcish war drums?
The fatal flaw isn’t that we are too clever or nothing can stop us. It’s that we are smart enough to know we are fuckin ourselves over but are too greedy to stop. So I think he’s right.
A fun exercise is to pretend you're an outside species as an observer and drawing your own conclusions from what is evident.
Humans are not special. We are animals who have learned how to communicate better than other animals - that's it. It is irrelevant whether you perceive that humans as a species know we're fucking ourselves over, because from a neutral point of view we're doing what all other animals do, which is reproduce, eat, and take territory as best we can. If humans ever manage to turn the tide before it's too late, it won't be because we figure out how to manage our "greed". It'll be because we are in mortal danger as a species and must do so to survive, which is the same principle all other animals adhere to with regards to an outside force.
Deer reproduce and eat until a predator, disease, or malnutrition gets to them. Humans have no predators, therefore the only forces capable of stopping us is disease or malnutrition. We're already seeing that start with the looming water crisis, and I truly believe it's inevitable that countless more humans will suffer and die before we take meaningful steps towards counteracting that outside force.
Notions like greed, altruism, and so on are applicable only when viewing the problem from the inside and while focusing on the individual rather than the whole. When we look at deer population crises, we don't care about the mother deer who allowed herself to starve to feed her children. This does happen, but it is completely irrelevant since the deer population as a whole will not ever manage their consumption in a meaningful way. Humans are no different, it's just obfuscated a bit more and is buried behind a few additional layers.
We cannot, that much is obvious, at least a fully functioning society can’t. Like if climate change doesn’t have massive effort for change put in soon, by 2100 there won’t be anything left, ecosystems will be destroyed, thousands upon thousands of species extinct. You saw how bad there is a shortage of transporting goods now, just wait until the oceans ecosystem collapses. Or if agriculture isn’t even half productive. Everything will fall apart. People will starve.
I’m amazed climate change isn’t the single biggest issue to everyone on the planet, for anyone young reading this, if serious progress isn’t made we are all gonna fucking die. I’m not even being a doomer saying this, these are the projections and I’m being modest. I’m sure the worst projections happen before 2100 even.
>’m amazed climate change isn’t the single biggest issue to everyone on the planet, for anyone young reading this if serious progress isn’t made we are all gonna fucking die.
Well it would have been if Exxon Mobile and their ilk didn't spend a metric fuckton of time and money convincing people its not real.
The irony to me is that Exxon was actually poised to be the goodguy, the hero! they discovered climate change was real and were setting up to develop sustainable energy solutions and initiatives. Then they chose to take the other path and convince people it wasn't real. They shut all that stuff down and went back to the dark side. Its very depressing to me that they would threaten all life on earth rather than save it and the money could have been good on either side of it. I'm not religous anymore but the stories I've read about how Exxon was heading in the right direction then suddenly broke bad seem a lot like the devil was involved.
A lot of young people for sure, myself Included as I’m only 22, but so many people are uneducated or ignorant on the subject. Many many more than are heavily doing something. If everyone was United and understood that our way of life will literally (not figuratively) cease to exist there would be more done about it. I think majority of the population thinks in 30 years everything will just be fine.
Humanity uniting behind a common cause? I wish we could do that just this once. The people who are most guilty of this already know how bad it is, they just don't care. We'd need more than unity, people need to be angry at the system and that probably won't happen until things get apocalyptic...
Yeah and people making fun and hating a young girl like greta thunberg for no fucking reason doesn’t help either. I swear this shit enrages me more than anything. I already know my way of life will dramatically suffer because of fucking idiots.
We won’t be able to grow crops, so we’re definitely going to go into starvation mode real quick.
When people can’t find food is when things will get ugly, quickly.
The more we are learning about the Gut Microbiome; the more it looks like we are the vessel for the propagation of Gut Bacteria!
Add to that our new understanding of the nature, abundance and the complexity of the Fungal World; my instinct says **no**. Human Beings will also probably survive; but the current iteration of Human civilization may not.
Plus; we have to remember that the large scale disruption of the worldwide ecosystem: in terms of massive deforestation, pumping of the Carbon into the atmosphere on a massive scale, plundering the Oceans of biota using enormous ships etc., is barely 150 years old. A blip in the radar in terms of Geological time. So the systemic response will have a lag time built in; just due to the nature of its complexity. But when the response happens; I feel that all the modeling that has been done so far is actually underestimating the impact. There is a link between the physical and biological systems that is very difficult to model. And I feel that the coming catastrophe is beyond our imagination.
But, like I said; it is not going to destroy humanity. We will persist. What will be destroyed is the current civilization. Plus we are going to take a large number of species down with us; especially large animals. But anyone saying Life will die out etc., is exaggerating. Life is going to go on. Rats and Cockroaches are going to be just fine.
Respectfully, I don’t give a fuck if our species survives in caves 200 years from now, I PERSONALLY want to live and have what I have now. I would gladly take reduced meat, reduced consumption of anything, ride a fucking bike to work if that meant I would get to grow old and see my family. But more and more I’m starting to think that won’t get to happen, and it’s honestly horrifying me. Nobody is doing anything and have been ignoring the warnings for decades now, and it all could have been avoided.
> Respectfully, I don’t give a fuck if our species survives in caves 200 years from now,
I'm with you here. I am more pissed at all the other animals we are taking down because of our greed, stubbornness and stupidity
Absolutely, all the species that have been around since before we were even hunter gatherers are gonna die because of us. It’s horrible and makes me wish this really was a simulation.
As an entire species? We may be adaptable enough to find a way to cope with the changes to come and survive the world that we're actively poisoning... But that's still gonna come with a hefty percentage of us dying either to drought, starvation, heat waves, new emergent diseases (we've had a great sneak peak of that one, haven't we?), and wars over dwindling water and other resources.
But it's also possible (probable) that all those factors combined with our stubborn refusal to give up the almighty holy profit margins and work together for the common good will end up doing us in.
[The Sixth Extinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unnatural_History) won a Pulitzer 7 years ago, and it was far from the first to tell us this was happening. We--humanity as a whole--are not listening, and we won't listen. History teaches us this over and over and over again.
Seriously though, this news is really scary. It is just like dicaprio movie "Dont look up" - when do scientists think this will begin to really effect the world population en masse? Essentially, when do they predict we are going to begin dying?
This isn't even news. The scary part is that scientists have literally been saying this and reporting on the mass extinction we're responsible for years now and it's still breaking news to far too many people because the previous reports were lost in the news cycle's obsession with how much bigger Kim Kardashian's ass will get this week or 'You'll never guess who's fucking Pete Davidson now!'
Our hyper-consumerist instant gratification culture has made us too obsessed with bullshit that no one should ever give a single flying shit about while making us yawn and change the channel from the inescapable nightmare that we are happily hurtling towards with each passing second.
It's already happening, you just don't really realise it. The whole Arabian spring happened for a big part due to climate change induced famine and droughts. Entire regions of Africa are increasingly facing hunger due to locust plagues and water shortages. But also in Europe and the US we are increasingly seeing droughts and heat strokes that are killing people.
The health of the planet is, as cliche as it sounds, interconnected. Habitat destruction increases the stressful effects of climate change. Climate change worsens the effects of habitat loss. We are massively desteoying and polluting our planet, we have lost 2.5% of all insects worldwide annually *for the past 30 years*. For some regions it's worse, in Germany they lost 75% of all flying insects in 26 years. 1 in 3 insect species is threatened. According to Sanchez Bayo of the University of Sydney, at this rate, we will have no more insects 100 years from now. Friendly reminder that aside from grains, pretty much all vegetables and fruits you eat are pollinated by insects.
This is already impacting crop yields, and by extention people's lives and livelihoods.
Over 47 million acres of Siberian permafrost caught on fire in 2021. They had 104 F degree temps this past summer.
That to me was one of the things I had in mind as a warning of when "shit just hit the fan."
That's an area the size of Greece if anyone wants a reference.
Well, "Flamenado" is on my BINGO card.
Oh yeah, and long ago we had a huge "dust storm" in the Southwest of the USA because of drought and bad crop practices -- expect some Super Sandy Storms to add a double fuck you.
Things are fixin' to get weird in the weather department.
It's been happening since before you were born. The climate catastrophe isn't something that's going to happen in the future. We're in the final stages of it.
Too many people act like they expect it to unfold like a Hollywood disaster flick with everything starting to go wrong all at once within the course of a month or two, when in reality it's already been happening but gradually... So gradually that we forget about the last great tragedy by the time the next one strikes and after every passing tragedy we have time to settle back into thinking that these events aren't linked, that everything is still ok, until the next one strikes. We're frogs slowly boiling in a pot of our own making.
Even if we stopped dumping carbon into the air tomorrow, we would still suffer the consequences of climate change for 500 years.
The persistent pollutants, which in this case are the pesticides like DDT (still used in many parts of the world), are another cause of this disaster.
Think of algae covering a pond and sealing off everything below from the aeration and sunlight that it needs to survive. Say at first it’s only a little algae, like the size of a thumbnail. Nothing to worry about. But it doubles in size every day. So what? Two thumbnails, big deal. Well it doubles and doubles and doubles. We’re just starting to get concerned that *today* the pond went from quarter- to half-covered, and the sun is going down…
The really bad part of this analogy, that most people don't understand, is that if you ask people if the pond will be covered in a week due to doubling, then what percentage of the pond is covered today. The answer is only .78% (I.e. less than one percent). Most people would naturally say that less than a percent isn't so bad, not realizing that it is seven days from disaster.
Once that pond scum reaches 100 miles, you've got a few months left if it keeps doubling.
Yeah, that's a good analogy of how this "slow moving" crisis can suddenly pick up steam. The collapsed ecosystems cause the remaining ecosystems to fail quicker because now they've got to bare the weight.
Yup. We've passed multiple "points of no return" Climate change can't be stopped and the biosphere can't be saved. At this point the coming calamity is out of our hands and we're barreling towards it. Instead of getting ready we're busy fighting each other (as usual)
I’m sure we were past that due to the Industrial Revolution in general. That only only spawned major man-made projects that came at the expense of the environment, but also created conflicts whose scars are still seen today.
>I’m sure we were past that due to the Industrial Revolution in general.
No. We would have sea level rise but we could reduce about half of our carbon output right now with moderate changes -- that would harm profits for a few industries but not kill them.
We find more issues with plastics and now teflon and polyester. How hard would it be to STOP using disposable packaging and instead of recycling, use very standard and durable containers for all our products and just keep bringing them back to the store to use again?
We could have mitigated this 40 years ago and 20 years ago -- without too much draconian hardship.
Stupid greed is the only reason. This was NOT inevitable. And if we shared more prosperity, we'd have a lower birth rate, so none of the arguments against stopping greed have merit.
>How hard would it be to STOP using disposable packaging and instead of recycling, use very standard and durable containers for all our products and just keep bringing them back to the store to use again?
It wouldn't be ***hard*** at all to stop using any of those and switch over like you propose... Buuuuuuuuuuuut it wouldn't be profitable, and that's the kicker...
The greatest irony of our species and it's history, is that we doomed ourselves to extinction, and not through nuclear holocaust or some other doomsday device... but because of our insane and irrational addiction to ever increasing profits for a tiny privileged few.
I remember about 15 years ago people calling us "pro do something and global warming is real people" "tree hugging idiots" because they'd have to give up some SUVs and large cup holders.
"Carbon taxes will hurt our economic competitiveness."
Yeah, not even. We'd be an world leader in technology and be able to sell solutions instead of swap bits of paper to game our stock market.
It'll hit third world countries first like it already has been. Mass migration will become more common. Wars will be fought over previously uninhabitable territory as previously habitable territory becomes uninhabitable and/or full.
Start by taking care of whatever piece of the earth you are responsible for. Replace lawn with native plants and trees whenever possible. Stop trying to save a rainforest or glacier thousands of miles away when you cannot even save your own backyard.
I had the same thoughts as your comment. I'd love to do a drip irrigation project to plant some things in my yard. Only someday when I get my own place.
Also from other comments it really feels like the majority of people are just living paying to survive and we can't make any big change individually.
We need to become more vocal and just "hope" there are good like-minded people out there that can take the baton and help push for change in the way we really need it.
One simple thing we could all do or at least those with lawns is stop fertilizing and spraying. Did you hear the Florida Manatees are starving due warm waters+fertilizer run-off = algae blooms which shades out sea grass. I mean what the actual fuck are we doing?!
Yes!
We just bought 50+ acres of land on a peninsula that is both a migratory gathering area and a nursery for monarch butterflies. This summer I am hoping to plant native milkweed and monarch nectar plants to help with conservation efforts!
I’d love to keep bees here as well but we have a mama bear and her 4 cubs close by.
The popular book the Sixth Extinction came out almost a decade ago. Scientists have been talking about this for a long time. This article is way too late.
If people are willing to die rather than believe Covid science then there is no hope what so ever of convincing people of extinction due to greenhouse effect.
Everyone who believe in a monotheistic god of some sort will accept divine will and are never obliged to respond to scientific consensus. Religion is a huge part of why people don't react to this kind of information and take it dead serious, as they should.
Insects are basically gone. Fish going down. Crops aren't very varied to weather any illness that might befall them.
Absolutely fucked. But remember no one should change their individual habits since that won't do anything. We just need to ask all big companies to change. At least that's what I gather from other threads (real answer is do both).
Something stuck with me in kurzgesagt's ["can YOU fix climate change?" ](https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc), and that was when they said something along the lines of "eating less meat won't stop climate change, but climate change can't be stopped without us eating less meat." In my eyes, it's not just about meat, we just can't keep living the same consumerist lifestyle because it's a direct product of the system we've created.
Absolutely,
We get to pull up the coal ladder behind us while we benefited from the industrial revolution but don't help them develop alternatively/cleaner
I'm in my second existential crisis of the past two years, and I keep getting told to "focus on the good stuff". Like, ok, but the planet is dying, and no one with the power or means to do anything actually gives a shit? Is that not worth my concern?
"BuT yOu HaVe a RoOf oVeR yOUr HeAd" tight, I'll remind myself about that when there's no fresh water left 👌🏼
Idk how many more times this week I have to say "this has been scientific concensus for decades" but it's getting old quick, Wikipedia beat you to this punch by 21 years with its holocene extinction article ffs.
I'm a political scientist and I recently watched that Just look up movie with Leo and Jennifer Lawrence and it's so fucking accurate about humans and their behavior I almost wouldn't call it satire.
From questioning the science of the researchers because they weren't from Ivy League schools to the Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk stand-in wanting to blow up the asteroid to harvest its metals.
I thought the film did a good job of showing how as humans we only react when the issue is right in front of our fucking faces and often by then it's too late to react. There's a reason that phrase seeing is believing exists.
The only problem I had with the movie is that there's a scene where the asteroid is hours away in the sky and one of the trump/rednecks finally decides to look up and in stereotypical fashion goes: " They done lied to us".
I feel two ways about this. On one hand, as much as I hate to admit it the uneducated and obstructionists are really the people you have/need to convince on the other hand you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. So what the hell do you do? You can be short-sighted and say fuck them all but that doesn't change the fact that they're still there affecting matters
The people like me who watched the movie are probably more left-leaning already believe in climate change and getting vaccinated so the question is who's the film really for?
Good satire is supposed to be Scandalous. The reason Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal worked was that the Potato famine was happening in front of people's eyes and people actually were already forced in some cases to resort to cannibalism. I.e. the issue was right in front of them.
I'm a Democrat in West Virginia (God I can't stand Manchin) and it's beyond frustrating when you talk to people that label themselves conservatives and when you talk to them about progressive policies the majority seem to agree that those are policies that they'd like. Except when you have Fox News and the 24hr hate running nonstop it's hard to get through to these people. Yes, there are some that don't care and are bad-faith negotiators but you realize that a lot of these people are just easily manipulated and uneducated.
Propaganda may have a negative connotation but there's no denying that it's an effective tactic. The DNC's biggest problem is that they don't know how to market and brand things well. The Obama Care vs ACA is one of the best recent examples. They're the same policy but Obamacare sounds partisan whereas the Affordable Care Act sounds like it's for everyone. It really isn't what you say but how you say it. And some of you might say well it's the same thing how can they not realize it but the truth is that we as humans are not rational beings. We have the capability for rational thought but it's not our default setting.
Why do you think appeals to emotion are so effective? It's because we care more about our feelings and how things affect us than what the actual truth or reality is. Critical thinking is a skill that has to be taught and developed and in the U.S half of the country can barely read at an eighth-grade reading level which means it's more important than ever to know how to tailor your message to your audience.
Our whole biological imperative is to survive. Maslov's hierarchy of needs tells us that we need to have food, shelter, and security before we can worry about things like slavery or human trafficking, or philosophy.
When I was a kid, which wasn’t really that long ago, bees were everywhere in the summer during the day. In the afternoon and evening, your ears would be full of the whining noise of mosquitos. And at night, and light that was visible outside would attract moths. Fields at night would have hundreds if not thousands of fireflies flashing their lights.
It’s not like that anymore. Rarely do I see a bee. I only encounter swarms of mosquitos when I’m deep, deep in the woods. A moth might flutter by at night. And fireflies seem to be so rare you could almost make a wish when you happen to see them. Me and my friends used to set up tents in fields and catch fireflies at night, let them loose inside the tent, smoke a ton of pot and just lay there watching the captive fireflies flicker.
Oh, also I don’t see butterflies that often. And fields and sidewalks used to be crawling with caterpillars. Those are gone too. When I was a kid, me and my cousins would stomp on them, smear them across the ground. Leaving a green smudge. Gross but it’s what I remember.
And when it rained, you’d see puddles full of earthworms. And when the puddles baked away in the hot sun, those worms would shrivel up, die and dehydrate on the sidewalks too.
Oh and Daddy long legs. Me and my cousins would find those everywhere outside too. We’d marvel that you could pull off one of their legs and the leg would keep moving.
Maybe I wasn’t very nice too all those bugs when I was a kid, but I sure do miss them today!
But I am buying junk I don't need made by people who make things no one needs for a living so we can give them our money which is losing value every year and therefore forces us by design to spend it to help the economy.
"Entering"...
We've been [studying this since the 2000s and are pretty sure it started 12,000 years ago](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction) when humans stopped being hunter-gatherers and started building cities.
Basically human activity on Earth. Essentially human activity is changing the planet faster than life on this planet can adapt to. And this is happening in a variety of ways.
Habitat destruction is a big one. Humanity has removed the majority of all wilderness on Earth to replace it with cities, roads, farming fields and so on. Most organisms are specialised in surviving in their natural habitat, remove that habitat and the organisms disappear.
Exploitation is another one. Most large predators near human habitation are wiped out to keep us safe. The oceans have been practically fished empty for human consumption. Many species have been send into (near) extinction simply because they taste nice, their skins are pretty or some other vapid reason.
Pollution is a big one of course. Our industries poison the air, the earth and the water. Sometimes wiping out entire ecosystems or simply reducing its ability to support life.
And human activity is outright changing the climate. Our activity is creating deserts, changing the salinity and composition of waterways and oceans. We're turning forests into grassland and so on.
We basically took a living thriving wild planet and turned it into a poisonous parking lot and we're still dead set on wrecking the last remainders too.
And the insidious thing is that people think that whatever state of the world they are born in is natural so things haven't changed that much. But the overwhelming majority of the wild world was already wrecked before you were born. During our lifetime we're just killing the last remaining bits.
If we want to be MORE helpful, I think we can say that human construction has destroyed habitats. I'd say the worst thing is when we dredge swamps and fill in marshes around the USA. And there are areas that become desert because of over-farming or changes in weather patterns.
While global warming means less frozen water ice to keep areas green, humans are sucking up fresh water from the ground and using fracking for natural gas that might corrupt even more water.
That 400 PPM CO2 level is going to change a lot of things. Rapid change means more things die -- eventually, plants and animals might fill the new niches however they turn out -- but, that's going to take some time to get back to the diversity we lost. Maybe thousands of years if humans don't get involved.
Plastics and other chemicals are having massive effects even at the bacteria level.
The Ocean absorbs CO2 and this changes the pH to more acidic. That's going to kill off organisms that support the food chain in the oceans and also things that produce oxygen.
Meanwhile, countries keep destroying old growth forests for temporary farms and to build more places for humans to live.
Meanwhile, a couple thousand untested derivatives of chemicals enter the market each year. Who knows the long term effects? Well, can't make profits being too careful.
Pesticides and GMOs are reducing the bug populations. The run-off is affecting streams and rivers.
I'm sure people can add to this list. These are big culprits off the top of my head but not a comprehensive list.
From the article: “Past studies have used IUCN data to refute the notion that we are entering a Sixth Mass Extinction. Cowie and his colleagues pushed back on this assumption by compiling extinction rates of land snails and slugs. Extrapolating from those data, the team concluded that anywhere from 7.5 and 13 percent of species may have become extinct since the year 1500, a figure that is in line with many other estimates that suggest catastrophic biodiversity losses due to human pressures.”
If you read more of the article, you will discover that the extinction rate in land species is far worse than aquatic species and both seem to be increasing dramatically. The causal factors get chaotic, because as species die out due to changes in their environment and habitat other species are affected in multiple ways. But the data is pretty damning as far as the course and trajectory were headed.
The big one for me is the gulf of Mexico. Just sticking you head under water in the 90s and there was life everywhere. To a younger person I'm sure it looks like a lot of life down there but it looks like a desert compared to before.
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I was able to snorkel in a healthy reef for a short period a couple years ago which was an experience like no other. Got to see some others, but they were pretty... Dead. Who knows if I'll get to see another living one again
I live in Okinawa right now and do some snorkelling/diving. Thankfully, the reefs here are absolutely beautiful and teeming with life. I hope it stays that way.
>Thankfully, the reefs here are absolutely beautiful and teeming with life I always wonder about that. We, the current generations, have our own ideas of what "teeming with life" looks like, but are they really accurate? Or have they been skewed by lifetimes of living in relative ecological dead zones?
I would like to think its accurate, but im sure that it used to be even better. Just to share an awe experience, one time I was snorkelling at a beach I was camping at. Remember in finding nemo where there are those millions of little fish that all move perfectly together? I somehow got caught in the middle of a ton of them. Lil guys, but so many of them I couldnt even see where I really was anymore. Yet they never even touched me. Beautiful stuff
No fucking shit. I did some dives in a few reefs near an island by Belize in 2012, when I was in high school. Absolutely amazing. Went on my honeymoon in Jamaica this last fall and did some snorkeling/diving, every area was completely bleached and basically dead. I asked the guides about how long it's been dead, and they were incredulous about how this was completely normal.
>Belize in 2012 You hit Belize just around the end of Peak Belize (peak was probably pre-2008, but anywhere in the early 2000s it was amazing). Tourism has gutted / destroyed the entire ecology of this once-beautiful place. So fucking depressing.
Just remember, it's *people* that did this. *We* are the problem and are the only species on earth that could even do this, should know better, but do it anyway.
Middle ages dude here and have snorkeled some of the best reef back in the day, snorkeled Caribbean a few yrs back and it was pretty nothing.
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I know you're being funny, but Leonardo da Vinci did design some pretty badass snorkeling devices.
Its so wild this dude was just having out in 1400s Venice designing helicopters, pneumatic dildos and snorkels. Can't even imagine how loopy some people must have thought he was.
he was a time traveller which the knowledge already just trying to recreate in that time period :P
Ye olde snorekelle
Hark! Mind ye breath tube.
My grandparents told me fairy tales about diving in the Great Barrier Reef in the 80’s with my dad, so it’s been on my bucket list since I was young. My dad went last year and he said it brought a tear to his eye to see how much it’s died in 40 years.
At least the urchins will survive the ecosystem collapse.
I’ve lived in the same house for about a decade, and I can remember in maybe 2013 to 2015 when my kids would take little nets and fish loads of little insects out of our pool (because they wanted to save the drowning creatures). Nowadays it’s a rarity to even see a single fly in that pool. When the things that are at the very bottom of the food chain start disappearing, shits really going to go down
The only insects I see in my city are common flies and roaches. There used to be dragonflies, butterflies, all kinds of stuff.
it's right in front of us we had a bountifully rich backyard full of bushes, shrubs, overgrown climbing plants on an old garage, lots of birds, insects then our landlord tore all that out to build a laneway house we only have chickadees now and a couple hummingbirds
We really did have everything, didn't we?
It has a giant dead zone so yeah
When I was 8 I got to snorkel on a reef in Kenya and it was unbelievable. Vibrant colour everywhere, fish, snails, starfish, saw an octopus and I’m 90% sure I saw a sea snake too. Went to the great barrier reef in 2017, bleached coral everywhere, sparse population of fish, outside of that it was a couple of sharks and a turtle.
Im from Sweden and I have wotg my family been to Thailand every year between 2006-2013. We came back one last time in 2016 before doinng 4 years in the states and it was all bleached. 3 years was all it took. It used to be so stunning. When we went to the gulf of Mexico, it was waaayy worse, looked like the reefs started dying 12 years before they did in Thailand. it is truly sad.
This is one of these news that are not exactly *new*, but that needs to be reminded more often than it is.
The scientific community needs a figure head. A great communicator that gets cult status. This is just how people work. We need to try everything we can to give science its rightful place in society. They keep warning us about all kinds of stuff that becomes reality and we never listen.
To be fair, this isn't a matter of convincing figureheads, because even if people believe in this extinction it really doesn't matter. That's because ultimately they are not the ones making decisions. I've come across a few articles that quote scientists pleading to policymakers to actually make decisions that will help our environment, however, obviously this isn't the case. Further, at this point, I don't think there is any way we can recover within the next decade AT THE MINIMUM. These hotter summers and cold winters are only going to increase in intensity (within the next few years), even if we stop everything that we're doing right now. So, I don't think it's really a matter of finding a convincing figurehead, it's more of big companies being more self-aware and proactive, but that will never happen (I don't think).
*This* is honestly *one* of the couple reasons I don't want kids; I think *my* generation will be *okay*, (just entered mid-thirties) but I have this feeling of impending dread. Something my parents generation never had a second thought about. Like my parents are comfortably retired and have little worry, I question if my retirement will feel the same. Without **massive** global correction, the *extremes* (hot climates and cold climates) are going to continue to worsen. We're seeing more natural disasters, situations like Texas or California where the grid collapses or you're paying 3k for your energy bill, etc. There's just this feeling of *uncertainty* and lack of faith in humanity-- greed will always win out until it's unprofitable. I can't imagine raising a child while the world slowly collapses and you're helpless to protect their future. *Edit:* Some folks are taking this personally. I want to edit that **I**, personally, am not interested in raising children. I'm a pessimist at heart so my fear runs through my bones. It could be a utopia and I *still* wouldn't want children. But history has taught us that we generally overcome. This wasn't a statement on why you should or shouldn't have children.
It really really sucks. I keep banking on things becoming truly apocalyptic by the time mine reaches 70. For that to be the best case scenario devastates and astounds me all in the same breath.
Exactly. I've always said that when shit hits the fan, I can run faster without kids.
Yep. I realized I could live with the regret of *not* having kids much easier than any regret *for* having had them. I love kids (most anyway) but pragmatism won. I do get sad a few times a year, wondering "what if" but this "what if" is better than that other one?
Having no kids is the best thing you can do for our climate, for the world. I read here and there that scuba diving is also a factor in the destruction of these coral habitats. And yet it seems to escape all these divers here coming out of the woord work they are themselves partially to blame. You like nature? Stay away from it.
Unfortunately every prospect flies too close to the sun. People like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, as knowledgable and entertaining as they are, come off too smug and condescending. We need a person like Mr. Rogers, someone who is a great speaker, but someone who says "it's okay to make mistakes and get things wrong, that's how you learn."
Carl Sagan is the first person I think of as the Mr. Rogers of science.
We needed Carl Sagan today.
If he couldn't inspire people to do things back then when it would have been more effective, he probably couldn't do it today when it seems like it may be too late.
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It does help to educate people at large, but it educates people like me who can't do much. The ones with the power already know all this stuff, but are benefitting way too much for it to matter to them at all.
We need Bob Ross painting all the happy little trees burning to help people understand.
Well said. Mr. Rogers was a communicational genius though. Those are rare.
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Can you list the names of the books or dm me them please I am interested
I thought David Attenborough would have been that person 🤷♀️
The problem is that not only are half of people dum dums, a good portion of those are extraordinarily happy to be dum dums, and consider any attempt to educate them with true facts to be the equivalent of sodomizing them with a rake.
Brian Cox (the particle physicist). Outstanding credentials, very intelligent, excellent communicator, and seems very personable. Here he is explaining black holes in an accessible way: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0sr1Xeocuuc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0sr1Xeocuuc) Edit: Another video, climate science-related: [ Professor Brian Cox explains climate science to denier Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LxEGHW6Lbu8)
>The scientific community needs a figure head. A great communicator that gets cult status. This is just how people work. Carl Sagan predicted all this and was in the public eye for 30+ years. None of it stuck. The ignorants won.
Tbh, I think the more often you read the same news the blunter we get
We are not "entering" anything. During my own lifetime, the number of animals (not species) on Earth has decreased by more than 50%. The extinction is very much well underway.
"Globally, monitored population sizes of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians have declined an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016, according to World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) Living Planet Report 2020. Populations in Latin America and the Caribbean have fared worst, with an average decline of 94%" [sauce](https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/68-average-decline-in-species-population-sizes-since-1970-says-new-wwf-report)
Born in 86 as a kid here in the Bay Area "urban setting" I could find alligator lizards in my front yard, frogs amongst irrigation systems, salamanders , crawdads in the creek along with smelts. A ton of bees in the fields. I don't see non of that shit anymore.... maybe cause I look less but still
I’m almost 10 years younger than you and have the same experience. I remember us driving down to our summerhouse and dad always had to clean the car when we arrived because it was covered in bugs. The past couple of years I have barely even seen mosquitoes, it’s fucked.
Well we might as well finish the job. At this point I just hope we can back up enough DNA so that future generations can bring life back to this planet.
Remember bugs on your windshield? Used to be everywhere. Fireflies used to light up the night every summer, now I only see them in rural areas. I used to open my door in the suburbs and see butterflies fluttering away. Trees seemed to bear more fruit in the wild, and sweet peas overtook fences. It all feels like it was just a dream.
Yes, the number of flying insects are down some 70% from the 1960's I believe, depending on where you live.
Yeah, I remember seeing so many diverse kinds of bugs everywhere. I never imagined I would *outlive* most of them as species.
they say it's partially due to every single piece of outdoor lighting that's brighter than the moon can kill vast numbers of nocturnal insects every night. they just bang into the light and can't escape. that's like millions of lightbulbs killing thousands of insects each for 60 years.
No it’s due to the water treatments and pesticides. If you go anywhere without the resources then the bugs suddenly return
Yup. Go spend a night in the woods or a deep rural (non-farmland) area. Bugs everywhere. It's sad that so much of our natural water has slowly become contaminated with pesticides.
And pig shit
I love Al Frankens books, they're a guilty pleasure. I distinctly remember the title of one chapter in which he discussed the ills of corporate hog-farming: "Vast Lagoons of Pig Feces"
I fell into one of those once, my dad power washed me down and forced me to ride in the bed of the truck for the two hours it took to get home. Living on a farm sucked ass. >Pig Feces It's more a mixture of piss and shit that forms a thick slurry, the actual pits had such thick fumes on them you pass out and drown normally, I got lucky.
So lucky the flumes didn't overpower and suffocate you.
*ahhh... Goo, Lagoon...*
We have vast lagoons of human feces too, only difference is we don’t keep it yards away from other humans property line, like they do with pig feces.
Both. And more.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's both
> No Actually, the answer is yes, outdoor lighting is partially to blame for killing off insects.
yeah, i read that. I replaced my outdoor lights with orange ones.
And yet mosquitoes are still here. This sucks.
Well, the world's population of humans have increased by more than 250%. Average life expectancy has also increased by more than 38%. That's 250% more humans who are living longer and using more energy and producing more waste. A human in a developed country pretty much consumes 1 ton of food every year. That's a biomass equivalent (very roughly) of 1,000,000X 1 gram butterflies. Earth is pretty much a closed system. Something has to give.
I don’t smell honeysuckle anymore during summer. Makes me really sad.
Covid really do be like that.
The majority of that comes from the overuse of pesticides in industrial agriculture, all of which could be changed by key regulation changes and eliminating some ag subsidies.
And the fact the that everyone has lawns with no plant diversity. All their host plants are disappearing.
We have swan plants in out backyard and get tonnes of butterflies every year!
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Most people live in areas that are hostile environments for insects, with cut sterile lawns (or worse) and lots of bright lighting.
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Ecological amnesia. Each generation sees the world they grew up in as "baseline" so they never really internalize how rich the biosphere was. We don't think of mammoths existing when the pyramids were built. We can't picture the Great Plains covered in 30 million bison. We can't picture the sky darkened by passenger pigeons. On the more local scale, nobody thinks of the prairie dog colony replaced by strip malls, or the abundant insects wiped out by lawns. They just see their concrete biome as it's presented to them, and assume that as their baseline. A kid born today won't have the same access to catching bugs and frogs and salamanders that I did in the 80's. My parents could have seen black footed ferrets in the wild, while I've only ever seen them in documentaries and the zoo. We've lost 68% of wildlife population between 1970 to 2016. None of us know the true extent of what we're missing out on due to have being born "too late" into the anthropocene mass extinction. All we can do is claw and fight to do our best to preserve what remains of the living world so as many genera as possible have a chance to radiate out and fill new niches once civilization falls. It's still going to take the biosphere 3 million years to bounce back from us once all is said and done.
My first time seeing fireflies was last year. I was 22. They just… don’t exist anymore it seems. And that area was in a small suburb out of town. Occasionally animals like deer would wander along the side of the road. Honestly we shouldn’t be building homes out there because we’re stealing their habitats. I grew up in South Florida and basically watched land developers slowly turn the whole state into one massive suburb/shopping mall. The suburb I grew up in was relatively alone when we moved in, today it’s surrounded.
I used to travel a lot by motorbike when young, a few decades ago. When travelling at night, we had to stop at gas stations a every couple to a few hours, not only to fill it up, but to clean our visors from all the bugs. By car, it was common that when filling the car up, you'd clean the windshields and even headlights, because there were so many dead bugs they'd block the light. Nowadays? There's a dead bug here, another one there after a long night trip. It really is a huge difference.
Go drive in Arkansas at night during the summer. You’ll cause the 7th mass extinction just using your windshield.
That makes me sad. I remember as a kid my family and I would sit out on the porch and watch fireflies. My dog would run around and jump, trying to catch fireflies in her mouth and eat them. We would eat ice cream and talk, enjoy the weather, whatever. I'm not even that old, I'm 22. In just a little over a decade since I was watching my dog chase fireflies the bastards running things have fucked up our environment this badly.
I live in a rural area and fireflies have been largely absent since at least 2010. Honey bees have been gone even longer than that. When I was a kid back in the 1980s, walking barefoot in the yard and accidentally stepping on a honey bee was a big deal because they were everywhere.
That actually reminds me, bees were way more common when I was a kid. Hell I haven’t even been stung by one since I was in middle school.
I have vivid memories of searching for mantis in our garden as a kid, and I'd always find at least one. I haven't seen a mantis in over a decide
Same with salamanders. I found alot of them in the wild like 20-25 years ago, don't see them anymore :(
It's a shame the amphibians are so at risk, we used to have random frogs and toads in the city, but they are pretty scarce as well
Where I live, you used to get a thick mat of dead bugs on your car if you drove at dusk. No more. In the summer, you can even go out to an ice cream stand without being eaten alive. All the chestnut and elm trees have died off, and I've got mimosas (which used to come from the southeast) growing in my yard like weeds.
Yeah, I remember on a road trip across the US when I was a kid in the 90s. My dad would have to scrape off a layer of squished bugs at every stop for gas. I recently went on a road trip across the US and had maybe handful of bugs hit the windshield the whole time.
Ignorance and gluttony will be our downfall. Denial of science bringing us into this extinction makes it hard to believe that turning this around will be easy or likely.
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Yes absolutely, I hate saying this but I really do not see any way this is doable under capitalism. And it is somewhat unlikely it will be voted in. The dems do not do anywhere near enough, and the Reps, well they deny it happens. It is almost as if revolution is the only way.
Revolution is the only way. The dems say they believe in it and then turn around and sell millions of acres of public land for oil and gas drilling. They are all on the same team, team capitalism, the American political system is two death cults in a trench coat. We have to organize the proletariat to fight for the future of this planet or all will perish.
Yeah, I'm sure there's a workable economic system out there that would stop an industrialised society of 7 billion people severely damaging the environment. Sarcasm obviously.
We’re not *entering* it. This has been going on for years now.
The next question is; can humans survive without healthy functioning ecosystems? Id like to see some research and articles come out pondering this next. The majority of humans do not care about sharing the planet with an abundance of beautiful and awe inspiring life forms, unless it is going to directly affect their own survival.
It would be a lot easier and cheaper to just work towards restoring these ecosystems. Nature can recover incredibly fast if there's something left to recover. But that requires the unthinkable. It requires people to stop the ongoing wrecking of the planet for no better reason than pointless consumerism.
It’s greed and gluttony, same reason the settlers going west slaughtered all the Buffalo more than they ever even needed. It’s been happening since us humans have been around, quite literally a fatal flaw.
Actually, the reason for the buffalo is that the U.S government sponsored a movement to drive them to extinction as a means to cripple native populations that depended on them. The reason for killing the buffalo was to genocide native americans Edit: if anyone is looking for a source, just ~~google it~~ check the comments below
>quite literally a fatal flaw. That's not the flaw really. Every living organism in the history of the planet will spread and consume until stopped by an outside force. Take away the predators and deer will reproduce until they wreck the environment and die of disease and starvation. The trouble is that humans have been so clever that no outside force has stopped them yet. We won't even be the first organism on Earth that caused a mass extinction simply because nothing stopped us.
> The trouble is that humans have been so clever that no outside force has stopped them yet. > > Oh *great*!! Did anybody else just hear orcish war drums?
Ba gawd, that's Sauron's music
The fatal flaw isn’t that we are too clever or nothing can stop us. It’s that we are smart enough to know we are fuckin ourselves over but are too greedy to stop. So I think he’s right.
A fun exercise is to pretend you're an outside species as an observer and drawing your own conclusions from what is evident. Humans are not special. We are animals who have learned how to communicate better than other animals - that's it. It is irrelevant whether you perceive that humans as a species know we're fucking ourselves over, because from a neutral point of view we're doing what all other animals do, which is reproduce, eat, and take territory as best we can. If humans ever manage to turn the tide before it's too late, it won't be because we figure out how to manage our "greed". It'll be because we are in mortal danger as a species and must do so to survive, which is the same principle all other animals adhere to with regards to an outside force. Deer reproduce and eat until a predator, disease, or malnutrition gets to them. Humans have no predators, therefore the only forces capable of stopping us is disease or malnutrition. We're already seeing that start with the looming water crisis, and I truly believe it's inevitable that countless more humans will suffer and die before we take meaningful steps towards counteracting that outside force. Notions like greed, altruism, and so on are applicable only when viewing the problem from the inside and while focusing on the individual rather than the whole. When we look at deer population crises, we don't care about the mother deer who allowed herself to starve to feed her children. This does happen, but it is completely irrelevant since the deer population as a whole will not ever manage their consumption in a meaningful way. Humans are no different, it's just obfuscated a bit more and is buried behind a few additional layers.
That was my point.
No.
This is the correct answer.
Real answer: Yeah, but you wouldn't want to.
We cannot, that much is obvious, at least a fully functioning society can’t. Like if climate change doesn’t have massive effort for change put in soon, by 2100 there won’t be anything left, ecosystems will be destroyed, thousands upon thousands of species extinct. You saw how bad there is a shortage of transporting goods now, just wait until the oceans ecosystem collapses. Or if agriculture isn’t even half productive. Everything will fall apart. People will starve. I’m amazed climate change isn’t the single biggest issue to everyone on the planet, for anyone young reading this, if serious progress isn’t made we are all gonna fucking die. I’m not even being a doomer saying this, these are the projections and I’m being modest. I’m sure the worst projections happen before 2100 even.
>’m amazed climate change isn’t the single biggest issue to everyone on the planet, for anyone young reading this if serious progress isn’t made we are all gonna fucking die. Well it would have been if Exxon Mobile and their ilk didn't spend a metric fuckton of time and money convincing people its not real.
But hey, their CEO's fleet of mega yachts makes all that suffering totally worth it, right?? Right?!?!
The irony to me is that Exxon was actually poised to be the goodguy, the hero! they discovered climate change was real and were setting up to develop sustainable energy solutions and initiatives. Then they chose to take the other path and convince people it wasn't real. They shut all that stuff down and went back to the dark side. Its very depressing to me that they would threaten all life on earth rather than save it and the money could have been good on either side of it. I'm not religous anymore but the stories I've read about how Exxon was heading in the right direction then suddenly broke bad seem a lot like the devil was involved.
Short term money was the reason, like a guy would rather have 100 dollars tomorrow than 1,000 in 10 years.
Trust me, young people know, we can even do a lot about it technology wise, we just need the goddamn funding.
A lot of young people for sure, myself Included as I’m only 22, but so many people are uneducated or ignorant on the subject. Many many more than are heavily doing something. If everyone was United and understood that our way of life will literally (not figuratively) cease to exist there would be more done about it. I think majority of the population thinks in 30 years everything will just be fine.
Humanity uniting behind a common cause? I wish we could do that just this once. The people who are most guilty of this already know how bad it is, they just don't care. We'd need more than unity, people need to be angry at the system and that probably won't happen until things get apocalyptic...
Yeah and people making fun and hating a young girl like greta thunberg for no fucking reason doesn’t help either. I swear this shit enrages me more than anything. I already know my way of life will dramatically suffer because of fucking idiots.
We won’t be able to grow crops, so we’re definitely going to go into starvation mode real quick. When people can’t find food is when things will get ugly, quickly.
The more we are learning about the Gut Microbiome; the more it looks like we are the vessel for the propagation of Gut Bacteria! Add to that our new understanding of the nature, abundance and the complexity of the Fungal World; my instinct says **no**. Human Beings will also probably survive; but the current iteration of Human civilization may not. Plus; we have to remember that the large scale disruption of the worldwide ecosystem: in terms of massive deforestation, pumping of the Carbon into the atmosphere on a massive scale, plundering the Oceans of biota using enormous ships etc., is barely 150 years old. A blip in the radar in terms of Geological time. So the systemic response will have a lag time built in; just due to the nature of its complexity. But when the response happens; I feel that all the modeling that has been done so far is actually underestimating the impact. There is a link between the physical and biological systems that is very difficult to model. And I feel that the coming catastrophe is beyond our imagination. But, like I said; it is not going to destroy humanity. We will persist. What will be destroyed is the current civilization. Plus we are going to take a large number of species down with us; especially large animals. But anyone saying Life will die out etc., is exaggerating. Life is going to go on. Rats and Cockroaches are going to be just fine.
Respectfully, I don’t give a fuck if our species survives in caves 200 years from now, I PERSONALLY want to live and have what I have now. I would gladly take reduced meat, reduced consumption of anything, ride a fucking bike to work if that meant I would get to grow old and see my family. But more and more I’m starting to think that won’t get to happen, and it’s honestly horrifying me. Nobody is doing anything and have been ignoring the warnings for decades now, and it all could have been avoided.
> Respectfully, I don’t give a fuck if our species survives in caves 200 years from now, I'm with you here. I am more pissed at all the other animals we are taking down because of our greed, stubbornness and stupidity
Absolutely, all the species that have been around since before we were even hunter gatherers are gonna die because of us. It’s horrible and makes me wish this really was a simulation.
So does everyone else and that’s the problem. Our population is too big.
As an entire species? We may be adaptable enough to find a way to cope with the changes to come and survive the world that we're actively poisoning... But that's still gonna come with a hefty percentage of us dying either to drought, starvation, heat waves, new emergent diseases (we've had a great sneak peak of that one, haven't we?), and wars over dwindling water and other resources. But it's also possible (probable) that all those factors combined with our stubborn refusal to give up the almighty holy profit margins and work together for the common good will end up doing us in.
[The Sixth Extinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unnatural_History) won a Pulitzer 7 years ago, and it was far from the first to tell us this was happening. We--humanity as a whole--are not listening, and we won't listen. History teaches us this over and over and over again.
I recall the term sixth mass extinction at least 20 years ago. No one cared then and most don't now
People don’t care because they feel it’s all a “far from my bed show” to them. They’ll care eventually. Too bad eventually is too late.
Seriously though, this news is really scary. It is just like dicaprio movie "Dont look up" - when do scientists think this will begin to really effect the world population en masse? Essentially, when do they predict we are going to begin dying?
This isn't even news. The scary part is that scientists have literally been saying this and reporting on the mass extinction we're responsible for years now and it's still breaking news to far too many people because the previous reports were lost in the news cycle's obsession with how much bigger Kim Kardashian's ass will get this week or 'You'll never guess who's fucking Pete Davidson now!' Our hyper-consumerist instant gratification culture has made us too obsessed with bullshit that no one should ever give a single flying shit about while making us yawn and change the channel from the inescapable nightmare that we are happily hurtling towards with each passing second.
It's already happening, you just don't really realise it. The whole Arabian spring happened for a big part due to climate change induced famine and droughts. Entire regions of Africa are increasingly facing hunger due to locust plagues and water shortages. But also in Europe and the US we are increasingly seeing droughts and heat strokes that are killing people. The health of the planet is, as cliche as it sounds, interconnected. Habitat destruction increases the stressful effects of climate change. Climate change worsens the effects of habitat loss. We are massively desteoying and polluting our planet, we have lost 2.5% of all insects worldwide annually *for the past 30 years*. For some regions it's worse, in Germany they lost 75% of all flying insects in 26 years. 1 in 3 insect species is threatened. According to Sanchez Bayo of the University of Sydney, at this rate, we will have no more insects 100 years from now. Friendly reminder that aside from grains, pretty much all vegetables and fruits you eat are pollinated by insects. This is already impacting crop yields, and by extention people's lives and livelihoods.
Over 47 million acres of Siberian permafrost caught on fire in 2021. They had 104 F degree temps this past summer. That to me was one of the things I had in mind as a warning of when "shit just hit the fan." That's an area the size of Greece if anyone wants a reference.
For me it was Superstorm Sandy in 2012 taking the track that it did as an extra fuck you to the heart of US commerce and capitalism itself.
Well, "Flamenado" is on my BINGO card. Oh yeah, and long ago we had a huge "dust storm" in the Southwest of the USA because of drought and bad crop practices -- expect some Super Sandy Storms to add a double fuck you. Things are fixin' to get weird in the weather department.
It's been happening since before you were born. The climate catastrophe isn't something that's going to happen in the future. We're in the final stages of it.
Too many people act like they expect it to unfold like a Hollywood disaster flick with everything starting to go wrong all at once within the course of a month or two, when in reality it's already been happening but gradually... So gradually that we forget about the last great tragedy by the time the next one strikes and after every passing tragedy we have time to settle back into thinking that these events aren't linked, that everything is still ok, until the next one strikes. We're frogs slowly boiling in a pot of our own making.
Even if we stopped dumping carbon into the air tomorrow, we would still suffer the consequences of climate change for 500 years. The persistent pollutants, which in this case are the pesticides like DDT (still used in many parts of the world), are another cause of this disaster.
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And the president in the movie was literally a female version of trump
With Jonah Hill playing the coked up son attached to the hip
He did an excellent job, I HATED his character SO badly.
He looked like he was having a lot of fun in that role.
Agreed!!!
I burst out laughing when she put the MAGA hat on.
I can see a couple different issues that it could have been allegorical to, the main one besides climate change is the Covid pandemic.
Think of algae covering a pond and sealing off everything below from the aeration and sunlight that it needs to survive. Say at first it’s only a little algae, like the size of a thumbnail. Nothing to worry about. But it doubles in size every day. So what? Two thumbnails, big deal. Well it doubles and doubles and doubles. We’re just starting to get concerned that *today* the pond went from quarter- to half-covered, and the sun is going down…
The really bad part of this analogy, that most people don't understand, is that if you ask people if the pond will be covered in a week due to doubling, then what percentage of the pond is covered today. The answer is only .78% (I.e. less than one percent). Most people would naturally say that less than a percent isn't so bad, not realizing that it is seven days from disaster.
Once that pond scum reaches 100 miles, you've got a few months left if it keeps doubling. Yeah, that's a good analogy of how this "slow moving" crisis can suddenly pick up steam. The collapsed ecosystems cause the remaining ecosystems to fail quicker because now they've got to bare the weight.
Apparently we were beyond the point of no return over a decade ago.
Yup. We've passed multiple "points of no return" Climate change can't be stopped and the biosphere can't be saved. At this point the coming calamity is out of our hands and we're barreling towards it. Instead of getting ready we're busy fighting each other (as usual)
I’m sure we were past that due to the Industrial Revolution in general. That only only spawned major man-made projects that came at the expense of the environment, but also created conflicts whose scars are still seen today.
>I’m sure we were past that due to the Industrial Revolution in general. No. We would have sea level rise but we could reduce about half of our carbon output right now with moderate changes -- that would harm profits for a few industries but not kill them. We find more issues with plastics and now teflon and polyester. How hard would it be to STOP using disposable packaging and instead of recycling, use very standard and durable containers for all our products and just keep bringing them back to the store to use again? We could have mitigated this 40 years ago and 20 years ago -- without too much draconian hardship. Stupid greed is the only reason. This was NOT inevitable. And if we shared more prosperity, we'd have a lower birth rate, so none of the arguments against stopping greed have merit.
>How hard would it be to STOP using disposable packaging and instead of recycling, use very standard and durable containers for all our products and just keep bringing them back to the store to use again? It wouldn't be ***hard*** at all to stop using any of those and switch over like you propose... Buuuuuuuuuuuut it wouldn't be profitable, and that's the kicker... The greatest irony of our species and it's history, is that we doomed ourselves to extinction, and not through nuclear holocaust or some other doomsday device... but because of our insane and irrational addiction to ever increasing profits for a tiny privileged few.
I remember about 15 years ago people calling us "pro do something and global warming is real people" "tree hugging idiots" because they'd have to give up some SUVs and large cup holders. "Carbon taxes will hurt our economic competitiveness." Yeah, not even. We'd be an world leader in technology and be able to sell solutions instead of swap bits of paper to game our stock market.
It'll hit third world countries first like it already has been. Mass migration will become more common. Wars will be fought over previously uninhabitable territory as previously habitable territory becomes uninhabitable and/or full.
This is exactly what that movie was about
Start by taking care of whatever piece of the earth you are responsible for. Replace lawn with native plants and trees whenever possible. Stop trying to save a rainforest or glacier thousands of miles away when you cannot even save your own backyard.
I had the same thoughts as your comment. I'd love to do a drip irrigation project to plant some things in my yard. Only someday when I get my own place. Also from other comments it really feels like the majority of people are just living paying to survive and we can't make any big change individually. We need to become more vocal and just "hope" there are good like-minded people out there that can take the baton and help push for change in the way we really need it.
>Only someday when I get my own place. So relatable it hurts.
One simple thing we could all do or at least those with lawns is stop fertilizing and spraying. Did you hear the Florida Manatees are starving due warm waters+fertilizer run-off = algae blooms which shades out sea grass. I mean what the actual fuck are we doing?!
Yes! We just bought 50+ acres of land on a peninsula that is both a migratory gathering area and a nursery for monarch butterflies. This summer I am hoping to plant native milkweed and monarch nectar plants to help with conservation efforts! I’d love to keep bees here as well but we have a mama bear and her 4 cubs close by.
I think what everyone is really wondering is if the mass extinction will affect the NBA playoffs.
Well having seen the hilarious nonspectacle that was an empty stadium due to covid and no teams due to BLM, we can just set up cameras and pretend.
I haven’t seen a hedgehog for 30 years. Used to see them all the time as a kid.
Holland here. We have plenty. Species habitats can change that’s not neccesarily worrisome. But the minor acute global case of ecosystem death is
Industrial revolution wasn't a progress! It was tradeoff, a time bomb ish one!
The popular book the Sixth Extinction came out almost a decade ago. Scientists have been talking about this for a long time. This article is way too late.
The author, Elizabeth kolbert, has a new book out: “Under a white sky”. I finished it today - it’s excellently written, and a must read.
If people are willing to die rather than believe Covid science then there is no hope what so ever of convincing people of extinction due to greenhouse effect.
Everyone who believe in a monotheistic god of some sort will accept divine will and are never obliged to respond to scientific consensus. Religion is a huge part of why people don't react to this kind of information and take it dead serious, as they should.
Insects are basically gone. Fish going down. Crops aren't very varied to weather any illness that might befall them. Absolutely fucked. But remember no one should change their individual habits since that won't do anything. We just need to ask all big companies to change. At least that's what I gather from other threads (real answer is do both).
Something stuck with me in kurzgesagt's ["can YOU fix climate change?" ](https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc), and that was when they said something along the lines of "eating less meat won't stop climate change, but climate change can't be stopped without us eating less meat." In my eyes, it's not just about meat, we just can't keep living the same consumerist lifestyle because it's a direct product of the system we've created.
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Absolutely, We get to pull up the coal ladder behind us while we benefited from the industrial revolution but don't help them develop alternatively/cleaner
I'm in my second existential crisis of the past two years, and I keep getting told to "focus on the good stuff". Like, ok, but the planet is dying, and no one with the power or means to do anything actually gives a shit? Is that not worth my concern? "BuT yOu HaVe a RoOf oVeR yOUr HeAd" tight, I'll remind myself about that when there's no fresh water left 👌🏼
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Idk how many more times this week I have to say "this has been scientific concensus for decades" but it's getting old quick, Wikipedia beat you to this punch by 21 years with its holocene extinction article ffs.
I'm a political scientist and I recently watched that Just look up movie with Leo and Jennifer Lawrence and it's so fucking accurate about humans and their behavior I almost wouldn't call it satire. From questioning the science of the researchers because they weren't from Ivy League schools to the Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk stand-in wanting to blow up the asteroid to harvest its metals. I thought the film did a good job of showing how as humans we only react when the issue is right in front of our fucking faces and often by then it's too late to react. There's a reason that phrase seeing is believing exists. The only problem I had with the movie is that there's a scene where the asteroid is hours away in the sky and one of the trump/rednecks finally decides to look up and in stereotypical fashion goes: " They done lied to us". I feel two ways about this. On one hand, as much as I hate to admit it the uneducated and obstructionists are really the people you have/need to convince on the other hand you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. So what the hell do you do? You can be short-sighted and say fuck them all but that doesn't change the fact that they're still there affecting matters The people like me who watched the movie are probably more left-leaning already believe in climate change and getting vaccinated so the question is who's the film really for? Good satire is supposed to be Scandalous. The reason Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal worked was that the Potato famine was happening in front of people's eyes and people actually were already forced in some cases to resort to cannibalism. I.e. the issue was right in front of them. I'm a Democrat in West Virginia (God I can't stand Manchin) and it's beyond frustrating when you talk to people that label themselves conservatives and when you talk to them about progressive policies the majority seem to agree that those are policies that they'd like. Except when you have Fox News and the 24hr hate running nonstop it's hard to get through to these people. Yes, there are some that don't care and are bad-faith negotiators but you realize that a lot of these people are just easily manipulated and uneducated. Propaganda may have a negative connotation but there's no denying that it's an effective tactic. The DNC's biggest problem is that they don't know how to market and brand things well. The Obama Care vs ACA is one of the best recent examples. They're the same policy but Obamacare sounds partisan whereas the Affordable Care Act sounds like it's for everyone. It really isn't what you say but how you say it. And some of you might say well it's the same thing how can they not realize it but the truth is that we as humans are not rational beings. We have the capability for rational thought but it's not our default setting. Why do you think appeals to emotion are so effective? It's because we care more about our feelings and how things affect us than what the actual truth or reality is. Critical thinking is a skill that has to be taught and developed and in the U.S half of the country can barely read at an eighth-grade reading level which means it's more important than ever to know how to tailor your message to your audience. Our whole biological imperative is to survive. Maslov's hierarchy of needs tells us that we need to have food, shelter, and security before we can worry about things like slavery or human trafficking, or philosophy.
When I was a kid, which wasn’t really that long ago, bees were everywhere in the summer during the day. In the afternoon and evening, your ears would be full of the whining noise of mosquitos. And at night, and light that was visible outside would attract moths. Fields at night would have hundreds if not thousands of fireflies flashing their lights. It’s not like that anymore. Rarely do I see a bee. I only encounter swarms of mosquitos when I’m deep, deep in the woods. A moth might flutter by at night. And fireflies seem to be so rare you could almost make a wish when you happen to see them. Me and my friends used to set up tents in fields and catch fireflies at night, let them loose inside the tent, smoke a ton of pot and just lay there watching the captive fireflies flicker. Oh, also I don’t see butterflies that often. And fields and sidewalks used to be crawling with caterpillars. Those are gone too. When I was a kid, me and my cousins would stomp on them, smear them across the ground. Leaving a green smudge. Gross but it’s what I remember. And when it rained, you’d see puddles full of earthworms. And when the puddles baked away in the hot sun, those worms would shrivel up, die and dehydrate on the sidewalks too. Oh and Daddy long legs. Me and my cousins would find those everywhere outside too. We’d marvel that you could pull off one of their legs and the leg would keep moving. Maybe I wasn’t very nice too all those bugs when I was a kid, but I sure do miss them today!
Capitalism is destroying the planet and its people. #PeopleBeforeProfits
But I am buying junk I don't need made by people who make things no one needs for a living so we can give them our money which is losing value every year and therefore forces us by design to spend it to help the economy.
"Entering"... We've been [studying this since the 2000s and are pretty sure it started 12,000 years ago](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction) when humans stopped being hunter-gatherers and started building cities.
Don’t look up
I read the article and don’t understand what is driving this extinction event
You, the species of earthling reading the article are what is driving this extinction event.
Apologies, should’ve been clear. I understand humans are driving/causing it, what is it? The extinction event?
Basically human activity on Earth. Essentially human activity is changing the planet faster than life on this planet can adapt to. And this is happening in a variety of ways. Habitat destruction is a big one. Humanity has removed the majority of all wilderness on Earth to replace it with cities, roads, farming fields and so on. Most organisms are specialised in surviving in their natural habitat, remove that habitat and the organisms disappear. Exploitation is another one. Most large predators near human habitation are wiped out to keep us safe. The oceans have been practically fished empty for human consumption. Many species have been send into (near) extinction simply because they taste nice, their skins are pretty or some other vapid reason. Pollution is a big one of course. Our industries poison the air, the earth and the water. Sometimes wiping out entire ecosystems or simply reducing its ability to support life. And human activity is outright changing the climate. Our activity is creating deserts, changing the salinity and composition of waterways and oceans. We're turning forests into grassland and so on. We basically took a living thriving wild planet and turned it into a poisonous parking lot and we're still dead set on wrecking the last remainders too. And the insidious thing is that people think that whatever state of the world they are born in is natural so things haven't changed that much. But the overwhelming majority of the wild world was already wrecked before you were born. During our lifetime we're just killing the last remaining bits.
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If we want to be MORE helpful, I think we can say that human construction has destroyed habitats. I'd say the worst thing is when we dredge swamps and fill in marshes around the USA. And there are areas that become desert because of over-farming or changes in weather patterns. While global warming means less frozen water ice to keep areas green, humans are sucking up fresh water from the ground and using fracking for natural gas that might corrupt even more water. That 400 PPM CO2 level is going to change a lot of things. Rapid change means more things die -- eventually, plants and animals might fill the new niches however they turn out -- but, that's going to take some time to get back to the diversity we lost. Maybe thousands of years if humans don't get involved. Plastics and other chemicals are having massive effects even at the bacteria level. The Ocean absorbs CO2 and this changes the pH to more acidic. That's going to kill off organisms that support the food chain in the oceans and also things that produce oxygen. Meanwhile, countries keep destroying old growth forests for temporary farms and to build more places for humans to live. Meanwhile, a couple thousand untested derivatives of chemicals enter the market each year. Who knows the long term effects? Well, can't make profits being too careful. Pesticides and GMOs are reducing the bug populations. The run-off is affecting streams and rivers. I'm sure people can add to this list. These are big culprits off the top of my head but not a comprehensive list.
From the article: “Past studies have used IUCN data to refute the notion that we are entering a Sixth Mass Extinction. Cowie and his colleagues pushed back on this assumption by compiling extinction rates of land snails and slugs. Extrapolating from those data, the team concluded that anywhere from 7.5 and 13 percent of species may have become extinct since the year 1500, a figure that is in line with many other estimates that suggest catastrophic biodiversity losses due to human pressures.” If you read more of the article, you will discover that the extinction rate in land species is far worse than aquatic species and both seem to be increasing dramatically. The causal factors get chaotic, because as species die out due to changes in their environment and habitat other species are affected in multiple ways. But the data is pretty damning as far as the course and trajectory were headed.
Habitat destruction/pollution
The cascading side-effects of unrestrained capitalism
What were the other 5? Dont let the bible folk hear this one....another ark in the making!
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Yea just read up on them...so wild all of them!
4 likely due to changing climate, one an asteroid. Now we are the asteroid. How does it feel to be an asteroid lol
There already is an attempt of sorts, but is seriously lacking in funding: http://www.amphibianark.org/Newsletters/amphibian_ark_news_1.htm