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lprovenImagine Earth without people
From the current New Scientist. Interesting article, if not shattering news to some of us.
For a beautiful - if not entirely genuine - look at Chernobyl today, if you haven't seen it, look at Kid of Speed's photodiary.
Meanwhile, actually, things are worse than is generally appreciated. There looks to be large-scale collapse happening in the oceans now, and that really is bad news. The rainforests aren't really the lungs of the planet - they are reservoirs of massive genetic diversity, but they're a relatively closed system. They store lots of carbon and freshwater but they don't actually absorb much CO2 or emit much oxygen. The Earth's photosynthetic resource, the world's lung, is the phytoplankton in the top few metres of the oceans.
If the ocean ecosystems collapse, we're all stuffed. The Gulf Stream is faltering; large parts of the polar ice shelves are melting. Sea levels are probably going to rise substantially - several meters - over the next century or so, even if our technological society dies off. The coral reefs and littoral zones will get deeper & their communities will die.
Previously, they'd just move inland, following the retreating shores, but now, the land getting flooded will have been either extensively farmed (ergo, full of fertiliser, pesticides and so on) or urban (ergo, heavily polluted with all sorts of nasties that will end up in the water.) Plus it's probably never happened this fast before. As Siberia and the Canadian artic melts, huge amounts of methane will be liberated from the thawing permafrost, making matters worse.
The rising seas have never been more polluted than they are now and they will get much much worse before they get better.
I have been watching the global situation with increasing dismay for a quarter of a century. It has never looked so bad as it is now. We've passed the point where we're using resources faster than they can be replenished this month, according to some estimates - others place it years ago - and the population continues to explode; this month, America topped three hundred million people. Last Tuesday, allegedly. 300,000,000 people. It only passed 200 million the year I was born.
It's the 3rd most populated nation in the world, after China and India, and its inhabitants use more resources per head than anyone else.
I really do think that we've gone over the point of no return, now.
It seems to me that if anything, considering the planet as a whole, AIDS could be considered as a good thing. If it continues to spread, even accelerates, as our population continues to rise, then it has some chance of controlling human numbers, alongside famine, which is going to rise and rise. As the oceans swell, desertification will increase in the tropics and the area of arable land will shrink.
Any organism that's down to such small numbers that it's being bred in zoos is basically dead; even if numbers increased, the genetic bottleneck means that the population will be very inbred. Golden hamsters are now quite rare in the wild, I believe, but those in captivity all came from a stock of something like seven that were captured less than a century ago. They are almost all clones of each other now. If they were ever rereleased, the first bug to come along and kill one would kill them all.
We have caused the biggest mass extinction since the K-T boundary, the one that killed the dinosaurs 65My ago. Possibly we will soon cause it to exceed the Permian-Triassic one.
But this time, the Earth's in a lot worse state when it comes to recovery.
And unlike the scenario imagined in my first link, humans are probably not going to die out completely.
Which is, perhaps, a shame...
From the current New Scientist. Interesting article, if not shattering news to some of us.
For a beautiful - if not entirely genuine - look at Chernobyl today, if you haven't seen it, look at Kid of Speed's photodiary.
Meanwhile, actually, things are worse than is generally appreciated. There looks to be large-scale collapse happening in the oceans now, and that really is bad news. The rainforests aren't really the lungs of the planet - they are reservoirs of massive genetic diversity, but they're a relatively closed system. They store lots of carbon and freshwater but they don't actually absorb much CO2 or emit much oxygen. The Earth's photosynthetic resource, the world's lung, is the phytoplankton in the top few metres of the oceans.
If the ocean ecosystems collapse, we're all stuffed. The Gulf Stream is faltering; large parts of the polar ice shelves are melting. Sea levels are probably going to rise substantially - several meters - over the next century or so, even if our technological society dies off. The coral reefs and littoral zones will get deeper & their communities will die.
Previously, they'd just move inland, following the retreating shores, but now, the land getting flooded will have been either extensively farmed (ergo, full of fertiliser, pesticides and so on) or urban (ergo, heavily polluted with all sorts of nasties that will end up in the water.) Plus it's probably never happened this fast before. As Siberia and the Canadian artic melts, huge amounts of methane will be liberated from the thawing permafrost, making matters worse.
The rising seas have never been more polluted than they are now and they will get much much worse before they get better.
I have been watching the global situation with increasing dismay for a quarter of a century. It has never looked so bad as it is now. We've passed the point where we're using resources faster than they can be replenished this month, according to some estimates - others place it years ago - and the population continues to explode; this month, America topped three hundred million people. Last Tuesday, allegedly. 300,000,000 people. It only passed 200 million the year I was born.
It's the 3rd most populated nation in the world, after China and India, and its inhabitants use more resources per head than anyone else.
I really do think that we've gone over the point of no return, now.
It seems to me that if anything, considering the planet as a whole, AIDS could be considered as a good thing. If it continues to spread, even accelerates, as our population continues to rise, then it has some chance of controlling human numbers, alongside famine, which is going to rise and rise. As the oceans swell, desertification will increase in the tropics and the area of arable land will shrink.
Any organism that's down to such small numbers that it's being bred in zoos is basically dead; even if numbers increased, the genetic bottleneck means that the population will be very inbred. Golden hamsters are now quite rare in the wild, I believe, but those in captivity all came from a stock of something like seven that were captured less than a century ago. They are almost all clones of each other now. If they were ever rereleased, the first bug to come along and kill one would kill them all.
We have caused the biggest mass extinction since the K-T boundary, the one that killed the dinosaurs 65My ago. Possibly we will soon cause it to exceed the Permian-Triassic one.
But this time, the Earth's in a lot worse state when it comes to recovery.
And unlike the scenario imagined in my first link, humans are probably not going to die out completely.
Which is, perhaps, a shame...
