Regardless of whether humanity caused this or not, we ought to be sequencing the DNA of all of these species in the event that we survive the climate shift.
If the conservative talk radio is right that humans aren't causing a shift or that there isn't a shift at all, great! We'll still want to be able to study the DNA of these extinct species to improve our understanding of living systems.
Sure. But thats a false equivalency and you know it. When pretend that because species do go extinct in nature, and humans are currently causing extinction, that the two are even remotely close to the same thing is a clear attempt at disinformation.
There have been other times when plants have gone extinct at the current rate. They usually involved city+ size asteroids.
Plants, animals, humans are just a disaster for biodiversity.
> Most extinctions have occurred in the last 114 years (that is, since 1900; Table 1).
> modern extinction rates for vertebrates varied from 8 to 100 times higher than the background rate
> for example, that under the 2 E/MSY background rate, 9 vertebrate extinctions would have been expected since 1900; however, under the conservative rate, 468 more vertebrates have gone extinct than would have if the background rate had persisted across all vertebrates under that period. Specifically, these 468 species include 69 mammal species, 80 bird species, 24 reptiles, 146 amphibians, and 158 fish.
All that matters is that unlike during the age of the dinosaurs, this time around there are humans that can catalogue dead and dying species for analysis in some potential future.
It doesn't matter if the climate is or isn't shifting.
It doesn't matter if humans did or didn't cause this.
It doesn't matter if the species will go extinct or will evolve to survive in some form.
Depends on how you define legitimate. Also, given today's research "climate", I imagine publishing a dissenting opinion is tantamount to career suicide. Good luck getting funded to prove anything. Particularly considering how politicized climate science has become.
Which is unfortunate, because skepticism should be a part of healthy scientific practice - and I think it'd be a stretch to say that climate science isn't subject to the same problems, like p-value abuse and selective publishing, that plague other non-experimental, purely model and statistics based fields. No one is going to publish negative results when they can tweak any of hundreds of model variables to force agreement with data.
I think a valid proxy for bias is the relative lack of publications discussing possible benefits of climate change.
> I imagine publishing a dissenting opinion is tantamount to career suicide.
Opinions are not publishable. It is so damaging to propagate the idea that some guys over there have one opinion, and then some other guys have a different opinion, and there's really no way to tell which is correct, and that this is what science is about. Discussions about climate science in the public sphere are politicized, but only because of massive disinformation campaigns by those who stand to profit less if reasonable countermeasures were implemented.
> I think a valid proxy for bias is the relative lack of publications discussing possible benefits of climate change.
We might go extinct but if we don't, it might be pleasant to vacation in the arctic? Is this the sort of scientific claim you have in mind?
> We might go extinct but if we don't, it might be pleasant to vacation in the arctic? Is this the sort of scientific claim you have in mind?
I think GP means things like "all that potentially fertile land that will thaw off" that sometimes show up, e.g. wrt. Siberia. Personally, even if true, I suspect it doesn't compensate for the farming land lost - and even if it did, we won't be likely to survive the effects of mass migration and conflict for these lands.
>We might go extinct but if we don't, it might be pleasant to vacation in the arctic? Is this the sort of scientific claim you have in mind?
This is the sort of hysteria that results from one sided science, and makes it less likely for laymen to take climate science seriously. The worst case models predict extinction and so called tipping points. But, if you read the IPCC reports, the further you move down the chain of journalism->IPCC summary->literature, the less certain these catastrophic interpretations become.
>Opinions are not publishable
Sure, perhaps a poor choice of word. Let's call it dissenting literature.
>Discussions about climate science in the public sphere are politicized
You don't think that the same politicization could play at least a small role in the direction that climate science is being taken? These scientists are human beings, after all, and the problem space is broad enough to easily ask only questions that align with certain popular notions.
Not to mention, as someone who has dealt with geoscientific (though not climate) models, given a sufficiently complex model it's generally possible to obtain any desired (consciously or otherwise) result while simultaneously fitting historic and calibration data.
The problem is that skepticism, to lay people, has been equated to "it's not true! Ergo, we don't need to do anything".
Meaning that it -should- be career suicide. Because the evidence in favor is so large, that it's incredibly unethical to give climate change deniers more credibility
The problem with that idea is that we haven't cataloged all of the plant and animal species. There are many species that are going extinct before we've even identified them.
How do we know they exist if we haven't seen them? Is this based on an estimate of the rate of extinction of known species and the rate of discovery of new species?
If the conservative talk radio is right that humans aren't causing a shift or that there isn't a shift at all, great! We'll still want to be able to study the DNA of these extinct species to improve our understanding of living systems.