There has been about 69 per cent decline in the wildlife population of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish across the globe in the last 50 years. The highest decline, 94 per cent was in Latin America and Caribbean region. According to WWF report, Africa recorded 66 percent fall in wildlife population, the Asia Pacific 55 percent and population of freshwater species reduced by 83 percent globally.
The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?
"Estimate that, since around AD 1500, possibly as many as 7.5–13% (150,000–260,000) of all ~2 million known species have already gone extinct, orders of magnitude greater than the 882 (0.04%) on the Red List."
We had a ~10C increase in temperature from 20000 YA - 13000 YA or so and then a yoyo jump back down ca. 6C and up again in a 1000 years, during the younger dryas.
While the 19th-21th century increase of 1-1.2C or so is a bit faster, it's not a magnitude faster.
Humans have definitely changed nature everywhere, and is probably responsible for many species dying. But blaming that on the climate change doesn't really make sense. Deforestation is much more likely to be the cause.
But deforestation and the following biodiversity loss is a completely different problem than reducing CO2. And in general, very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation (and contrary to popular opinion, even large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either).
> very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation
Reform of agriculture might be it. Agriculture is also the leading driver of deforestation (50% of pastures were forested in the past).
> large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either
But it could, it's probably the best tool in our arsenal. And it would not only affect CO2, but many of our other problems too (droughts, biodiversity, warming ...).
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century
Agricultural land use, particularly for animal feed, poses the biggest obstacle to ecosystem restoration and carbon sequestration, hindering climate efforts. The potential for carbon sequestration is vast, with enough capacity to meet the entire 1.5°C carbon budget.
Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests. Better farming techniques across the world could lead to storage of 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, data shows
Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops (upto 80% for animal feed), and raise livestock
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).
> If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).
No we wouldn't. Everybody gets cause and effect backwards on this one. They see that we're using essentially all of our arable land for food production and draw the conclusion that's how much is needed to produce the amount of food we currently produce.
But it's actually the other way around. We use all the land available because that's the cheapest way to produce the amount of food we need. If we had more land, we'd use it and food would be cheaper. If we had less land we'd produce the same amount of food, but it would be more expensive.
For an extreme example, we could probably feed 8 trillion people on the same amount of land by covering all of our arable land with greenhouses.
Moving towards a plant-based diet would mean needing less land as we wouldn't be raising as many animals for meat. The greenhouse idea is cool, but it'd be very resource intensive.
So, while we can definitely get creative with land use, we also need to consider the costs and environmental impacts.
No, it means that farmers will stop dumping so much fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides on their land chasing high yields. It means 30 bushel per acre crops instead of 100 bushel per acre crops. It means cheaper food. All good things, but land usage won't change significantly.
> means 30 bushel per acre crops instead of 100 bushel per acre crops
It would not be so bad, imho. Industrial ag might be effective (from the economic viewpoint, very destructive from the environmental one), but not as much as producers of that stuff would like us to beliveve. And if we manage to deplete our soils even further, then even industrial ag wouldn't be able to do much.
We could and should change the way we farm, while preserving comparable yields. It might be necessary to learn farming again, or invent new machinery. There are dozens of methods we could utilize (syntropic, natural, veganic farming, permaculture, food forests, nitrogen fixing plants / trees, companion planting, etc.), and new ones would be found.
"The analysis we present here offers a new perspective, based on organic yield data collected from over 10,000 organic farmers representing nearly 800,000 hectares of organic farmland. Averaged across all crops, organic yield averaged 80% of conventional yield. However, several crops had no significant difference in yields between organic and conventional production, and organic yields surpassed conventional yields for some hay crops."
We are witnessing the sixth mass extinction event. Defined as the loss of 75% of species, this process typically spans around 2.8 million years. However, we're on track to reach this milestone in just about 100 years.
The abstract question of whether a higher or lower temperature would result in more habitable land (assuming, say, a gradual change over a million years) is completely 100% irrelevant to the issue of climate change.
A fast enough change will:
- Make places where large numbers of people currently live uninhabitable due to temperature and sea levels
- Kill off most plants and animals because the ones in a given place won't be adapted to the new climate, even if theoretically the climate in other places would now be suited to them, in a way that will take millions of years to recover from.
Simply saying "warmer is better" is utterly missing the point.
Well, if the earths population was 2 million, 15000 years ago and Sudan's today is 50 million, I think it's quite clear that Sudan's population has gone up quite a bit also over 15000 years.
