'The sixth great extinction is happening', conservation expert warns

[nitpicked]

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93qvqx5y01o

With her signature shawl draped over her shoulders and silver hair pulled back from her face, Jane Goodall exudes serenity - even over our slightly blurry video call.
(snip)

One of the remedies she wants to talk about today is a tree-planting and habitat restoration mission that her eponymous foundation and non-profit technology company, Ecosia, are carrying out in Uganda. Over the past five years, with the help of local communities and smallholder farmers, the organisations have planted nearly two million trees.

“We’re in the midst of the sixth great extinction,” Dr Goodall tells me during our interview for BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science. “The more we can do to restore nature and protect existing forests, the better.”
(snip)

“If we don't get together and impose tough regulations on what people are able to do to the environment - if we don't rapidly move away from fossil fuel, if we don't put a stop to industrial farming, that's destroying the environment and killing the soil, having a devastating effect on biodiversity - the future ultimately is doomed.”
(snip)

[MrWowWow]

1. Tree Planting is Hippy Hopelessness

The planet is literally on fire. It's climate is collapsing, and tree planting is suggested? Not a chance of succeeding. Geologic time has contracted to human time. The time to have planted trees to trap carbon was over 50 yes ago. It is not a viable solution to climate change abatement nor its remediation.

[2naSalit]

2. ...

It's the biosphere, stupid.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. That we are in the middle of an actual great extinction is a bit of an exaggeration.

With all due respect to Ms Goodall, we are really not in a mass extinction.

In those, anywhere from 75% to 96% of all species went extinct. And during each of them there were vast changes in climate and the like, far vaster than what's going on now.

Here's a link that may prove useful: https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions

[moniss]

6. First of all the facts of the percentage loss in some

species etc. are actually quite huge. I don't get someone trying to paint Goodall as out of touch etc. because of her indication to plant trees because she also speaks about moving away from fossil fuels and other measures. So she is hardly putting tree planting out there as some universal panacea to correct all ills. But the function of trees and their critical connection to the ecosystem goes way beyond just being carbon traps.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

7. Some species, yes.

But what percentage of all species have been lost so far? Specifics matter a lot. Again, we are no where near being in a "6th Mass Distinction."

[hatrack]

8. And what we're doing now is far faster than what was going on then . . .

Last edited Sun Nov 17, 2024, 01:38 PM - Edit history (1)

The Permian Extinction, to the degree that scientific data allow us to reconstruct it, took between 20,000 and 110,000 years to play out. And that's how long it took for atmospheric CO2 to rise from +./ 400 ppm to +/- 2,500 ppm.

Today's direct data show a roughly 100 ppm increase (that is, 230 billion tons) increase in 65 years. At the rate we're going - i.e. going from 315 ppm in 1958 to 422 ppm as of October 2024, we'll get there much, much more quickly, especially if there are natural systems/processes that we haven't factored into our analysis, and as FF development continues.

And to "get there" - that is, hit levels at which we couldn't live anyway - isn't the main point (CDC classifies CO2 as ILDH (Immediately Dangerous To Life And Health) at 5,000 ppm).

We would have screwed climate stability, crop weather predictability and much more well before we got to the lab-rat level of carbon dioxide intoxication.

Rate of change matters.

[AllyCat]

4. Death Stranding.

Perfect. Just what we need. 😢

[jfz9580m]

5. K&R

This is what saddens me the most..that we are taking the rest of the biosphere down with our stupid, crass ways as a species.