Well, the increased variability itself may be a part of the climate change.
I’ll give an anecdote. I’m working on a project that tracks the length of the rainy season over time in a certain region. There is no clear trend one way or another, but what does stick out as a super strong and clear trend is that the variability of both extremes occurring is increasing.
> Of course, from a short-term timeline (say 100 years), the rate of species extinction from global warming will surely outpace the rate of species creation, since evolution has no time to act.
Which is really the only factor that matters here.
A large quantity of things will likely go extinct before being able to adapt or migrate sufficiently to keep up with the changes.
The re-development of biodiversity takes millions of years, and that’s basically irrelevant from the timescale of humanity.
Same here. I was a heavy smoker who struggled terribly to quit.
But once I quit, well, your “pay me to drink petrol” analogy is accurate. Its been this way for about 10 years now. I just don’t smoke, it’s now repulsive to me, and there’s almost no conceivable way for me to go back to it other than putting myself through the punishment of the early smoker again where it’s just disgusting and doesn’t feel good at all for several weeks.
> That “cow pasture/range” chunk is largely extremely low productivity scrub land owned by the federal government and leased basically for free by cattle folk. We could convert all of it to national parks without much more than a blip in food calories produced in the US.
Agreed!
I would emphasize restoration and protection in almost every case.
Just that there’s also ways we can work towards conservation on land that is being utilized too.
You talked about farms but there’s also: managed forests, anywhere anything is grazing, private lands, fisheries, artificial reefs and kelp forests, any area we already use which we can also stack on an incidental conservation benefit ontop of (as you mentioned renewable energy infrastructure will be a big one, the book I mention is full of other surprising examples such as military bases), things like wildlife underpasses, suburban lawns, and so on. This adds up to a lot of land.
I hope we protect half of the land and ocean like Edward O. Wilson and other major biologists recommend, but also I think it’s smart to look at everything and not just protected areas.
I agree that we should ideally minimize our agricultural footprint and turn everything else into a nature reserve. But we’ve got to work from the realities of where we are today.
Notice that for the USA for example, not very much of the land is state or federal parks. The vast majority is used by humans in some way, and the reality is that they’re not about to turn it all into parks.
So, while pushing for the protection of as much land as possible, we should also study conservation on land that’s not already a protected area.
The book I mentioned has a number of examples where good conservation work has actually been done on such lands.
The human footprint already covers nearly the entirety of the planet. Conservation of systems that are within or directly adjacent to that footprint is actually very important. Extraordinary amounts of biodiversity are contained in these areas and we need to study how to reconcile our land use with the needs of that biodiversity. We shouldn’t ignore it out of a fear that people will get the wrong idea.
We’re another level of the fractal of life, replicating patterns seen in bacterial biofilms, slime molds, circulatory systems, nervous systems, leaves, all manner of multicellular architectures.
It’s certainly a bad thing that we are growing in a sort of zero-sum manner against many original ecosystems though.
We need to learn to restrain our own growth (a tough one that we’re in the process of trying to beat into all of our heads it seems), and also we need to learn how to maximize the potential for biodiversity to exist within the structure of human occupied areas as well. (A good book on this last subject is “Win-win Ecology”).
A problem like a traffic jam needs systemic coordinated action though to be able to solve. Complaining about the lack of perceived ability to get everyone acting is legitimate.
We understand it but humans are composed of a variety of minds and what the rational one wants isn’t necessarily what we do.
Although conservation probably has more to do with reality looking different depending on your own local observations, to a Brazilian cattle rancher or Indonesian logger at the frontlines of the biodiversity crisis, things look different. For a consumer of those goods and materials, they likely don’t realize the connection.
Pretty sure it’s just Landsat data, which is freely available. As is Sentinel, MODIS, and a number of other satellite platforms.
Google has been a pretty great pioneer on geospatial data science and visualization platforms, especially with Earth Engine (also free to use and allows you to access vast repositories of free geospatial data and use Googles computing resources to do data science with them).
I’ll give an anecdote. I’m working on a project that tracks the length of the rainy season over time in a certain region. There is no clear trend one way or another, but what does stick out as a super strong and clear trend is that the variability of both extremes occurring is increasing.