Monday, August 05, 2019

How Do You Like Them Odds?


A somewhat different way to view climate change is by losers (many) and winners (few).  Which species will tough it out. Which won't. An article from BBC explores this subject. Hint - Cockroaches and bull frogs, they've got a solid future. Pandas and humans - not so much. In fact, we could be among the first species to go.
Even with our extraordinary capacity for innovation and adaptability, humans, it turns out, probably won’t be among the survivors. 
This is partly because humans reproduce agonisingly slowly and generally just one or two at a time – as do some other favourite animals, like pandas. Organisms that can produce many offspring quickly may have a better shot at avoiding extinction. 
It may seem like just a thought experiment. But discussing which species are more, or less, able to survive climate change is disturbingly concrete.
...And, of course, there is an alternative: we humans could get our acts together and stop the climate crisis from continuing to snowball by adopting policies and lifestyles that reduce greenhouse gases. But for the purposes of these projections, we’re assuming that’s not going to happen.

...Heat tolerant and drought resistant plants, like those found in deserts rather than rainforests, are more likely to survive. So are plants whose seeds can be dispersed over long distances, for instance by wind or ocean currents (like coconuts), rather than by ants (like some acacias). Plants that can adjust their flowering times may also be better able to deal with higher temperatures. Jen Lau, a biologist at Indiana University Bloomington, suggests that this may give non-native plants the advantage when it comes to responding to climate change.
...Importantly, though, the uniquely devastating nature of the current human-made climate crisis means that we can’t fully rely on benchmarks from the past. 
“The climate change that we see in the future will differ in many ways from the climate change that we’ve seen in the past”, notes Jamie Carr, an outreach officer for the Climate Change Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission.
Cockroaches have built-in survival advantages. They know how to seek shelter beneath and behind things. They learned to burrow underground. They also eat just about anything. Koalas, on the other hand, are dead meat. They eat eucalyptus trees and climate change won't be kind to their sole source of food. So, they're gone.
..The future will have not only more extreme environments, but also more urban, human-altered spaces. So “resistant species would likely be the ones that are well attuned to living in human-modified habitats such as urban parks and gardens, agricultural areas, farms, tree plantations, and so on”, says Arvin C Diesmos, a herpetology curator at the Philippine National Museum of Natural History. 
CIFOR’s Nasi sums it up. “The winners will be very small, preferably endotherms if vertebrates, highly adaptable, omnivorous or able to live in extreme conditions.” 
In the words of the IUCN’s Carr, “It doesn’t sound like a very pretty world.”
Of course, to some extent we already know what’s needed to limit the bleakness of the future natural world. This includes reducing greenhouse gases; protecting biodiversity; restoring connectivity between habitats (rather than building endless dams, roads and walls); and reducing interrelated threats like pollution and land harvesting. Even species that are close to extinction, like Saiga antelopes, can be brought back from the brink with enough conservation effort. To reflect the power of sustained conservation, scientists are developing a Green List of species on the road to recovery and full health, to complement the IUCN’s Red List of threatened species. 
The political barriers are daunting. But scaling them, it seems, would beat surrendering the planet to the microbes.

4 comments:

  1. Odd that things such as cockroaches will win the day!

    Should have known that.

    TB

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  2. The more complex the organism, the worse the odds of avoiding extinction.

    I've thought a good deal about resilience and it's apparent that we're mortally dependent on man-made structure. While we haven't yet merged with machines in some techo-chimera, we can't last long without their support.

    I've written a few times about the Kessler Effect. This is the theory that it is a mathematical certainty that, at some point, all the satellites and other space junk orbiting Earth will set off a cascade of collisions with the mass of shrapnel taking down all our satellite networks, navigation, communications, etc.

    If we have a Kessler event mankind would be reduced to a 1950s existence but without many of the systems that served us back then. Aircraft, for example, would have to fall back on radio navigation or intertial nav. No GPS. Ships might have to go back to more ancient means of navigation. No ATMs, perhaps even no means of accounting for deposits, withdrawals, payments, etc. Even essential food transportation could be crippled. What then? The US military on permanent DefCon 5.

    We're not resilient at all. Few know where their food comes from much less how its planted, grown and harvested. What do we do when populations of species upon which our own continuation depends begin to collapse?

    I don't even know how long my ammunition supply would hold out.

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  3. In addition to cockroaches, Trailblazer, an offshoot of that species, the Koch brothers, will also survive due to their great financial resilience and multiple habitats throughout the world.

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  4. I've come across a couple of articles suggesting the uber-rich are becoming nervous, Lorne. It seems some of them feel they already have a plebeian bullseye on their backs.

    One of those items that I posted somewhere on this blog involved a futurist/professor who was paid a six figure sum to deliver what he thought was to be an address on climate change. When he got to the swank venue he found his audience was just four or six very wealthy individuals who wanted to barrage him with questions focused on their own post-apocalyptic survival. One asked how, once money became meaningless, he would be able to retain the loyalty of his guards. He feared they would turn on him and take his stuff.

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