RE: Mass Extinction!
December 4, 2010 at 12:52 pm
(This post was last modified: December 4, 2010 at 12:54 pm by Shell B.)
Actually, they are unable to determine the actual size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Any article that says differently is full of shit. It is huge, but it is immeasurable for several reasons. One, some of the plastic is suspended below the surface and some floats on the surface. Two, it shifts around in the same area. All who have studied it say that, while it is big, at this point, there is no way of measuring it. The closest they can get is giving an estimate of pieces of plastic per square foot/yard/mile.
No, they are two separate issues. I feel this way because habitat destruction is an immediate problem that aids extinction every day. Habitat destruction also aids climate change, but if we run out of fucking trees, I think it hardly matters if it gets hot here.
(December 4, 2010 at 3:09 am)orogenicman Wrote:(December 4, 2010 at 1:14 am)Shell B Wrote:(December 4, 2010 at 1:07 am)Chuck Wrote: The fact seems to be that the current climatological fluctuation in the last 60,000 years is not severe compared to what repeated transpired in the last 2.8 million years. Yet there were no major global extinction events between 2.8 million - 60,000 years, but there is what appears to be a fairly severe global extinction level event starting 60,000 years ago and rapidly picking up pace in the last 12000 years. The spread of modern Homo Sapiens seems to be one major global scale influence that coincided with this latest extinction event. To remove human as the most important agent of interest, one needs to identify another.
Of course, humans shouldn't be removed as a suspect in this mass extinction. Nonetheless, I think it is the scale of the extinction that we are to blame for, not the extinction itself. "Climatological fluctuation" is not the only problem here, either. Invasive species, over-hunting, etc. all have their place among the ways humans wipe out species. I'm actually not as concerned about climate change as I am about habitat destruction.
With regard to at least the current event, I think it would be a mistake to try to separate or else emphasis one thing over another (i.e., climate change from habitat destruction). It seems rather obvious that the two go hand in hand.
No, they are two separate issues. I feel this way because habitat destruction is an immediate problem that aids extinction every day. Habitat destruction also aids climate change, but if we run out of fucking trees, I think it hardly matters if it gets hot here.
