[SeaGypsy]

Ibon, it is not the species at threat ultimately from CC, it is our volume & our dominance. Humans have proven to be extremely adaptable as you are well aware. Currently the Panda bear has been lifted from 'critically endangered' to endangered', there are maybe 30,000 now. Get back to our most vulnerable status when there are a few tens of thousands of people left. I don't buy it.

[Ibon]

Currently the Panda bear has been lifted from 'critically endangered' to endangered', there are maybe 30,000 now. Get back to our most vulnerable status when there are a few tens of thousands of people left. I don't buy it.

Just to clarify as maybe I was misunderstood. We are the most vulnerable, but not to extinction or even to a level as critical as the Panda Bear. We are the most vulnerable to a correction simply because there is no other species so deep into overshoot..... with a self created ecosystem that is brittle with little resiliency and redundancy with food and energy substitutes.
6/7 of the population reducing to a cool 1 billion for example would be an outcome consistent with what I am stating here.

Of course any species that goes extinct as a result of climate change is a species ultimately more vulnerable than humans if we just correct back down to 6/7nths of our current population. So yeah, Orangutans are probably more vulnerable.

Just remember that the very day we see consequences start to impact human footprint on the planet is the very day that a process goes into reverse, where natural ecosystems start reclaiming former human landscapes. That will be a day that perhaps will merit a name just like the Anthropocene marks the beginning of human induced changes in our biosphere. It will be a significant inflection point.

[dohboi]

"We are the most vulnerable, but not to extinction"

That's exactly the contradiction that SG and I object to.

It's like I am standing over an old lady that I have been kicking to death, and I continue to smash her face in with my hobnail boots, I declare: "I am much more vulnerable than you and all the other old lady's I've cudgeled to death or to within an inch of their lives. It's just that I don't happen to be on the verge of (or past the point of) expiration like you poor saps."

My guess is that you have taken a metaphor/likeness/similarity (human society is like an ecosystem) and turned it into an actual and evaluative equivalence (loss of some part of that 'human ecosystem' has the same intrinsic value as loss of parts of the actual global ecosystem).

But perhaps the misunderstanding springs from something else (or is my own??) ??

"any species that goes extinct as a result of climate change is a species ultimately more vulnerable than humans"

So, thanks for that clarification.

[dohboi]

"...where natural ecosystems start reclaiming..."

Unfortunately, many of our harms will continue and even increase even if we all disappeared tomorrow.

•We have a whole thread on runaway GW that you can peruse--permafrost, methane hydrates and other carbon feedbacks have been destabilized and triggered by our ff emissions, and are taking on a life of their own, continuing the trajectory of global heating long after we are gone. And of course GW will continue to drive species up mountains till there is no mountain left, and drive them north till there is no 'north' left.

•As the oceans continue to 'catch up' with the high concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, they will continue to acidify, thinning and dissolving the shells of many critical species, large and small, threatening the entire food chain there.

•West Antarctic Ice Sheet is going to go into the ocean now no matter what. That will doom coastal ecosystems around the world, which in turn will put probably billions of tons of our trash of various sorts into the oceans, further degrading that crucial ecosystem.

•The inevitable collapse of WAIS, the continued melt of other ice sheets given the continued warming spelled out above, and the increasing stratification from surface warming of the oceans--all of these will tend to shut down oceanic circulation systems, leading to anoxic conditions throughout, leading to mass death of pretty much every marine species that depends on dissolved oxygen.

•That mass death in the oceans in an oxygen deprived environment will lead to sulfur based life forms thriving which will create vast plumes of deadly SH2 gas which will obliterate all life wherever they drift over land or through the air.

•All out nuclear plants will go critical, poisoning vast regions around them for a long period of time.

(Don't be fooled by the apparent short-term recovery of wildlife around Chernobyl: recent studies have showed that the radiation has wiped out the fungus critical for turning dead wood, for example, back into productive soil. The interruption of that crucial cycle will spell eventual disaster for that whole ecosystem.)

•We have created billions of tons of plastics which will continue to poison and disrupt the digestive systems of species all the way down to the tiniest as they very slowly break down.

•We have also created tens of thousands (more?) of chemicals that have never existed in nature. We don't even know what the long-term (or even short term) effects of most of these will have on individual plants and animals, or on ecosystems, much less what their combined effect might be. As these leak out of whatever containers and devises they are in now, and as the coasts flood, these will be released in ever larger quantities to the ecosystem, poisoning many individuals and whole ecosystems.

...

and these are just a few of the ways that human impact on ecosystems will persist and even worsen once we're gone that drift through my head on this drowsy Wednesday morning. Others can likely come up with others.

That's not to say that there won't be some isolated places on the planet where recovery will start quickly. It's just not the only story.

(Sorry to impinge on your happy fantasy.)

[Ibon]

"We are the most vulnerable, but not to extinction"

That's exactly the contradiction that SG and I object to.

I acknowledge this and stand corrected.

My guess is that you have taken a metaphor/likeness/similarity (human society is like an ecosystem) and turned it into an actual and evaluative equivalence (loss of some part of that 'human ecosystem' has the same intrinsic value as loss of parts of the actual global ecosystem).

This is not the metaphor I am employing here. Intrinsic value implies better or worse. There is no better or worse in nature. I am viewing man made environments in all its facets from cities to cow pastures as an integrated self created ecosystem. This is not hard to understand when you consider biomass. We replaced the biomass of native ecosystems when we destroyed them and replaced this biomass with our own living arrangement; crops, pastures, cities, etc. Just like a natural ecosystem our man made living arrangement supplies the same components; food, shelter, sanitation, etc. It is less a metaphor and more an accurate term in my view. We are not integrated any longer into natural ecosystems in the way we gather our food or shelter ourselves. We have created our own ecosystem quite literally.

And it is highly vulnerable to correction.

What I have done with these posts, which I will now acknowledge as being not completely correct, was use the provocative term "most vulnerable" in comparing humans and our landscapes as disproportionately more vulnerable to climate change than are natural ecosystems.

Where I stand by though is that any species, human or otherwise, when in extreme overshoot, does become the most vulnerable component in their ecoystems. There I did it again

Let's say "most vulnerable to correction" then. Maybe that is better. Ripe for correction we are. OK, I don't want to any longer belabor the point unless anyone else still has juice to go further into this.....

[dohboi]

"Ripe for correction we are"

Very well (and Yoda like) stated!

Your defense of your position, though, leads me to the conclusion that my diagnosis was actually right. But I think we should leave it there.

[Ibon]

"...where natural ecosystems start reclaiming..."

Unfortunately, many of our harms will continue and even increase even if we all disappeared tomorrow.

We have a whole thread on runaway GW that you can peruse--permafrost, methane hydrates and other carbon feedbacks have been destabilized and triggered by our ff emissions, and are taking on a life of their own, continuing the trajectory of global heating long after we are gone.

All out nuclear plants will go critical, poisoning vast regions around them for a long period of time.

(Don't be fooled by the apparent short-term recovery of wildlife around Chernobyl: recent studies have showed that the radiation has wiped out the fungus critical for turning dead wood, for example, back into productive soil. The interruption of that crucial cycle will spell eventual disaster for that whole ecosystem.)

Not much concrete evidence here. Regarding nuclear consequences on habitats we often inflate the consequences. 10% mutation rates for humans is a catastrophe. 25% mutation rates for any other species means that 75% continue to successfully procreate. With half lifes and dispersal it is not that many generations before mutations drop even further. The fungus die-off is in the core hotspots, outside of that area decomposition is not so affected. I just read up on this with a Smithsonian article that seems to bear this out.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... 180950075/

Accelerating climate change is an area where I think the point I am trying to make is more relevant. This is where human landscapes really are very vulnerable to disruptions due to the dependency we have on very few crops along with the other points I made on previous posts. Natural ecosystems are inherently armed with far richer biodiversity than human ecosystems.

A good comparison would be that natural ecosystems are playing with a full deck of cards while human landscapes only have a few cards of one suit and thus have very little resiliency. Again, I don't want to belabor this point beyond this simple comparison.

[Tanada]

Dohboi if you are talking about the study I read abut forest litter break down in the Chernobyl zone then you did not understand what you read. In 99 percent of the zone the fugi and bacteria that break down forest litter are functioning just exactly as you would expect in a healthy ecosystem. What the scientists in that study did was select the sites where breakdown is NOT happening and confirm the contamination in that very small portion of the total is the cause. Is a 1 percent failure rate of breakdown life forms something we should pay attention too? Absolutely! But stretching that 1 percent to cover 100 percent is not only unwarranted, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is actually taking place.

There is also he fact that forest fires clear out forest litter and return the nutrients to the soil. Bacteria and Fungi decay is better, but it is not the exclusive way nutrients get recycled. Very little in an ecosystem has a limit set by one path. There is also the fact that browsing animals like goats and deer will eat forest litter to get the nutrients directly and their digestive bacteria are also a factor in the total picture. Don't focus on one tree so hard you miss the rest of the forest around it, filled with complexity.

[dohboi]

Ib "Natural ecosystems are inherently armed with far richer biodiversity"

T "filled with complexity"

Exactly. And its complexity and diversity is its resilience. Yet it is exactly that complexity which is under attack from every angle in this ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Event.