Plantagenet wrote:
It is highly unlike that humans will be hit hard and other species will just replace us. Mass extinctions don't work that way.
When the climate goes haywire and a mass extinction event occurs, it decimates ALL life on earth.
Why do I even bother still coming here engaging in dialogue with amateurs?
Humans and their slave animals and crops have blanketed 45% of terrestrial earth. I can name off the top of my head 15 species that make up this juggernaut; humans, corn, soy, rice, cattle, pigs, chickens, dogs, potatoes, oil palm, plantains, sweet potatoes, sorghum, yams. Before we go further consider that a dairy cow or GMO corn cannot exist without the petro chemicals and industrial agriculture that supports it, these are genetically selected organisms married to industrial agriculture and if released in the wild will not even produce one generation of offspring.
Those 15 species you put on one column. On the other column you have tens of millions of species, many still not classified, all of that inventory of refuge biodiversity humming along in intact ecosystems. On any altitude or latitude gradient you can see within even one species a rich genetic gene pool with adaptability across a suite of environmental parameters including temperature, rainfall, food sources etc.
Yes, climate change will effect both columns. And yes, climate change will put a dent into those hundreds of millions of species making up the biodiversity of natural ecosystems.
But in terms of adaptability to change there is no contest when comparing the vulnerability of whats in column 1 vs whats in column 2.
Climate change is one of the important vectors to correct human overshoot. Disproportionately it will effect humans and their slave crops and animals. And when that retreat happens the speed at which natural ecosystems will recolonize former human landscapes will be astonishing.
In the tropics there are ficus tree roots just waiting to get a foothold on concrete.
Pioneer species around the planet buying their time waiting in the shadows, in the flash of a moment of geologic time they will make this current incarnation of Kudzu Ape irrelevant.