Shift in Ecosystems according to NASA?
Climate change in the world around us will eventually change the plants that cover a large percentage of the lands surface. Plants such as forests, grasslands and or tundras. This information is according to the new NASA and University computer modeling study.
NASA: “The model projections paint a portrait of increasing ecological change and stress in Earth’s biosphere, with many plant and animal species facing increasing competition for survival, as well as significant species turnover, as some species invade areas occupied by other species. Most of Earth’s land that is not covered by ice or desert is projected to undergo at least a 30 percent change in plant cover — changes that will require humans and animals to adapt and often relocate”
“Climate change at least of resent has been deemed as a problem, but it is also a natural process of weather patterns altering possibly on a global scale. Climate change also affects people and the environment through rising/falling temperatures pushing the climate through global warming or ice ages. With the recent concern, which is global warming the climate is experiencing rising greenhouse gas affects but at a quicker rate than the natural change. Climate change can cause the loss of species or new adaptations taken on by species. Unfortunately, if the changes are to quick then species cannot adapt like needed because this takes millions of years. Not only does differences in climate affect species of animals it also affects flora. Moderate warming levels can benefit farmers but can limit the types of crops that can be grown. Specific signs of climate change are: heat waves, drought, heavy precipitation and also bigger storms (tropical). All of this can be caused by anthropogenic means or through natural causes from the Earth. Personally, I feel climate change is a very real things and needs to be looked into and taught to the youth so they too can take a part in slowing down the changes to a more natural rate.”
—References1. (My opinion)
2. (EPA.gov / Summary of key findings PDF)
3. (EPA.gov / Society and Ecosystems PDF)
Climate Change Takes a Toll on Cultures
green.blogs.nytimes.comIn some places, the shifts in ecosystems require indigenous cultures to rapidly adapt or perish as their traditional means of subsistence becomes harder to sustain.
… Over longer arcs of time, Dr. Baptiste [Brigitte Baptiste, director of the Colombian Environment Ministry’s Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute] explained by e-mail, indigenous knowledge keeps pace with change, assuring the viability of the community. But in the case of rapid climate change, “if this adaptive capacity, already embedded in the fabric of local cultures, fails to give quick answers, the youngest members of the community may jump out of the tradition.”
— NYT Green blog
“We have decades of experience as first responders in aid of species threatened by the familiar challenges of habitat loss, pollution and overharvesting. In many of these cases the solution is straightforward (often, stop eating that species), even if the sociopolitical and economic challenges can be formidable. The appropriate conservation response for amphibians perishing from disease must await a real breakthrough in disease control.”
—Joseph R. Mendelson III in American Scientist. Lessons of the Lost: Amphibians are all but gone, bequeathing us lessons that must not be squandered
Mangrove conservation pays off for Kenya's coastal communities
trust.orgMangrove conservation is important in the fight against climate change, and not just because mangroves can slow storm surges, prevent erosion and lower disaster risk for coastal communities.
“In the Freshkills Park in New York City, currently under construction, park workers and environmental scientists are using cutting edge engineering to turn a massive dump into the original wetlands and meadows that form the main habitats in this area. In the case of Freshkills, workers were dealing with a layer of pure garbage. They had to build a new layer of rocks and soil on top of the trash, fitting it out with release valves that emit methane from the decaying garbage underneath. The methane gas will be sold to an energy company, and funds used to continue improving the park.”
—How to Rebuild a Broken Ecosystem — Yes, You Can Do It, Too!Humans do not exist within a food chain.
It angers me when people who like to argue the fact that we’re “top of the food chain” so we can do what we want with all the animals that are “beneath us”.
We are not apex predators, we are cultivators. We raise our animals from birth and kill them in enclosed spaces. There is nothing predatory about this behaviour.
The ecosystem that we find ourselves in is an entirely unnatural one of our own making. Our increased “intelligence” has overall been of no benefit to the natural world that we live in whereas animals that live outside of our ecosystem, the animals that live in the wild within their own ecosystems - they are self sustaining, they do not over-feed themselves because they are intelligent enough to know that those animals will no longer be around if they eat them all - they consume within the limits of their ecosystem and maintain balance. Humans know nothing of balance and living within limits.
A perfect example of this is the European colonisation of North America - we wiped out every pack of wolves that we encountered because they posed a threat to our unnatural way of breeding cattle and sheep. What was the result of this extermination over a period of years? North America now has increasingly high populations of Deer which are culled each year to control numbers or left to breed even more and then killed for “sport”. The larger the populations of deer - the more grasses and young saplings are eaten before they have time to grow and so on down the food chain. Exterminating wolves has affected the entire ecosystem of many, many wild areas of North America. Wolves are currently making a come-back in North America, travelling huge distances from Canada, but again there are people completely against their re-introduction - demonising them and killing them at will regardless of their protection status.
Away from land we have now over-fished our oceans to the point where we need to farm fish on an increasingly large scale (I wont even go into the disgusting ways of killing fish that are farmed and how mariculture affects the ocean). Commercial fishing vessels are destroying ocean ecosystems with the use of Bottom Trawling; entire populations of Hammerhead sharks are disappearing from the Sea of Cortez due to over-fishing (which also has an effect on the sea lion population) and other populations of shark species all around the globe are being decimated to meet the needs for Shark fin soup.
Humans do not benefit the natural world. We destroy it to meet our own greedy, materialistic needs. This want of everything and wanting it now is a disgusting, vile thing.
There is a serious amount of re-education that needs to happen. There are a lot of people trying to make this happen but I’m not entirely sure how much it’s going to help. I personally think that the human race is doomed to destroy itself and the environment in which we live.
Will Humans ever lose their ego?
Who knows what will happen to the universe should humans ever expand throughout space in the coming millennia. Thankfully I will not be around to see that happen.
