Attenborough: Coral reefs gone after 2050...

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Miyaru

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It's one of the predictions in Sir David Attenboroughs latest documentary:


"So the world is not as wild as it was.

We have destroyed it.

Not just ruined it, we have completely destroyed that world, that non-human world is gone."

While the whole world focusses on the current Covid-19 pandemic throughout 2020, and any critical responses to that pandemic are being censored by Facebook, Twitter and the media giants, the message in this documentary is pretty clear: we have messed up. Bigtime. Watch it on Netflix.

Humans have unbalanced the world so much, that nature is going to re-balance. The human species have grown to unsustainable numbers. Medical knowledge has enabled mankind to keep even the weakest individuals alive, weakening the species as a whole.
Weakening mankind to a point where a single virus can no longer be fought off by a properly functioning immune system.
Where governments worldwide are limiting everybody's freedom while waiting for a vaccine...

Time to look beyond short-term measures like social-distancing. Time to wake up and see the real problem.
 
I watched this a couple of nights ago, and think it's one of his best documentaries--certainly his most powerful. I liked that he didn't leave it at simply pointing out the decline but also offered some possible remedies. I don't think he mentioned pandemics, but the connection certainly didn't escape me.
 
My wife and I watched it together, and we left feeling mightily depressed. Yes, he did announce a number of steps that could be taken to help solve this problem, but neither of us harbored any hope that any of them will occur. There are just too many powerful people who are only interested in what is best for them.

The reason is best exemplified by a story of my grandfather. Many years ago the rural road in front of his house was repaved in a way that changed the drainage, causing water to pool in his front yard. Being poor, my then 95-year old grandfather went for an easy solution. He had a load of dirt delivered, and he had my brother (I was not around) rake it to regrade the yard, with the result that the new lawn level was several inches above the bottom of the shingle siding on the house. My brother asked him if that wouldn't cause the shingles to rot, resulting in a need for expensive repairs . "Not in my lifetime," my grandfather replied.

When I dived in Thailand, I saw reefs completely destroyed by dynamite fishing. The fishermen know that with the reefs destroyed, they are destroying future fishing. They don't care. Dynamite gives them a great fish haul now. The lack of fish tomorrow is tomorrow's problem. Does anyone believe that the people who replaced the Amazonian rainforest with palm oil plantations or the government that actively supported it are going to change their minds and return to land to the critical diversity of a wild rainforest?
 
Well, i am a brazilian, so what could i say? Simply tired to live on a future super power who never take off and with a government that don't give a **** for our great natural enviromental resources
 
As a rule, scientists -- and I count myself among them -- possess the same predictive prowess and accuracy as that of the late Jean Dixon, the celebrity psychic of tabloid fame, who, ironically enough, did not anticipate her own demise.

Attenborough, at ninety-four, is making an awfully safe prediction of a potential 2050 extinction event.

I grew up during the hand-wringing, "the end is nigh" period of Stanford biologist, Paul Erhlich's The Population Bomb, with its apocalyptic predictions of wholesale environmental / societal collapse by the 1980s; the need for "temporary" sterilants in the water supply to thwart pregnancies; even the eventual demise of England, for some odd reason ("If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”); and global starvation events, by or before the close of the twentieth century -- none of which ever came to pass -- even with his gross underestimation of the current global population (well over twice his wildest predictions: a generous margin or error); though, Ehrlich's influence did leave an indelible mark upon science fiction -- most memorably, the film, Soylent Green, based upon Harry Harrison's novel, Make Room! Make Room!

Still can't stomach a Wheat Thin.

So, too, were the dire predictions of an imminent ice age, throughout the seventies -- there were computer models -- coupled with the existential angst of a probable manmade "Nuclear Winter," throughout the Cold War eighties.

Corals, so far as the fossil record indicates, arose some 500 million years ago, at a time when atmospheric CO2 levels may well have exceeded 7000 ppm (many times greater than today); and they've survived five global mass extinction events since that time, including the Ordovician–Silurian, when 70 percent of all species perished; the Late Devonian -- again, a whopping 70 percent; the Permian–Triassic event, the so-called "Great Dying," where upwards of 96 percent of all species were said to have disappeared; the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event, where a 75 percent species loss, was the booby prize; and the Cretaceous-Paleogene event, where a bolide the size of Manhattan, whacked, both the Yucatán; the dinosaurs and yet another seventy-five percent of all extant plant and animal life, in one fell swoop.

I have every confidence that they'll survive, in one form or another, the idiocy of dynamite fishing; bleaching events; even the "boatniks" with piss-poor anchoring skills, if they could withstand a choking cascade of 15,000 million tons of soot and vaporized rock; darkness and the probable cessation of photosynthesis, of over two years, at the close of the Cretaceous . . .
 
I grew up during the hand-wringing period of Erhlich's The Population Bomb, with its dire predictions of wholesale environmental and societal collapse and mass, potentially global starvation, by the close of the twentieth century -- none of which ever came to pass, not by a long shot,

Actually we are beginning to see food/water shortages and serious declines in ecosystem functions. The leap from a 100 story building isn't a big deal. When you pass the 3rd floor on the way down, everything is still fine at the moment.
 
Actually we are beginning to see food/water shortages and serious declines in ecosystem functions. The leap from a 100 story building isn't a big deal. When you pass the 3rd floor on the way down, everything is still fine at the moment.

Does any of the 1.3 billion tonnes of wasted food, each year -- a full third of all food produced for human consumption -- figure into your "one hundred story" leap?

The Doomsday Clock is at 100 seconds to midnight; time to wring my hands and panic.

I recommend Otto Friedrich's The End of the World: A History -- dire predictions, all -- for the last thousand years or more . . .
 
...
The Doomsday Clock is at 100 seconds to midnight; time to wring my hands and panic.
...
I totally agree with you. When I see all the Covid panic in the world, it certainly looks like a Doomsday Clock.
The weak will be wiped out by the virus, the species will diminish in numbers and become healthier. Unethical maybe, but nature doesn't care about ethics.

But you can't deny that humans are unbalancing the world. That specific mammal is responsible for taking entire fish stocks out of this world and bringing plastic into this world.
 

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