Earth is still doomed

Plants and animals make life worth living. They also help make it possible.

Humanity is in the middle of the Anthropocene extinction in which a trillion different animal and plant species are at risk. Unless climate change is reversed, only the hardiest organisms— such as rats, cockroaches, jellyfish or microscopic life— will survive. Humans might not boast the survivability of some species when faced with extreme environmental pressures, but human intelligence can adapt to changes faster than animals can with natural selection.

On Black Friday, a congressionally mandated climate report was released that projects severe economic harm to the United States economy should climate change continue unabated. The Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume 2 projects that millions of lives will be at risk and will cost the economy billions of dollars by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced significantly.

This report also found, like many others before it, that humans are the main cause of global warming. If people do not take responsibility for the damage that has been done to the planet, there is not going to be much planet left to fight for.

Earth’s biosphere is like a spinning top and each living thing helps keep it spinning by maintaining ecological balance. Every species that goes extinct and every environment that is irreversibly damaged causes the top to destabilize. When the top stops spinning almost everything will die. If current global greenhouse emissions are not reversed, parts of south Asia will become uninhabitable in the summers. It is not difficult to imagine Earth becoming so hostile to life that people can only survive in artificial habitats.

In November 2017, over 15,000 scientists signed in agreement that climate change must be addressed. The eight authors of “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,” asserted that “We have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.”

They recommend limiting population growth and drastically reducing consumption of fossil fuels, meat and other resources.

A few things are powerful enough to upset the balance, such as catastrophic climate change from volcanic activity, asteroid impact or the evolution of new organisms that completely changed their environment, such as cyanobacteria or humans beings.

According to “Periodicity of extinctions in the geologic past,” a landmark paper published in 1982 by Jack Sepkoski and David M. Raup, Earth has experienced five major extinction events with minor extinction events occurring unevenly throughout. Life had always managed to find a way to survive these apocalypses through a few hardy organisms whose success is passed onto their decedents.

Mammals currently dominate the planet thanks to a tenacious shrew-like creature that survived the extinction of (most) dinosaurs.

This time though even the shrews are screwed.

If humans continue to upset the balance, the biodiversity of the life will be greatly diminished. When it comes to an ecosystem, the more species the better.

A report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has found that population sizes of wildlife decreased by 60 percent globally between 1970 and 2014. If the human race is going to live in an environmentally stable planet, people will have to protect animals as well.

One day, zoos might be one of the only places to see live exotic animals. If things get worse, a lot more species might soon be considered exotic.

All plants and animals have roles in their environment and ecosystems tend to have multiple species whose purpose overlaps. If one goes the way of the dodo, another can hopefully fill the void. Extinction of a species reduces the overall health of an environment and it becomes more vulnerable to complete collapse.

Southern California has suffered an ecological collapse of its under-water kelp forests before. With proper conservation of marine life, their range can continue to expand along the coast. Sea otters are incredibly important for maintaining the health of kelp forests by preying on anemones and other creatures that graze on kelp.

Humans overhunted sea otters all along the California coast in the 1800s, which caused a population boom of all the creatures that eat kelp. Combined with pollution from storm drains, overfishing of important organisms and sediments from human development, the huge kelp forests that once supported 800 different species have been reduced by 80% in the past 100 years.

This event is not isolated to the California coast.

Humans have ousted the local apex predators again and again. These predators are at the top of the food chain and they keep the environment healthy by managing the populations of other animals. In the aftermath of an ecological coup all the species will be affected by overpopulation, disease and eventually starvation when their food runs out.

Though they may be a danger to us at times, large predators are some of the most important members in an ecosystem. When deer populations boom, human hunters try to cull their numbers, but what the environment needs is more wolves and cougars.

Even though some species fall under “least concern” when it comes to their conservation, once the cascading extinction event enters the home stretch, even the most stable populations will be decimated.

We have been eating away at the ocean’s population of fish for millennia, but it has been recently shown that the population of all marine vertebrates has been cut in half since the 1970s, according to a 2015 report by the WWF, which found previously ignored species like sea cucumbers are now being overfished due to lack of other species. Without an active effort to protect species and regions from humans, the pests will dominate the world.

Although life on the planet has bounced back from mass extinctions before (over the course of millions of years), humans are a game changer. There might be no limit to how thoroughly human industrialization can damage the world. Humans, and other survivalists like cockroaches, may withstand the environmental catastrophe. But things might get so bad that they may never improve.

A runaway greenhouse effect could boil the oceans and cause clouds to block out the sun. There must be a concerted effort to focus on combating all the various causes of climate change before it is too late.

Responsibility for climate change is often pushed off onto the individual. Those in power to enact change instead tell people to recycle more, take shorter showers and carpool. But it is the various industrial giants that are the culprits. The world’s biggest polluters, like the coal, oil, agriculture and other industries, should be held responsible for the effects of climate change.

Like the “Giving Tree,” the environment has given humanity the tools and resources to industrialize and globalize. Now it is up to people to create a civilization capable of restoring the environment. Humans have long struggled with shortsightedness, but the complete destruction of the biosphere of Earth is not something that can be procrastinated on any longer.

A UN climate report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts an increase in environmental-based disasters, food scarcity and war if global continues to increase. According to the report, there are only 12 years left to prevent the temperature from rising beyond 1.5 C above preindustrial levels.

Unless civilization can mobilize itself and wage a war on climate change during the next decade, a climate crisis unlike any other will bring unprecedented horror to the human race as the planet slowly dies.

It is far too late to squabble about whether to respond or not. Billions of people are at risk, including every species of plant and animals.

Failing to address climate change now is the same as suicide.