Has the bio sphere been damaged enough to cause a positve feedback cycle of extinction?

Question

what is a tech forum

Answer 1

I think you need to be on a tech forum.

Answer 2

in some places yes i reckon so. forget the lovely amazon, it's gone man! deforestation wont stop for decades, and the rains will fail, then the remnants of the forest will burn...

my main fear is ocean anoxia and acidification, they are spreading already. loose the algae and we get a big co2/acidification positive feedback cycle.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

Answer 3

Much of the Amazon is now under protection and is only used for renewable purposes. This wasn't done by government fiat but by people contributing money to purchase the land. Having been up and down the Amazon I can vouch for the fact it is still huge, still very green and still healthy. I'd like it if they protected still more land there but we've got a good start. Wikipedia states that from 2002-2006, the conserved land in the Amazon Rainforest nearly tripled and the rate of deforestation dropped as much as 60%. "About 1,000,000 square kilometres (250,000,000 acres) have been put onto some sort of conservation, which adds up to a current amount of 1,730,000 square kilometres (430,000,000 acres)."

Many factors besides climate change can affect the acidity of the oceans, historically this isn't at all unusual and no reason to think the seas are dying. Claims that the oceans are dying are straight out of science fiction, if we made a concerted effort we could conceivably make that happen, but not by accident.

The biosphere is perfectly healthy, thanks, never better. More CO2 is good for plants, less ice and warming oceans mean more water in the air to help them further. Then again, what's good for one species is bad for another, so it depends on your point of view. Despite wild claims of mass extinctions, some as high as 50% of all species becoming extinct in the next 20 years, there isn't a shred of evidence to support that. Polar bears for instance, have survived several interglacial periods that were totally ice-free and much warmer than the one we're in now.

The Earth is very good at self-regulating it's climate but it sometimes takes an inconveniently long time to do so, from the perspective of lifeforms living here. The oceans have been near-death before, all surface life has been exterminated, it's been a giant snowball. But none of that has happened in hundreds of millions of years and it's not going to happen now since the causes for those events no longer exist.

Answer 4

Yea, Pauli Shore did permanent damage to that systems ecology.

Answer 5

Not to dat extent, but still it has damaged a lot.... if it continues then the results wud b very worse....