First Mammal Species Goes Extinct Due to Climate Change

The Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola) seems to have disappeared from its home in the eastern Torres Strait of the Great Barrier Reef, the scientists say. The animal was last seen by a fisherman in 2009, but failed attempts to trap any in late 2014 have prompted scientists to say it is likely extinct.

Also called the mosaic-tailed rat, the rodent is named after its home on Bramble Cay, a small island that is at most 10 feet (3 meters) above sea level.

The rats were first seen by Europeans on the island in 1845, and there were several hundred there as of 1978. But since 1998, the part of the island that sits above high tide has shrunk from 9.8 acres to 6.2 acres (4 hectares to 2.5 hectares). That means the island's vegetation has been shrinking, and the rodents have lost about 97 percent of their habitat.

"The key factor responsible for the extirpation of this population was almost certainly ocean inundation of the low-lying cay, very likely on multiple occasions, during the last decade, causing dramatic habitat loss and perhaps also direct mortality of individuals," writes the team, led by Ian Gynther from Queensland’s Department of Environment and Heritage Protection.

“For low-lying islands like Bramble Cay, the destructive effects of extreme water levels resulting from severe meteorological events are compounded by the impacts from anthropogenic climate change-driven sea-level rise,” the authors add.

http://news.nationalgeog...nge-bramble-cay-melomys/

You feel this climate change is natural?

To preface, I believe climate change is despicable and am devoting much of my career to stopping climate change and enhancing the environment.

But for conversational purposes, aren't humans and all the things we do "natural" as well? Just as sparrows build nests and slugs leave behind unique chemical compounds, humans do the same with the materials we find on Earth. As everything was made with something found on Earth, doesn't that make everything we have and do natural? An extraterrestrial race could easily view us as another species on the planet - one that has made great changes to our environment just like other animals do, but not to the same extent as humans.

I think it is not necessarily the most useful to frame climate change as an artificial thing versus the natural world. It is better, in my opinion, to frame it as an unsustainable action that Homo sapiens perform that threatens the existence of the system that put us here and has maintained us.

NYC is no less natural than an ant hill.

To preface, I believe climate change is despicable and am devoting much of my career to stopping climate change and enhancing the environment.

But for conversational purposes, aren't humans and all the things we do "natural" as well? Just as sparrows build nests and slugs leave behind unique chemical compounds, humans do the same with the materials we find on Earth. As everything was made with something found on Earth, doesn't that make everything we have and do natural? An extraterrestrial race could easily view us as another species on the planet - one that has made great changes to our environment just like other animals do, but not to the same extent as humans.

I think it is not necessarily the most useful to frame climate change as an artificial thing versus the natural world. It is better, in my opinion, to frame it as an unsustainable action that Homo sapiens perform that threatens the existence of the system that put us here and has maintained us.

But in fact there have been many ice ages, most of them long before humans made their first appearance. And the familiar picture of an ice age is of a comparatively mild one: others were so severe that the entire Earth froze over, for tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

In fact, the planet seems to have three main settings: “greenhouse”, when tropical temperatures extend to the poles and there are no ice sheets at all; “icehouse”, when there is some permanent ice, although its extent varies greatly; and “snowball”, in which the planet’s entire surface is frozen over.

Why the ice periodically advances – and why it retreats again – is a mystery that glaciologists have only just started to unravel.
https://www.newscientist...history-of-ice-on-earth/

General Overview of the Ice Ages


Extinct mammals of the ice ages: Mammoths and saber tooth tigers. (From: The Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits)
Geologically speaking, we live in a time period of intense climatic change. Since the last 1 million years, our species and our human forebears experienced a dozen or so major glaciations of the northern hemisphere, with the greatest ever occurring around 650,000 years ago. During this period of extreme ice buildup, the ice advanced deep into the Midwest, from its center around Hudson Bay in Canada, and deep into Germany, from its center on the Scandinavian Shield. So much ice collected in these two major regions and several lesser ones that the sea level dropped by some 400 feet and the overall global temperature was lowered by around 5°C (about 9°F). Mammoth, mastodon, wooly rhinoceros, giant bison, camels, horses, and many large predators (cats, wolves, bears) roamed the grasslands well south of the rim of the miles-high ice, both in North America and in Europe. Small bands of humans made a living by hunting and gathering in Africa, and perhaps elsewhere. The glaciation that occurred 650,000 years ago lasted some 50,000 years. It had a profound effect on the landscape, carving great glacial valleys and fjords and lakes, and making moraines and glacial outwash plains around the perimeter of its extent. The greatly lowered sea level allowed rivers to cut deeply into the shelves of the continents and into the edges of the shelves, where the sea floor drops off into the deep ocean. Here canyons could form which would later serve to funnel sediments from the shelf into the deep sea.
http://earthguide.ucsd.e...limatechange2/01_1.shtml

So, should we consider all of our preventable destructive actions as natural events? And not make efforts to correct them?

So, should we consider all of our preventable destructive actions as natural events? And not make efforts to correct them?

To preface, I believe climate change is despicable and am devoting much of my career to stopping climate change and enhancing the environment.

But for conversational purposes, aren't humans and all the things we do "natural" as well? Just as sparrows build nests and slugs leave behind unique chemical compounds, humans do the same with the materials we find on Earth. As everything was made with something found on Earth, doesn't that make everything we have and do natural? An extraterrestrial race could easily view us as another species on the planet - one that has made great changes to our environment just like other animals do, but not to the same extent as humans.

I think it is not necessarily the most useful to frame climate change as an artificial thing versus the natural world. It is better, in my opinion, to frame it as an unsustainable action that Homo sapiens perform that threatens the existence of the system that put us here and has maintained us.

Most predictions say the warming of the planet will continue and likely will accelerate. Oceans will likely continue to rise as well, but predicting the amount is an inexact science. A recent study says we can expect the oceans to rise between 2.5 and 6.5 feet (0.8 and 2 meters) by 2100, enough to swamp many of the cities along the U.S. East Coast. More dire estimates, including a complete meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, push sea level rise to 23 feet (7 meters), enough to submerge London.

http://ocean.nationalgeo...l-issues-sea-level-rise/

Even if we meet that 2°C target, in the past with those types of temperatures, we may be committing ourselves to this level of sea level rise in the long term,” Andrea Dutton, a geochemist at the University of Florida and one of the study’s co-authors, said. “The decisions we make now about where we want to be in 2100 commit us on a pathway where we can’t go back. Once these ice sheets start to melt, the changes become irreversible.”

The study examined past changes and laid out a framework for using them to refine our understanding of what the future holds for coastal communities. According to separate research by Climate Central, a 20-foot sea level rise would reshape the U.S. coast, causing Louisiana to lose its boot and transforming the Bay Area into the Bays Area by forming a second inland bay. It would also threaten the world's coastal nations and megacities.

Sea levels have already risen about 8 inches compared to pre-industrial times. That rise has helped boost the surge and flooding damage from storms like Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan, and dramatically increased the occurrence of everyday flooding during high tide in cities from Baltimore to Honolulu.

The most recent projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicate that if emissions continue on their current trend, sea levels could continue to rise another 39 inches by the end of this century.
http://www.climatecentra...evels-rise-20-feet-19211