The Sixth Mass Extinction and a Happy Holiday Wish! by DeVita
Laurenc DeVita
Phillip Cafaro, in his paper, “Three Ways to Think About the Sixth Mass extinction1 lists these possibilities: “This paper focuses on three common and plausible ways to think about the sixth mass extinction: as a loss of important resources (a mistake); as interspecies genocide (a crime); and as evidence that humanity is a cancer on the biosphere (as an inevitability)”.
Nearly everyone has heard of the “Sixth Mass Extinction”, if only from detractors and doubt merchants. Sadly, there is no question of our culpability in the collapse of the natural environment. The evidence, carefully gathered by a globe full of scientists of every discipline from biology to climatology to paleontology, is irrefutable. Anyone who denies it is simply admitting they value money more than life on Earth. It is common to play a “gee-whiz” game with the number of species going extinct; in truth, we have no idea. We hadn’t cataloged all the species yet. Put it this way: it is enough to justify the term SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION, putting the Anthropocene on the list with other collapses of global biodiversity.
What it means is that the wonderfully rich and varied environment we inherited 12,000 years ago, when the weather became mild and predictable, is now destroyed, and growing worse.
Largely because we filled the very narrow space we can inhabit, the thin band of breathable air and soil and water, with carbon. Carbon is energy; we burned wood for a long time (Rome clear cut entire forests to make glass), and then, in the 1700s, coal. The oil we now burn in huge quantities has only been with us a little over a hundred years. Even so, it leads the pack in terms of environmental destruction, pumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and into the sea. From cars and trucks and ships; in processing and transportation, pretty much everything we eat and everything we own is due to burning fossil fuels.
All that carbon translates into not just higher temperatures, but unstable, unpredictable weather. It translates into acid seas, now so acidic in some areas that bivalves can’t form a shell, and have disappeared. It further drives other forms of pollution, since fossil fuels are used to strip the soil in search of mineral resources, to strip the forests to provide paper and lumber and electricity (consider this: https://energytransition.org/2015/07/biomass-growth-is-over/) and generate other forms of pollution. Fossil fuels also allowed us to fill the world with plastic filth; we all carry plastic microfibers in our flesh now, and a recent survey found plastic molecules in rain water collected in Juneau, Alaska2.
It is fossil fuels which have allowed our population to approach eight billion. This is easily seen if one considers the two data streams, human population and fossil fuel use. Fossil fuels allow more people to live, by producing, processing, distributing and marketing food. Picking up where the sail and water wheel left off, coal and then oil drove mechanization and the use of the Haber-Bosch process of creating fertilizers. Today, peak yields are derived from tractors and implements which use lasers and satellites to distribute the perfect amount of chemical. All products of fossil fuels.
There are other, even more essential things we have done: first, we tinkered with a set of global dna molecules which had formed naturally for three billion years. Some see the global DNA as a story, where some very simple but very old organisms have very long and complicated strings. The other terrible thing we have done is purify and modify radioactive materials. We have far more nuclear material now than we can safely dispose of. Much of it, as plant maintenance declines in the coming hard times, is going to end up in rivers, ground water, and the sea. The already depleted environment will become mutagenic for thousands of years. If we stopped now, and recovered, separated and sequestered that material, it would be a small help. But, we won’t because we need our bombs to be safe and our electricity to continue to pollute the environment. Yeah, compelling arguments for nuclear weapons and power plants.
So, whether through accident, or intentional crime, or because we are simply a cancer, we are killing the world.
In response, the world is about to shrug us off.
It isn’t just that the climate has shifted and our mellow, stable weather is dissipating, it is that you don’t get to kill off numberless species you share the environment with and continue to live yourself. Eight billion people require the maximum extraction possible to move food and people and wealth. Polluted water, soils salted with ferts and poisoned with pesticides, looming shortage of energy as fossil fuel production declines, and unstable weather, and we see a world where humans just can’t exist in the billions. Indeed, it is sobering to think that there are other reasons we should fear our end. One is that we are the last Homo. When we arose, we had many cousin species, but they are now all gone, and we are the last. Further, we show a lack of variability in our genetic code. The variability is one measure of resilience in a species.
We have all grown up in a time when science could solve every problem, and people working together could derive a sustainable society. However, that position is contrary to the data.
The data says: increasing temperatures; disruption of the atmospheric and marine flows causing unstable weather, and increasingly severe storms. It also says our bodies are saturated with heavy metals, various noxious chemicals, and now plastic. We live in our own petrochemical filth.
Our mother is about to kiss us goodbye, because we were witless, because we were murderous, and because we are fouling the environment we need to live.
Otherwise, enjoy it while you can, happy holidays, best of luck in the coming new year!
I leave it to you to see if your knuckles drag, but nothing you have said pertains to me at all. Nothing.
Further, the elite doesn’t want any mention of the damage we have done to the environment; they, like you, want us to pretend everything is fine.
Here is big vacuum in the middle of your argument; you insist it is politics, not science. Your depreciating remarks regarding “egghead circle jerk reading from the script handed down from those who fund their research grants” reflect on you, your ignorance and truncated view of the world, but not on the thousand of hard working, diligent scientists.
Your inability to accept the facts might explain why you avoid facts completely in your rant, and, instead, imagine that you know something everyone else doesn’t.
Honestly, I think you are probably working at maximum capacity, and it might be unfair to insist you let some actual information into your world view.
Sadly,the environment doesn’t care what you think. Neither do those who can read the data.
I have a confession to make.
I do care more about the economy than about life on the planet because the two are inseparable.
Life on the planet is getting better, and the environment is getting cleaner because of market capitalism and cheap and abundant energy.
More people have been lifted out of crushing poverty, and are living longer healthier lives all across the world in the last couple decades than at any other time in human history.
Population growth in the modern industrial world has dropped below replacement rates, which has the same globalist elite that relentlessly promotes the idea of an overcrowded, dying planet hypocritically throwing open their borders to import new waves of low skilled immigrants to man the factories and clean up after their privileged, white benefactors.
The tried & true way to a healthier and cleaner planet is making its inhabitants richer and healthier, so they can afford to have concern for their surroundings, and stay put.
The key to bringing that about is the wealth generating commerce made more efficient and productive by cheap, abundant and reliable energy.
The benefits far outweigh the risks.
Startling technological advances are coming down the pike daily, the news of which is all but drowned out by the media fear factory.
So wallow in despair if you think its a good idea. Sit, melodramatically weeping on the edge of your graves. Keep your useless masks on. Treat your families, friends, and neighbors like hazardous waste. Stay in your house. Cringe with fellow faith based bitter clingers. Keep scanning the skies for that ‘Sweet Meteor of Death’ and give the rest of us a break.
Things are nowhere near as bad as the doom and gloomers fervently hope they are.
Oh.
At least now I understand the source of your cognitive deficiency. You can’t distinguish between the real world an money. In case you missed the actual article, life on the planet doesn’t mean just humans, it means life on the planet, of which we are one species. You really do value money more than life, a horrifying mental illness.
“Life on the planet is getting better, and the environment is getting cleaner because of market capitalism and cheap and abundant energy” That is not only untrue, it is insane. No, life is not getting better, it is going extinct, yeah? No, the environment is not getting cleaner, it is more damaged than it has ever been. You like to pretend.
Yes, you found a partial fact: population growth rate is falling.
Sadly, you missed the rest: but population is already higher than the system can support, and will probably grow another billion people. The take away: population is already swamping the environment, as the data clearly demonstrates. The data is the rest of your fact.
Your struggling attempt at demographic is simply wrong. There are more people in poverty,hungry and without clean water, now than there ever were. You confuse your comfy life in the West with most of the rest of the world.
“The tried & true way to a healthier and cleaner planet is making its inhabitants richer and healthier, so they can afford to have concern for their surroundings, and stay put.”
That is blatantly false. Driving carbon use, which is what you have said, is literally killing the world and us with it. There is virtually no credible evidence to the contrary, and a planet of evidence to demonstrate how wrong that is.
There is little need to continue. Your speech is literally taken right out of the commercials for the petroleum and chemical commercials of the 1960s. It is solidly founded on stealing as much as possible from the ground and turning it in to pollution. It is about an insatiable appetite, a pathology, which disregards the consequences of consumption to the environment, and to people.
No “gloom and doomers” I know hope for collapse. None. They are scientists reporting the data and its implications. They are genuinely worried, and have a mass of data to underline their concern.
Whereas you can’t seem to make that out. The plaque of your political ideology prevents you. Since everything you know is based on ideology and not fact, you assume that is true of everyone.
It isn’t.
Try this: put down your political affiliation and approach the data from the perspective of a critical thinker. If you can, do some actual research, and when you find studies, read them, compare the merits of their argument, see where they disagree and let the data show you the evidence.
Otherwise, you will continue to sound like an old DuPont commercial (with a slogan which has been discontinued since the 80s).
What is somewhat disturbing is Mr. DeVita’s reaction to hearing discouraging words for what appears to be the first time.
There was a recent observation that leftist ideologues only know what they’ve been told, and they only talk to each other.
It could not have been illustrated more clearly here.
Something Mr. DeVita has apparently not heard or even considered before has him channeling his inner amateur psychoanalyst and spiraling off into accusations of cognitive deficiency, insanity and “horrifying mental illness” all over what is basically a casual observation that the world is far from coming to an end, and a slightly different idea about how precious tax dollars should be wasted.
Exhausted class warfare tropes were also part of the rant.
The only thing missing was the cry of “racism”, which is something that was delivered in a previous exchange
This was all triggered by a completely accurate observation that predictions of environmental catastrophe have a solid track record of abject failure.
This is not the behavior of someone who is confident in his depressing and paranoid world view.
It is the reaction of a religious fanatic who false god has been challenged, and it is more and more common among environmentally hysterical utopian collectivists who are coming to the realization that their old script isn’t working anymore.
Which brings up this immortal DeVita line: “Since everything you know is based on ideology and not fact, you assume that is true of everyone”.
Here’s a suggestion: Try saying that in front of a mirror.
Psychological projection is real, and its fabulous.
Well, you aren’t even making sense now, just barfing up unrelated snippets of right wing dogma.
No, I am not a liberal.
No the subject isn’t about me, or even you, it is about the fully evidenced damage to the planet by burning fossil fuels and other bad ideas.
No, the ideology is your trick, which is why, for you, everything is ideology, there is no reality. Your attempt to reflect that on me is unsupported,and sad..
Here is the reality: climate change, mass extinction, collapse. Not dogma, not what I “believe” or what someone told me, but rather the result of years of regarding the mainstream science.
Like it or not, the world changed. You didn’t.
OMG – let’s face it, we’ve screwed Mother Nature for so long, she’s pissed off and wants to slap us down, and how can you blame her. I’ve always said – at least since the ’80’s I have – she wants to kill off at least 1/2 of us, and lately it looks like she’s got a good start. Not being a terribly religious person, and wanting to be comfortable (at any cost apparently), all I can say is “that’s the way the cookie crumbles”. Of course I compost, and grow some of my own food, and try not to “defile” my personal space in the world, but I do realize that I’m part of the problem, and I have inadequate solutions to the problem of extinction. We all have to get off at the end of the ride…….
We’re really not buying this suicidal eco-cult crap. Get a better religion, and how about actual science rather than parroting science-ish.
Okay
Nice try, but your anger and confusion don’t change the facts.
Regarding the level of science, this is a small newspaper, the level of citation is relatively low. However, you can simply check each fact to see for yourself that, for example, the EROEI on new oil wells is very low, so low that lenders are no longer financing them. You can check to see that, yes, we all have plastic in our bodies. You can check the work of thousands of accredited scientists to see that biodiversity is crashing. Yep, every word is verifiable.
Good luck on the coming year!
The “Parasites ‘R’ Us” crowd really seems to have a lot to atone for.
Its enough to make one wonder why it is they are still above ground to lecture the rest of us.
Normal people’s consciences are clear. The ease and comfort of life in the modern industrial world requires tradeoffs, and until those preaching doom, gloom and collective guilt set an example by giving up everything they want to make everyone else feel so guilty about, or, even better, removing themselves from precious and suffering Gaia’s ecosystem, their rank hypocrisy and sanctimony will remain impossible to ignore.
“…How everything flips! The Left are now the fundamentalists & creationists, intoning church words, and wanting to look into your heart…” – Happy Hectares
This is not about conscience it’s about reality and what humans have wrought.
It is, indeed, a crowd, as an increasing number of people connect the dots to understand the full cost of the comfort they, that is you, enjoy.
You don’t have to feel guilty, because you aren’t fully aware of the predicament. The ignorant can’t be blamed.
Of course, now you know, so…
Related, on the climate catastrophe scam. From W.M. Briggs, Statistician to the Stars. As always, follow the money.
“…It works like this, and in all elite-manufactured crises.
The rulers, which are increasingly the oligarchs and the upper echelons of the expertocracy, decide a lucrative crisis is upon us. The cry goes out, “What Expert can take the funds we are providing and prove in a scientific way this list of solutions are the only possible way out of the predicament we have only just now discovered?”
Top Experts answer. These great brains, while taking the money, may even be skeptical, at first or at last. They may even view the whole thing as an intellectual puzzle, taking the payoff only so that knowledge can be advanced, arguing that it never hurts to solve any puzzle, for much can be learned that way. And then there is always the odd case of a true believer, an eminence that really does think the crisis, or something like it, is real.
It is here that midwit Experts ooze out of their offices, excited by the scent of money and the possibility of fame. Many assure themselves that because the upper echelon is in on it, there must be something to the whole thing. They pucker up and aim for the nearest teat.
The proportion of true believers swells. The midwits point to the elite and are happy to believe, well pleased to elevate themselves, in their minds, above the doubters. Soon, a flood of Science™ is upon us, its very size sufficient to convince doubters. How could so many be wrong, they ask themselves. Surely something is here to see.
The same story, with minor variations, is repeated in the bureaucracy. Top bureaucrats, at the national and international level, know it’s best to align themselves with the rulers. Many won’t believe, but will reason like the top scientists. Something good may come out of this, they think. Besides, it’s better to have a larger than smaller office, for the other important work we have.
Then the mid-level bureaus are activated, all seeking a sliver of turf. Many true believers are here, as with the scientists, and for the same reason. They follow their betters. Soon, as with all bureaucracies, the programs themselves become more important than the goal. Process is king.
Once started, nobody knows how to kill a bureaucracy. It can only exist, or grow. Unless some major new crisis comes along to redirect efforts.
Again, as with Experts and bureaucrats, the media, anxious as ever to serve their masters, enters the fray.
Many leading journalists, or owners of media firms, are cynics. They’re happy to preach whatever the official line is, with seeming sincerity, even if that line inverts itself. Whatever, they say. I’m just reporting.
Reporters aren’t terribly bright, but they do look to their leaders, like any group, and because of their limited mental capacity, they become true believers faster. They can never remember what they say from one crisis to the next, which is why we have so much fun looking at their old statements, contrasting them with new ones. This Reality exposure doesn’t faze them in the least. They keep looking up.
Meanwhile, the oligarchs and elite Experts begin gleaning the wheat. It’s damn lucrative. There are trillions involved in the climate crisis (far outshining the coroandoom)…”
https://wmbriggs.com/post/37937/
What a ridiculous supposition!
Like all such severe misunderstandings, there is just enough truth to hang the fabric on. Yes, the government is often duplicitous, and yes, the elite want to control us.
However, the elite, like trump, for example, want us to keep consuming, keep trying to pump oil. So, you got the telescope backwards there.
Likewise, to believe your windy tale, we would have to accept that tens of thousands of different kinds of specialists from all over the globe are in agreement about this. Sure, there are some fringe authors, but in general, no serious scientist doubts human caused mass extinction. None.
So, your tangled story is intended to cast doubt, to make it seem that all those scientists didn’t find what they found. Why? I would say, money, Paul. Yes? You care more about the economy than you do about life on the planet.
What other motivation would you have to misread the data so badly?
Nope.
Its about cost free, sanctimonious, moral exhibitionism from those who believe they are some sort of advanced life form put on Earth to minister to knuckle dragging deplorables.
The only reliable thing about gloom and doom climate predictions is that they are always wrong.
That “globe full of scientists of every discipline from biology to climatology to paleontology” is an egghead circle jerk reading from the script handed down from those who fund their research grants.
We all know who they are. They’re the “For Thee But Not For Me”, oceanfront vacation home owning crowd that lectures us from climate conferences in four star hotels and resorts, while nibbling exotic cuisine and drinking fine wines, maskless & unafraid, and right after flying in on their carbon spewing fleet of personal private jets.
Their position on the impending environmental apocalypse couldn’t have been made clearer, and as the great man once said, “I’ll believe there’s a crisis when those who say there’s a crisis start acting like there’s a crisis”.
So how proud utopian leftist, human extinction enthusiasts must be, selflessly doing pro bono public relations work for the richest, most powerful people, corporations and authoritarian government and non-government entities that have ever existed.
The term “useful idiots” has never been more appropriate.