Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
You're conflating acidification with acid. The oceans will never be acidic.
Shellfish arrived when ocean pH was way lower than it is today, or the foreseeable future.
We're probably underestimating how rapidly creatures can adapt to change. I'm reminded of that example they teach in high school of a peppered moth that turned into a black moth relatively quickly in response to pollutants creating a black environment.
That's not to say that rapid climate change is trivial, but it is a denial of apocalyptic doom.
Finally, we'll probably be genetically modifying most creatures we care about in the future. It will probably be trivial to create crabs that survive lower pH even decades from now, as an example.
Our capacity to not only adapt ourselves to a changing environment, but other creatures, will be insanely better in the future.
We're entering the Golden Era. I'm only sad knowing I won't be around in a thousand years to see just how great everything is.
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* If the numbers are conflated, that will be on the marine biologists. Not me.
* What happened 165-million years ago would not be representative of Earth as it is today. Your reference authors are not providing that context. I won't speculate on the reason(s) the caveat was omitted.
* I believe that your way-overestimating the time-frame 'quickness' in which species could adapt to non-linear environmental changes. Perhaps you could cite one example of species evolution which occurred on a time-scale of a few hundred years.
* As to genetic engineering, there exist no extant species from which to extract DNA from, which presently could withstand the environmental changes predicted in the models. The 'reservoir' of genetic material you'd need to work from is zero.
* You would find 'some' species which could replace those going extinct, until their thresholds are reached.
* There's not enough money on Earth to pay for adaptation, if that's all you did. Where will $88-trillion/year come from ?
* By all metrics, we're clearly heading for mass extinction.