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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Large ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest, will collapse and disappear alarmingly quickly, once a crucial tipping point is reached, according to calculations based on real-world data.
Writing in Nature Communications, researchers from Bangor University, Southampton University and The School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, reveal the speed at which ecosystems of different sizes will disappear, once they have reached a point beyond which they collapse -- transforming into an alternative ecosystem.
For example, once the 'point of no return' is reached, the iconic Amazon rainforest could shift to a savannah-type ecosystem with a mix of trees and grass within 50 years, according to the work.
Some scientists argue that many ecosystems are currently teetering on the edge of this precipice, with the fires and destruction both in the Amazon and in Australia.
"Unfortunately, what our paper reveals is that humanity needs to prepare for changes far sooner than expected," says joint lead author Dr Simon Willcock of Bangor University's School of Natural Sciences.
"These rapid changes to the world's largest and most iconic ecosystems would impact the benefits which they provide us with, including everything from food and materials, to the oxygen and water we need for life."
-- submitted from IRC
Gregory S. Cooper, Simon Willcock & John A. Dearing. Regime shifts occur disproportionately faster in larger ecosystems. Nature Communications, 2020 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15029-x
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @06:04PM (5 children)
> These rapid changes to the world's largest and most iconic ecosystems would impact the benefits which they provide us with, including everything from food and materials, to the oxygen and water we need for life.
The hand of free market capitalism has spoke, these are much more valuable :
Beef exports
Palm oil exports
Mining
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @06:13PM (3 children)
Are you not capable of not buying any of the products exported from the Amazon?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @03:10PM
Do you have any idea how hard it is to avoid buying products that aren't problematic in some way? Normal people do not have 40 hours a week to research the impact of what they're doing is. It's a large part of why it's so important that governments set some sort of minimum standards on things like that. The labels themselves don't always differentiate between the way things were produced in a given country.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 15 2020, @09:26AM (1 child)
are you capable of understanding that a single person's purchasing habits, even if spotless, are not enough?
some of us actually don't buy palm oil or non-local meat because of exactly this issue (also in NZ for sheep, S.Am for several products, all sources of nonessential products which are costly in petroleum to make, and it'd be great if another Coltran source were found, etc)
and it's pretty clear to us that the world isn't magically following suit and acting sanely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 15 2020, @03:41PM
Speaking of understanding and acting sanely, go on boycotting palm oil to save the Amazon forest if you want to act insane or ignorant.
Because the facts are for the Amazon forest it's more like soybean oil instead of palm oil [1].
Somehow we hear fewer calls to boycott soybean oil to save the Amazon and its cute critters for some reason... Like maybe the US needs to sell soybean oil and it can't sell it as easily due to the trade war with China?
[1] https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=br&commodity=soybean-oil&graph=exports [indexmundi.com]
https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=br&commodity=palm-oil&graph=exports [indexmundi.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @03:04PM
Thank God the Democrats are being really smart and rigging the primary in favor of Biden. Because it's so much more important that we prevent the voters from getting a candidate that might do something about the climate than risk having to allow all those voters to get medicare for all and free college.
Better not risk it, we'll just let the next few generations worry about it, we've got ours, so the hell with them for making the poor decision to be born now rather than what those really smart Boomers did, being born when times were good.