Wildlife, biodiversity and climate
A habitable climate depends on wildlife and biodiversity, because:
- Climate is a consequence of biodiversity and biodiversity is everything that ecosystems represent to life on Earth;
- A stable climate and therefore, a habitable Earth, depends on stabilising ecosystems; and
- Animals are the only mechanism that can do that.
As wildlife declines, we are breaking down biodiversity structure and losing energy (in the form of carbon) out of food chains and into the atmosphere and ocean. This way, climate and our food security are inextricably linked. We’re not only stripping soils of the material needed to feed us, we’re also introducing chaotic free energy into our atmosphere and causing huge fluctuations in the weather. The latter makes it harder for us to know when, where and how to feed ourselves.
Climate change: fossil fuels v. wildlife
Climate change has always been the symptom of biodiversity loss … that’s to say, the breakdown of the complex connectivity between lifeforms that allows Earth to flex in response to changing conditions.
Only recently have we created artificial climate change by mining carbon buried deep underground by animals millions of years ago. The animals that did that are no longer around and today’s animals, that would be busy moderating modern-day carbon, have populations that are heavily depleted.
We cannot engineer our way out of this crisis. We can only rebuild ecosystems rich in a diversity of animal life.
Latest posts about why the oceans are important
A recent study published in the Journal of Paleoecology looked at the size of fish in the last interglacial period. It found that anchovies were less numerous. So, researchers conclude, that fish get less abundant when it’s warmer, but does it matter? Anchovies are near the base of the food chain and almost everything above depends on them. Commercial fisheries will certainly suffer but the greater and more worrying reality is absent from this paper. Snapshots in time are arbitrary, as the last interglacial, lasted for 13,000 years. We face a different and greater challenge.
There is no doubt this study is important. It adds more evidence to the fact that we are heading towards an ecosystem that can support less biomass and therefore, fewer humans.
But the last interglacial lasted for millennia and the change in climate was only a tiny fluctuation in evolutionary time. Earth was still operating at a steady stable-state. That’s to say, the Sun’s energy could be absorbed into food chains and life go on, as normal. ‘Normal’ being a rate at which evolution, natural selection and cultural diversification was sufficient to maintain a diversity of species. This is the sole mechanism that makes the planet habitable for humans.
There was no mass extinction. Ecosystems were relatively stable. Humans survived this period.
Our next thirty years is a very different ‘kettle of fish’ if you’ll excuse the metaphor ; )
We are not heading for 2ºC warming
I keep hearing scientists talk this way but it’s misleading. In the modern day we have two problems: the release of fossil fuel and the extinction of animal life.
We aren’t simply heading for 2ºC warming, we are heading for wholesale destabilisation of ecosystems. It just so happens that physics dictates this to be in a warming direction but that’s arbitrary. It’s a correlation but it is not the thing we need to be concerned about.
The paper’s abstract says:
‘These small fish species are more difficult to harvest and are less palatable than anchovies, indicating that our rapidly warming world poses a threat to the global fish supply.’
If we were just heading for a reduction in fish numbers that would be manageable as we could adapt. 120,000 years ago anchovies were doing okay. Their numbers weren’t as high as they are today, but they survived the interglacial period, as did we.
The real problem we face now is that anchovies, like humans, will have to survive a period of intensive ecosystem instability. Numbers and distribution of fish won’t just decline, they could become so unpredictable, as to become dysfunctional.
It’s about chaos not warming
Let’s go back to the question. Fish get less abundant when it’s warmer, but does it matter? The answer is, of course, yes – if those fish are the base of a food chain.
Boris Worm, quoted in Mongabay says:
“We cannot expect fish harvest to remain the same under climate change, and need to use our dwindling supply more cautiously, allowing for wider margins of error”.
But this presumption only holds if the margin of error relates to numbers of fish. It assumes that warmer ecosystems carry fewer fish. This might have been true 120,000 years ago before human capital exceeded natural capital. Also, over over timescales, of tens of thousands of years. But today’s situation is completely different.
First, the change is so rapid, that there are already huge fluctuations in extremes of temperature and weather (which links directly to the ocean). Second, we have removed a huge amount of wild animal biomass from the land and ocean which was responsible for maintaining stable ecosystems.
The paper forecasts declining fish stock without making any prediction about the impending chaos in ecosystem function. It compares a time when climate systems were biodiversity-linked, with a time now, where they are not.
Our impending problem is the reduction in ecosystem stability inherent in our burning of fossil fuels and killing of wildlife. This paper, like so many ecological studies, doesn’t seem to even acknowledge this overarching paradigm. It takes a complex system and distils it into a single linear narrative that ends up with the conclusion: we will need to eat fewer fish.
