So a few humans got killed, and a lot of property got burned, but the real losers were the animals.
“Hundreds of species have been affected by these fires,” Legge says. “That includes many dozens of threatened species; some of these will be brought to the brink of extinction as a result of this event. And if they’re not made extinct by this event, I think this is the beginning of the end for them. Because this event will reoccur. It’s awful. It will be ecosystem collapse in a lot of cases. And we’re not exactly sure what we’ll end up with at the end of it all.” (my emphasis)
So here’s the thing: What is happening in California, the Pacific Northwest, Australia, the Amazon, and elsewhere is that the climate is changing.
Bit of a surprise, right? I mean, it’s called “climate change” for a reason.
But this means that the plants and animals that are in these places now, which have been adapted to a particular climate, which means not just temperature but rainfall, will no longer be viable. They will be removed. That’s just how this is going to run.
Now, if we were going to stop here, or even just continue a bit, whatever. It’d be awful, we’d lose biodiversity, but we’d recover.
But as the interviewee, Sarah Legge, notes later on:
Obviously, the driver here is climate change, leading to extended drought and high temperatures. Australia is looking at 3 to 4 degrees of warming. I’m frightened to even imagine the country in that scenario. If this fire event is what we experienced with 1 degree of warming, what on earth are we going to be experiencing at 3 or 4 degrees of warming?
Yeah. Only one-third to one-quarter through this. The worst is yet to come.
Note the bolded text in the first post “Because this event will reoccur.” This isn’t the last fire in Australia, or elsewhere.
There will be less dramatic reshaping of climate. Rains that don’t come, maybe even monsoons that don’t come. Less water or more water. Local areas will have wildly variable temperature changes–arctic temperature increases are already at three to four degrees celcius.
This will effect us and our agriculture. We grow crops in latitudinal bands, modified by soil and water availability. As those change, we’re going to have huge spikes in the prices of crops, and eventually (and eventually may be rather soon), famines. We tend to grow monocrops without genetic variability (corn, rice, wheat, etc.) Vat-grown food, which industry is pushing, is still going to require vast monocrops (though much of it will be algae), and much of it will still be vulnerable to these sorts of changes.
We’ve only just started this process. So far, very few humans have died, but the plants and animals are taking the brunt.
But that will change.
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