Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048

[Ichingcarpenter]

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.

That's when the world's oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, -- with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama -- was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.

The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.

"I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are -- beyond anything we suspected," Worm says in a news release.

"This isn't predicted to happen. This is happening now," study researcher Nicola Beaumont, PhD, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, U.K., says in a news release.

"If biodiversity continues to decline, the marine environment will not be able to sustain our way of life. Indeed, it may not be able to sustain our lives at all," Beaumont adds.


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/salt-water-fish-extinction-seen-by-2048/

[postulater]

1. 2006? What's new?

[BrotherIvan]

2. We must deal with climate change

But somehow, we also need to talk about over-population. I believe the whole climate change denial and the push for large families by the fundagelicals is some kind of race to fill the world with white xtians before the major die off comes. It's bizarre and it's scary. But somehow we need to stop thinking that population is a taboo subject. There are too many humans and we use too many resources. Overfishing is because there are too many mouths to feed and so many are dying of starvation or are malnourished. We must shake off our old bronze age myths and wake up to the rapidly changing situation.

[truebrit71]

3. But in a way, isn't the impending contraction of the human population due to climate change...

...sort of solving that problem all by itself?

To be sure I am not minimizing in anyway the self-inflicted horrors that are about to be inflicted upon human kind due to its own ignorance, greed and lethargy, but the equation will balance itself out when the seas die, the great plains turn to dust and the seas rise to gobble up the beachside McMansions....

I just hope I'm not around long enough to see it but I fear that it will be here sooner rather than later...All of this "by the second half of the century" or "by 2100 X Y & Z will happen" stuff is far too optimistic I fear....I am of the firm belief that X Y & Z will happen in the next couple of decades...well before 2050...

[BrotherIvan]

4. Yes, it will, unfortunately...

We could have done it the easy way, but chose the hard way. It is so amazing that we knew about this and did nothing, in fact, just sped up the destruction. We can put a man on the moon, but we can't figure out how not to destroy our own environment, proving ourselves to be nothing more than megalomaniacal parasites.

[Nihil]

6. Excellent turn of phrase there:

> proving ourselves to be nothing more than megalomaniacal parasites

Well done!



If only it wasn't so f*cking accurate ...

[BrotherIvan]

7. Yes, it was the outcome of having no more worlds to conquer

We wiped out all the cultures that could have taught us to live with the land, those that never got the foolish notion in their heads that they were somehow separate from or above nature. Now we come to the inevitable conclusion of our violent bronze age myths. I do think the last straw was the triumph of greed. It's a part of our cultural story and our language now, this insatiable lust to consume. Don't know how it will ever stop until it destroys itself.

[nashville_brook]

5. k and r