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jrlocke | 4 years ago
The worry isn't that global warming will be bad for animals, you're right, there will be winners and losers, likely in comparable amounts. The worry is that it will be bad for biodiversity, a resource that is extremely slow to replenish (even taking into account these new opportunities). On the edges of the curve, some animals will be huge winners, and some will be huge losers. 10xing the populations of some species while others go extinct is only a net null on the very surface, it's still a huge loss diversity wise.
georgewsinger|4 years ago
> Researchers examined the number of known families of marine invertebrates, as well as sea-surface temperatures, over the course of 540 million years of Earth's history. They found that when temperatures were high, so was biodiversity. When temperatures fell, biodiversity also declined.
This happens because global warming causes a marginal increase in tropical areas:
> Tropical ecosystems are known to be Earth's most diverse, and the tropics would be expected to expand during warm eras.
Of course, from a short-term timeline (say 100 years), the rate of species extinction from global warming will surely outpace the rate of species creation, since evolution has no time to act.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11350
OrbitRock|4 years ago
Which is really the only factor that matters here.
A large quantity of things will likely go extinct before being able to adapt or migrate sufficiently to keep up with the changes.
The re-development of biodiversity takes millions of years, and that’s basically irrelevant from the timescale of humanity.