This article highlights my problem with Global Warming

[Don]

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com ... ntarctica/

The article clearly blames this on global warming and that's bad. Let's say an all powerful entity arrived and told us that the current global warming is completely natural, does this mean it is now totally okay for habitat to get wiped out in Antarctica because we are not involved? I'm assuming nobody bio-engineered these crabs to be awesome habitat destroyers and we didn't purposely set them loose to try to increase the number of crabs we can catch. Did God said that the habitat in Antarctica is sacred and thus made the water too cold for the crabs to swim through? Actually that'd at least make some sense if you're to blame this on human. These crabs always could've wiped out their neighboring environment and it just happened that the water was too cold for them to swim through. Whether the cause is manmade or not, they'd still wipe out their neighbors when they can swim through the water.

It seems to me a lot of these articles basically assume that extinction or anything that comes close to it has to be bad. If temperature is warmer than now, some stuff might go extinct that wouldn't have otherwise. But I'm sure there are also stuff that'd go extinct (or already extinct) because the temperature is what it is now compared to something else. If we're in the Ice Age, then the wholly mammoth and sabertooth tiger wouldn't be extinct, but life would pretty much suck for just about everyone else.

[Julius Seeker]

Global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect, and the greenhouse effect is caused by greenhouse gasses - I am sure that some of the 29.9 billion metric tons of greenhouse gasses that civilization put into the atmosphere last year would contribute to a greenhouse effect. If a supreme being caused the icecaps to melt, and drown out coastal lands, and much of our interior lands.... you can believe me that it will be devastating to our civilization; think of all the migrations and conflicts that will occur; and that's just one problem. How are we going to feed the populations when the better portion of our fertile land is under ocean? It's Thomas Malthus in ways he never even dreamed.

On the subject of migrating species, and the destruction of native species. These can be devastating to eco-systems; but the King Crab in Antarctica could have just as easily been introduced by human beings. I suppose not everything is all bad, it looks like this foreign species (Flying Silver Carp from China) actually makes fishing easier than we ever thought possible here in North America =P

[Don]

There is no divine being that says protection from predators in another geographic location is some kind of divine right.

What I don't get is that these articles seem to imply that if the King Crabs just became more durable swimmers and got to Antarctica on their own, it'd apparently be totally okay because no global warming is involved. Perhaps maybe never in the history of Earth has some kind of predator migrated from one area to another and wiped out the local population on their own? Having the habitat destroyed is probably something worth concern over, but those crabs could've got there without global warming too.

[Julius Seeker]

No, there isn't, but humanity has gone crazy in causing species to transfer all around the world. Some of them being very damaging to the local wildlife which don't have a chance against it. For example, the Silver Carp aren't predators, but they essentially filter feed all of the food supply of the local fish in the Mississippi waterway and this is causing havoc on the local ecosystem. In Australia, there are rabbits eating all the vegetation, drinking up the fresh water supplies. On the East Coast we have snakeheads introduced from Thailand, which quickly spread across the East coast; I believe they were introduced first in 2003 in the South Eastern US, and have spread all through the Eastern water systems, and are now surprisingly already getting into Canada. These fish are highly aggressive predators (known to attack humans); they can easily spread because they can breath out of water, and move out of water. This is a sort of fish that would have never been able to get beyond its traditional ecosystem without the aid of humans, there are no fish here that can really defend against it....



To see how aggressive these things are, watch the video below. Warning, this video may be found very disturbing; I am not a fan of this sort of thing (particularly when the owners of predatory pets are disrespectful like this, it's a little sickening):


Speaking of global warming, this is a model that some scientists came up with to help curve the problem.. Although it doesn't do anything to help lower the amount of poisons leaking into our soils, our water supplies, and the air we breath.