Vocal Voices

They are becoming endangerd plants.

We know the climate is changing. We know the seas are poisoned. We know the air is polluted and we know some fish stocks face extinction.

We are now being told that grasses cannot evolve quickly enough to cope with the speed of climate change. This really could be the disaster of all disasters. Grass food crops provide almost half of human calorific intake, either directly or through the meat we eat. They also cover about a quarter of the planets land area providing habitats for all sorts of other flora and fauna. Those fauna then control other fauna or are controlled by others higher up the food chain - link after link - all the way up to us.

It is not that all grasses will become extinct. Many wild grasses will take up the niches left behind by their cousins, but eventually they, too, will have problems. The main concern is with cultivated varieties used for food. These varieties have a smaller genetic variation and are less able to cope with change.

Science is on to it, trying to create climate-proof varieties, but the solution is a long way off. They apparently have till about 2070. GM anyone?

Workingman wrote:They apparently have till about 2070. GM anyone?

Ah this is already in progress. Australia is already planting drought resistant GM wheat. It was resisted till 7 years of drought then the resistance fell away as people began to realise that it was adapt or fail. However they're going to need to work smarter, because the way the climate is changing it'll need to be 7 years resistant to drought and 3 years resistant to flood.....

However, 2070. About the time, they estimate, that the Arctic will be ice free in summer......

Which, without some higher intervention, will come some time in the next decade but I'm betting on before 2020. An ice free Arctic is going to kick the planet into a different climatic response and they aren't going to get those 64 years. They'll be lucky to get 24 of them and may not even get that.

I wonder when they'll try to produce fire proof wheat and grass??? 2010 is so quickly forgotten. You can GM wheat to survive long periods without water but it is always the same, it's tinder dry. One lightning strike and it's burning. The great plains are experiencing thousands of lightning strikes in one storm. This is what happened to Russia in 2010 and it took nearly 20% of the world wheat crop with it. It's happening in Canada and Alaska in the forests right now, but it will be the wheat plains later when the land dries even more.

It's believed the Dinosaurs died out due to change in habitat. Namely they starved to death or evolved to another form which was more in tune with nature. When the climate changed they moved and kept on moving till the sea stopped them.

Here's the fun thing.

There weren't 7 billion large Dinosaurs on the planet 64 Million years ago, they didn't have planes trains and automobiles and they sure as hell didn't have nuclear weapons.

I'm not sure we're not going to suffer the same fate as the Dinosaurs in the end. Just maybe a bit quicker as we each kill the other off trying to steal what little they have instead of managing what we have.

They say that our footprint on the land is measurable from the explosion of the first nuclear weapons. It's in the fossil record. Then again, over a few million years, our current age will be a few microns thick. Blink and you will miss it.... I wonder if those archaeologists, in millions of years time, will even recognise us? Although they'll probably find the satellites first... But only the geosynchronous ones, the rest will fall back to earth.

The GM thing is interesting. At present it is relatively small scale, in overall terms, and the modifications are very specific. So, there will be one GM of a plant to cope with X problem, and another GM of the same plant to cope with Y problem.

When the food crop grasses start to fail the GMs are going to have to be 'broad church' in nature and ongoing in terms of research, performance and production. That, of course, is music to the ears of the of GM manufacturers as they will hold the rights to the seeds. Even so their efforts will eventually come to the end of the line.

The Anthropocene epoch is unlikely to be discovered by human archaeologists millions of years from now. Humanity will have been long gone before then. ET, might find the evidence, but it will be way too late for our future generations.

I wasn't talking about Human archaeologists

I was talking about whatever race rose again after Humans destroyed themselves. Which, as far as I can ascertain, is what we are busily doing right now.

Suff wrote:I wasn't talking about Human archaeologists

Planet of the gerbils!