Is the world being destroyed?

Saying that we are facing a planet "devoid of a productive ocean" is apocalypic science fiction.

Many commonly-eaten fish could face extinction as warming oceans due to climate change increases pressure on their survival while also hampering their ability to adapt.

New research suggests that fish like sardines, pilchards and herring will struggle to keep pace with accelerating climate change as warmer waters reduce their size, and therefore their ability to relocate to more suitable environments.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, also provides the first evidence to counter the scientific theory that decreased movement will result in more species, by suggesting the opposite is true. This means many species will also be less able to evolve to cope with warmer temperatures, increasing their risk of dying out.

'Serious implications'

Professor Chris Venditti, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, and co-author of the study, said: “Warming waters are a double whammy for fish, as they not only cause them to evolve to a smaller size, but also reduce their ability to move to more suitable environments.

“Our research supports the theory that fish will get smaller as oceans warm under climate change, but reveals the worrying news that they will also not be able to evolve to cope as efficiently as first thought. With sea temperatures rising faster than ever, fish will very quickly get left behind in evolutionary terms and struggle to survive.

“This has serious implications for all fish and our food security, as many of the species we eat could become increasingly scarce or even non-existent in decades to come.”

The study, led by the Center for Advanced Studies in Arid Zones (CEAZA) in Chile and the University of Reading in the UK, used statistical analyses of a large dataset of globally distributed fish species to study their evolution over the past 150 million years. The study provides first solid evidence of how historical global temperature fluctuations have affected the evolution of these species.

It focused on Clupeiforms - a highly diverse group of fish found all over the world, which includes important species for fisheries, such as anchovies, Atlantic herring, Japanese pilchard, Pacific herring, and South American pilchard. However, the findings have implications for all fish.

Fish have thus far only had to deal with a maximum average ocean temperature rise of around 0.8°C per millennium. This is far lower than current warming rates reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of 0.18°C per decade since 1981.

An unexpected finding

The findings support the long-held expectation among scientists that fish will generally get smaller and move less as world warms, due to having to increase their metabolism and therefore needing more oxygen to sustain their body functions. This will impact fish species because larger fish are able to travel longer distances owing to their greater energy reserves, whereas smaller fish are less able to seek out new environments with favourable conditions as the climate changes.

However, the research contradicts the assumption that an increase in smaller fish will mean more new species emerging because of concentrating genetic variations within local areas.

Instead, the scientists found warmer waters would lead to fewer new species developing, robbing fish of another of their key weapons to cope with climate change.

Overfishing has also been found to make fish smaller in size, so the new study adds to the list of pressures they face as a consequence of human actions.

1. He is starting with an ideological point to make.

2. He is using Google (or some other way to find articles) to support his viewpoint.

3. He is either missing or ignoring any articles that contradict his opinion.

I did a quick search for "fish adapt climate change".

I don't have to balance both sides of the discussion. To tell you the truth, I don't really think arguments for "the other side" are worth presenting

In my opinion, if you are going to claim to be science-based, you need to do this.

Your opinions are, in my opinion, far more extreme than the articles you post to back them up.

People are great and progress is great. The progress qe have made as a species over the past thousand years is amazing. We have doubled the human lifespan, reduced war and famine to all-time lows almost completely eliminated slavery and made great strides in human rights.

In recent decades it has often been said that we are living at the “hinge of history”, an unprecedented period during which a catastrophic event such as rapid climate change, nuclear war or the release of a synthesised pathogen may bring an end to human and perhaps all sentient life on the planet.

Most people think that such extinction would be bad, in fact one of the worst things that could happen. It’s plausible that the process leading to various forms of extinction, and extinction itself, would be bad for many of us, given that our lives are, overall, good for us and that, all else being equal, the longer they are the better. But it’s also plausible that extinction would be good for some individuals – those in the final stages of an agonising terminal illness, for example, whose pain can no longer be controlled by drugs. This means one key factor in judging the overall value of non-extinction will involve weighing these disparate interests against each other.

How might we do that? Let’s focus on sudden extinction. Imagine that some huge asteroid is heading to earth, which if it hits will remove any possibility of life on Earth. If you have the power to deflect it, should you do so, from a moral point of view? If extinction would be bad for all sentient beings, both now and in the future, the answer “yes” seems hard to argue with. But, as we just saw, that’s not the case.

Consider the huge amount of suffering that continuing existence will bring with it, not only for humans, and perhaps even for “post-humans”, but also for sentient non-humans, who vastly outnumber us and almost certainly would continue to do so. As far as humans alone are concerned, Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill at the University of Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute estimate that there could be one quadrillion (1015) people to come – an estimate they describe as conservative.

These numbers, and the scale of suffering to be put into the balance alongside the good elements in individuals’ lives, are difficult to fathom and so large that it’s not obvious that you should deflect the asteroid. In fact, there seem to be some reasons to think you shouldn’t.

How can we make comparisons like these? CI Lewis, a leading Harvard philosopher in the mid-20th century, offered an intriguing thought-experiment. To judge the value of some outcome, you have to imagine yourself going through the relevant experiences. Usually when we think about extinction, because we are not in great pain, we focus on the good things we’ll miss. But if God were to offer you the choice of living through all the painful and pleasurable experiences that will ever occur without extinction, would you jump at the opportunity? I have to say I wouldn’t.

There are, of course, many other ways of measuring value, more technical and precise than Lewis’s thought experiment. Most of them assume that values can be compared against one another on a continuous scale. Imagine that you want the pleasure of being admired on the beach for your impressive tattoo. But getting it will hurt. So you balance the pleasure against the pain, and decide to go ahead only if the first outweighs the second.

But perhaps there are discontinuities in value. John Stuart Mill, for example, used to claim that some pleasures – such as enjoying some great work of art – are “higher” than others, in the sense that no amount of “lower” pleasure – such as that of eating peanuts – could equal the higher pleasure in overall value. Likewise, some pains might seem discontinuous in value with others. Imagine that the Devil offers you a choice between a year of the most appalling agony imaginable, and some period with a barely perceptible headache. Some would take the second option, however long the headache lasted, perhaps even if it were to last for eternity.

Since we are considering whether extinction might be better than continuing to exist, the question arises whether some pains could be so great that they outweigh any number of pleasures and other goods. To avoid the worries that arise from imagining large numbers, consider just one kind of pain, undoubtedly among the worst that any sentient being could experience: that of torture by electric shock.

One recent victim of such torture described it as “like they are breaking every bone of every joint in your body at the same time”. Along with the sheer physical agony of such torture go many emotional horrors: dread, terror, panic, humiliation, degradation, despair.

Now consider some relatively short period of such torture – an hour, say – and return to CI Lewis’s thought-experiment. Imagine a choice between, on the one hand, the non-existence of immediate extinction and, on the other, an hour of electric shock torture followed by some period of pleasure and other goods. What would you choose?

Not (I hope) having been tortured, you might want to ask one of its victims just how bad it is. Unfortunately, it is common for such victims to say that it is impossible to convey this badness. Jacobo Timerman, for example, who was tortured in Argentina, said: “In the long months of confinement, I often thought of how to transmit the pain that a tortured person undergoes. And always I concluded that it was impossible. It is a pain without points of reference, revelatory symbols, or clues to serve as indicators.”

Another problem is that it appears to be hard to remember the true nature of agony. Harriet Martineau, who suffered terribly throughout her life from a uterine tumour, once said during a period of remission: “Where are these pains now? – Not only gone, but annihilated. They are destroyed so utterly, that even memory can lay no hold upon them.”

Perhaps one reason we think extinction would be so bad is that we have failed to recognise just how awful extreme agony is. Nevertheless, we have enough evidence, and imaginative capacity, to say that it is not unreasonable to see the pain of an hour of torture as something that can never be counterbalanced by any amount of positive value. And if this view is correct, then it suggests that the best outcome would be the immediate extinction that follows from allowing an asteroid to hit our planet.

Of course, allowing an asteroid to hit the Earth would probably be bad for you and those close to you. But given what’s at stake, it may well be that you should pay these costs to prevent all the suffering. As the philosopher Bernard Williams once said: “If for a moment we got anything like an adequate idea of [the suffering in the world] … and we really guided our actions by it, then surely we would annihilate the planet if we could.”

The question of whether extinction would be good or bad overall is obviously very important, especially in the face of potential catastrophic events at the hinge of history. But this question is also very difficult to answer. Ultimately, I am not claiming that extinction would be good; only that, since it might be, we should devote a lot more attention to thinking about the value of extinction than we have to date.

Wishing for the extinction of 7 billion humans seems a little extreme to me.

What you are pushing is craziness.

Right now, life for [some] humans on planet Earth is better than at any tine in history.

This continued claim that humans are suffering more than ever is simply false.

If you want to persist in the depressed delusion, name a period in human history where you think things were better and we can compare.