Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Stéphane Boyer, senior lecturer at UNITEC Institute of Technology is worried that plants and animals can’t move fast enough to survive climate change. His solution: give nature a helping hand, by digging up entire ecosystems, and moving them hundreds of miles, to maintain optimum climatic conditions.
Climate change threatens entire ecosystems – let’s pick them up and move them
Climate change poses a major threat to the world’s ecosystems. As the world warms, animals and plants will move to keep pace with their preferred climate, but many will be unable to keep up with the speed of change, particularly if humans are in the way.
Programs to move individual species to protect them from climate change already exist. But they are largely limited to those species that are conspicuous, large and charismatic (mostly mammals and birds).
In any given ecosystem, there could be thousands of species (many of which we still don’t know about). Those capable of migrating may have a chance of reaching more hospitable conditions but most species will not be able to cover the large distances required to find a different climate in the short period of time it will take for their environment to change. These ecosystems are effectively fated to disappear, unless of course they could be moved to a safer location.
Picking up and moving entire ecosystems at risk of being wiped out by climate change could be one way to preserve vulnerable plants, animals and insects. It may sound far-fetched, but actually this technique has already been used to deal with other human impacts.
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Many questions remain unanswered. We don’t know how much it will cost, whether people will accept it, or even whether it will do more good than harm. But to protect ecosystems from climate change, we need to consider all the options.
The history of my native Australia is a cautionary tale, on the negative consequences of introducing new species, but also a tale of the adaptability of species.
Rabbits, introduced from temperate England, rapidly colonised the arid Australian desert. They are still a major pest species. For decades, Australia has funded a biological warfare laboratory dedicated to trying to kill the rabbits – so far without lasting success.
The Prickly Pear at its peak took over 15,000 square miles of farmland out of production, because it was so difficult to control. The South American Cactoblastis Cactorum moth was released to control the problem, and largely worked out as expected – though in this case Australia probably got lucky. In other places, Cactoblastis is considered a damaging invasive species.
The poisonous Cane Toad, introduced to control Cane Beetles, rapidly spread throughout tropical regions of Australia, wreaking toxic havoc on native predators, until the more persistent species of local wildlife finally discovered a way to eat them without being poisoned.
My point is, if ecosystems are geographically connected, species will naturally find a way to adapt and / or move in response to climate change, no matter how fast it occurs. There have been many natural abrupt shifts in climate, such as the Younger Dryas, which were a lot faster than anything we are likely to cause. The ecosystem survived just fine.
If ecosystems are geographically isolated from each other, given the havoc individual introduced species can cause, transplanting an entire cross section of one ecosystem into another in my opinion is just environmental vandalism. The combined system will eventually sort itself out, as new patterns emerge. But why do it in the first place?
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Dig up entire ecosystems and transplant them?
Which is more alarming….the propagators of such drivel or the dupes who swallow it…
Just when you think the Eco-loons have run out of ways to spend other people’s money they excel themselves.
This is why children are controlled and managed – they do not understand the ramifications of many of the things they wish to play with.
How do you move an ecosystem when there are thousands of possible species that you are not aware of, hence do not know of the interactions of these species within that environment?
That’s not surprising: the rabbit is a desert animal, introduced into England by the Romans. They struggle in snowy winters, and have only really become a pest since people stopped eating them (ie. post WWII – folk were glad of them during the war).
“They struggle in snowy winters, …. ”
Nah, they evolved to become the Snowshoe rabbits.
Dead wrong. They are thought to have evolved on the Iberian Peninsula about 4k years ago. Also if raising them in warmer areas they have a rough time dealing with the heat, people will put ice bottles with them and the like during the summer. They do not struggle in snowy winters in any vague way, they in fact thrive in colder climates much more readily then the very hot ones.
Yes, the Iberian Peninsular – Spain – is conserably warmer and drier than England.
The fact that people providing cooling to bred rabbits is not relevant evidence.
Rabbits do not hibernate, so they starve when it’s snowy. They have to resort to eating bark off trees.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/allsorts-60/4274640448/
Sleepalot, is that not a snow-covered beaver lodge in the background of your posted picture?
Now iffen that de-barking was rabbit chewing’s ….. then it musta been chewed on by big rabbits when the snow was 18” to 20” deeper.
lol Ive raised rabbits for over a decade and am well read on them. They absolutely excel in cold places and are very hard to raise effectively in hot places. There is zero debate at all here, you simply do not know what you are talking about. Also spain is NOT desert as claimed. They are given ice because they sit there panting all day, barely ever breed and do not taste nearly as good in warm spots because their eating cycles are all messed up as well.
BTW the not relevant evidence is the idea they do not hibernate and struggle finding food in winter. This is true of the vast bulk of animals that live in colder areas. Surely you knew that? People in very hot spots need to often breed through several generations to even get decent performing stock whereas this is no issue for those in very cold spots such as where I live. raised in captivity the winter food issue is also obviously meaningless, whereas you will have issues in very hot areas irregardless. Chickens and even ducks need protected from extreme winter cold. The rabbits this is no issue, they take it readily.
@ur momisugly Samuel No, pic taken in England (Cumbria) – no beavers here.
The picture of tractors may have been a small part of the mass of machinery bought by the Labour Government for the Tangyanika Ground Nut scheme, it cost millions and produced small quantities of nuts and was quickly abandoned by Nuts who dreamt it up.They managed to turn hundreds of acres of land into a dust bowl. Science and Socialism working hand in hand!
The area on which Unitec’s main campus is located was formerly home to the Whau Lunatic Asylum, later known as Carrington Hospital.
Fox News …The UN starts toward new control over the world’s oceans !!
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/04/08/exclusive-un-starts-toward-new-control-over-worlds-oceans.html?intcmp=hplnws
It has always been about power !!
Passive aggression. Invent an insanely expensive and very likely harmful geo-engineering “solution” for something which they know will never be implemented anyway, as a means of frightening people into accepting “more reasonable” climate mitigation strategies like giving up fossil fuels in favor of “green” energy.
Just get a magic helmet, and be done with it …
https://dailymotion.com/video/x1atzuy
It worked for Elmer
..Elmers video is not working !! LOL
The embedded video plays a short advertisement first, and then the video. You might have an add-blocker plug-in that prevents the video from playing.
Go directly to the source …
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1atzuy_what-s-opera-doc_shortfilms
Perhaps they can undo the damage of the last glaciation while they’re at it. Many years ago during a visit to http://www.newenglandwild.org/visit/Garden-in-the-Woods I noticed they were selling a wildflower I hadn’t heard of before, Oconee Bells. A note said they used to be native, but weren’t able to recolonize New England after the last glaciation.
I bought some, and tried to plant them in a good area (ISTR they like Maidenhair Fern habitat), but they struggled for a few years and died. I might try again some year in a sunnier area. They also got munched on by some insect, it’s possible it wasn’t around before the glaciers.
I’m glad that Unitec isn’t trying to restore glaciers to our long term average conditions.
http://www.wildflower.org/image_archive/320×240/A_C/A_C_IMG0482.JPG
Ric W, best that they not try to undo “the damage of the last glaciation” at this location,…. to wit:
Neat, I think I’d lie down in front of that bulldozer!
I helped NH Audubon lay the original boardwalk through their Ponemah Bog around 1980 and was a one person software consulting company I called Sundew Systems. My car’s license plate is still SUNDEW. http://www.nhdfl.org/events-tours-and-programs/visit-nh-biodiversity/ponemah-bog.aspx
The first bog I visited was in northeast Ohio, courtesy of my high school’s “Field Ecology” summer course. We got to drill tree cores, something handy to know about here at WUWT.
This boggy area will be moved North to “protect it”. A boggy area in Northern Canada will be removed to provide a new location for it . Best you don’t visit that day.
Oconee Bells are native to and survive in a very small ecosystem, the Jocasee Gorge, here in Oconee County South Carolina. Unfortunately for the flower, most of Jocasee Gorge is now Duke Power’s Lake Jocasse. What remain can still be seen every year mid-March to early April in Devil’s Fork State Park (well worth visiting year round for spectacular scenery).
Now you know more about the Oconee Bell than you ever needed
One of the great things about WUWT is that no matter how minor a tidbit I might comment on, someone else can chime in with much more information. I hadn’t realized it was so scarce today in what I guess has to be called its exile on a climatic island.
The problem..when you pay people to sit around and be great thinkers…
….they begin to believe they are
I think, therefore I are smart.
last week or so I runned into this article, paper in Global Change Biology:
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V19/apr/a2.php
It seems genetic modifications of some plant scecies can take place in times as short as 15 years. So they can adapt to this mind-blowing climate change of 1.5ºC/century.
Best Onion story ever !!!
The Onion is almost out of business because it can’t compete with leftist lunatic stories like this. Reality has become one big Onion story.
There was a time not too long ago when if somebody seriously proposed something like this, two guys in white would show up with big butterfly nets and would take them away for a nice long vacation in a padded room. Now a days, not only are these crackpots not laughed, they are taken serious by almost every major news agency.
I really miss those saner times.
NASA releases study that claims ” Climate Change ” has shifted the Polar Axis by a ” Shocking” amount !!!
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/the-shocking-reason-why-earths-poles-are-wobbling/66158/
The study found that the Polar Axis has moved 17 cm/year for 15 years ( 8 ft ) BUT, their pretty pictures make it look like it’s moved 1,000’s of miles !!! Seriously pathetic desperation !
I agree wholeheartedly (even though my sister, my older sister, claims I don’t possess such an organ) with Boyer.
But, I think, before we move ecosystems poleward, away from environments that’ll become to hot for them, we must first move our movers and shakers, our intellectuals, our elites, our betters, to cooler climates so they can be protected from the roasting heat waves a’comin’. That way they’ll be safe and available to protect us in the desperate future.
For some unexplainable reason, perhaps to experience our upcoming global warming pain, our elites all seem to congregate in tropical hot spots: you know; places like Bali, Durban, and Cancun. Sure, I understand the selflessness, but surely these locations, already tropically warm, will quickly become unsurvivably hot in a warming world. Surely, as the most important members of our species they must be the ones moved first to cooler climes where the deamon breath of singeing heat may be tempered. How about Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada; or Dawson, Yukon, Canada? Fairbanks, Alaska, USA? I’ll even work on a fund to pay for the relocation expenses.
Perhaps, considering that Boyer works for UNITEC, the movement should be from Auckland to the Auckland Islands. I understand that many people pay a premium to live on one of the islands off Auckland (they are the same thing aren’t they?).
did this genius calculate how much CO2 would be released to make the move, and what effect that would have on “climate change”?, he asked rhetorically…
what an idiot.
If humans are causing the extinction of animals and that’s not natural, then either we are aliens from another planet and not part of the ecosystem, or these scientists are blantantly rejecting evolution.
Please forgive the language in this comic vignette from a live George Carlin show:
https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4
But he does kinda nail it; except for not acknowledging God.
..If we really want to help the ecosystems of the world, we need to protect them from the Eco-Fools that think like Boyer, which is pretty much all of them !
Fascinating. It’s evolution in action. Natural selection allows a species to adapt to its environment and – over time – evolve into a different species.
What you see here is a geographically isolated set of homo sapiens adapting into an environment where they can thrive and reproduce while doing nothing that could possibly be described as useful work. Field studies by environmental biologists have established the probability that, given time, this subspecies will, in response to environmental stress from things like grant applications, the requirement to publish whether or not they have anything coherent to say, etc. etc., evolve into a distinct species which has been given the provisional name homo insanus (Mann, Jones et al., 2016)
You can’t fix stupid.
Proof that unintelligent design is real. — Eugene WR Gallun
“We don’t know …… whether it will do more good than harm.” More proof that anything, anything, that supports the AGW narrative is published.
Make sure they pack the mosquitoes, rats, and any other verminous species. They’re important parts of an ecosystem, too! Spreading disease and parasites en masse is a small price to pay to save our wildlife from the unbearable 2 degree warmer habitats they’ll have a hundred years from now.
(As an aside, one reason invasive species can dominate a foreign ecosystem so quickly is because the natural predators, parasites, and diseases that keep the population in check back home are suddenly hundreds or thousands of miles away.)