@GeorgeMonbiot Also, every ecosystem in the world and its biodiversity is primarily adapted to climate i.e. it's a major axis of that n-dimensional hypervolume. Meaning all species will become unadapted to the niche they currently occupy.
@GeorgeMonbiot As the climate shifts and every species becomes unadapted to the niche they currently occupy, some will be able to adapt to new niches, but many won't. Hence the mechanism by which many species will cease to exist and become extinct.
@GeorgeMonbiot A n-dimensional hypervolume niche is far too complex for anyone to understand, even partially. So the actual impacts of that climate shift and which species survive, which go into major decline, and which go extinct will be impossible to predict.
@GeorgeMonbiot Species have something of an ability to adapt for small variations in the climate, because the patterns of weather, and therefore local short term climate varies from year to year.
@GeorgeMonbiot However, over time these variations are usually evened out, but in a rapidly shifting climate being warmed by human carbon emissions there will be a trend of change, which are beyond the limits of what many species adapted to their current niches can cope with.
@GeorgeMonbiot This won't happen all at the same time, but it will effect nearly all species on Earth, all biodiversity, therefore drastically altering the n-dimensional hypervolume that the human species and its economy and food supply occupy.
@GeorgeMonbiot Humans and their economy, their autecology, rely on a myriad of what they call "ecosystem services", actually fairly normal deep interconnections which all species have with the ecosystem they live in. These interconnections are part of that n-dimensional hypervolume niche.
@GeorgeMonbiot Humans and their technology have something of an ability to adapt, by destroying more of that biodiversity and other natural systems, but soon their own economy and the niche it occupies, will get badly squeezed, until it collapses and changes.
@GeorgeMonbiot I've repeatedly tried to point out, that it is the ecological impacts of climate breakdown that are the biggest danger to the human population and its food supply, not the big physical changes we tend to think about.
@GeorgeMonbiot Despite the illusion, or should it be delusion, that we are apart from the rest of nature, we are as reliant on our niche and myriad relationships with other species as any other species. Not understanding something is not the same as that niche and interconnections not existing.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
