November 11, 2014 - 20:50
Chapter 8 of The Sixth Extinction talks about how global warming can affect the envionment, especially tropics, and lead to species extinctions. There are some very vivid data to show how traumatic it can be for the environment to change. "We've entered Anthropocene", the character Thomas said. "Look around, kill half of what you see, that's what we could be talking about", an Paleontologist describes the extinctions. Because of Anthropocene, because of global warming, the tropics are dying, the species are dying.
To be honest, this does not shock me at all. In the beginning of this book, someone says that the species would be extincted before we even know that they exist. There are so many, too many kinds of species live in the Tropics, the complicated structure and the trees protect them from being exposed. They are dedicated and extincted, we will never know what they are. There are so many creatures in this world, we cannot expect to understand all of them. Also, why do we want to know anyway? We are the ones who killed them. Forget about changing the situation, the trees in the tropics need hundreds of years to grow, after you cut them off in 10 minutes, you would need 10 decades to grow them back. By the time they were revived, we will be dead.