European bison to be introduced into Kent woodland

[SteamyTea]

Great! Unfortunately it is such a small area.


I really would like to see lynxes and wolves reintroduced. This should be feasible in Scotland. It would do wonders for the landscape in the long run, keeping the deer in check and allowing the forests to recover. They are already doing a good job with restoration of the landscape (re-forestation etc) but apex predators could help to have that happening in a natural way.


I wish I could live 200 years and see how nature has recovered after the coming wars and global warming have wiped out most of humanity.

Disregarding war, climate change does not look good for wildlife, it is happening to fast to allow for habitat transformation.
And I am not sure what wildlife would like an even more wet and windy UK.

[Birdman]

Disregarding war, climate change does not look good for wildlife, it is happening to fast to allow for habitat transformation.
And I am not sure what wildlife would like an even more wet and windy UK.

I agree that climate change is too fast and that many species will be lost because of that. However, habitat destruction by humans is an even bigger threat than that. The problem is, of course, that climate change is likely to accelerate habitat destruction by humans because we'll need new places to live and grow crops when the current ones disappear.


My expectation (crystal ball) is that these pressures will result in major wars that will set us as a species back hundreds of years or more. Human population will collapse and in many areas nature will take over again, like what happened in Tsjernobyl or Central America. This hasn't happened on a global scale yet, but there are many examples in history where locally people wiped themselves out by not taking enough care of their environment. Currently, we are so dependent on global systems (energy from the Middle East, electronic parts from Asia, food from all over the world, data from offshore datacentres that can be destroyed in a major war - much of our  knowledge lost, because who writes paper books nowadays?). So if this falls apart, many areas won't be able to survive. And the areas that do survive will be set back centuries because of the unavailability of resources and the knowledge that was lost.


Imagine most of our electronics gets destroyed by an EMP during a major conflict and global supply lines are cut. That's the end of civilisation as we know it. People will kill each other over the few remaining resources and most will die, ending up with just a few pockets where people survive on sustenance farming. None of these pockets will have knowledge or resources to rebuild what was before. Nobody knows how to design and produce a transistor, let alone a microprocessor. So we are going back to the iron age, more ore less, with population numbers to match. Then, nature will start reclaiming the earth.


We are currently living in the middle of a mass extinction event. We will end up with a greatly reduced number of species, but some of them will thrive in the new environment. Hopefully the few species-rich nature areas that still exist can serve as a starting point when they get taken over by nature. Like the little hills that you come across in the jungle of Guatemala, which are actually cities that were reclaimed by nature hundreds of years ago after the human population wiped itself out. It's going to be awesome.


 

[Jac]

My expectation (crystal ball) ............................  It's going to be awesome.

Unfortunate that we wont be around to appreciate it

[SteamyTea]

I am not as pessimistic as some about change in general, and especially climate change.
One thing that the human world will not loose is knowledge, that makes life a lot easier.


It is odd how we tend to look at land based 'stuff', while most of the Earth is water.  This is where the most important changes happen.  Humans can easily adapt, even to rising sea levels (though the scale of that is currently slow, storm surges will have a greater effect, and these will happen more frequently).
There really is no shortage of land and the Northern Hemisphere has a surplus of land that will become suitable for food and irrigation (Steppe and Prairies).  This will, in effect, free up areas that are currently used.
What the human race has to do is adapt faster than the 40 km a century that the agricultural line is currently moving Northwards.
The fastest way to do this, without conflict, is more global trade and loosening immigration criteria.

So the UK is well ahead of the game here come next year with all these trade deals we are going to do without the interference of the EU.

[Birdman]

One thing that the human world will not loose is knowledge,

That is a dangerous assumption. It has happened before. In Western Europe in the middle ages and 500 years ago in the Inca empire, for example.


I admit that my view is pretty apocalyptic, but imagine what would happen in a global war where an EMP wipes out most electronics and also datacentres get destroyed or become inaccessible. If the whole world (the survivors) fractures into different groups fighting each other, how would you know how to build microprocessors again and have the resources to do it? And without that, much of current knowledge is inacessible.


In old times, you just needed somebody who knew how to forge steel and then you were able to make ploughs again. But now we depend on very complex systems that, when destroyed, cannot be easily be reconstructed by a local group of sustenance farmers. I think many people underestimate how fragile the whole thing is.

[SteamyTea]

That is a dangerous assumption. It has happened before. In Western Europe in the middle ages and 500 years ago in the Inca empire, for example.


I admit that my view is pretty apocalyptic, but imagine what would happen in a global war where an EMP wipes out most electronics and also datacentres get destroyed or become inaccessible. If the whole world (the survivors) fractures into different groups fighting each other, how would you know how to build microprocessors again and have the resources to do it? And without that, much of current knowledge is inacessible.


In old times, you just needed somebody who knew how to forge steel and then you were able to make ploughs again. But now we depend on very complex systems that, when destroyed, cannot be easily be reconstructed by a local group of sustenance farmers. I think many people underestimate how fragile the whole thing is.

The Dark Ages led to the Renaissance, a lot of innovation event on back then.
Any half decent data centre will have back up systems that can cope, even down to spare hardware that can be brought into use. Including generators.
And then there is all the paper backups.
These days we tend not to kill too many people in wars, we knock out key communications and industries, topple governments, then rebuild the country.
"The world will end with a whimper, not a bang"

[watershed]

So the UK is well ahead of the game here come next year with all these trade deals we are going to do without the interference of the EU.

Probably wont be the"UK" much longer looking at recent polls

[ninthace]

Can I suggest the Japanese model?  As societies become more sophisticated and crowded the birth rate falls leading initially to an aging population putting a burden on the labour force, but in time leading to a reduced but technically sophisticated population.
Birdman - while I do not underestimate the effects EMP your view may be  somewhat dated.  Many critical systems are now hardened and a lot of storage is impervious to EMP.   The bigger issue is surviving the cause of the EMP and the aftermath in the first place.

[SteamyTea]

The bigger issue is surviving the cause of the EMP and the aftermath in the first place.

We are well overdue a massive solar flare similar to the 1859 Carrington event, calculated at X50, the 2003 event was initially thought to be a piffling X28, but upgraded to X45 later.

[ninthace]

We are well overdue a massive solar flare similar to the 1859 Carrington event, calculated at X50, the 2003 event was initially thought to be a piffling X28, but upgraded to X45 later.

I was rather thinking of the EMP associated with man made sunshine followed by a long cold spell. 

[SteamyTea]

I was rather thinking of the EMP associated with man made sunshine followed by a long cold spell.

Interesting.  Castle/Bravo was the largest bomb detonated by the USA (1954) and it released 63,000 TJ.  Or 3,888,888.8 kWh (if that was electricity bought in the UK it would costs around £2.33 million).
As a quick approximation, the world uses around 168,000,000,000 kWh/day (168 TWh/day).
So to release the same amount of energy that the world uses every day, the USA would need to explode 43,200 Castle/Bravo a day.


So the real problem is not a 'nuclear winter' it is out insistence of burning fossil fuels.

[Birdman]

Birdman - while I do not underestimate the effects EMP your view may be  somewhat dated.  Many critical systems are now hardened and a lot of storage is impervious to EMP.   The bigger issue is surviving the cause of the EMP and the aftermath in the first place.

The EMP in itself maybe survivable and data not destroyed, but the problem is society falling apart (worldwide) and breaking into small fractions fighting each other for bare survival. For example, to get a datacentre running again, you'll need a working grid and parts that are made in China. This may not be a priority for a local community. After a few weeks, the local community will take the datacentre apart just for the raw materials when shelter and food become the main priority. People are cold and hungry.


This may sound implausible, but it really doesn't take much for society to fall apart. For example, look what happened in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster. And that was only a localised event. Imagine a disaster on a global scale.


We are incredibly lucky that most of us have never seen a global war/ disaster in our lifetime, and therefore think it can't happen and things will work out fine. But our globalised supply chains and reliance on electronics that can be knocked out with a handful of EMP weapons makes us incredibly vulnerable to a total breakdown of society and all the things we now take for granted. I agree with you that datacentres itself are well protected and backed up, so in theory data could get restored. But that may not happen because society breaks down when people start killing each other for food and shelter.

[SteamyTea]

The EMP in itself maybe survivable and data not destroyed, but the problem is society falling apart (worldwide) and breaking into small fractions fighting each other for bare survival. For example, to get a datacentre running again, you'll need a working grid and parts that are made in China. This may not be a priority for a local community. After a few weeks, the local community will take the datacentre apart just for the raw materials when shelter and food become the main priority. People are cold and hungry.


This may sound implausible, but it really doesn't take much for society to fall apart. For example, look what happened in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster. And that was only a localised event. Imagine a disaster on a global scale.


We are incredibly lucky that most of us have never seen a global war/ disaster in our lifetime, and therefore think it can't happen and things will work out fine. But our globalised supply chains and reliance on electronics that can be knocked out with a handful of EMP weapons makes us incredibly vulnerable to a total breakdown of society and all the things we now take for granted. I agree with you that datacentres itself are well protected and backed up, so in theory data could get restored. But that may not happen because society breaks down when people start killing each other for food and shelter.

Or people start to do what they always have and cooperate and rebuild a better society.
Worth reading Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince.

[Birdman]

Or people start to do what they always have and cooperate and rebuild a better society.

Very idealistic, but that won't happen if all means of communication are down. And you certainly won't get the replacement parts from China in order to restore these communication links. So nobody really knows what is happening and even a central authority (if that still exists) wouldn't be able to command anything. The only kind of cooperation that I would expect in that situation is local communities organising their defence against raiding parties from neighbouring villages, or organising raiding parties yourself to survive because you have only one day food left.

[rigby]

superb! they're much easier on the soil underfoot than regular cattle and think of all that yummy mozzarella