While science decides whether humans are responsible for the change, [and frankly, given the evidence, I don't see what other cause there could be - what else even could change the ecosystem to such a degree?]
A butterfly flaps its wings in China and it rains in Central Park. Chaos Theory describes how that works, and it also describes how things can be affected on a cosmological scale. A star goes supernova in Vega and everything from dark matter to sunspot activity to the manner and speed at which we (our solar system) are meandering in and out of the spiral arm of the galaxy is affected. There is a direct correlation between sunspot activity and solar wind emissions and the climate on Earth. There is also a correlation between climate and where we are in that spiral arm. Those things, and others, have had a significant impact on our climate patterns and climate changes over the eons. The increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere isn't helping, to be sure, but there is simply not enough data to point the finger at a single cause. It's like several million causes in combination.
I think we can agree that if it needs to be reversed, or at least slowed down, only humans can do it.
I think you give humans too much credit.
The Koch Bros have spent a lot of money over a lot of years to change the conversation and the outcome, but science doesn't lie, and the time to make changes [even if they have a negative effect on the Koch's business interests] is running short.
Yep. The planet nor the solar system gives a rat's furry little behind about the Kock brothers.
While the debate rages on over whose fault it is, what happens when we pass the point of no return? When the honeybees go extinct? When the extreme weather events become the everyday norm?
Same thing that's happened with the previous five mass extinctions on this planet. There's gonna be a sixth one, and there's nothing we can do about it. We may hasten it with the ways we are affecting live on the planet (species are becoming extinct at alarming rates) or it might just be the result of another large body impact. There are so many big rocks flying around in space that the Earth has basically been playing a big game of Frogger ever since the solar system formed, and it's amazing that we haven't been impacted far more often than we have.
Back in the 1800s the concept of
anything being extinct simply didn't exist. When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to the northwest, the hope (and assumption) was that they would find mastodons roaming around out there, because mastodon bones has been dug up, to they must be somewhere, things don't go just extinct. Do they? But someone, a French naturalist I think, figured that since all these bones from different animals keep getting dug up, and no one has ever seen these creatures, something must have caused them to no longer be in existence. The concept of extinction was born half a century before the concept of evolution. So they now knew things became extinct, but they had no idea how new species came about, not how the extinctions happened. They simply thought everything had always been exactly as it was.
The asteroid impact that did in the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was a theory that was scoffed at for more than a century, until it was proven in the 1980s and 1990s, because it didn't mesh with the theory of slow-process evolution. But we now know that the history of life on this planet consists of really long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic. The climate and ecosystem usually changes slowly, but sometimes it changes fast, and when it does, it's very hard for most organisms to keep up.
People are beginning to panic, and they're looking for not only a quick fix, but an easy blame.
