Maybe no one cares about climate change because we’re wired for extinction | Grist
[Psychologist named Andrew Shatté], a professor at the University of Arizona, is best known for his work on resilience -- the ability of humans to deal with adversity. His thesis on climate change, in a nutshell, is that we are hardwired for extinction. He compares us to the Irish elk, which went extinct about 11,000 years ago. The male of that species evolved to grow big antlers -- I mean really gargantuan antlers, racks up to 12 feet wide, designed for the usual reasons of aggression, defense, and sexual display. Over time, the antlers got so big that the elk couldn't consume enough calories to sustain their growth, so instead the antlers began to feed in auto-parasitic fashion on the calcium in the animals' bones. If galloping osteoporosis didn't kill them, they got their antlers impossibly tangled up in the overhead branches and starved to death.
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The cause of Irish Elk extinction is speculative. There are several alternate (or complimentary) theories.
1. Antler size
2. Man hunting Elks to extinction
3. Climate change
Now, it's interesting that George Black found no room to mention the possibility that climate change may have been a contributory factor.
On its own the size of the antlers CANNOT have caused extinction, because the process of natural selection would have eliminated animals whose antlers grew too large to be viable in the local habitat. However with climate change, local vegetation may have changed sufficiently to cause extinction in a marginal animal.
I wonder why he didn't mention the fact that climate changed dramatically thousands of years ago before the modern industrial era? I guess we'll never know.
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