Saury fishing is seeing historic low catch this season, price is shooting up to $60 in extreme cases from usual $1/fish. They’ll be gone much earlier than those cute whales and dolphins but there’s nothing meaningful going on
Most of the biosphere is on the brink of some sort of extinction. We are pushing this planet to another climate regime. Prepare for the anthropocene, because it's coming faster than expected.
Not to take away from any conservation efforts to reduce or reverse these extinctions, but: is cloning a viable replacement strategy? Is it conceivable that in 100-200 years, cloning and re-introducing an extinct species will be fairly affordable (on a small scale)?
Judging from this article on Wikipedia, work is underway in this field, although it hasn't been too fruitful yet.
I don't thing that cloning would be our best bet. And would be really expensive making it impractical.
Specially with those huge animals. Would need incredibly complex and humongous laboratories just for trying to hold each 3000 Kg newborn. Avoiding contamination and making the embryo cameras sterile for months would be a real headache.
We must forget the idea that cloning will save the day someday, be smart and use our narrow and shrinking interval of opportunity to act now.
Habitats are very complex interrelationships. Even IF cloning brings them back in future, we won't have their natural habitats and niches. It's like saving the threads but not knowing how to sew them back together into a garment. That's why habitat protection is non-negotiable if we want to save Earth's biodiversity.
It’s not just the habitats that are complex, either. Intelligent mammals like whales and elephants, orcas and dolphins, actually have their own culture as well, and by culture I mean survival specific knowledge passed down between generations.
Simply cloning one of these animals and dumping it into the ocean reminds me of seal conservation efforts where seals were rehabilitated and then basically dumped into the ocean and swiftly eaten by orcas. A naïve approach is unlikely to work.
> Not to take away from any conservation efforts to reduce or reverse these extinctions,
Presumably one reason the loss of species is bad because it lessens biodiversity. If extinct species could be re-introduced in a more amenable future, then that would be a good thing, no?
Animals are not automatons. They socialize, depend on each other, and teach each other. They all have means of communicating. Essentially, they have cultures. If you were to introduce cloned animals into the wild after natural ones had died, there would be no other animals of their kind who could teach them how to do various things necessary to their survival, or teach them how to communicate. Moreover, there is no guarantee that any future environment would be more amenable. For most animals, we would have no idea what that meant, no way to measure it.
It's not just that a few species go extinct. Whole ecosystems change. In 100 years the environment might not be suitable for the species anymore (e.g. reintroduction of wooly mammoths would be a disaster today) due to global issues (temperature, co2, acidity/salinity), but also local issues such as losing food sources, breeding grounds or some other species already filling the empty niche.
Even if cloning was an option, extinction is just a side effect of habitat erosion. Without habitat, there's no place where those species, even when cloned, could thrive.
Pushing solutions into the future is exactly why we ended up with this mess in the first place.
Similarly, governments right now are competing with each other who declares the most ambitious climate plan to be realised by 2050, instead of doing something right now.
We can dance around it all we want, but we will always arrive at human overpopulation contributing to all our environmental problems. We can fool ourselves that lowering birth rates mean lowering population. We can fool ourselves that stabilizing the population hides that we are using more than the Earth can sustain, which will lead to population collapse. We can fool ourselves that human nature requires growth yet many civilizations have stabilized populations for centuries and nations like Thailand went from 7 children per couple to under 2 in a few years purely voluntary (think the opposite of the One Child Policy, no forced abortions or sterilizations). We can fool oursleves that efficiency will lower our waste to sustainable levels.
We can fool ourselves that rich nations won't feel it as much, but it will hit us just as much eventually.
This community is so quick to split atoms, fuse atoms, and rocket to Mars. If we can do those things, we can globally provide the contraception and education that leads to 1.5 children per couple for a few generations, which will bring our population to sustainable.
Over-population is one big elephant in the room. The other one is disproportionate and ridiculously unbalanced consumption and wealth distribution. You can never succeed in getting very poor people to care about their numbers or about the Earth.
Sorry, but we're talking about whales and dolphins here.
Poor people don't meaningfully contribute to the ritual overfishing of the oceans. They don't cause massive oil spills. The poor don't tend to operate the kinds of active sonar that confuses cetacean navigation. Those are decisions made by people with capital.
It is easy to try to blame a problem caused by people consuming on the people that own the means of harvesting. The demand for harvesting animals from the commons (i.e. seas) or mining oil exists regardless of who owns it. Someone else will step in to provide the food and the energy. The problem remains demand, and regardless of economic status, people contribute to that. The whale in the room isn't the whale. It's the low cost of harvesting fish, or pumping oil compared to the alternatives.
In less developed societies, most people end up dying before adulthood. As modernization reaches these places, more of their children survive.
If each woman previously had five children, but only one survived, you're going to have less overall population than if she had two children, and they both survive.
Current predictions have population peaking at 10-11 billion humans worldwide. That's a level of population we could sustain with our current technology. Most "first world" nations have a birthrate under the replacement rate, with population numbers only being held up by immigration.
The problem is that we want more than we can have, and we fail to establish clear incentives to limit ourselves. We aren't overfishing the oceans because we have to have that much fish to survive, we overfish the oceans because people love to eat fish.
Imagine if the human population halved over night. Would trawlers suddenly stop? Would the price at fish markets be so low that boats would stop going to sea? I doubt it somehow. The meat would still be sufficiently cheap and/or desirable.
Marine mammals die due to an inability and unwillingness to regulate fishing.
I’m not super educated on the subject but am I wrong to think that basically all large non-domesticated mammals will go extinct over the next few generations? It doesn't look like humans are inclined to do anything about the climate and these animals seem particularly vulnerable.
You are indeed wrong. Many populations are thriving. Some examples local to me: black bears, cougars, grizzly bears, various species of deer and a couple of elk herds. Climate change won’t affect these animals much, especially here in BC. They may end up migrating north a bit but bears in particular are incredibly adaptable animals.
I'm not a scientist nor have I studied ecological effects on species, but you're statement is definitely too strong.
Its probably unlikely that all non domesticated animals will die in the soon (next 200yrs) future.
Beyond that it's just beyond unpredictable, because the challenges of that time haven't even been identified yet.
Nobody knows the future. Sperm whales benefit of our overfishing so they recovered really fast. Hector's dolphins are hurt by our overfishing, so they are in big trouble.
Wikipedia says it's "critically endangered, possibly extinct", there have been no confirmed sightings in nearly 20 years, and a large 6 weeks survey back in 2006 turned out no living individual and declared it functionally extinct even if it wasn't technically extinct yet. Furthermore Yangtze water quality has only gotten worse since then.
> In August 2007, a Chinese man reportedly videotaped a large white animal swimming in the Yangtze. Although the animal was tentatively identified as a baiji, the presence of only one or a few animals, particularly of advanced age, is not enough to save a functionally extinct species from true extinction. The last known living baiji was Qiqi (淇淇), which died in 2002.
I think the problem is that you can never really know for sure if a species is extinct. But this is pretty sad, and I wouldn't know why anyone would want to go in an argument to prove the GP incorrect.
We must take in mind that there are a second species of endangered cetacean still living in Yagtzee River, so videotaping a white animal does not mean necessarily that baiji, or even chinese paddlefish, are alive. Could be CGI or even a plastic bag.
The story of the last tasmanian tiger always makes me sad.
> The last captive thylacine, later referred to as "Benjamin", was trapped in the Florentine Valley by Elias Churchill in 1933, and sent to the Hobart Zoo where it lived for three years. The thylacine died on 7 September 1936. It is believed to have died as the result of neglect—locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters, it was exposed to a rare occurrence of extreme Tasmanian weather: extreme heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night This thylacine features in the last known motion picture footage of a living specimen: 62 seconds of black-and-white footage showing the thylacine in its enclosure in a clip taken in 1933, by naturalist David Fleay.
> After the thylacine's death the zoo expected that it would soon find a replacement, and "Benjamin"'s death was not reported on in the media at the time. Although there had been a conservation movement pressing for the thylacine's protection since 1901, driven in part by the increasing difficulty in obtaining specimens for overseas collections, political difficulties prevented any form of protection coming into force until 1936. Official protection of the species by the Tasmanian government was introduced on 10 July 1936, 59 days before the last known specimen died in captivity.
> The thylacine held the status of endangered species until the 1980s. International standards at the time stated that an animal could not be declared extinct until 50 years had passed without a confirmed record. Since no definitive proof of the thylacine's existence in the wild had been obtained for more than 50 years, it met that official criterion and was declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1982 and by the Tasmanian government in 1986. The species was removed from Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 2013.
this is why nobody trusts the news. And also why global warming is so controversial. If, hypothetically, some credible scientists tomorrow did some research that showed global warming is not as bad as we thought, would that get reported widely? No way.
Even if your articles are 100% fact based, selection bias in which stories to report and which to promote is a huge issue.
It's why we love places like HN, also - both for the un-editorialized ranking of stories as well as the ranking of comments.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest it's not as bad as we thought if you search out there. You'll never see it in the popular mainstream news though.
Part of this is also on the readers. Science is suppose to change as more evidence comes in. But, many people for whatever reasons ignore updates unless they match their narrative. Nuance is lost.
> If, hypothetically, some credible scientists tomorrow did some research that showed global warming is not as bad as we thought, would that get reported widely?
Absolutely yes. It would be hard to come up with strong evidence that the hundreds (thousands?) of other papers are wrong, but extraordinary evidence would absolutely be shared widely.
I admire your optimism. My view is that people that have bet their political or journalistic careers on a certain matter or position are very reluctant to embrace opposite facts (consciously or unconsciously).
As another example - there were huge campaigns to get women to get screened for breast cancer. Turns out there is little to no benefit in doing so based on extensive long term scientific studies (very surprising to me but that’s what it is). It is taking forever for that fact to come out and it’s not even that controversial.
The point doesn't require optimism at all. In fact, it requires a certain degree of magical thinking to believe that the information WOULDN'T get a wide degree of publicity.
Consider the massive numbers of people and industries who are ideologically and economically motivated to show that climate change is a hoax. It's an absurdly charged issue. Also consider the massive effort that would be required to thoroughly debunk the many dozens of sources of evidence and papers that suggest climate change is both man-made and accelerating.
You are correct that some types of information don't spread as fast as others. In fact, the vast majority of information on earth doesn't get prominent national attention. By definition, it's quite abnormal to reach that level. I don't know much about breast cancer screening, but it seems obvious that "breast cancer screening isn't as reliable as we thought" isn't a shoe-in for front page news, and I'm not sure why that should have any implications for climate change news.
Not sure about un-editorialized ranking of stories. There are entire classes of important stories that are probibited by the rules, stories and comments are shown based on a combination of voting and the whims of a couple staff members, and the site is owned by an organization invested in the companies that are being discussed.
HN is a fun discussion site but if it was your only source of information your worldview would be very warped.
There are plenty of really bad examples in your link.
Do you think its okay to hunt down a species like a blue whale from 400k to 10-30k and say 'yeah thats okay'?
There are plenty of other examples.
And do you assume they grow back because of no intervention or continuous intervention? I would say its about continues intervention.
Continues -> reminding people how shitty it is and that we can't accept the current state which you would say is 'pretty OK'.
And don't get me wrong: Why would you even try to counter argue about something like whale rescue? Do you have the feeling that we as a society are spending too much money on rescuing and saving species versus i don't know cars?
Lets give them more money, lets create jobs which are actually here to help our planet and lets do something useful once instead of writing just another backend.
> Do you think its okay to hunt down a species like a blue whale from 400k to 10-30k and say 'yeah thats okay'?
This argues against something I didn't say, imply, or mean.
This could be a good time for you to think about how to listen to people you disagree with in a constructive way. It's an important life skill even outside HN!
The IWC's responsibilities are in conflict with each other. There's reasonable cause to dispute an attempt to paint a rosy picture.
And are the near-certain extinctions noted in the BBC article incorrect? I don't see any reason given in your post to doubt the veracity of the BBC article's claims.
So I view your comment as containing a non-trivial amount of white-washing.
> By far the biggest threat is becoming accidently captured in fishing equipment and nets, which kills an estimated 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises a year.
I suspect that focusing on this one area will have the greatest positive outcome. I’d like to see a better data-centric analysis; dolphin safe campaigns have sufficient history to draw from.
Saving river dolphins in highly urbanized areas might be beyond any reasonable effort. Saving every traditional habitat, such as the St. Lawrence River for belugas, might also distract from ensuring sustainable habitats exist for each species with a broad range.
There are a zillion dogs and cats in the world too but I'd rather that they didn't die prematurely due to a panicked and prolonged suffocation.
Supporting a charitable interpretation of your criticism, the BBC article is much closer to advocacy journalism [1] than investigative journalism. To be equally fair to the BBC, they are accurately describing the language used in the scientist's open letter The Real and Imminent Extinction Risk to Whales, Dolphins And Porpoises [2].
Like all complex issues, trade-offs exist and we could all benefit from more critical thinking.
Just ended up watching
David Attenborough: A life on our planet on Netflix. It truly opened my semi- open eyes permanently. It is a brilliant one and I urge everyone to watch it to see where we're headed.
I took a pledge to go vegetarian and this time for real. There is definitely something all of us can do and I think collectively we can stop the slaughter our planet is going through.
> "Let this be a historic moment when realising that whales are in danger sparks a powerful wave of action from everyone: regulators, scientists, politicians and the public to save our oceans," said Mark Simmonds.
Even our own extinction doesn't seem to spur much effort, I'm not sure why there is an expectation whales would.
> > "Let this be a historic moment when realising that whales are in danger sparks a powerful wave of action from everyone: regulators, scientists, politicians and the public to save our oceans," said Mark Simmonds.
> Even our own extinction doesn't seem to spur much effort, I'm not sure why there is an expectation whales would.
> > "Let this be a historic moment when realising that whales are in danger sparks a powerful wave of action from everyone: regulators, scientists, politicians and the public to save our oceans," said Mark Simmonds.
> Even our own extinction doesn't seem to spur much effort, I'm not sure why there is an expectation whales would.
Considering the human population is at an all-time and expected to increase significantly in the next 20 years, especially in locations with poor healthcare. What are your arguments that the human population has to worry about going extinct?
If we wipe out the vast majority of the animal and plant life and drinkable water on the planet, how likely do you think we will keep our population at an all-time high?
I think it's certainly possible you're right that population will keep increasing for the next, well, 10 years at least, maybe not 20, but meanwhile we're cratering our biocapacity, and we are not going to have anywhere near enough resources left on the planet to sustain that population if we keep going on our current trajectory.
There's quite a few experts that say it's already too late, we've already depleted our biocapacity too much, the only way to correct for it is to undergo some form of rapid decline at some point in the future (collapse). I found this video incredibly illuminating on that point (I honestly thought we were still under the limit before watching it, not way past it already):
Extinction may be a bit extreme, humans might be able to survive somehow, but the vast majority will not.
Here's one article that discusses the possibility of human extinction. Key quote: "I don’t want to claim that we can’t survive the loss of many, many species. We’ve already proved that we actually can. We’re very adaptable. But I think the bottom line is, you wouldn’t want to find out."
I think we should re-target the mission to saving dogs/cats lives. Since we love to hate/war on each other too often. You will find less people unsympathetic towards their pets.
I sometimes need to make basic safety recommendations at work. I include the phrase "small children or animals" where appropriate for exactly that reason. I see people gasp when I get to the animals part all too often.
77 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadhttps://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/08/b67d07c2d081-japa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene#Biodiversity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Climate
It could be dated to the extinction of the woolly mammoth and other megafauna.
It could be dated to the Industrial revolution and mass burning of coal. ( 1760-1840)
IMHO, this is one plausible geologic marker at 1940-1950: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
Judging from this article on Wikipedia, work is underway in this field, although it hasn't been too fruitful yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloning#Cloning_extinct_and_en...
Specially with those huge animals. Would need incredibly complex and humongous laboratories just for trying to hold each 3000 Kg newborn. Avoiding contamination and making the embryo cameras sterile for months would be a real headache.
We must forget the idea that cloning will save the day someday, be smart and use our narrow and shrinking interval of opportunity to act now.
Simply cloning one of these animals and dumping it into the ocean reminds me of seal conservation efforts where seals were rehabilitated and then basically dumped into the ocean and swiftly eaten by orcas. A naïve approach is unlikely to work.
We don’t care for the whales we have now.
> Not to take away from any conservation efforts to reduce or reverse these extinctions,
Presumably one reason the loss of species is bad because it lessens biodiversity. If extinct species could be re-introduced in a more amenable future, then that would be a good thing, no?
Even then, on a human timeline a thousand years is nothing. We still have buildings that are 3x as old.
Pushing solutions into the future is exactly why we ended up with this mess in the first place.
Similarly, governments right now are competing with each other who declares the most ambitious climate plan to be realised by 2050, instead of doing something right now.
We can fool ourselves that rich nations won't feel it as much, but it will hit us just as much eventually.
This community is so quick to split atoms, fuse atoms, and rocket to Mars. If we can do those things, we can globally provide the contraception and education that leads to 1.5 children per couple for a few generations, which will bring our population to sustainable.
Poor people don't meaningfully contribute to the ritual overfishing of the oceans. They don't cause massive oil spills. The poor don't tend to operate the kinds of active sonar that confuses cetacean navigation. Those are decisions made by people with capital.
Could you explain why this is not the case?
If each woman previously had five children, but only one survived, you're going to have less overall population than if she had two children, and they both survive.
The problem is that we want more than we can have, and we fail to establish clear incentives to limit ourselves. We aren't overfishing the oceans because we have to have that much fish to survive, we overfish the oceans because people love to eat fish.
Marine mammals die due to an inability and unwillingness to regulate fishing.
Its probably unlikely that all non domesticated animals will die in the soon (next 200yrs) future. Beyond that it's just beyond unpredictable, because the challenges of that time haven't even been identified yet.
Could go either way. Lets try nothing otherwise we might create a sustainable environment with healthy air, energy and more animals for nothing.
Anyway, here is the International Whaling Commission's detailed inventory of populations: https://iwc.int/status
By and large, whale populations are growing back as hunting has stopped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiji
Wikipedia is wrong
https://iucn-csg.org/baiji/
> In August 2007, a Chinese man reportedly videotaped a large white animal swimming in the Yangtze. Although the animal was tentatively identified as a baiji, the presence of only one or a few animals, particularly of advanced age, is not enough to save a functionally extinct species from true extinction. The last known living baiji was Qiqi (淇淇), which died in 2002.
I think the problem is that you can never really know for sure if a species is extinct. But this is pretty sad, and I wouldn't know why anyone would want to go in an argument to prove the GP incorrect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_paddlefish
Even today, there are dozens of videos claiming encounters with tasman tigers, that range from CGI to dogs with painted stripes.
> The last captive thylacine, later referred to as "Benjamin", was trapped in the Florentine Valley by Elias Churchill in 1933, and sent to the Hobart Zoo where it lived for three years. The thylacine died on 7 September 1936. It is believed to have died as the result of neglect—locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters, it was exposed to a rare occurrence of extreme Tasmanian weather: extreme heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night This thylacine features in the last known motion picture footage of a living specimen: 62 seconds of black-and-white footage showing the thylacine in its enclosure in a clip taken in 1933, by naturalist David Fleay.
> After the thylacine's death the zoo expected that it would soon find a replacement, and "Benjamin"'s death was not reported on in the media at the time. Although there had been a conservation movement pressing for the thylacine's protection since 1901, driven in part by the increasing difficulty in obtaining specimens for overseas collections, political difficulties prevented any form of protection coming into force until 1936. Official protection of the species by the Tasmanian government was introduced on 10 July 1936, 59 days before the last known specimen died in captivity.
> The thylacine held the status of endangered species until the 1980s. International standards at the time stated that an animal could not be declared extinct until 50 years had passed without a confirmed record. Since no definitive proof of the thylacine's existence in the wild had been obtained for more than 50 years, it met that official criterion and was declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1982 and by the Tasmanian government in 1986. The species was removed from Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine#Extinction_in_Tasman...
350 species previous thought to be extinct are known to still exist.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/features/visit-ani...
Even if your articles are 100% fact based, selection bias in which stories to report and which to promote is a huge issue.
It's why we love places like HN, also - both for the un-editorialized ranking of stories as well as the ranking of comments.
Absolutely yes. It would be hard to come up with strong evidence that the hundreds (thousands?) of other papers are wrong, but extraordinary evidence would absolutely be shared widely.
As another example - there were huge campaigns to get women to get screened for breast cancer. Turns out there is little to no benefit in doing so based on extensive long term scientific studies (very surprising to me but that’s what it is). It is taking forever for that fact to come out and it’s not even that controversial.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53753458
I don't expect major public health shifts to happen within a month of a paper being published, especially during a pandemic.
Consider the massive numbers of people and industries who are ideologically and economically motivated to show that climate change is a hoax. It's an absurdly charged issue. Also consider the massive effort that would be required to thoroughly debunk the many dozens of sources of evidence and papers that suggest climate change is both man-made and accelerating.
You are correct that some types of information don't spread as fast as others. In fact, the vast majority of information on earth doesn't get prominent national attention. By definition, it's quite abnormal to reach that level. I don't know much about breast cancer screening, but it seems obvious that "breast cancer screening isn't as reliable as we thought" isn't a shoe-in for front page news, and I'm not sure why that should have any implications for climate change news.
HN is a fun discussion site but if it was your only source of information your worldview would be very warped.
Don't state like its the norm now not to believe well known old and trusty news papers.
My basic assumption is, that they are not lying but they can also make mistakes.
Do you think its okay to hunt down a species like a blue whale from 400k to 10-30k and say 'yeah thats okay'?
There are plenty of other examples.
And do you assume they grow back because of no intervention or continuous intervention? I would say its about continues intervention.
Continues -> reminding people how shitty it is and that we can't accept the current state which you would say is 'pretty OK'.
And don't get me wrong: Why would you even try to counter argue about something like whale rescue? Do you have the feeling that we as a society are spending too much money on rescuing and saving species versus i don't know cars?
Lets give them more money, lets create jobs which are actually here to help our planet and lets do something useful once instead of writing just another backend.
This argues against something I didn't say, imply, or mean.
This could be a good time for you to think about how to listen to people you disagree with in a constructive way. It's an important life skill even outside HN!
Thats where that one is coming from.
And are the near-certain extinctions noted in the BBC article incorrect? I don't see any reason given in your post to doubt the veracity of the BBC article's claims.
So I view your comment as containing a non-trivial amount of white-washing.
I suspect that focusing on this one area will have the greatest positive outcome. I’d like to see a better data-centric analysis; dolphin safe campaigns have sufficient history to draw from.
Saving river dolphins in highly urbanized areas might be beyond any reasonable effort. Saving every traditional habitat, such as the St. Lawrence River for belugas, might also distract from ensuring sustainable habitats exist for each species with a broad range.
Pretty sly lumping them together like that. There are a zillion dolphins, and it’s probably almost all them getting caught.
Supporting a charitable interpretation of your criticism, the BBC article is much closer to advocacy journalism [1] than investigative journalism. To be equally fair to the BBC, they are accurately describing the language used in the scientist's open letter The Real and Imminent Extinction Risk to Whales, Dolphins And Porpoises [2].
Like all complex issues, trade-offs exist and we could all benefit from more critical thinking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism
[2] (PDF) https://www.mammalresearchinstitute.science/s/Scientists-Sig...
I took a pledge to go vegetarian and this time for real. There is definitely something all of us can do and I think collectively we can stop the slaughter our planet is going through.
Even our own extinction doesn't seem to spur much effort, I'm not sure why there is an expectation whales would.
> Even our own extinction doesn't seem to spur much effort, I'm not sure why there is an expectation whales would.
> > "Let this be a historic moment when realising that whales are in danger sparks a powerful wave of action from everyone: regulators, scientists, politicians and the public to save our oceans," said Mark Simmonds.
> Even our own extinction doesn't seem to spur much effort, I'm not sure why there is an expectation whales would.
Considering the human population is at an all-time and expected to increase significantly in the next 20 years, especially in locations with poor healthcare. What are your arguments that the human population has to worry about going extinct?
I think it's certainly possible you're right that population will keep increasing for the next, well, 10 years at least, maybe not 20, but meanwhile we're cratering our biocapacity, and we are not going to have anywhere near enough resources left on the planet to sustain that population if we keep going on our current trajectory.
There's quite a few experts that say it's already too late, we've already depleted our biocapacity too much, the only way to correct for it is to undergo some form of rapid decline at some point in the future (collapse). I found this video incredibly illuminating on that point (I honestly thought we were still under the limit before watching it, not way past it already):
https://youtu.be/qPb_0JZ6-Rc
Extinction may be a bit extreme, humans might be able to survive somehow, but the vast majority will not.
Here's one article that discusses the possibility of human extinction. Key quote: "I don’t want to claim that we can’t survive the loss of many, many species. We’ve already proved that we actually can. We’re very adaptable. But I think the bottom line is, you wouldn’t want to find out."
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...