Date: Sunday, September 27th 2015

Participants (from 15 countries):

Host: Rick

Moderator: Rick

Teams

Panel PRO: Amir Alipur

Panel CON: Johny, Tibi, Riya

Audience: Masato, Marwa, Sunita, Markov, Meriem, Mary, Filbert, Jay, Lala, Seif., Flory, Ayisha, Tufail, Jawad, Nacer, Yusuf

Panel PRO:

Global warming can have a negative impact in animals’ life directly and indirectly.
Some species of animals that have lived in cold areas such the North Pole have been pushed to seek other places to live due to the increase of heat in their environment, causing major changes to the ecosystem
There are places where rivers have decreased their flow and eventually disappeared due the lack of rain that used to feed them. This has affected the fish as well as the animals that used those rivers to live.
Data shows that global warming is a major contributor to the extinction or decline of various animal species
Global warming can endanger both human and animal life in parts of the world, specifically in coastal areas and islands, due to impact to ice fields in both the Arctic and Antarctic
Global warming causes climate changes throughout the world, whether in areas such as the Amazonian rain-forest or can exacerbate desertification in dry areas, leading to major ecosystem system changes for animal species that live in these areas

Panel CON:

Causes of extinction have prehistorically been dominated by natural earth processes such as geological transformation of the Earth's crust and major climatic oscillations, as well as species interactions.
Since the ascent of modern man, the causes of extinction have been dominated by the activities of humans.
Accelerated human population growth and expanded scope of agriculture.
Natural causes of extinction are regarded as being an irrelevantly small fraction of present extinction events, but are important.
The most important causal anthropological activities are habitat destruction, over-exploitation, pollution and the introduction of alien species to an environment.
Deforestation, overgrazing and urbanization and the humans’ need of food, space and clothing have the major cause of animal extinction.
Disease and parasitism have been other factors of species extinction.
Scientists have a better understanding of how many stars there are in the galaxy than how many species there are on Earth. So, if we don’t know how much there is to begin with, we don’t know exactly how much we’re losing.

Audience summary:

Marwa remained undecided
Sunita remained undecided
Masato remained undecided
Riya voted for team A
Tibi voted for team B
Flory team B
Ayisha voted for team A

It was a tie and what we can conclude from this discussion is this:

In the endeavor of finding the root cause of species extinction, we identify various factors. These factors may have been the driving causes behind global warming but global warming itself may not be the main cause. There have been causes that have nothing to do with global warming such as diseases, overfishing, and human need of clothing. However, since we know little about the species that lived or may have lived in the past, we cannot conduct the comparative analysis to determine how many species have become extinct before the manifestation of global warming caused by human activity.

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Global Warming vs Animal Extinction | Sept 27th 2015 | Recording File

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