I don’t really deal with it well either and really the only positive takeaway for me is knowing that some animals will thrive pretty much no matter how bad it can get, which means those will be the animals re-diversifying and dominating the planet in an evolutionary explosion of new species long after we’re all gone.
Past extinction events were what filled the ocean with fish, turned huge dinosaurs into tiny birds and flooded the planet with mammals, to name a few big shifts.
One thing that seems to love the warming oceans are soft-bodied cephalopods, who also seem to love that we’re eating up their fish competitors, so we might just be handing the ocean over to an octopus-based future.
On land, the predictable roaches, ants, wasps and rats are doing well, as are clever corvids.
The BEST equipped land mammals in my opinion, however, are all of the armadillos. Their range is already rapidly expanding because many armadillo species are opportunistic omnivores well adapted for harsh, unpredictable climates and can establish themselves anywhere from flooded swamps to barren deserts. They burrow and they swim and they can scavenge almost anything.
When the huge dinosaurs disappeared, it left tiny rodent-sized mammals free to diversify into every furry milk-making thing we have today; wolves and whales and bats and humans. That’s UNBELIEVABLE. That’s so many absurdly different things that all came from basically a shrew.
50 million years from now, what if there’s a planet full of wolfadillos and whaleadillos and battadillos and….I don’t know if anything as monstrously brained and imaginative as us will ever re-evolve, that already took almost a billion years to accidentally happen the one time, but, anything is possible. Maybe they’d be a gentler people.
