this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Yeah, this is a good topic. I can add a few:
~~Short term, pets in houses, farm animals, etc will need to escape and start fending for themselves otherwise they'll starve (or dehydrate).~~. Oops, I'd somehow missed an entire paragraph of your post ๐คฆโโ๏ธ Sheep need us to trim their wool, because we've bred them up grow fair more than they need. They'll get too hot if they don't have problems with defecation first (an actual thing farmers have to worry about).
Medium to long term, when dams and dikes aren't maintained they'll eventually fail, flooding vast areas including the Netherlands.
I guess that the world will continue heating for a bit even once we're gone, so we wouldn't be around to theoretically use our tech to help. Obviously, we're the reason it's happening in the first place, but nature's not equipped to deal with change that's this rapid.
Yes, most of those we created through breeding, but you could argue that wolves and coyotes created modern deer the same way.
I do wonder if many would go extinct in the medium term from predation, before they can evolve fast enough to adapt; I'm thinking farm pigs and chickens would be OK in the short term - they don't need us to survive - but wild dogs/coyotes/wolves, large cats like the NA lions, raptors, foxes... they'd all be putting a lot of pressure on those mostly defenseless breeds. Pigs are not wild hogs. Cattle and horses exist just fine in their environments without humans. Even with predation, herds are large and they aren't defenseless.
Sheep are an exception; like you said, they need us to perform maintenance because of how we've bred them. Are there others?
My thoughts go to a lot of our stored and operational fuel supplies. Nuclear fuel (both civil and weapon) would eventually become exposed through lack of storage container maintinance and cooling starting meltdown reactions in their localized environments. Oil extraction, distribution, and refining systems are automated to an extent but somewhere a tank is going ng to rupture or just run out of space and then it's all getting into the environment, likely at sea to have what effects that may cause.
Oh, yeah. If we suddenly disappeared, there'd be so many environmental catastrophes.
I'm sure it'd level off, but a driver falling asleep at the wheel on the highway tends to cause problems. If the BP spill in the Gulf had nobody trying to cap it off who knows how long it'd have kept going.