Tag Archives: Extinction

After 29 Million Years, A River Dolphin Faces Risky Future

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“If you recall the emotional impact of the 2009 movie “The Cove,” you know how horrible it is to witness the spectacle of hunters trapping and slaughtering dolphins. But it was also gratifying to our feelings of outrage, because it seemed like something we could fix, with a bit of public outrage and international pressure.

“It’s infinitely harder to come to terms with the fate of an animal like the blind dolphin of the Indus River in Pakistan and India. Nobody stabs or beats them to death any more. Hunting ended by law in the early 1970s. But that is not the same thing as saving the subspecies. Instead the Indus River dolphins are on the red list of endangered species. They have lost 80 percent of their old home range, which once extended almost 2200 miles from the Arabian Sea to the foothills of the Himalayas.

“Beginning in the early twentieth century, irrigation dams have repeatedly sub-divided the dolphin’s habitat, into a current total of 17 segments—10 of them now devoid of dolphins. According to a new study in the journal Biological Conservation, anywhere from 1200 to 1750 individuals survive—with 70 percent of them confined to a single 118-mile stretch of river.”  strangebehaviors.wordpress.com

Can This Book Help Stop The Current Mass Extinction?

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“There have been five known mass extinctions in Earth’s history, the most recent of which took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Uncovering this history was a scientific triumph, but if we manage to prevent the next one that would really be something.

“This June, a team of six biologists calculated that since 1500, vertebrate species have been going extinct at rates up to 100 times faster than is typical—and the number is rising. In other words, the paper’s authors claim, a sixth mass extinction is now underway, and it’s being caused by human activity.

“Two of the paper’s authors, Gerardo Ceballos and Paul Ehrlich, along with Paul’s colleague and wife Anne Ehrlich, have just released a book on the topic. In The Annihilation of Nature: Human Extinction of Birds and Mammals, Ceballos and the Ehrlichs meticulously document a representative sampling of extinct, endangered and threatened birds and mammals. They assess the causes of each animal’s woes while making the case that humans should start caring.”  Sourced through Scoop.it from: inthesetimes.com

GR:  At a recent wildlife discussion meeting, a newcomer to our rural neighborhood commented that throughout most of her life growing up in Los Angeles, she hadn’t thought about wildlife.  Now, living in an area where small mammals, birds, and reptiles are common, she had become interested.  So, here’s our problem:  Most people in rich urban cultures have no reason to think about wildlife.  Thus, they have no reason to conserve energy and goods that are depleting Earth’s resources and wildlife carrying capacity. Adding to this problem, the people responsible for much of the land outside the cities–and live there–are concerned with harvesting the resources. For them, wildlife is just a nuisance.

THE COMING ERA OF ABUNDANT CLEAN ENERGY #Auspol 

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In the 1980s, leading consultants were skeptical about cellular phones. McKinsey & Company noted that the handsets were heavy, batteries didn’t last long, coverage was patchy, and the cost per minute was exorbitant. It predicted that in 20 years the total market size would be about 900,000 units, and advised AT&T to pull out. McKinsey was wrong, of course. There were more than 100 million cellular phones in use in 2000; there are billions now. Costs have fallen so far that even the poor — all over world — can afford a cellular phone.
The experts are saying the same about solar energy now. They note that after decades of development, solar power hardly supplies 1 per cent of the world’s energy needs. They say that solar is inefficient, too expensive to install, and unreliable, and will fail without government subsidies. They too are wrong. Solar will be as ubiquitous as cellular phones are.  Sourced through Scoop.it from: jpratt27.wordpress.com

GR:  Clean energy certainly is a critical goal.  But attaining the goal without reversing human population growth and all of its impacts on nature will only draw out our mass extinction and ecocide of the Earth.

Do We Really Need “Hypoallergenic Parks”?

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“Hypoallergenic parks: Coming soon?” That was the headline on the press release, and the specter of sanitized nature made me mutter “Oh, crap.” So I downloaded the study. It’s being published in the Journal of Environmental Quality, and it made me wonder, for the first time in my life, whether we might be taking this whole damned environmental quality thing a bridge too far.

“Let’s stipulate that we have already paved under much of the natural world to suit human needs, especially in and around cities, and further, that we often manipulate what’s left to our own purposes, and finally, that these changes almost always work to the detriment of the birds, butterflies, and other animals that once depended on these habitats. Is the logical conclusion that we now also need a war on trees that happen to cause hay fever?

“The study, by a team of Spanish researchers, looked at trees in Granada, a city widely admired for its abundance of handsomely-planted boulevards, parks, gardens, and other green spaces. But because of its Mediterranean climate and long growing season, Granada is also a hay fever hotspot, with almost 30 percent of residents saying they are allergic to pollen.”  Sourced through Scoop.it from: strangebehaviors.wordpress.com

GR:  I agree that we cannot view nature only in terms of its benefits or costs for humans.  That’s too narrow a view even for humans, and it certainly ignores the needs of animals.  It’s just this type of thinking that is behind the disappearance of over half of Earth’s wildlife.

 

Record-Breaking Wildfires, Greenland Melting and Earth’s Hottest Month Ever

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Humans have some advantages over other animal species, but like the animals, we can’t control our urge to reproduce and our desire for the security of material wealth. Sentient but not sapient, sensitive but not wise, our advantages have let us to eliminate competition, disease, and danger. Thus, nothing can stop our booming population and our world-destroying “environmental footprint.”  (ACD = anthropogenic climate disruption)

Exposing the Big Game's avatarExposing the Big Game

The following article from Truthout.org covers all that I was going to go over in Part 2 of Global Warming: the Future is Now, so here’s this instead:

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Dahr Jamail | The World on Fire:

The US is now officially in the worst wildfire season in its history, as almost 7.5 million acres across the country have burned up since spring.

Articles about ACD’s impacts are now being published in more mainstream outlets, carrying titles that include verbiage like “the point of no return,” and it is high time for that, given what we are witnessing.

A recently published study by the UK-US Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Reliance revealed that “major shocks” to worldwide food production will become at least three times more likely within the next 25 years due to increasingly extreme weather events generated by ACD. One of the coauthors of the report…

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Predators and the food chain and preventing the suburban extinction of small native creatures

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“It is springtime here in Mount Waverley, close to the Reserve. The air is filled all day with the anguished squawks of smaller birds vainly trying to divert enormous crows from taking babies from their nests. Pairs of noisy miners are squawking at crows; by dusk, they must be exhausted. In our reserve, the Australian raven terrorises the other birds and dive-bombs the smaller dogs. The bellbirds keep their portion of the reserve, and will not let other birds colonise their areas.

“Every spring there are fewer little birds. Wrens and tits, which were quite plentiful in our garden twenty years ago, seem to have gone. Crows can be seen sometimes flying down the street with little birds in their beaks. We had no crows twenty years ago here. They are out of their ecological niche, whether native or exotic. The little birds have an ecological function in getting rid of noxious insects and other garden pests and these proliferate without them.

“Surely small birds have enough predators with cats, foxes and cars. Surely there is no need to protect all of the growing hordes of native crows or Australian ravens, on the grounds they have an important role in the food chain and they are native.  Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.onlineopinion.com.au

GR:  Habitat destruction, invasive species introductions are parts of the actions we have taken to begin Earth’s sixth mass extinction.

Evidence of species loss in Amazon

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Researchers studying plants, ants, birds, dung beetles and orchid bees in the Brazilian Amazon have found clear evidence that deforestation causes drastic loss of tropical forest biodiversity.  Sourced through Scoop.it from: phys.org

How Much Will Antarctica and Greenland Ice Raise Seas?

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Scientists have figured out the worst that could happen if the mammoth chuck of continental ice at the bottom of the world—the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—continues melting. By 2100, ice sheet melt would raise sea levels by 7.9 inches, enough to pose a risk to low-lying nations, according to a study published today in The Cryosphere.
By 2200, ice sheet melt would raise sea levels by 1.6 feet.

The melted water from Antarctica and Greenland, glaciers, and the thermal expansion of the ocean due to higher temperatures are expected to raise sea levels by 3.3 feet in 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That would be sufficient to submerge 17 percent of Bangladesh.  Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.scientificamerican.com

GR:  Adding all that freshwater to the oceans will have enormous impacts that are quite horrible in comparison to simple coastal flooding.  Read about the possible outcomes HERE.

Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole Toward a Second Great Dying? World Ocean Shows a Face Now Shadowed With the Early Signs of Extinction.

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The last time Earth experienced a Great Dying was during a dangerous transition from glaciation and to hothouse. We’re doing the same thing by burning fossil fuels today. And if we are sensitive to the lessons of our geological past, we’ll put a stop to it soon. Or else doesn’t even begin to characterize this necessary, moral choice.

The Great Dying of 200 million years ago began, as it does today, with a great burning and release of ancient crabon. The Siberian flood basalts erupted. Spilling lava over ancient coal beds, they dumped carbon into the air at a rate of around 1-2 billion tons per year. Greenhouse gasses built in the atmosphere and the world warmed. Glacier melt and episodes of increasingly violent rainfall over the single land mass — Pangaea — generated an ocean in which large volumes of fresh water pooled at the top. Because fresh water is less dense than salt water, it floats at the surface — creating a layer that is resistant to mixing with water at other levels.  Sourced through Scoop.it from: robertscribbler.com

GR:  Excellent post by Robert Scribbler comparing today’s mass extinction with the great Permian-Triassic episode 200 million years ago.  That one eliminated more than 99% of all life on Earth.  Recovery was slow; on land, ecosystems took 30M years to recover. Today, fossil fuel burning is quickly taking us toward the same conditions that prevailed over life during the great Permian-Triassic event.