 |
|
“Biodiversity underpins the health of the planet and has a direct impact on all our lives so it is alarming that despite of an increased awareness of environmental issues we continue to see a downtrend trend,” said WWF campaign head Colin Butfield…
WWF’s Living Planet Index tracks some 4,000 species of birds, fish, mammals, reptiles and amphibians globally. It shows that between 1970 and 2007 land-based species fell by 25 percent, marine by 28 percent and freshwater by 29 percent. Marine bird species have fallen 30 percent since the mid-1990s.
“No one can escape the impact of biodiversity loss because reduced global diversity translates quite clearly into fewer new medicines, greater vulnerability to natural disasters and greater effects from global warming.
Reactionary politics have added another characteristic to the basics of fear of change, conservative political correctness. It’s now considered an essential rule to refuse responsibility for the actions of human beings, collectively and individually.
Refuse responsibility – there’s no need to respond.
Nothing with a backbone is important to the ecosystem. We aren’t even tracking what is important: insects. Insects drive the bio mass. Sadly, its not known how the loss of higher orders reflects on the health/bio diversity of insects.
The microscopic world is also more important than backbones–but I assume more resilient and harder to kill off than insects.
Yea, enjoy those nature shows. Catalogue of what were losing–no way around it as humans will kill off almost all the other backbones before we kill off ourselves.
And thats why Fermi’s paradox is no paradox at all.
It’s just God’s will.
We all need to impose our belief systems on those who deserve to survive.
We need to create a crusade upon all species who don’t dearly hold our beliefs.
Do you ever get the feeling that we are just around the corner from a Mad Max world?
Cripes. Aren’t there any neocon nutballs here, today, to defend extinction?
They must also be the klowns who sneak out earliest on a Friday.
We’ve already caused a mass extinction greater than the one that took out the non-avian dinos 65.3 MYA. Now we’re trying to beat out The P/T extinction 250 MYA, oddly was caused by non-human caused global warming. Read Under a Green Sky for details.
We complain about US interference, but, in this case, it’s not the US that is doing the bulk of the decimation. I’m thinking more about countries such as Brazil, Australia, China, etc. Countries attempting to manifest their own destiny to the detriment of their own land and biomass. Not sure what we can do about it without seeming dictatorial and interefereing.
Careful there #6 things like science, History, the Geologic Record, and reality do not mix well with the media and governmental picture of the uiniverse.
Seriously though, no scientists worth the money and time spent for their degree would ever make such an idiotic statement as, “World biodiversity as declined by almost one third.”
Such a statement would first require us to have knowledge of every single species from cingle celled life on up. No one claims to have achieved this feat yet, and no one ever will for the simple fact that new species are constantly emerging, and not just among single celled organisms.
Secondly you would then have to be able to track the exact numbers and dispositions of all the animals. This would require tracking devices implanted in everything that lives, including ourselves.
Finally it would require a system for collecting and categorizing all this data for countless trillions of organisms at a reasonable rate, about every few nanoseconds should do the trick. What, not even all the computers in the world could even begin to approach any significant portion of that capacity? Darn.
Then there is the small matter that extinction is as much a natural part of the ecosystem as proliferation. It has happened before. It will happen again, at least until the eventual heat death of the universe.
#7 – Angus,
We could start by signing on to Kyoto with the other 161 nations. Being alone out of 162 is a really bad place from which to lead by example.
#9 – bobbo,
Actually, if we had a statistical universe of the species around, it could act as a reasonable proxy for the total species on the planet, or at least the multicellular minority thereof. We could then quote the statistic as plus or minus some percentage as is often done in statistics. My guess is that this was indeed done by the scientists and that the popular press merely rounded to about a third and is expressing the lack of precision by stating a third rather than 33.3333333%.
This is commonly done. It’s why programmers like myself quote a time frame of three months rather than a time frame like 91.25 days, which would certainly be beyond the level of precision possible. Sometimes the units used indicate the lack of precision.
As for extinction being part of the natural ecosystem, true. So are we. So was the comet 65.3 MYA. To say that we are causing extinctions at around 1000 times the background rate of extinction does not deny this. It merely gives us proper recognition for being a catastrophic event in the history of our planet.
#10, I’m all for signing Kyoto as soon as the restrictions are placed on China, India, and Russia as well. Let’s make it a viable step to cut emissions, and not a money transfer.
Uh huh. And, by the year 2000, the earth will be overpopulated, out of food, and out of resources… and we’ll all be eating Soylent Green. Oh, wait.
Stop sniffing Paul Ehrlich’s underwear, boys, it only causes grim hallucinations.
#11 – angus,
It’d be a lot easier to fix Kyoto from the inside. As the largest polluter in the world, there is somewhat of a moral imperative. As for China, don’t forget when counting their pollution to remember that a tremendous amount of it is to make shit for us!! Therefore, it’s still our pollution. If we stop our consumerist religion, their pollution will drop far more than by any action on their part that Kyoto could require.
#12 – zeph,
Do you not see food shortages around already? If the time was off, it doesn’t mean the prediction was wholly invalid. Malthus was wrong on two counts.
1. He underestimated the degree to which we’d steal from our children to feed ourselves.
2. He overestimated the truly sustainable population on the planet, probably by thinking of a few generations rather than many thousands or even millions of years.
What is the Sustainable Human Population for this Planet?
No woman in the USA will give a damn about it as long as there are ponies.
Meantime, they’ve listed the polar bear as ‘threatened’ even while the populations are increasing.
Seems like BS to me.
#15 – MikeN,
Meantime, they’ve listed the polar bear as ‘threatened’ even while the populations are increasing.
Meanwhile, they’ve listed the polar bear as threatened while they are being recorded for the first time cannibalizing each other, being consistently lower weight year over year, attacking walruses in desperation, drowning, etc.
Got any data to show the population trend of the polar bear? I’m finding it a tad difficult to believe they’re increasing in numbers.
The Canadian government doesn’t consider the polar bear threatened. All the data you need you can get from them. My guess is people with an agenda are releasing lies and exaggerations about the polar bear.
Maybe they can use this listing to try and shut down the government. Just about anything the government does is likely to lead to more CO2 and more warming.
#18 – MikeN,
All the data you need you can get from them. My guess is people with an agenda are releasing lies and exaggerations about the polar bear.
Make a claim; post a link. That’s how it works. No guessing allowed.
Here are links I found through a quick search. Unfortunately, four links trip the spam filter. Let me try just two.
http://tinyurl.com/226pgf
http://tinyurl.com/2v3egr
Good, that worked. Here are two more.
http://tinyurl.com/8z8tt
http://tinyurl.com/2krunt
Good little circular reasoning they have there. One of the experts you quote admits things are getting better, but says the polar bear is still vulnerable due to global warming. So unless you solve global warming, the polar bear is threatened, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.