DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 20, 2016

Global Warming Timeline

Look at the history of the world's temperature from 20000 BC to the present.  

Concerned experts and activists have been struggling for years now to find new ways to explain the urgent but elusive nature of the climate-change threat. Because the data is complex and the effects are measured in small degrees over long terms, this is not an easy problem. But Randall Munroe, the resident nerd-genius behind the XKCD web comic, has found one brilliant solution: A long scrolling chart, like a timeline doing a headstand, that tracks millennia of human history against trends of cooling and warming (XKCD).

Climate Change Means No Forests

Hawaii, California, the Pacific Northwest….Millions of trees are dying.  Whole forests devastated.

“It’s heartbreaking. This is the biggest threat to our native forests that any of us have seen. If this spreads across the whole island, it could collapse the whole native ecosystem.”

Almost six years later and nearly 50,000 acres of native forest on the big island are infected with rapid ohi’a death disease. Rumors abound as to its origin: did it emerge from Hawaii’s steaming volcanoes? A strange new insect? Scientists still aren’t sure of where it came from or how to treat it.

In northern California, an invasive pathogen called Sudden Oak Death is infecting hundreds of different plants, from redwoods and ferns to backyard oaks and bay laurels. The disease is distantly related to the cause of the 19th-century Irish potato famine, and appears to have arrived with two “Typhoid Marys”, rhododendrons and bay laurels, said Dr David Rizzo, of the University of California, Davis.

Five years of drought in the west have not only starved trees of water but weakened their defenses and created conditions for “insect eruptions” across the US, said Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana. Bark beetles and mountain pine beetles, usually held in check by wet winters, now have more time to breed and roam. The latter have already expanded their range from British Columbia across the Rockies, to the Yukon border and eastward, into jack pine forests that have never seen the bug.

Push to Increase Pangolin Protection

Will it be enough?  Probably not.  This gentle creature is headed for extinction because humans place no value on wildlife.

Environmentalists have urged governments attending a global wildlife conference in South Africa this month to impose maximum restrictions on the trade of endangered pangolins, a scaly mammal that is the inspiration for two Pokemon characters.

The long-snouted, nocturnal pangolin, the size of a small dog and found in Africa and Southeast Asia, is the world's most illegally trafficked mammal, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

ENV said pangolins are shipped from Africa to meet demand in Asia, where products made from pangolins are prized for their supposed medicinal value and have led to local numbers falling.

The pangolin trade is already limited under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Environmentalists are pressing CITES to increase the trade restrictions to "only in exceptional circumstances" - the highest level of protection.

Read about pangolin trafficking in Myanmar.