Extinction Is Hard Work

I guess humans have to take credit for the efficiency we have developed in driving species to extinction.  In the history of the planet, species extinction takes hard work, even cosmic events.  

For tens of millions of years, Earth's oceans were crowded with 5,000-lb. (2,200 kilograms) turtles, whale-size sea cows and sharks as large as school buses. Then, about 2.6 million years ago, they started dying in droves.

Koch Brothers Fund Anti-electric Bus Propaganda

What a surprise!  The Koch Brothers are worth $120 billion dollars, a fortune built on oil, gas and other extraction industries.  They hate the concept of electric buses for a simple reason, the don't use oil or natural gas as fuel.  So, the Koch are using their network of propagandists to attack electric buses.

Electric buses are replacing existing diesel-fueled fleets at an accelerating rate, and the transition to battery-powered buses is outpacing even the most optimistic projections. In this light, it should come as little surprise that commentators and organizations with ties to the Koch network and the oil industry are attacking a transportation option that yields fewer fossil fuel profits and cleaner, healthier air for people and planet.

No More Maple Syrup

Reduced snow cover in forests in the North East United States may doom the maple syrup industry and reduce the ability of those forests to help sequester CO2. 

The researchers explain how lack of adequate snowpack causes sugar maples to grow 40 percent slower than usual, and when the snowpack returns, they are unable to recover. 

One biochemist has described the study as a "big deal"..."This spells trouble for the trees — and for humans — as the trees not only give us syrup, but also eat up a chunk of carbon pollution."

Trump Brings Back Coal (Bonuses for Owners)

Even in bankruptcy coal company executives are reaping million dollar bonuses while the people who live in West Virginia coal country can't drink the water.

Norway Says "No"

Norway moves to ban the import and use of biofuels derived from unsustainable palm oil plantations. 

Norway is to become the first country to stop its biofuel industry buying palm oil that is linked to catastrophic deforestation.

The parliamentary decision, which is set to come into force from 2020, has been welcomed as a victory in the fight to save rainforests, prevent climate change and protect endangered orangutans.

Lobstocray Always End

In Maine the lobster is king.

Lobster landings – or the amount of lobster caught – have risen fivefold in the past three decades. Lobster has become a half-billion-dollar industry in Maine. And the reason for the boom, according to scientists, is climate change.

According to a report released earlier this year from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) in Portland, while the lobster population has risen over 500% along Maine’s coast over the past 30 years, the population is expected to drop by between 40% and 62% by 2050.

Bye, Bye Butterfly

The canary in the coal mine.

According to the Xerces Society, a conservation organization, in the 1980s between 10 million and 4.5 million monarchs spent the winter in California. The last count, conducted annually by volunteers each November, showed that in 2018 there may be as few as 30,000 across the state – a number that’s 87% lower than just the year before.

Daily Quick Read - December 4, 2018

In Poland scientists and policy makers from around the world are trying to figure out how to save us from ourselves.  They are working to put the commitments from the Paris climate accord into action.  Despite the urgency of the situation, it is hard to believe that the planet can be saved in time. 

The situation is dire according to Sir David Attenborough:

"The world's people have spoken.  Time is running out.  They want you, the decision-makers, to act now.  Leaders of the world, you must lead.  The continuation of civilisations and the natural world upon which we depend is in your hands."

Unfortunately, the leader of the only nation in the world that has pulled out of the Paris deal has generated what is known as the "Trump Effect" which is directly influencing the attitude of many nations toward collective efforts to achieve the change necessary to save ourselves.  Trump's decision has impacted the fight against global warming in three critical ways:

·      U.S. Federal rollbacks have increased the attractiveness of fossil fuel investments globally.
·       The US decision to withdraw from the Agreement has created moral and political cover for others to follow suit.
·        Goodwill at international negotiations has been damaged.

     In the near future we are going to have to face the potential that a quick fix solution to global warming is going to be offered to the world.  It won't fix what's already broken and it might lead to disastrous collateral damage, but it will be cheap and probably result in profits for some chemical companies.  It's called "solar dimming" and I can't wait for Trump to hear about it.       

                            

     …scientists are increasingly musing about conducting dramatic interventions in the atmosphere to cool the planet. And new research suggests that a project of atmospheric cooling would not only be doable, but also cheap enough that a single, determined country could pull it off. That cooling wouldn't reverse climate change. The greenhouse gases would still be there. The planet would keep warming overall, but that warming would significantly, measurably slow down.

Sometimes when I read all this I feel like a mouse or hamster stuck in my cage neurotically running in my exercise wheel.  Well it turns out that mice and hamsters may actually enjoy running to nowhere.  When researchers put wheels in outdoor settings they found   

 …that many wild mice would find the wheel, climb on and start running. Other animals to enjoy the ride were frogs, rats and shrew… 

Back to my wheel now.

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Apocalypse Now!

This article in The New York Times Magazine provides a frightening overview of The Insect Apocalypse that is upon us.  Insects are disappearing at an alarming rate on a global scale.  

"...the most disquieting thing wasn’t the disappearance of certain species of insects; it was the deeper worry... that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing, a loss of abundance that could alter the planet in unknowable ways." 

We don't have good baseline information concerning insect populations.  Yes, we have a clear understanding regarding the visible massive reduction in a charismatic species such as the Monarch butterfly. We even have a grasp of the causes, but the reality is that we a much more limited understanding as to what is happening to other less colorful and visible species of insects.  In fact, we are very likely aware of perhaps only one fifth of total number of species of insects on the planet.  

We’ve named and described a million species of insects... There are 12,000 types of ants, nearly 20,000 varieties of bees, almost 400,000 species of beetles... A bit of healthy soil a foot square and two inches deep might easily be home to 200 unique species of mites, each, presumably, with a subtly different job to do. And yet entomologists estimate that all this amazing, absurd and understudied variety represents perhaps only 20 percent of the actual diversity of insects on our planet — that there are millions and millions of species that are entirely unknown to science.

Long term studies of insect populations are limited, but in virtually every case where a details history exists, the results are the same - massive declines in the both the variety of species and the quantity of insects.  And, it's not just the insects that are impacted.

 ...a tropical ecologist named Brad Lister returned to the rain forest where he had studied lizards — and, crucially, their prey — 40 years earlier... Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams...But even scarier were the ways the losses were already moving through the ecosystem, with serious declines in the numbers of lizards, birds and frogs. The paper reported “a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.” 

This was a study done in an environment where insecticide were not in use and no deforestation had occurred unlike other studies where one or both of those were potential contributors to insect population declines.  In this case, climate change was considered the most likely cause. 

As of yet, we don't even know the rum extent of what is already lost, but we do know that the effects are measurable.  What will happen when we reach some inflection point where the quantity and variety in the insect world decreases to a point where the vital niches filled by the million species of insects are no longer performed?   The outcome is not likely to favor humans.

By eating and being eaten, insects turn plants into protein and power the growth of all the uncountable species — including freshwater fish and a majority of birds — that rely on them for food, not to mention all the creatures that eat those creatures. We worry about saving the grizzly bear, says the insect ecologist Scott Hoffman Black, but where is the grizzly without the bee that pollinates the berries it eats or the flies that sustain baby salmon? Where, for that matter, are we?