DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 29, 2016

Peru Fails to Enforce Laws

More in The Guardian’s expose of the government actors in the illegal wildlife trade.  In Peru, local government fails completely to enforce existing laws. 

Wildlife is part of the town’s daily trade. A ban on selling bushmeat is openly ignored in Belén’s market. Deep-auburn slabs of the smoked meat of the endangered South America tapir (Tapirus terrestris) are stacked high on trestle tables. The protruding hoof of a peccary or the paw of an agouti betray the fact that there is hunted game on sale.

A yellow-footed tortoise (Chelonoid denticulata), listed as vulnerable by the IUCN red list, is butchered for the pot while still quivering, its head moves from side to side. The woman cutting up its front-parts remarks: “This animal dies when it’s in the pot.” Biodiversity served up in all its gory detail. The soft-shelled eggs of the taricaya, an Amazon river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis), also listed as vulnerable, are served in pungent heaps to customers in the rubbish-strewn alleys.

Indigenous communities are allowed to hunt and eat wild game but selling the meat is prohibited. But old habits die hard, says Clelia Rengifo, the head of wildlife trafficking control for the regional government of Loreto, Peru’s largest Amazon region which occupies one-third of the country, an area bigger than Germany.

More Guardian Reporting

The Guardian exposes senior government officials in Laos racking profits from the illegal wildlife trade.  Maybe it’s time the U.S government took a stand and put pressure on these governments. 

Officials at the highest level of an Asian government have been helping wildlife criminals smuggle millions of dollars worth of endangered species through their territory, the Guardian can reveal.

In an apparent breach of current national and international law, for more than a decade the office of the prime minister of Laos has cut deals with three leading traffickers to move hundreds of tonnes of wildlife through selected border crossings.

In 2014 alone, these deals covered $45m (£35m) worth of animal body parts and included agreed quotas requiring the disabling or killing of 165 tigers, more than 650 rhinos and more than 16,000 elephants.

Trading in all three of those species is prohibited by Lao law and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species(Cites) which came into force in Laos in 2004. The Lao government has publicly paraded its commitment to the convention.

Reprieve for Pangolins

The gentle, shy pangolin is the world’s most trafficked animal.  All for bullshit reasons.   At the Cites convention this week, the pangolin was given a total ban international trade.  Now if governments will actually enforce this action.

Pangolins, the world’s most illegally trafficked mammal, were thrown a lifeline at a global wildlife summit on Wednesday with a total trade ban in all species.

More than a million wild pangolins have been killed in the last decade, to feed the huge and rising appetite in China and Vietnam for its meat and its scales, a supposed medicine. The unique scaly anteaters are fast heading for extinction in Asia and poachers are now plundering Africa.

But the 182 nations of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) unanimously agreed a total ban on international trade on all species at the summit in Johannesburg, prompting cheers and applause from delegates.

Cites works to crack down on wildlife trafficking, currently a $20bn-a-year criminal enterprise, and to ensure the legal trade in food, skins, pets and traditional remedies does not threaten the survival of species. The summit also boosted protection for the barbary ape on Wednesday, Europe’s only wild primate, and a spectacular-horned mountain goat.

Tick Tock….

Point of no return passed?  An open question right now.

"The last time our planet saw 400 ppm carbon dioxide in our atmosphere was about 3.5 million years ago, and global climate was distinctly different than today," David Black, associate professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York, tells The Christian Science Monitor in an email.

"In particular, the Arctic (north of 60°) was substantially warmer than present, and global sea level was anywhere between 15 and 90 feet higher than today," Professor Black says.

"It took millions of years for the atmosphere to reach 400 ppm CO2 back then, and it took millions of years for the atmospheric CO2 to drop to 280 ppm right before the industrial revolution. One of the things that really concerns climate scientists is we as humans have taken only a few centuries to do what nature took millions of years, and most of that change was just in the last 50-60 years."

While global concentrations have spiked above the 400 ppm level for several years, the summer growing season has always absorbed enough atmospheric CO2 through photosynthesis to keep concentrations below that mark for the bulk of the year.

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.