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"Some 12 per cent of all bird species, 23 per cent of mammals, 25 per cent of pine and other conifer trees, 32 per cent of amphibians and 52 per cent of cycads (ancient tropical plants) are currently threatened with extinction, and climate change alone might commit an additional 15 to 37 per cent ... to premature extinction within the next 50 years." ....

The issue is a tough sell because it's complicated, hard to measure, and solutions appear to threaten vested interests.

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The planet is losing species faster than at any time since 65 million years ago, when the earth was hit by an enormous asteroid that wiped out thousands of animals and plants, including the dinosaurs. Scientists estimate that the current rate at which species are becoming extinct is between 100 and 1,000 times greater than the normal "background" extinction rate - and say this is all due to human activity.

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WILD bees and the flowers they pollinate are in serious decline in Britain, according to research which suggests that the future of many species is under threat.

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NEW YORK - If the world continues to get warmer, vast amounts of methane gas trapped under the sea could belch up and worsen climate change, according to a study.

“We may have less time than we think to do something (about the prospect of global warming),” Dr. Ira Leifer, a marine scientist at University of California Santa Barbara, said in an interview.

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[ 21 July 2006: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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A team at California‘s Scripps Institution, in a headline-making report this month, found that warmer temperatures, causing earlier snow runoff and consequently drier summer conditions, were the key factor in an explosion of big wildfires in the U.S. West over three decades, including fires now rampaging east of Los Angeles.

"Temperature increases are intimately linked with increases in area burned in Canada, and I would expect the same worldwide," said Mike Flannigan, a veteran Canadian Forest Service researcher.

"Snowmelt starts much earlier in the spring," she said by telephone from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. "Precipitation is decreasing. This combination of elevated temperatures and decreased precipitation should provide conditions for greater fire occurrence."

The Sukachev institute‘s satellite data show that more than 29 million acres — an area the size of Pennsylvania — have been burned in Russia already this year. Orbiting cameras see a red-and-green checkerboard in Siberia, of "hotspots" among endless evergreens.

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[ 21 July 2006: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Rising sea levels linked with climate change are predicted to drown large areas of mangroves that line the shores of Pacific island nations. Mangrove forests provide shoreline protection by reducing wave energy, they act to filter coastal pollution, and the long underwater roots of the salt-loving trees shelter fish nurseries.

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We blind ourselves to the yawning chasm between feeling safe and being safe.

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Pumping carbon dioxide through pipes into a North Carolina pine forest, Mohan found that poison ivy grew at 2½ times its normal rate, an increase five times the average gain for trees. The noxious vine grew thicker, used water more efficiently and became far more allergenic to humans.

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Energy companies are planning to build over 150 coal-fired power plants across the United States, according to a report released July 20, 2006 by U.S. PIRG and other environmental groups nationwide, including Huntington, WV-based Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC).

Far from enhancing America’s energy security, the wave of proposed plants – most of them powered by dirty, last-generation technologies – would dramatically increase global warming emissions and pose energy security and economic problems.

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The planet is losing species faster than at any time since 65 million years ago, when the earth was hit by an enormous asteroid that wiped out thousands of animals and plants, including the dinosaurs. Scientists estimate that the current rate at which species are becoming extinct is between 100 and 1,000 times greater than the normal "background" extinction rate - and say this is all due to human activity.

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Many geologists are debating whether this human caused extinction event is the sixth mass extinction event. The number of species that have gone extinct so far really only registers as a minor extinction blip in geologic history. But the rate of extinctions has been so high, that several generations from now this could become the largest extinction since the Cretacous.

Mind you, even 'minor' extinctions are devestating. While say 5% of all species may become extinct, the majority of the worlds species feel a large impact.

During the largest extinction in history, the Permian extinction, 50% of all the worlds species were extinct, but this figure included 90% of the planet's marine species and between 98 to 99.5% of all life on earth. Much of the planet was rendered totally barren.

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CLEVELAND Researchers predict global warming will lead to a steep decline in Lake Erie water levels over the next 50 years.
The newest update to a Lake Erie management plan predicts global warming could cause the lake's surface area to shrink by up to 15 percent.

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An Op-Ed article in the Wall Street Journal a month ago claimed that a published study affirming the existence of a scientific consensus on the reality of global warming had been refuted. This charge was repeated again last week, in a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

I am the author of that study, which appeared two years ago in the journal Science, and I'm here to tell you that the consensus stands. The argument put forward in the Wall Street Journal was based on an Internet posting; it has not appeared in a peer-reviewed journal — the normal way to challenge an academic finding. (The Wall Street Journal didn't even get my name right!)

My study demonstrated that there is no significant disagreement within the scientific community that the Earth is warming and that human activities are the principal cause.

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Scientists worldwide are watching temperatures rise, the land turn dry, and vast forests go up in flames.

In the Siberian taiga and the Canadian Rockies, in southern California and in Australia, researchers find growing evidence tying an upsurge in wildfires to climate change—an impact long predicted by global-warming forecasters.

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Until now, concern about rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been focused on global warming.

But scientists have discovered a second reason to worry: About half of the greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels -- an amount weighing about the same as 140 billion Volkswagen Beetles -- has ultimately ended up in the world's oceans.

While this has the beneficial effect of slowing down the rate at which the planet's atmosphere is heating up, ocean researchers have found that the huge influx of carbon dioxide since 1800 is making oceans more acidic than they have been for millions of years. If not reversed, this trend could destabilize -- or even threaten --much of the world's marine life, particularly animals that can't adapt to living in a more corrosive environment....

This is a particular worry for coral reefs, which are viewed as the ocean's rain forests because of their amazing biological diversity. "What we're finding is that [acidification] decreases their ability to build their skeletons," says Chris Langdon, a coral-reef expert at the University of Miami. "We think this is important because one of the sure outcomes of this is going to be the loss of coral-reef framework around the world."

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2. It may function as a source or sink for atmospheric methane, which may influence global climate

Methane from the hydrate reservoir might significantly modify the global greenhouse, because methane is ~20 times as effective a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, and gas hydrate may contain three orders of magnitude more methane than exists in the present-day atmosphere. Because hydrate breakdown, causing release of methane to the atmosphere, can be related to pressure changes caused by glacial sea-level fluctuations, gas hydrate may play a role in controlling long-term global climate change.

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More than 60 percent of the United States now has abnormally dry or drought conditions, stretching from Georgia to Arizona and across the north through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

An area stretching from south central North Dakota to central South Dakota is the most drought-stricken region in the nation, Svoboda said.

"It's the epicenter," he said. "It's just like a wasteland in north central South Dakota."

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
Gee don't the Great Lakes look tasty?

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The sights around the Great Lakes this year have been shocking, with massive fish kills due to the latest foreign invader to hit the water, a deadly virus known to scientists as viral hemorrhagic septicemia.

The virus, which doesn't harm humans or birds, has had an effect akin to a piscine plague, killing fish from Lake Erie to the St. Lawrence River. The toll is in the tens of thousands, and perhaps far higher.
…
One possible route for infection is Lake Chautauqua, in New York State. It lies just 10 kilometres south of Lake Erie, but drains into a tributary of the Mississippi. "That's a direct route straight into the heartland of the U.S.," Dr. Groocock says.

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To date, 200,000 litres of oil have leaked from the tanker, contaminating a 24km2 area. The oil slick has already reached the coastal towns of Nueva Valencia and Jordan on Guimaras Island, as well as Villadolid, Pulupandan and Bago on Negros Island. The spill is heading up through the Guimaras Strait.

The Guimaras Strait is one of the most productive fishing grounds in the country, as well as a popular tourist destination. It is home to pristine white sand beaches, several marine sanctuaries and unspoiled coral reefs and mangrove forests.

The Philippines coast guard is calling this the worst oil spill in the country’s history.

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Holidaymakers heading for Mediterranean beaches are being warned to prepare for an unprecedented invasion of the invertebrates whose sting can, in extreme cases, cause heart failure.

Oceana, which campaigns to protect and restore the world's oceans, attributes the rise in the number of jellyfish to a rise in water temperature because of climate change. It also highlights over-fishing of natural predators that feed on jellyfish, and pollution along the continent's coasts.

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Previous mass extinctions took place over hundreds of thousands of years - even ones that were precipitated by a single catastrophic event, like an impact from space.

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Do you have a source for that, because I don't think this is true. I think we have no idea how long those extinction events stretched.

There is even disagreement of the most recent event, the KT boundary, whether it was million of years of less than a million years. I can't imagine how we'd distinguish between an event that happened over a hundred thousand years and an event that happened over 10 years.

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Originally posted by Proaxiom:
Also, it would seem strange that a meteor impact or a nearby supernova, which are theorized as possible causes of events, would have that long-lasting an impact. Wouldn't such a major disruption cause an ecological domino effect? (Not that we know those things were actually causes, but they might have been.)

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Do you have a source for that, because I don't think this is true. I think we have no idea how long those extinction events stretched.

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There've been several 'megaflood' scenarios, and theres pretty clear evidence left behind to support those. At the end of the Pleistocene era, there was a huge mass extinction... Including the wooly mammoth. This is greatly attributed to massive flood.

We've seen smaller version of a mass flood occour in very recent times... A melting glacier will have pool of water left ontop of it. When the ice walla melt, all this fresh water is released. In larger ice age eras, this could include KM's of land flooded with a giant wall of water (and evidence of such by the sudden mass extinction of large animals). Theres a lake in the Canadian artic that broke it's wall and dumped an entire lake worth of water into the arctic ocean (kills the fresh water fish pretty quickly).

Here is a pretty indepth view on the formation of 'A RE-EVALUATION OF THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL ORIGIN OF THE CAROLINA BAYS*' (FYI, Extraterrestrial origin refers to asteriods/comets and not space aliens )

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The proposed model with shock waves from cometary fragments exploding above the surface creating a series of similar landforms is conceptually very simple, and is far less complex than most of the terrestrial models postulated recently. For geometrically regular forms such as Carolina Bays we prefer a simple causal mechanism if it is feasible.

Examination of impact mechanics and Carolina Bay morphometry eliminates traditional impact phenomena resulting from meteoroid swarms or asteroids. However, the unique orbital and physical characteristics of a comet favor a model in which a high velocity retrograde comet or a low velocity prograde comet collided with the Earth. The incoming nucleus approached from the northwest and fragmented. The fragments, diverging from the main trajectory, volatized and subsequently exploded in the atmosphere near the surface. The resultant shock waves created shallow elliptical depressions which are best displayed in the sandy sediments of the Coastal Plain.

This model is not fully substantiated. But, given the terrestrial and extraterrestrial constraints used in this paper, a comet remains a viable alternative worthy of further consideration. We hope that the physics of such an event can be explored, and that these results support our contention. We believe that a multidirected research effort will eventually result in a consensus about a truly enigmatic set of landforms.

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[ 22 August 2006: Message edited by: Noise ]

Great flood theories

(the following is a quote from the site... using the quote tags is causing some troubles with the greater and lessthan signs I beleive)

"Is there any other evidence supporting a Great Flood?

Yes. Massive extinctions occurred at the end of the Pleistocene. Most of these are associated with the larger megafauna. The following disappeared from America, Europe and Australia:

All herbivores (greater than) 1000 kg

75% of herbivores 100-1000 kg

41% of herbivores 5-100 kg

(lessthan) 2% of herbivores (lessthan) 5 kg

This extinction of megafauna included: wooly mammoths & mastodons, the saber-toothed tigers, native American horses & camels, giant Australian kangaroos, wombats, the marsupial lion (Thylacoleo carnifex), the largest ever marsupial (the 2 1/2-ton Diprotodon), giant Irish deer or Irish elk, wooly rhino, peccaries, short-faced bears, as well as the armadillo-like glyptodonts, and the giant ground sloths (Megatheriadae).
"

[ 22 August 2006: Message edited by: Noise ]

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EAST LANSING, Mich. — Climate change appears to be contributing to the waking of a dangerous sleeping giant in the most northern wetlands of North America – mercury.

Released into the atmosphere most prodigiously with the launching of the industrial age, the toxic element falls back onto Earth, and accumulates particularly in North American wetlands. A Michigan State University researcher working closely with the U.S. Geological Survey finds wildfires, growing more frequent and intense, are unleashing this sequestered mercury at levels up to 15 times greater than originally calculated.

The report, “Wildfires threaten mercury stocks in northern soils,” appears this week in the online edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

“This study makes the point that while peat lands are typically viewed as very wet and stagnant places, they do burn in continental regions, especially late in the season when water tables are depressed,” said Merritt Turetsky, assistant professor of plant biology and fisheries and wildlife at MSU. “When peat lands burn, they can release a huge amount of mercury that overwhelms regional atmospheric emissions. Our study is new in that it looks to the soil record to tell us what happens when peat soil burns, soil that has been like a sponge for mercury for a long time.”

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On the crest of the eastern Andes is an expansive vista of one of the most diverse forests on Earth. Storm clouds boil up in the pink evening sky, and fog advances over the foothills, suffusing the mountains with the moisture that makes them so astonishingly full of life.

These are the cloud forests of Peru. Clouds born of moisture rising from the Amazon River Basin sustain a great variety of trees, which in turn support ferns, mosses, bromeliads and orchids that struggle to lay down roots on any bare patch of bark. It's these epiphytes (``epi'' means ``on top of,'' and ``phyte'' means ``plant''), plus the wet humus soil, the thick understory of plants and the immersion in clouds, that distinguish cloud forests from other types.

Miles Silman, a biologist from Wake Forest University, and other scientists are attempting to catalog and understand the plant and animal life in Andean cloud forests before it's too late. Oil companies, having found petroleum and natural gas in the surrounding lands, are cutting roads and pipelines that scientists say are damaging some plant populations. Also, local farmers and ranchers clear cloud forest to expand their operations and harvest firewood.

Most significant, the cloud forests here are threatened by climate change.

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A noisy minority of industry-financed scientists - "biostitutes" is a better term for them - and committee chairmen in the Senate and House have continued to deny human causes and pooh-pooh potential impacts. They are a new Flat Earth Society.

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The planet is losing species faster than at any time since 65 million years ago, when the earth was hit by an enormous asteroid that wiped out thousands of animals and plants, including the dinosaurs. Scientists estimate that the current rate at which species are becoming extinct is between 100 and 1,000 times greater than the normal "background" extinction rate - and say this is all due to human activity.

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An internal audit shows the federal government is doing a poor job of protecting Canada's endangered species, and a leaked policy plan suggests it aims to do worse, a leading environment group says.

The government was to have the first 133 recovery plans in place by last month.

But only 21 have been posted and of those, just three identify specific areas to be protected. Two of the three are already in parks.

Hampered by lack of co-ordination, "lack of overarching federal vision," and inadequate funding — which is to be cut by more than a third next year — "Environment Canada is struggling to meet the legislated deadlines for recovery strategies," the review report states.

The draft policy would let the social and economic impacts be part of the initial choice, increasing the chance for industries, developers or others to block protection, Plotkin says.

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Save a tree ... print less money to pay for Environment Canada

Meanwhile here's Alberta's answer to their shrinking habitat(from the same article):

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Provincial governments are often stumbling blocks to protecting habitats: In most cases, they draw up the plans for Ottawa to approve, and are reluctant to set aside protected areas.

For example, the Alberta government has refused to protect northern lands where oil and gas development is destroying the boreal forest habitat of woodland caribou. Instead, it approved increased killing of wolves, which prey on caribou.

Ottawa has not objected.

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So when the wolf numbers start to decrease does this mean they will be fed caribou meat?

Sounds like there's going to be some great opportunities for some good ole boys to get paid to shoot some critters to help save the
inveye- or - mint!

[ 23 August 2006: Message edited by: a lonely worker ]

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(I thought many attributed human hunting as a cause of some megafauna extinctions

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Humans were relatively in balance with nature until 4000 BC when we suddenly discovered agriculture and civilization as we know it. Over hunting by humans prior to then didn't really occour (nothing we can observe atleast) as the cave dwelling humans were at balance with their sorroundings (it was announced that 'over hunting did not kill off the wolly mammoth' as a science headline a few months back). Modern man is a different beast ^^

Pleistocene extinctions can be traced to a single event, possibly extra-terrestrial in origin (by such I would mean asteriod or other heavenly body).

From that previous linked article

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Is there any evidence of a massive flood at the end of the last glacial period?

Yes, this can be found in the Lake Missoula, Altai and Agassiz megafloods, to name a few.

Glacial Lake Missoula, a North American inland sea, was as big as Lakes Erie and Ontario combined. The glacial lake covered over 3,000 square miles, and was over 2,000 feet deep at the edge of the glacial dam. The Missoula megaflood release over 520 cubic miles of water and ice across Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. Flood waters roared across the landscape at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour, the lake drained in as little as 48 hours. Some argue that it was caused by a massive ice dam that broke releasing a massive flows of water and ice and the event repeated several times. Refer to: http://www.opb.org/programs/ofg/episodes/1001/missoula/index.php Others argue for a single flood event. Refer to: http://nwcreation.net/articles/missoulaflood.htm

Deep in Altai mountains in Southern Siberia a huge ice age lake 300 feet deep containing 200 cubic miles of water ruptured sending a wall of water 1,500 feet high down the Chuja River valley at 90 miles per hour. Refer to: http://www.sentex.net/~tcc/cfdb-sib.html

The Lake Agassiz megaflood in Canada was even larger than the other two. The flood released over 5,000 cubic miles of water approximately 11,335 years ago. Refer to: http://cgrg.geog.uvic.ca/abstracts/FisherPreborealThe.html

If these massive megafloods, along with others, were triggered simultaneously by a large comet impact, they could hypothetically generate a global flood event.

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(ADDED IN AS A CORRECTION... Below is an error on my part, it's millions not thousands)

Just as a side not to remember... Theres evidence of 30-50k years ago, the arctic was a lush tropical environement. 2 theories to explain that, the earth really warmed up, or the arctic land orginated outside of the polar regions. It's amazing how much can change in 50 000 years hey?

[ 24 August 2006: Message edited by: Noise ]

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Humans were relatively in balance with nature until 4000 BC when we suddenly discovered agriculture and civilization as we know it.

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I certainly wouldn't take that as axiomatic. Our profound effect on our environment is a result of our unprecedented intellect, and we have been roughly as intelligent as we are now for tens of thousands of years.

There are certainly ecological changes in the Americas that happened soon after the first humans migrated here.

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Pleistocene extinctions can be traced to a single event, possibly extra-terrestrial in origin (by such I would mean asteriod or other heavenly body).

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I'd think such a recent major impact would have left an obvious marker.

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Theres evidence of 30-50k years ago, the arctic was a lush tropical environement. 2 theories to explain that, the earth really warmed up, or the arctic land orginated outside of the polar regions. It's amazing how much can change in 50 000 years hey?

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we have been roughly as intelligent as we are now for tens of thousands of years.

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Not at all. 11000BC is our first signs of Stone tools... 8000BC we actually see degredation of such stone tools. 7500 We've got pottery and a resurgance of stone tool making. 4000BC we've got devolved pottery and stone tools... 3800BC we have the Sumerian civilization, who are quite like us (including music). Modern Human is really only 6000 years old, and there has been very little change in intelligence since then (with the exception of recent times, which can be attributed to the environement we provide to our youth for learning).

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I'd think such a recent major impact would have left an obvious marker.

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Not really... The article has it right at the bottom, any evidence of an impact would be washed away (by such floods).

Bleh... Dunno how I mxed this one up. So a lil apology to you and correction to myself... I't million not thousand of years ago for the tropic polar region:
BBC. It's an interesting read.

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tmospheric carbon levels then are thought to have been about 2-3,000 parts per million (ppm), compared with almost 380 ppm today.

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Hmmm, carbon levels in the air are around 2-3000 ppm and the arctic is suptropical. woot! I should start getting my swim gear together

[ 24 August 2006: Message edited by: Noise ]

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Not at all. 11000BC is our first signs of Stone tools... 8000BC we actually see degredation of such stone tools. 7500 We've got pottery and a resurgance of stone tool making. 4000BC we've got devolved pottery and stone tools... 3800BC we have the Sumerian civilization, who are quite like us (including music). Modern Human is really only 6000 years old, and there has been very little change in intelligence since then (with the exception of recent times, which can be attributed to the environement we provide to our youth for learning).

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No, this still isn't right. Stone tools appeared around 2 million years ago, when our ancestors had less than half of our current cranial capacity. Google 'paleolithic'. We had fire 500,000 years ago, we were mining 100,000 years ago, and cultivating crops somewhere between 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

Physiologically, people who lived 40,000 to 50,000 years ago were pretty much the same as we are now. Since then we've migrated to everywhere except Antarctica; we are the only species to have adapted to living in every biome on the planet. This fact alone implies that we would have had significant environmental impact (the presence of any species affects the ecosystem, moreso when that species is a predator, as we are). It's in this period that our development has been accelerated.

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Further, cities developed hierarchial structures that depend on energy, first slaves, to enhance the wealth and power of the hierarchial rulers. But that appetite for power and wealth (and energy) is never satiable so cities expand and grow ever outward, or as colonies, until all is consumed.

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I have read that many anthropologists believe it is the opposite: social stratification led to cities, rather than cities leading to stratification. Cities were not really a very good idea, because they create large concentrated populations that are vulnerable to famine and disease. We were better off hunting and gathering. But they can generate things that hunter-gatherers cannot. People didn't need these things, but the leaders wanted them.

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And the arrival of "civilization" in America was in no way benign on either the people here, the species, or the ecosystem.

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As I mentioned above, there was initial destruction when the 'natives' first arrived, 15 to 20 thousand years ago, as well.

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Our unprecedented ability to adapt to and control our external environment ensures this. While other species go in cycles such that when they become too successful they deplete their resources (food or available habitat) and hurt themselves to return to a balance, we are too goddamn adaptive: when we deplete our resources, we adapt and find more to exhaust.

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I think the first part of the above highlights part of the problem and I would qualify, in part, the latter.

We don't really control our external environment although our arrogance tells us we can and do. But if we could and did control our external environment than surely we are doing a piss poor job of it.

Other species do not intentionally deplete their food supplies and resources. Humans do. And we don't so much adapt as we consume more. The end result is we are depleting all resources, and destroying any chance for resources and species to recover, to such an extent there will be no recovery when the crash occurs.

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We don't really control our external environment although our arrogance tells us we can and do. But if we could and did control our external environment than surely we are doing a piss poor job of it.

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I don't mean that we control the whole thing, just the part that is immediately surrounding us. We don't try to control the entire planet, even though our activities affect it.

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Other species do not intentionally deplete their food supplies and resources. Humans do.

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We intentionally deplete resources? You mean we want to destroy our food supplies?

I don't agree with you at all on that. We simply consume, the same as all other animals do. We are just extremely efficient at it, because our intelligence has provided advanced means of harvesting them.

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And we don't so much adapt as we consume more.

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It is adaptation. In other species, when they overconsume, they undergo a population crash that reduces consumption to a much lower level.

With humans, when we overconsume, we either replace the overconsumed resource with another one (which, eventually, we also overconsume), or we move to another place where there are unconsumed resources. Both of these are adaptations.

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And to be fair, humans don't destroy their natural habitat individually (although I am sure some do) but civilizations do.

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What is a civilization but an aggregate of individuals?

Consumption itself is destructive. When you consume something, it is no longer where it used to be, or what it used to be. Every person does it. Every animal does it. Plants do it. It's a part of life.

And people are just animals. We consume as our ancestors did to survive, but we have become extremely efficient at it. Civilization has enabled this efficiency to grow exponentially (though division of labour and economies of scale), but it grows regardless. This efficiency has meant that a lot of consumption can occur for reasons other than survival, but it is fundamentally the same thing.

It is quite possible that our consumption might alter our environment such that it is incapable of supporting us and our adaptive capacity will be exhausted. Then we will crash just as other species do, human civilization will come to an end, the world will have undergone another major extinction event (as this thread is discussing), and will carry on.

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We intentionally deplete resources? You mean we want to destroy our food supplies?

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We simply consume, the same as all other animals do.

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Through industrial farming methods, we are poisoning the land, the water, and the air -- as well with climate change we are impacting weather variability -- we are destroying our ability to produce food or to safely consume water or breathe air.

No other speicies does this much harm to its environment.

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It is adaptation. In other species, when they overconsume, they undergo a population crash that reduces consumption to a much lower level.

With humans, when we overconsume, we either replace the overconsumed resource with another one (which, eventually, we also overconsume), or we move to another place where there are unconsumed resources. Both of these are adaptations.

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What is a civilization but an aggregate of individuals?

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Civilization is extractive. Cities must, townsmen, must go beyond their borders to extract resources for their cities or towns. They are not sustainable. Civilization is inherently violent and oppressive as the extraction of resources from the lands of others is most often achieved through violence, war, and colonozation. See Guns, Germs and Steel and then Collapse.

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Consumption itself is destructive. When you consume something, it is no longer where it used to be, or what it used to be. Every person does it. Every animal does it. Plants do it. It's a part of life.

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Not necessarily. If a fox eats one rabbit, rabbits will reproduce. If a man cuts down one tree for shelter, another tree will grow. What is destructive is consumption for the sake of consumption and civilization.

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And people are just animals. We consume as our ancestors did to survive, but we have become extremely efficient at it.

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Civilization has become more efficient at expanding and extracting resources. And civilization is what is destroying our life supports.

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Civilization has enabled this efficiency to grow exponentially (though division of labour and economies of scale),

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but it grows regardless. This efficiency has meant that a lot of consumption can occur for reasons other than survival, but it is fundamentally the same thing.

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Or possibly the trait that makes us so efficient at consuming resources, our intelligence, will also enable us to find a way to conserve them and maintain a sustainable relationship with our environment.

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So the very thing that makes us so efficient at killing ur earth will also save it? Do you believe the bully who beat you every day you walked to school might one day show up to save you from a street thug? Not likely.

Here is a link:
http://www.endgamethebook.org/Excerpts/1-Premises.htm

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No other speicies does this much harm to its environment.

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Not true... There are several creatures upon Earth, such as locusts, that have mass comsumption and destruction patterns. Though, as Proaxiom points out, we've become more effieicent than locusts

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Not true... There are several creatures upon Earth, such as locusts, that have mass comsumption and destruction patterns. Though, as Proaxiom points out, we've become more effieicent than locusts

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Stones were used as tools (me hit this with rock) for many years, but actual constructed stone tools are much more recent. I'll post when I've found some decent articles to link.

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Hate to get pedantic but.... I think your timelines are off, though I agree with the gist of your posts. We've been chipping the ends off flints and other stones since Austrolapithicus and started using fire at least 700,000 years ago (why we have such nice smiles now, smaller teeth and jaws from purely human adaptations...) but it was only modern humans that started the explosion in tool making which led to more manipulation of our environment, between 60 and 100,000 years ago.

I agree that the agricultural revolution, starting 10,000 BCE, led to our first serious enviro problems though -desertification of the Sahara from overgrazing, clearing of forests and extermination of predators by early farmers, eventual stratification of settled societies etc- with the industrial revolution accelerating it beyond our control. Some groups did learn more sustainable methods, proof being that some high use areas are almost as fertile (for agriculture) as they were millennia ago.

Just as easy to say it's human stupidity that drives extinction patterns now as our inate intelligent, though I don't like any argument that basically puts it down to inate qualities. We could still turn things around if we used our also inate ability to grow up a little, take more responsibility as a self-aware species.

(oh, and the end of the last ice-age resulted in die offs of mega-fauna all over the world Proaxiam; Amerindian ancestors probably only played a small role in it, tipping the final balance in some cases like Eurasian hunters did)

[ 26 August 2006: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

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...The island may not have been settled until around 1200 A.D., centuries later than previously thought, and it may have been a large rat population, not the human inhabitants, that caused widespread deforestation. This evidence sheds new light on a story that has long fascinated outsiders...

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
I've never heard of rats eating trees; could they have been small beavers?

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Almost all of the palm seed shells discovered on the island show signs of having been gnawed on by rats, indicating that these once-ubiquitous rodents did affect the Jubaea palm's ability to reproduce.

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A climate change timebomb may be just 10 years away from detonating, according to the latest global warming evidence.

New data from a deep ice core drilled out of the Antarctic permafrost reveal a shocking rate of change in carbon dioxide concentrations.

The core, stretching through layers dating back 800,000 years, contains tiny bubbles of ancient air that can be analysed.

Scientists who studied the samples found they left no doubt as to the extent of the build-up of greenhouse gases.

For most of the past 800,000 years, carbon dioxide levels had remained at between 180 and 300 parts per million (ppm) of air. Now they are at 380ppm.

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Between July 2004 and August 2005, the rain forest lost 7,250 square miles, the [Brazilian] government said [Sept. 5, 2006].

“We will have two consecutive years with a rate of less than 7,720 square miles, returning to the levels of the mid-1990s,” said Joao Paulo Capobianco, the environment ministry’s secretary of biodiversity and forests.

But environmentalists say there is little reason to celebrate, as the world’s largest remaining tropical wilderness continues to be destroyed.

“The projection of a reduction of 11 percent would confirm something dramatic: What in the 1990s was the roof is now the floor,” said Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth Brazil. “Even in a year with a marked reduction of planting crops and clearing pasture, we still have structural deforestation of around 17,000 square kilometers (6,564 square miles) which before was considered a record.”

The highest rate of destruction in the Amazon was 11,200 square miles in 1995.

Environmentalists say deforestation has slowed largely because the price of soybeans has declined on the international market and Brazil’s currency has strengthened against the dollar, making it much less profitable to cut down the rain forest to plant grain....

The rain forest covers 60 percent of Brazil. Experts say as much as 20 percent of its 1.6 million square miles has already been destroyed by development, logging and farming.

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The Seattle Times reported that the Bearing Sea, where the annual catch totals some $1.7 billion, is seeing its sea life population dropping sharply. Researchers told the newspaper, for instance, the snow crab catch has declined by 85 percent over the last six years.

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The world's glaciers and ice caps are now in terminal decline because of global warming, scientists have discovered. A survey has revealed that the rate of melting across the world has sharply accelerated in recent years, placing even previously stable glaciers in jeopardy. The loss of glaciers in South America and Asia will threaten the water supplies of millions of people within a few decades, the experts warn.

Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, who led the research, said: "The glaciers are going to melt and melt until they are all gone. There are not any glaciers getting bigger any more."

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Hundreds of thousands of Cassin's Auklet chicks starved to death last year on Triangle Island, their fluffy corpses left to litter the largest bird colony on Canada's West Coast.

The 40,000 auklets on the craggy Farallon Islands west of San Francisco also had an "unprecedented breeding failure" and abandoned their nests en masse, say scientists who are now linking the 2005 disaster at the colonies to a strange quirk in the climate off Alaska.

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Logging in Indonesia has opened some of the most remote, forbidding places on Earth to development. After decimating much of the forests in less remote locations, timber firms have stepped up operations on the island of Borneo and in provinces on New Guinea, where great swaths of forests have been cleared in recent years. For example, more 20 percent of Indonesia's logging concessions are located in Indonesian Papua, up from 7 percent of in the 1990s.

Beyond logging, conversion of forest for large-scale agriculture, especially oil palm plantations, has been an important contributor to forest loss in Indonesia. The area of land covered by oil palm expanded from 600,000 hectares in 1985 to more than 5.3 million hectares by 2004. The government hopes to see this expanse nearly double within the next decade and, through its transmigration program, has encouraged farmers to turn wild forest lands into plantations. Since the fastest and cheapest way to clear new land for plantations is by burning, the effort has worsened fires: every year hundreds of thousands of acres hectares go up in smoke as developers and agriculturalists ignite the countryside before monsoon rains begin to fall in October or November.

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The massive resurgence of dengue fever in various parts of India is a vicious fallout of the increased temperature brought about by the unchecked global warming which for many years has been at the centre of an intense international debate and discussion. For earlier research studies have correlated the increased malarial cases to the proliferating growth of the mosquito population due to global warming.

Similarly, decreased crop yield, torrential rains, recurring droughts, inundation of coastal areas, water shortage and typhoons as well many other regularly occurring natural catastrophes are being blamed on the phenomena of global warming.

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World production of crude oil may have already peaked, setting the stage for declining output that could lag demand, a top advocate of the "peak oil" theory said on Thursday.

Matthew Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Co. International, a Houston-based investment banking firm specializing in the energy sector, said U.S. government data showed that the world oil supply has declined through the first half of this year.

Energy Information Administration data showed world supply of crude oil has declined to 83.98 million barrels per day in the second quarter after hitting 84.35 million bpd in the fourth quarter of 2005.

"If you basically have another six to ten months of that decline lasting, then I think for certain we would look back and say, 'Guess what? We actually reached a sustainable peak in crude oil production in December 2005,'" Simmons said at a meeting of the United States of the the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas.

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The steady rise in atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gases blamed for climate change shows no signs of abating, a UN agency has announced.

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide rose by about half a percent in 2005, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said.

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BROOKLIN, Canada, Nov 2 (IPS) - Every single commercial fishery in the world will be wiped before 2050 and the oceans may never recover if over-fishing continues at its current rate, a four-year scientific investigation has found.

"By the time my nine-year-old son is my age, there would be no wild seafood left," said Emmett Duffy, a scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences in the United States.

In this grim, not-to-far-off future, not only will there be no fish to eat, humans will also lose the vital services oceans provide, including processing wastes, cleaning beaches, controlling flooding and absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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The growth in global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels over the past five years was four times greater than for the preceding 10 years, according to a study that exposes critical flaws in the attempts to avert damaging climate change.

Data on carbon dioxide emissions shows that the global growth rate was 3.2 per cent in the five years to 2005 compared with 0.8 per cent from 1990 to 1999, despite efforts to reduce carbon pollution through the Kyoto agreement.

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[ 12 November 2006: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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The Ross Ice Shelf, a raft of ice the size of France, could collapse quickly, triggering a dramatic rise in sea levels, scientists warn.
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Initial analysis of sea-floor cores near Scott Base suggest the Ross Ice Shelf had collapsed in the past and had probably done so suddenly.

The team's co-chief scientist, Tim Naish, said the sediment record was important because it provided crucial evidence about how the Ross Ice Shelf would react to climate change, with potential to dramatically increase sea levels.

"If the past is any indication of the future, then the ice shelf will collapse," he said.

"If the ice shelf goes, then what about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet? What we've learnt from the Antarctic Peninsula is when once buttressing ice sheets go, the glaciers feeding them move faster and that's the thing that isn't so cheery."

Antarctica stores 90 per cent of the world's water, with the the West Antarctic Ice Sheet holding an estimated 30 million cubic kilometres.

In January, British Antarctic Survey researchers predicted that its collapse would make sea levels rise by at least 5m, with other estimates predicting a rise of up to 17m.

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[ 29 November 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Beijing, China, Dec 15: An expedition searching for a rare Yangtze River dolphin ended Wednesday without a single sighting and with the team's leader saying one of the world's oldest species was effectively extinct.

The white dolphin known as baiji, shy and nearly blind, dates back some 20 million years. Its disappearance is believed to be the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction.

A few baiji may still exist in their native Yangtze habitat in eastern China but not in sufficient numbers to breed and ward off extinction, said August Pfluger, the Swiss co-leader of the joint Chinese-foreign expedition.

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[ 16 December 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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So many sharks have been killed that they are "functionally extinct," which means they can no longer perform their role of controlling middle predators in the marine ecosystem, Baum told CBC News....

As many as 73 million sharks are killed worldwide each year for their fins, and the number is rising rapidly....

The new study concluded that the original estimates of declines in big sharks had been too conservative.

Now the population of scalloped hammerhead and tiger sharks may have fallen by more than 97 per cent since 1970, while bull, dusky and smooth hammerhead sharks are down by more than 99 per cent.

As the shark populations fell, the fish they once ate boomed and the marine life at the bottom of the food chain — scallops, shrimp, clams — have been ravaged.

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source BBC NEWS Jan 11 2006

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Scientists in Germany have discovered that ordinary plants produce significant amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which helps trap the sun's energy in the atmosphere.

The findings, reported in the journal Nature, have been described as "startling", and may force a rethink of the role played by forests in holding back the pace of global warming.

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source Press Release: NZ Forest Owners' Association 24 January 2006

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Forest methane scientists hose down media reports

The authors of a study which revealed for the first time that growing plants emit the greenhouse gas methane now say their work has been widely misinterpreted by many in the media.

The results of the study, which were published in the January 12 edition of Nature, led some commentators to incorrectly conclude that planting trees to combat global warming was a waste of time

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[ 30 March 2007: Message edited by: intelligent universe ]

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Ecuador's President Rafael Correa has declared the Galapagos Islands, home to dozens of endangered species, at risk and a national priority for action.

The islands, Ecuador's top tourist draw, were suffering an environmental and social crisis, he said.

Mr Correa's call came as a UN delegation was visiting to see if the islands should be declared "in danger".

The Galapagos Islands were made a World Heritage Site 30 years ago for their unique plant and animal life.

"We are pushing for a series of actions to overcome the huge institutional, environmental and social crises in the islands," Mr Correa said, adding that these problems were the result of years of neglect by previous governments.

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A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

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"It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic"

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Second only to Emperor penguins in size, King Penguins - distinguished by their ear patches of bright golden-orange feathers - thrive on the islands at the northern reaches of Antarctica, with a total population of over two million breeding pairs.

Because King penguins sit on the food chain in their region, they are sensitive indicators of alterations to the marine ecosystem and feel the effects of climate change more keenly as a result - in this case, the warming is reducing their food supply....

A recent report by the environmental conservation group WWF is warning that rising temperatures and the resulting loss of sea ice is robbing other species of the emblematic birds of the nesting grounds they need to breed successfully while lading a reduction in the availability of krill which they rely on for food.

The most vulnerable is the biggest, the Emperor, but the Gentoo, Chinstrap, and Adélie have also suffered dramatic drops in population, according to the Antarctic Penguins and Climate Change report.

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The report, produced by WWF, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network, says land species have declined by 25 per cent, marine life by 28 per cent, and freshwater species by 29 per cent.

Jonathan Loh, editor of the report, said that such a sharp fall was "completely unprecedented in terms of human history". "You'd have to go back to the extinction of the dinosaurs to see a decline as rapid as this," he added. "In terms of human lifespan we may be seeing things change relatively slowly, but in terms of the world's history this is very rapid."

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The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area on the seabed with too little oxygen to support fish, shrimp, crabs and other forms of marine life, is nearly the largest on record this year, about 8,000 square miles, researchers said this week.

Only the churning effects of Hurricane Dolly last week, they said, prevented the dead zone from being the largest ever.

The problem of hypoxia — very low levels of dissolved oxygen — is a downstream effect of fertilizers used for agriculture in the Mississippi River watershed. Nitrogen is the major culprit, flowing into the Gulf and spurring the growth of algae. Animals called zooplankton eat the algae, excreting pellets that sink to the bottom like tiny stones. This organic matter decays in a process that depletes the water of oxygen.

Researchers expected the dead zone to set a record — even more than the 8,500 square miles observed in 2002 — after the Mississippi, swollen with floodwaters, carried an extraordinary amount of nitrates into the Gulf, about 37 percent more than last year and the most since measuring these factors was begun in 1970.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area on the seabed with too little oxygen to support fish, shrimp, crabs and other forms of marine life, is nearly the largest on record this year, about 8,000 square miles, researchers said this week.

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Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say the dead zones must be viewed as one of the "major global environmental problems". They say: "There is no other variable of such ecological importance to coastal marine ecosystems that has changed so drastically over such a short time."

The key solution, they say, is to "keep fertilisers on the land and out of the sea"....

The number of dead zones reported has doubled each decade since the 1960s, but the scientists say they are often ignored until they provoke problems among populations of larger creatures such as fish or lobsters. By killing or stunting the growth of bottom-dwelling organisms, the lack of oxygen denies food to creatures higher up the food chain.

The Baltic Sea, site of the world's largest dead zone, has lost about 30% of its available food energy, which has led to a significant decline in its fisheries.

The lack of oxygen can also force fish into warmer waters closer to the surface, perhaps making them more susceptible to disease....

As well as fertilisers rich in nitrates and phosphates, sewage discharges also contribute to the problem because they help the algal blooms to flourish....

Climate change could be adding to the problem. Many regions are expected to experience more severe periods of heavy rain, which could wash more nutrients from farmland into rivers.

In May, scientists reported that oxygen-depleted zones in tropical oceans are expanding. They analysed oxygen levels in samples of seawater and found the effect was largest in the central and eastern tropical Atlantic and the equatorial Pacific. The increase could push oxygen-starved zones closer to the surface and give marine life such as fish less room to live and look for food.

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Prince Edward Island's famous Malpeque oysters are getting smaller and declining in quality because of agricultural runoff and overfishing, a research biologist in the province says.

The main culprit for the declining size is nutrients from nitrogen-rich fertilizers that spill into coastal waters from rivers and streams, said Thomas Landry of the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

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WWF: over 400 new species found in Borneo since 1994

27 Unknown Creatures Found in California Caves

WWF: New animal and plant species found in Vietnam

New Species Among Marine Marvels Found in 2006

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The Bay of Naples is renowned for its breathtaking beauty and glittering clear waters. For centuries, tourists have flocked to the region to experience its glories.

But beneath the waves, scientists have uncovered an alarming secret. They have found streams of gas bubbling up from the seabed around the island of Ischia. "The waters are like a Jacuzzi - there is so much carbon dioxide fizzing up from the seabed," said Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, of Plymouth University. "Millions of litres of gas bubble up every day."

The gas streams have turned Ischia's waters into acid, and this has had a major impact on sea life and aquatic plants. Now marine biologists fear that the world's seas could follow suit.

"Every day the oceans absorb more than 25m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere," said Hall-Spencer. "If it were not for the oceans, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be far higher than they are today and the impact of climate change would be far worse. However, there is a downside: it is called ocean acidification."

Scientists calculate that the seas are absorbing so much carbon dioxide that they are 30 per cent more acidic than they were at the start of the Industrial Revolution. The change is three times greater and has happened 100 times faster than at any other time during the past 20 million years....

Scientists found that in Ischia's highly acidic water:

• Biodiversity of plants and fish has dropped by 30 per cent

• Algae vital for binding coral reefs have been wiped out

• Invasive 'alien' species, such as sea-grasses, are thriving

• Coral and sea urchins have been destroyed, while mussels and clams are failing to grow shells.

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Half the world's mammals are declining in population and more than a third probably face extinction, said an update Monday of the "Red List," the most respected inventory of biodiversity.

A comprehensive survey of mammals included in the annual report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which covers more than 44,000 animal and plant species, shows that a quarter of the planet's 5,487 known mammals are clearly at risk of disappearing forever.

But the actual situation may be even grimmer because researchers have been unable to classify the threat level for another 836 mammals due to lack of data.

"In reality, the number of threatened mammals could be as high as 36 percent," said IUCN scientist Jan Schipper, lead author of the mammal survey, in remarks published separately in the US-based journal Science.

The most vulnerable groups are primates, our nearest relatives on the evolutionary ladder, and marine mammals, including several species of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

"Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide," said Schipper.

The revised Red List, unveiled at the IUCN's World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, is further evidence that Earth is undergoing the first wave of mass extinction since dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, many experts say.

Over the last half-billion years, there have only been five other periods of mass extinction.

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Or is it just too easy to get off on recountings of the problem?

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From a nearby thread, a positive note:

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In this election, the will of the majority is to move toward resolution of the threat to Earth's biosphere.

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This is a brand new condition for the great unwashed and their manipulating capitalist masters - who are undergoing shock therapy.

Opportunity knocks (for the "intellectual elite") to create answers.

[ 07 October 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]