by Chang-Ran Kim
Toyota Motor Corp. expects to cut costs for hybrid cars enough to be able to make as much money on them as it does on conventional gasoline cars by around 2010, a top executive said on Thursday.
Japan's top automaker has been keen to see the fuel-saving powertrain enter the mainstream since launching the Prius, the world's first hybrid car, in 1997, but sales have come at the expense of profitability given their high production costs.
But Masatami Takimoto, executive vice president in charge of powertrain development, said cost-cutting efforts on the system's motor, battery and inverter were bearing fruit, and the cost structure would improve drastically by the time Toyota reaches its sales goal of one million hybrids annually in 2010 or soon after.
"By then, we expect margins to be equal to gasoline cars," he told Reuters in an interview at Toyota's headquarters in Toyota City, central Japan.
If it succeeds, Toyota, on its way to becoming the world's biggest carmaker, will be removing the main hurdle to cost-competitiveness for the hybrid -- the expense of the powertrain, which twins a conventional engine with an electric motor. It will also likely widen its sales lead as more consumers seek better mileage amid rising fuel costs.
Data this week showed US gasoline prices at an all-time high above US$3 a gallon, and Takimoto said he expected energy prices to continue rising.
Toyota likely achieved cumulative hybrid sales of one million units this month, having moved 998,900 by the end of April. By 2020, Takimoto said he expected hybrids to become the standard drivetrain and account for "100 percent" of Toyota's vehicles.
In 2006, it sold 313,000 units, accounting for the majority of the world's hybrid cars, and aims to lift that to 430,000 units this year with ramped-up production of the popular Prius...
In other efforts to improve fuel economy, Toyota is trying to reduce the weight of vehicles through increased use of high-tensile steel and resin products, Takimoto said. Aluminium, at one-third the weight of steel, was once an attractive alternative, but he said its use was unlikely to expand for cars due to high and volatile prices.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Top 25 Censored news stories of 2007
From Projectcensored.org. (Most are stories reported in 2005 and 2006).
For more info on each story - see link.
#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo
#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
#12 Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
#15 Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner
#16 Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
#17 Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
#18 Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
#19 Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
#20 Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
#21 Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
#23 US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe
#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
#25 US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region
For more info on each story - see link.
#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo
#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
#12 Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
#15 Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner
#16 Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
#17 Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
#18 Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
#19 Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
#20 Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
#21 Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
#23 US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe
#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
#25 US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region
Monday, May 07, 2007
Japan - $100M in grants - $2B in loans
KYOTO, Japan - Japan pledged up to $2.1 billion in aid Sunday to the Asian Development Bank to combat global climate change and promote greener investment in the region.
The money is part of a new initiative rolled out by Tokyo to support development amid increasing concern that Asia’s breakneck economic growth is leaving the environment in tatters. It comes just days after a breakthrough agreement in Thailand set the world’s first roadmap for fighting global warming.
Under Japan’s push, Tokyo will grant $100 million to set up two special funds aimed at environmental friendly economic development and investment. It will also provide up to $2 billion in loans to the Asian Development Bank over the next five years to further promote regional investment.
"Climate change is an imminent challenge," Japanese Finance Minister Koji Omi said while announcing the plan at the ADB’s annual meeting in Kyoto. "Each country should recognize the issue as their own challenge."
Tackling environmental problems is emerging as a top priority at the ADB, which was chartered four decades ago to fight poverty through economic growth. The ADB is working to counter a mentality that poor nations must sacrifice the environment to the march of progress, amid criticism that the bank funds such rampant development.
Over the last three decades, Asia’s energy consumption has grown by 230 percent, and it is expected to double again by 2030, ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda said Sunday. The region already accounts for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions _ a leading cause of global warming.
Japan, which has the second-highest voting power in the ADB after the United States, will channel up to $100 million into two new funds - the Asian Clean Energy Fund and the Investment Climate Facilitation Fund.
The funds are envisioned as promoting renewable energy resources, such as solar power, and encouraging nations to build environmentally friendly infrastructure. They also aim to attracting greener investment.
"I expect this initiative will help ensure sustainable development in the region," Omi said...
"I think for quite some time, Asia has made the assumption that you grow first and worry about the environment later," Nag said. "I think we have overcome a main stumbling block, more or less, that was in the mind. That the environment is something you don’t need to worry about today."
In Kyoto, some 3,000 delegates from the ADB’s 67 member governments will debate plans to make the bank more responsive to environmental woes. The bank currently spends $1 billion a year on clean energy.
But activists assail the bank for continuing to fund coal projects, which are vilified as fanning global warming. The bank has no immediate plans to phase out funding coal, saying it’s more economical for poor countries...
The report, a summary of a study by a U.N. network of 2,000 scientists, said the world has to make significant cuts in gas emissions through increasing the energy efficiency of buildings and vehicles, shifting from fossil fuels to renewable fuels, and reforming both the forestry and farming sectors.
The money is part of a new initiative rolled out by Tokyo to support development amid increasing concern that Asia’s breakneck economic growth is leaving the environment in tatters. It comes just days after a breakthrough agreement in Thailand set the world’s first roadmap for fighting global warming.
Under Japan’s push, Tokyo will grant $100 million to set up two special funds aimed at environmental friendly economic development and investment. It will also provide up to $2 billion in loans to the Asian Development Bank over the next five years to further promote regional investment.
"Climate change is an imminent challenge," Japanese Finance Minister Koji Omi said while announcing the plan at the ADB’s annual meeting in Kyoto. "Each country should recognize the issue as their own challenge."
Tackling environmental problems is emerging as a top priority at the ADB, which was chartered four decades ago to fight poverty through economic growth. The ADB is working to counter a mentality that poor nations must sacrifice the environment to the march of progress, amid criticism that the bank funds such rampant development.
Over the last three decades, Asia’s energy consumption has grown by 230 percent, and it is expected to double again by 2030, ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda said Sunday. The region already accounts for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions _ a leading cause of global warming.
Japan, which has the second-highest voting power in the ADB after the United States, will channel up to $100 million into two new funds - the Asian Clean Energy Fund and the Investment Climate Facilitation Fund.
The funds are envisioned as promoting renewable energy resources, such as solar power, and encouraging nations to build environmentally friendly infrastructure. They also aim to attracting greener investment.
"I expect this initiative will help ensure sustainable development in the region," Omi said...
"I think for quite some time, Asia has made the assumption that you grow first and worry about the environment later," Nag said. "I think we have overcome a main stumbling block, more or less, that was in the mind. That the environment is something you don’t need to worry about today."
In Kyoto, some 3,000 delegates from the ADB’s 67 member governments will debate plans to make the bank more responsive to environmental woes. The bank currently spends $1 billion a year on clean energy.
But activists assail the bank for continuing to fund coal projects, which are vilified as fanning global warming. The bank has no immediate plans to phase out funding coal, saying it’s more economical for poor countries...
The report, a summary of a study by a U.N. network of 2,000 scientists, said the world has to make significant cuts in gas emissions through increasing the energy efficiency of buildings and vehicles, shifting from fossil fuels to renewable fuels, and reforming both the forestry and farming sectors.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Malaysia plans forest recovery to conserve orangutan
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) - Malaysian authorities have proposed a multi-million dollar scheme to regenerate a heavily logged forest in a bid to save its orangutan population, a report said Sunday.
A fund of 200 million ringgit (59 million dollars) will be used to replant trees to restore the Ulu Segama-Malua forest in eastern Sabah state on Borneo island.
The most important objective will be the conservation of the region's 3,000 orangutan population, Sam Mannan, a director with the local forestry department, told the Sunday Star newspaper.
He said the Ulu Segama-Malua ecological zone was among Sabah's "crown jewels" as it also contains a diverse array of plants.
The work will cover 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres) of logged forests as well as replanting 1,000 hectares of degraded forests.
Scientists recently claimed that Borneo island's orangutans were under threat of extinction because of disappearing habitat.
A study completed in September of orangutans and other animals along the Kinabatangan river, in central Sabah province, said the apes could face extinction in less than 50 years unless immediate conservation was undertaken.
Chunks of forest in Malaysia's Borneo, where orangutans live, have been carved away by private land ownership, mainly plantations, used to grow crops.
A fund of 200 million ringgit (59 million dollars) will be used to replant trees to restore the Ulu Segama-Malua forest in eastern Sabah state on Borneo island.
The most important objective will be the conservation of the region's 3,000 orangutan population, Sam Mannan, a director with the local forestry department, told the Sunday Star newspaper.
He said the Ulu Segama-Malua ecological zone was among Sabah's "crown jewels" as it also contains a diverse array of plants.
The work will cover 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres) of logged forests as well as replanting 1,000 hectares of degraded forests.
Scientists recently claimed that Borneo island's orangutans were under threat of extinction because of disappearing habitat.
A study completed in September of orangutans and other animals along the Kinabatangan river, in central Sabah province, said the apes could face extinction in less than 50 years unless immediate conservation was undertaken.
Chunks of forest in Malaysia's Borneo, where orangutans live, have been carved away by private land ownership, mainly plantations, used to grow crops.
South Pacific to stop bottom trawling
A quarter of the world's oceans will be protected from fishing boats which drag heavy nets across the sea floor, South Pacific nations have agreed.
The landmark deal will restrict bottom trawling, which experts say destroys coral reefs and stirs up clouds of sediment that suffocate marine life.
Observers and monitoring systems will ensure vessels remain five nautical miles from marine ecosystems at risk.
The South Pacific contains the last pristine deep-sea marine environment.
It extends from the Equator to the Antarctic and from Australia to the western coast of South America.
The high seas encompass all areas not included in the territorial sea or in the internal waters of a country.
The agreement reached in the coastal town of Renaca in Chile will come into force on 30 September.
It will close to bottom trawling areas where vulnerable marine ecosystems are known or are likely to exist, unless a prior assessment is undertaken and highly precautionary protective measures are implemented.
"Because of the cost implications of the necessary research and assessment and observer requirements, it may even have the effect of putting an end to bottom trawling," it said.
The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an alliance of leading environmental and conservation groups, welcomed the agreement...
In addition to the weighted nets and rollers which crush coral reefs, bottom trawling targets slow-growing species of fish, such as orange roughy, which take decades to reach breeding age.
Such species are especially vulnerable to overfishing because the population replenishes itself very slowly.
Last month, leading scientists warned there would be no sea fish left in 50 years if current practices continued.
The landmark deal will restrict bottom trawling, which experts say destroys coral reefs and stirs up clouds of sediment that suffocate marine life.
Observers and monitoring systems will ensure vessels remain five nautical miles from marine ecosystems at risk.
The South Pacific contains the last pristine deep-sea marine environment.
It extends from the Equator to the Antarctic and from Australia to the western coast of South America.
The high seas encompass all areas not included in the territorial sea or in the internal waters of a country.
The agreement reached in the coastal town of Renaca in Chile will come into force on 30 September.
It will close to bottom trawling areas where vulnerable marine ecosystems are known or are likely to exist, unless a prior assessment is undertaken and highly precautionary protective measures are implemented.
"Because of the cost implications of the necessary research and assessment and observer requirements, it may even have the effect of putting an end to bottom trawling," it said.
The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an alliance of leading environmental and conservation groups, welcomed the agreement...
In addition to the weighted nets and rollers which crush coral reefs, bottom trawling targets slow-growing species of fish, such as orange roughy, which take decades to reach breeding age.
Such species are especially vulnerable to overfishing because the population replenishes itself very slowly.
Last month, leading scientists warned there would be no sea fish left in 50 years if current practices continued.
Bangladesh - Water Problems
By Laurie Goering of the Chicago Tribune
ANTARPARA, Bangladesh -- Muhammad Ali, a wiry 65-year-old, has never driven a car, run an air conditioner or done much of anything that produces greenhouse gases. But on a warming planet, he is on the verge of becoming a climate refugee. In the past 10 years the farmer has had to tear down and move his tin-and-bamboo house five times to escape the encroaching waters of the huge Jamuna River, swollen by severe monsoons that scientists believe are caused by global warming and greater glacier melt in the Himalayas. Now the last of his land is gone, and Ali squats on a precarious piece of government-owned riverbank -- the only ground available -- knowing the river probably will take that as well once the monsoons start this month."Where we are standing, in five days it will be gone," he predicts. "Our future thinking is that if this problem is not taken care of, we will be swept away."
Bangladesh, which has 140 million people packed into an area a little smaller than Illinois, is one of the most vulnerable places to climate change. As the sea level slowly rises, this nation that is little more than a series of low-lying delta islands amid some of Asia's mightiest rivers -- the Ganges, Jamuna-Brahmaputra and Meghna -- is seeing saltwater creep into its coastal soils and drinking water. Farmers near the Bay of Bengal who once grew rice now are raising shrimp. Notorious for its deadly cyclones, Bangladesh is likely to face increasingly violent storms as the weather warms and see surging seas carry saltwater farther and farther up the country's rivers, ruining soils, according to scientists.
On Bangladesh's southern coast, erosion driven in part by accelerating glacier melt and unusually intense rains already has scoured away half of Bhola Island, which once covered an area nearly 20 times the size of Chicago. Land disputes, many driven by erosion, now account for 77 percent of Bangladesh's legal suits. In the dry northwest of the country, droughts are getting more severe. And if sea level rises by 3 feet by the turn of the century, as some scientists predict, a fifth of the country will disappear.
"Bangladesh is nature's laboratory on disaster management," said Ainun Nishat, Bangladesh representative of the World Conservation Union and a government adviser on climate change. As temperatures rise and more severe weather takes hold worldwide, "this is one of the countries that is going to face the music most," he said. Bangladesh is hardly the only low-lying nation facing tough times as the world warms. But scientists say it in many ways represents climate change's "perfect storm" of challenges because it is extremely poor, extremely populated and extremely susceptible. "One island here has more people than all of the small island states put together," said Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies and a top national climate change expert.
snip
Bangladesh's capital today is home to a growing sea of landless rural migrants like Jaha Nura Begum, 35, who lives in a rickety bamboo hut perched on stilts over a fetid backwater of the Turag River. Her family and 20 others fled Bhola Island three years ago when "the river took all our land, and there was nothing," she said. Now her husband breaks bricks as a day laborer at a nearby kiln and "we only eat if we can find work." With climate migrants accounting for at least a third and perhaps as many as two-thirds of rural dwellers flooding to Dhaka, even that work is hard to get. "As more and more come, it is more chaotic here," Begum said.
Bangladesh's government is doing what it can to prepare for coming hard times. With the help of non-profit organizations, it is testing new salt-resistant crops, building thousands of raised shelters to protect those in the path of cyclones and trying to elevate roads and bridges above rising rivers. Leaders who once insisted that the West created the problem and should clean it up "now accept we should prepare," Nishat said. The alternative could be ugly: insufficient food, a destabilized government, internal strife that could spread past the country's borders, a massive exodus of climate refugees and more extremism, Rahman said.
_________________________
Meanwhile - Drought hits northern Bangladesh
Dhaka - At least 33 people died in northern Bangladesh at the weekend due to the effects of a rainless summer that has struck the country's rice growing hinterlands, officials and media reports said Sunday.
Health Department officials in the worst affected northern regions of Rangpur and Dinajpur said hundreds of people infected by a diarrheal epidemic were treated in government-run hospitals, while the daily Ittefaq quoted health officials as saying the 33 deaths were due to intestinal diseases.
A severe shortage of safe drinking water was caused by a drought which swept the countryside, drying up deep wells and other reservoirs.
Medical officers at the international Cholera Hospital in the capital Dhaka reported an unusual increase of patients registering for dehydration treatment.
Nearly 350 people were admitted daily in the past one week, hospital sources said.
The Met Office said a low in the Bay of Bengal developed into a deep depression on Saturday affecting the summer heat.
Temperatures soared to 39 degree Celsius in the northern region with a high level of humidity, said senior weather officer Samarendra Karmakar.
ANTARPARA, Bangladesh -- Muhammad Ali, a wiry 65-year-old, has never driven a car, run an air conditioner or done much of anything that produces greenhouse gases. But on a warming planet, he is on the verge of becoming a climate refugee. In the past 10 years the farmer has had to tear down and move his tin-and-bamboo house five times to escape the encroaching waters of the huge Jamuna River, swollen by severe monsoons that scientists believe are caused by global warming and greater glacier melt in the Himalayas. Now the last of his land is gone, and Ali squats on a precarious piece of government-owned riverbank -- the only ground available -- knowing the river probably will take that as well once the monsoons start this month."Where we are standing, in five days it will be gone," he predicts. "Our future thinking is that if this problem is not taken care of, we will be swept away."
Bangladesh, which has 140 million people packed into an area a little smaller than Illinois, is one of the most vulnerable places to climate change. As the sea level slowly rises, this nation that is little more than a series of low-lying delta islands amid some of Asia's mightiest rivers -- the Ganges, Jamuna-Brahmaputra and Meghna -- is seeing saltwater creep into its coastal soils and drinking water. Farmers near the Bay of Bengal who once grew rice now are raising shrimp. Notorious for its deadly cyclones, Bangladesh is likely to face increasingly violent storms as the weather warms and see surging seas carry saltwater farther and farther up the country's rivers, ruining soils, according to scientists.
On Bangladesh's southern coast, erosion driven in part by accelerating glacier melt and unusually intense rains already has scoured away half of Bhola Island, which once covered an area nearly 20 times the size of Chicago. Land disputes, many driven by erosion, now account for 77 percent of Bangladesh's legal suits. In the dry northwest of the country, droughts are getting more severe. And if sea level rises by 3 feet by the turn of the century, as some scientists predict, a fifth of the country will disappear.
"Bangladesh is nature's laboratory on disaster management," said Ainun Nishat, Bangladesh representative of the World Conservation Union and a government adviser on climate change. As temperatures rise and more severe weather takes hold worldwide, "this is one of the countries that is going to face the music most," he said. Bangladesh is hardly the only low-lying nation facing tough times as the world warms. But scientists say it in many ways represents climate change's "perfect storm" of challenges because it is extremely poor, extremely populated and extremely susceptible. "One island here has more people than all of the small island states put together," said Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies and a top national climate change expert.
snip
Bangladesh's capital today is home to a growing sea of landless rural migrants like Jaha Nura Begum, 35, who lives in a rickety bamboo hut perched on stilts over a fetid backwater of the Turag River. Her family and 20 others fled Bhola Island three years ago when "the river took all our land, and there was nothing," she said. Now her husband breaks bricks as a day laborer at a nearby kiln and "we only eat if we can find work." With climate migrants accounting for at least a third and perhaps as many as two-thirds of rural dwellers flooding to Dhaka, even that work is hard to get. "As more and more come, it is more chaotic here," Begum said.
Bangladesh's government is doing what it can to prepare for coming hard times. With the help of non-profit organizations, it is testing new salt-resistant crops, building thousands of raised shelters to protect those in the path of cyclones and trying to elevate roads and bridges above rising rivers. Leaders who once insisted that the West created the problem and should clean it up "now accept we should prepare," Nishat said. The alternative could be ugly: insufficient food, a destabilized government, internal strife that could spread past the country's borders, a massive exodus of climate refugees and more extremism, Rahman said.
_________________________
Meanwhile - Drought hits northern Bangladesh
Dhaka - At least 33 people died in northern Bangladesh at the weekend due to the effects of a rainless summer that has struck the country's rice growing hinterlands, officials and media reports said Sunday.
Health Department officials in the worst affected northern regions of Rangpur and Dinajpur said hundreds of people infected by a diarrheal epidemic were treated in government-run hospitals, while the daily Ittefaq quoted health officials as saying the 33 deaths were due to intestinal diseases.
A severe shortage of safe drinking water was caused by a drought which swept the countryside, drying up deep wells and other reservoirs.
Medical officers at the international Cholera Hospital in the capital Dhaka reported an unusual increase of patients registering for dehydration treatment.
Nearly 350 people were admitted daily in the past one week, hospital sources said.
The Met Office said a low in the Bay of Bengal developed into a deep depression on Saturday affecting the summer heat.
Temperatures soared to 39 degree Celsius in the northern region with a high level of humidity, said senior weather officer Samarendra Karmakar.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
"Trashball"
From an article on The New York Times - seen on Visualize Whirled Peas:
An interesting artist was featured in today’s New York Times. Christopher Goodwin is a junk truck driver who scavenges for interesting pieces of trash, packages them in round plastic balls, and fills gumball dispenses with them. People buy these mementos for fifty cents a apiece. According to the NYT:
"Though some admirers see Trashball as a critique of America’s wasteful ways, Mr. Goodwin views it as archeology, a divination of who people are from what they leave behind, even if it is just because they are too lazy to toss it in a wastebasket."
CHRISTOPHER GOODWIN's Blog
An interesting artist was featured in today’s New York Times. Christopher Goodwin is a junk truck driver who scavenges for interesting pieces of trash, packages them in round plastic balls, and fills gumball dispenses with them. People buy these mementos for fifty cents a apiece. According to the NYT:
"Though some admirers see Trashball as a critique of America’s wasteful ways, Mr. Goodwin views it as archeology, a divination of who people are from what they leave behind, even if it is just because they are too lazy to toss it in a wastebasket."
CHRISTOPHER GOODWIN's Blog
"Feed the Hummer; forget the hunger"
...To put things in perspective, a 25-gallon SUV tank filled with pure ethanol uses over 450 pounds of corn. This amount of corn would meet the entire caloric needs of one person for an entire year.
"Feeling Warmth, Subtropical Plants Move North"
ATLANTA — Like a true belle, this city flounces into bloom when the weather turns, its redbuds, azaleas and forsythia emerging like so much lace on a bodice.
But in recent years, plants that thrive in even warmer weather have begun crashing the ball. At the Habersham Gardens nursery, where well-heeled homeowners choose their spring seedlings, a spiky-leafed, sultry coastal oleander has been thriving in a giant urn.
“We never expected it to come back every year,” said Cheryl Aldrich, the assistant manager, guiding a visitor on a tour of plants that would once have needed coddling to survive here: eucalyptus, angel trumpets, the Froot Loop-hued Miss Huff lantana. “We’ve been able to overwinter plants you didn’t have a prayer with before.”
Forget the jokes about beachfront property. If global warming has any upside, it would seem to be for gardeners, who make up three-quarters of the population and spend $34 billion a year, according to the National Gardening Association. Many experts agree that climate change, which by some estimates has already nudged up large swaths of the country by one or more plant-hardiness zones, has meant a longer growing season and a more robust selection. There are palm trees in Knoxville and subtropical camellias in Pennsylvania.
But horticulturists warn that it is shortsighted to view this as good news. Warmer temperatures help pests as well as plants, and studies have shown that weeds and invasive species receive a greater boost from higher levels of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, than desirable plants do. Poison ivy becomes more toxic, ragweed dumps more pollen, and kudzu, the fast-growing vine that has swallowed whole woodlands in the South, is creeping northward.
Already, some states are facing the possibility that the cherished local flora that has helped define their identities — the Ohio buckeye, the Kansas sunflower or the Mississippi magnolia — may begin to disappear within their borders and move north.
By the end of the century, the climate will no longer be favorable for the official state tree or flower in 28 states, according to “The Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming,” a report released last month by the National Wildlife Federation.
By the time of the annual Atlanta Dogwood Festival last month, the pale dogwood blooms had come and gone. Tara Dillard, a landscape designer and garden writer, said she now steers clients away from longtime favorites. “I’m writing a column about rhododendrons right now,” Ms. Dillard said. “And I think my conclusion is going to have to be not to plant rhododendrons. We have heated out of the rhododendron zone.”
...Some experts said global warming was affecting gardeners in another way, by raising awareness. In the Atlanta area, where in recent years watering has been restricted, nurseries and landscapers note a growing interest in drought-resistant plants and xeriscaping — landscaping that requires minimal water.
Nationally, the use of products like organic fertilizer, which requires less energy to produce than conventional fertilizer — and thus results in fewer emissions of heat-trapping gases — is ballooning, with some manufacturers reporting a doubling in demand each year.
Gardening and do-it-yourself magazines have begun to popularize rain gardens, which collect rainwater in barrels or shallow basins that are part of the landscaping. And mainstream publications like Martha Stewart Living and Better Homes and Gardens have advocated cutting back on gasoline-powered lawnmowers and blowers in favor of greener machines like rechargeable or push mowers, which come in sleek new lightweight designs.
Environmentally gentle gardening choices go hand in hand with hybrid cars, compact fluorescent bulbs and “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Oscar-winning documentary with Al Gore, said Mary Pat Matheson, the executive director of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. “Only in the last year has it even been accepted that it’s really happening,” Ms. Matheson said. “Awareness is starting to turn into action.”
But in recent years, plants that thrive in even warmer weather have begun crashing the ball. At the Habersham Gardens nursery, where well-heeled homeowners choose their spring seedlings, a spiky-leafed, sultry coastal oleander has been thriving in a giant urn.
“We never expected it to come back every year,” said Cheryl Aldrich, the assistant manager, guiding a visitor on a tour of plants that would once have needed coddling to survive here: eucalyptus, angel trumpets, the Froot Loop-hued Miss Huff lantana. “We’ve been able to overwinter plants you didn’t have a prayer with before.”
Forget the jokes about beachfront property. If global warming has any upside, it would seem to be for gardeners, who make up three-quarters of the population and spend $34 billion a year, according to the National Gardening Association. Many experts agree that climate change, which by some estimates has already nudged up large swaths of the country by one or more plant-hardiness zones, has meant a longer growing season and a more robust selection. There are palm trees in Knoxville and subtropical camellias in Pennsylvania.
But horticulturists warn that it is shortsighted to view this as good news. Warmer temperatures help pests as well as plants, and studies have shown that weeds and invasive species receive a greater boost from higher levels of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, than desirable plants do. Poison ivy becomes more toxic, ragweed dumps more pollen, and kudzu, the fast-growing vine that has swallowed whole woodlands in the South, is creeping northward.
Already, some states are facing the possibility that the cherished local flora that has helped define their identities — the Ohio buckeye, the Kansas sunflower or the Mississippi magnolia — may begin to disappear within their borders and move north.
By the end of the century, the climate will no longer be favorable for the official state tree or flower in 28 states, according to “The Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming,” a report released last month by the National Wildlife Federation.
By the time of the annual Atlanta Dogwood Festival last month, the pale dogwood blooms had come and gone. Tara Dillard, a landscape designer and garden writer, said she now steers clients away from longtime favorites. “I’m writing a column about rhododendrons right now,” Ms. Dillard said. “And I think my conclusion is going to have to be not to plant rhododendrons. We have heated out of the rhododendron zone.”
...Some experts said global warming was affecting gardeners in another way, by raising awareness. In the Atlanta area, where in recent years watering has been restricted, nurseries and landscapers note a growing interest in drought-resistant plants and xeriscaping — landscaping that requires minimal water.
Nationally, the use of products like organic fertilizer, which requires less energy to produce than conventional fertilizer — and thus results in fewer emissions of heat-trapping gases — is ballooning, with some manufacturers reporting a doubling in demand each year.
Gardening and do-it-yourself magazines have begun to popularize rain gardens, which collect rainwater in barrels or shallow basins that are part of the landscaping. And mainstream publications like Martha Stewart Living and Better Homes and Gardens have advocated cutting back on gasoline-powered lawnmowers and blowers in favor of greener machines like rechargeable or push mowers, which come in sleek new lightweight designs.
Environmentally gentle gardening choices go hand in hand with hybrid cars, compact fluorescent bulbs and “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Oscar-winning documentary with Al Gore, said Mary Pat Matheson, the executive director of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. “Only in the last year has it even been accepted that it’s really happening,” Ms. Matheson said. “Awareness is starting to turn into action.”
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Colony Collapse Disorder
Excerpts of a post by Peter Dearman @ GNN
...Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a seat in Ottawa’s House of Commons, making strong showings around 5% for Canada’s fledgling Green Party. She is also leader of the provincial wing of her party.
In a widely circulated email, she wrote:
"I’m on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies."
Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site at bushfarms.com.
Here, Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:
"Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I’m happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won’t hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.
This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I’ve gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren’t aware, and I wasn’t for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I’ve measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. …What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells."
Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?
These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.
“We’ve been pushing them too hard,” Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the CBC. “And we’re starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances.” Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it’s all of the above.
This conclusion is not surprising, considering how the practice of beekeeping has been made ultra-efficient in a competitive world run by free market forces. Unlike many crops, honey is not given subsidy protection in the United States despite the huge importance of the bee industry to food production. The FDA has hardly moved at all to protect American producers from “honey pretenders” – products containing little or no honey that are imported and sold with misleading packaging. Rare is the beekeeper that does not need pesticide treatments and other techniques falling under the rubric of ‘factory farming.’
You might be justifiably stunned to know how little money is being thrown at this problem. A January 29, 2007 Penn State press release (just before CCD hit the big networks) stated: “The beekeeping industry has been quick to respond to the crisis. The National Honey Board has pledged $13,000 of emergency funding to the CCD working group. Other organizations, such as the Florida State Beekeepers Association, are working with their membership to commit additional funds.” A quick look at CostofWar.com will tell you that that $13,000 buys about 4 seconds of war at the going rate. Remember, these same scientists had presented the world with a similar threat level two years ago. Apparently they were ignored.
...Not surprisingly, the use of one or more new pesticides was, and likely remains, on the short list of likely causes of CCD. But more than pesticides could potentially be harming bees. Some scientists suspect global warming. Temperature plays an integral part in determining mass behavior of bees. To mention just one temperature response, each bee acts as a drone thermostat, helping cool or warm the hive whenever it isn’t engaged in some other routine.
...Surprise — it’s an ecosystem thing. As with honeybees and CCD, the root of the bumblebee problem lies in our modern rationalist drive toward endlessly ordering the world around us. The long-term solution is a return to a more natural ecological order. This interpretation needs to be conveyed when mainstream media tell the CCD story.
Of course, with all the parasites, pathogens, pesticides and transit to stress out our hardworking honey bees, they are in peril. Even if some silver bullet saves us from CCD, it is more than obvious that we need to pay more respect to bees, and to nature.
____________________
Collapsing Colony Disorder Impacts N.D.
BISMARCK, N.D. — North Dakota now is among about a dozen states where beekeepers report some of their bees are buzzing away from hives for good.
Judy Carlson, the apiary inspector for the state Agriculture Department, said North Dakota beekeepers are returning to the state after using their bees elsewhere to pollinate cucumbers and almond and orange trees.
The phenomenon, known as collapsing colony disorder, affects crops that depend on bees for pollination.
A survey of 15 out of the 179 beekeepers in the state found about half had poor or disappearing hives, she said.
"Some are reporting that they are losing 50 to 80 percent of their hives," Carlson said.
North Dakota, with an estimated 382,500 hives, led the country in honey production last year.
"This is a really big deal for the honey industry here," state Agriculture Commissioner Roger Johnson said. "It's a real mystery because bees have an enormously strong homing instinct, but in this case, they are flying away and never coming back and nobody knows where they went."
Randy Verhoek of Bismarck said he lost half his 13,000 hives this year, costing him about $400,000.
"We'd go out one day and find full boxes, and a week later they would just be gone," he said.
Verhoek said he lost money because he did not have his normal hive count for pollination in California almond orchards. He said he had to send weakened hives to Texas for rebuilding.
Verhoek and Gackle beekeeper John Miller, with 10,000 hives, say the phenomenon of collapsing colonies may have many causes, including drought, disease and insecticides...
____________________
Another POV: Requiem for the Honeybee
Neonicotinoid insecticides are harmful to the honeybee
There has been a great deal of concern over the decline of the honeybee across the US, Europe and Australia [1] (The Mystery of Disappearing Honeybees, this series). The United States National Research Council (USNRC) Committee of the Status of Pollinators in North America report [2] focused on the impact of parasites, fungi, bacteria and viruses, but did not pay much attention on the impact of pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops, which may have lethal or sub-lethal effects on the bee’s behaviour or resistance to infection. There have been strong responses to the report on that account. On the other hand, any suggestion that GM crops and pesticides may be causing the decline of honeybees is met with heated denial from the proponents.
Certainly, honeybees are declining both in areas where GM crops are widely grown, and in other areas where GM crops are released in small test plots. Is there a common thread that links both areas? Yes there is, the universal use of systemic pesticide seed dressing in GM crops and conventional crops; in particular, the widespread application of a relatively new class of systemic insecticides - the neonicotinoids - that are highly toxic to insects including bees at very low concentrations. Systemic pesticide seed dressings protect the newly sprouted seed at a vulnerable time in the plant’s development. Seed dressings include systemic insecticides and fungicides, which often act synergistically in controlling early seedling pests.
The neonicotinoid insecticides include imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, clothianidin, and several others. Imidacloprid is used extensively in seed dressing for field and horticultural crops, and particularly for maize, sunflower and rapeseed (canola). Imidacloprid was detected in soils, plant tissues and pollen using HPLC coupled to a mass spectrometer. The levels of the insecticide found in pollen suggested probable delirious effects on honeybees [3]. For several years since 2000, French and Italian beekeepers have been noticing that imidacloprid is lethal to bees, and the insecticide is suspected to be causing the decline of hive populations by affecting the bee’s orientation and ability to return to the hive....
...Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a seat in Ottawa’s House of Commons, making strong showings around 5% for Canada’s fledgling Green Party. She is also leader of the provincial wing of her party.
In a widely circulated email, she wrote:
"I’m on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies."
Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site at bushfarms.com.
Here, Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:
"Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I’m happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won’t hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.
This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I’ve gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren’t aware, and I wasn’t for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I’ve measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. …What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells."
Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?
These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.
“We’ve been pushing them too hard,” Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the CBC. “And we’re starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances.” Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it’s all of the above.
This conclusion is not surprising, considering how the practice of beekeeping has been made ultra-efficient in a competitive world run by free market forces. Unlike many crops, honey is not given subsidy protection in the United States despite the huge importance of the bee industry to food production. The FDA has hardly moved at all to protect American producers from “honey pretenders” – products containing little or no honey that are imported and sold with misleading packaging. Rare is the beekeeper that does not need pesticide treatments and other techniques falling under the rubric of ‘factory farming.’
You might be justifiably stunned to know how little money is being thrown at this problem. A January 29, 2007 Penn State press release (just before CCD hit the big networks) stated: “The beekeeping industry has been quick to respond to the crisis. The National Honey Board has pledged $13,000 of emergency funding to the CCD working group. Other organizations, such as the Florida State Beekeepers Association, are working with their membership to commit additional funds.” A quick look at CostofWar.com will tell you that that $13,000 buys about 4 seconds of war at the going rate. Remember, these same scientists had presented the world with a similar threat level two years ago. Apparently they were ignored.
...Not surprisingly, the use of one or more new pesticides was, and likely remains, on the short list of likely causes of CCD. But more than pesticides could potentially be harming bees. Some scientists suspect global warming. Temperature plays an integral part in determining mass behavior of bees. To mention just one temperature response, each bee acts as a drone thermostat, helping cool or warm the hive whenever it isn’t engaged in some other routine.
...Surprise — it’s an ecosystem thing. As with honeybees and CCD, the root of the bumblebee problem lies in our modern rationalist drive toward endlessly ordering the world around us. The long-term solution is a return to a more natural ecological order. This interpretation needs to be conveyed when mainstream media tell the CCD story.
Of course, with all the parasites, pathogens, pesticides and transit to stress out our hardworking honey bees, they are in peril. Even if some silver bullet saves us from CCD, it is more than obvious that we need to pay more respect to bees, and to nature.
____________________
Collapsing Colony Disorder Impacts N.D.
BISMARCK, N.D. — North Dakota now is among about a dozen states where beekeepers report some of their bees are buzzing away from hives for good.
Judy Carlson, the apiary inspector for the state Agriculture Department, said North Dakota beekeepers are returning to the state after using their bees elsewhere to pollinate cucumbers and almond and orange trees.
The phenomenon, known as collapsing colony disorder, affects crops that depend on bees for pollination.
A survey of 15 out of the 179 beekeepers in the state found about half had poor or disappearing hives, she said.
"Some are reporting that they are losing 50 to 80 percent of their hives," Carlson said.
North Dakota, with an estimated 382,500 hives, led the country in honey production last year.
"This is a really big deal for the honey industry here," state Agriculture Commissioner Roger Johnson said. "It's a real mystery because bees have an enormously strong homing instinct, but in this case, they are flying away and never coming back and nobody knows where they went."
Randy Verhoek of Bismarck said he lost half his 13,000 hives this year, costing him about $400,000.
"We'd go out one day and find full boxes, and a week later they would just be gone," he said.
Verhoek said he lost money because he did not have his normal hive count for pollination in California almond orchards. He said he had to send weakened hives to Texas for rebuilding.
Verhoek and Gackle beekeeper John Miller, with 10,000 hives, say the phenomenon of collapsing colonies may have many causes, including drought, disease and insecticides...
____________________
Another POV: Requiem for the Honeybee
Neonicotinoid insecticides are harmful to the honeybee
There has been a great deal of concern over the decline of the honeybee across the US, Europe and Australia [1] (The Mystery of Disappearing Honeybees, this series). The United States National Research Council (USNRC) Committee of the Status of Pollinators in North America report [2] focused on the impact of parasites, fungi, bacteria and viruses, but did not pay much attention on the impact of pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops, which may have lethal or sub-lethal effects on the bee’s behaviour or resistance to infection. There have been strong responses to the report on that account. On the other hand, any suggestion that GM crops and pesticides may be causing the decline of honeybees is met with heated denial from the proponents.
Certainly, honeybees are declining both in areas where GM crops are widely grown, and in other areas where GM crops are released in small test plots. Is there a common thread that links both areas? Yes there is, the universal use of systemic pesticide seed dressing in GM crops and conventional crops; in particular, the widespread application of a relatively new class of systemic insecticides - the neonicotinoids - that are highly toxic to insects including bees at very low concentrations. Systemic pesticide seed dressings protect the newly sprouted seed at a vulnerable time in the plant’s development. Seed dressings include systemic insecticides and fungicides, which often act synergistically in controlling early seedling pests.
The neonicotinoid insecticides include imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, clothianidin, and several others. Imidacloprid is used extensively in seed dressing for field and horticultural crops, and particularly for maize, sunflower and rapeseed (canola). Imidacloprid was detected in soils, plant tissues and pollen using HPLC coupled to a mass spectrometer. The levels of the insecticide found in pollen suggested probable delirious effects on honeybees [3]. For several years since 2000, French and Italian beekeepers have been noticing that imidacloprid is lethal to bees, and the insecticide is suspected to be causing the decline of hive populations by affecting the bee’s orientation and ability to return to the hive....
Monbiot on Current Global Warming Policy
From the Guardian
The rich world's policy on greenhouse gas now seems clear: millions will die
Our governments have set the wrong targets to tackle climate change using outdated science, and they know it
Rich nations seeking to cut climate change have this in common: they lie. You won't find this statement in the draft of the new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was leaked to the Guardian last week. But as soon as you understand the numbers, the words form before your eyes. The governments making genuine efforts to tackle global warming are using figures they know to be false.
The British government, the European Union and the United Nations all claim to be trying to prevent "dangerous" climate change. Any level of climate change is dangerous for someone, but there is a broad consensus about what this word means: two degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. It is dangerous because of its direct impacts on people and places (it could, for example, trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the collapse of the Amazon rainforest) and because it is likely to stimulate further warming, as it encourages the world's natural systems to start releasing greenhouse gases.
The aim of preventing more than 2C of warming has been adopted overtly by the UN and the European Union, and implicitly by the British, German and Swedish governments. All of them say they are hoping to confine the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to a level that would prevent such a rise. And all of them know that they have set the wrong targets, based on outdated science. Fearful of the political implications, they have failed to adjust to the levels the new research demands...
The average global temperature is affected by the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This concentration is usually expressed as "carbon dioxide equivalent". It is not an exact science - you cannot say that a certain concentration of gases will lead to a precise increase in temperature - but scientists discuss the relationship in terms of probability. A paper published last year by the climatologist Malte Meinshausen suggests that if greenhouse gases reach a concentration of 550 parts per million, carbon dioxide equivalent, there is a 63-99% chance (with an average value of 82%) that global warming will exceed two degrees. At 475 parts per million (ppm) the average likelihood is 64%. Only if concentrations are stabilised at 400 parts or below is there a low chance (an average of 28%) that temperatures will rise by more than two degrees.
The IPCC's draft report contains similar figures. A concentration of 510ppm gives us a 33% chance of preventing more than two degrees of warming. A concentration of 590ppm gives us a 10% chance. You begin to understand the scale of the challenge when you discover that the current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (using the IPCC's formula) is 459ppm. We have already exceeded the safe level. To give ourselves a high chance of preventing dangerous climate change, we will need a programme so drastic that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere end up below the current concentrations. The sooner this happens, the greater the chance of preventing two degrees of warming.
But no government has set itself this task. The European Union and the Swedish government have established the world's most stringent target. It is 550ppm, which gives us a near certainty of an extra 2C. The British government makes use of a clever conjuring trick. Its target is also "550 parts per million", but 550 parts of carbon dioxide alone. When you include the other greenhouse gases, this translates into 666ppm, carbon dioxide equivalent (a fitting figure). According to last autumn's Stern report on the economics of climate change, at 650ppm there is a 60-95% chance of 3C of warming. The government's target, in other words, commits us to a very dangerous level of climate change.
The British government has been aware that it has set the wrong target for at least four years. In 2003 the environment department found that "with an atmospheric CO2 stabilisation concentration of 550ppm, temperatures are expected to rise by between 2C and 5C". In March last year it admitted that "a limit closer to 450ppm or even lower, might be more appropriate to meet a 2C stabilisation limit". Yet the target has not changed. Last October I challenged the environment secretary, David Miliband, over this issue on Channel 4 News. He responded as if he had never come across it before.
The European Union is also aware that it is using the wrong figures. In 2005 it found that "to have a reasonable chance to limit global warming to no more than 2C, stabilisation of concentrations well below 550ppm CO2 equivalent may be needed". But its target hasn't changed either...
In my book Heat, I estimate that to avoid two degrees of warming we require a global emissions cut of 60% per capita between now and 2030. This translates into an 87% cut in the United Kingdom. This is a much stiffer target than the British government's - which requires a 60% cut in the UK's emissions by 2050. But my figure now appears to have been an underestimate. A recent paper in the journal Climatic Change emphasises that the sensitivity of global temperatures to greenhouse gas concentrations remains uncertain. But if we use the average figure, to obtain a 50% chance of preventing more than 2C of warming requires a global cut of 80% by 2050.
This is a cut in total emissions, not in emissions per head. If the population were to rise from 6 billion to 9 billion between now and then, we would need an 87% cut in global emissions per person. If carbon emissions are to be distributed equally, the greater cut must be made by the biggest polluters: rich nations like us. The UK's emissions per capita would need to fall by 91%...
We must open immediate negotiations with China, which threatens to become the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by next November, partly because it manufactures many of the products we use. We must work out how much it would cost to decarbonise its growing economy, and help to pay. We need a major diplomatic offensive - far more pressing than it has been so far - to persuade the United States to do what it did in 1941, and turn the economy around on a dime. But above all we need to show that we remain serious about fighting climate change, by setting the targets the science demands.
The rich world's policy on greenhouse gas now seems clear: millions will die
Our governments have set the wrong targets to tackle climate change using outdated science, and they know it
Rich nations seeking to cut climate change have this in common: they lie. You won't find this statement in the draft of the new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was leaked to the Guardian last week. But as soon as you understand the numbers, the words form before your eyes. The governments making genuine efforts to tackle global warming are using figures they know to be false.
The British government, the European Union and the United Nations all claim to be trying to prevent "dangerous" climate change. Any level of climate change is dangerous for someone, but there is a broad consensus about what this word means: two degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. It is dangerous because of its direct impacts on people and places (it could, for example, trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the collapse of the Amazon rainforest) and because it is likely to stimulate further warming, as it encourages the world's natural systems to start releasing greenhouse gases.
The aim of preventing more than 2C of warming has been adopted overtly by the UN and the European Union, and implicitly by the British, German and Swedish governments. All of them say they are hoping to confine the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to a level that would prevent such a rise. And all of them know that they have set the wrong targets, based on outdated science. Fearful of the political implications, they have failed to adjust to the levels the new research demands...
The average global temperature is affected by the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This concentration is usually expressed as "carbon dioxide equivalent". It is not an exact science - you cannot say that a certain concentration of gases will lead to a precise increase in temperature - but scientists discuss the relationship in terms of probability. A paper published last year by the climatologist Malte Meinshausen suggests that if greenhouse gases reach a concentration of 550 parts per million, carbon dioxide equivalent, there is a 63-99% chance (with an average value of 82%) that global warming will exceed two degrees. At 475 parts per million (ppm) the average likelihood is 64%. Only if concentrations are stabilised at 400 parts or below is there a low chance (an average of 28%) that temperatures will rise by more than two degrees.
The IPCC's draft report contains similar figures. A concentration of 510ppm gives us a 33% chance of preventing more than two degrees of warming. A concentration of 590ppm gives us a 10% chance. You begin to understand the scale of the challenge when you discover that the current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (using the IPCC's formula) is 459ppm. We have already exceeded the safe level. To give ourselves a high chance of preventing dangerous climate change, we will need a programme so drastic that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere end up below the current concentrations. The sooner this happens, the greater the chance of preventing two degrees of warming.
But no government has set itself this task. The European Union and the Swedish government have established the world's most stringent target. It is 550ppm, which gives us a near certainty of an extra 2C. The British government makes use of a clever conjuring trick. Its target is also "550 parts per million", but 550 parts of carbon dioxide alone. When you include the other greenhouse gases, this translates into 666ppm, carbon dioxide equivalent (a fitting figure). According to last autumn's Stern report on the economics of climate change, at 650ppm there is a 60-95% chance of 3C of warming. The government's target, in other words, commits us to a very dangerous level of climate change.
The British government has been aware that it has set the wrong target for at least four years. In 2003 the environment department found that "with an atmospheric CO2 stabilisation concentration of 550ppm, temperatures are expected to rise by between 2C and 5C". In March last year it admitted that "a limit closer to 450ppm or even lower, might be more appropriate to meet a 2C stabilisation limit". Yet the target has not changed. Last October I challenged the environment secretary, David Miliband, over this issue on Channel 4 News. He responded as if he had never come across it before.
The European Union is also aware that it is using the wrong figures. In 2005 it found that "to have a reasonable chance to limit global warming to no more than 2C, stabilisation of concentrations well below 550ppm CO2 equivalent may be needed". But its target hasn't changed either...
In my book Heat, I estimate that to avoid two degrees of warming we require a global emissions cut of 60% per capita between now and 2030. This translates into an 87% cut in the United Kingdom. This is a much stiffer target than the British government's - which requires a 60% cut in the UK's emissions by 2050. But my figure now appears to have been an underestimate. A recent paper in the journal Climatic Change emphasises that the sensitivity of global temperatures to greenhouse gas concentrations remains uncertain. But if we use the average figure, to obtain a 50% chance of preventing more than 2C of warming requires a global cut of 80% by 2050.
This is a cut in total emissions, not in emissions per head. If the population were to rise from 6 billion to 9 billion between now and then, we would need an 87% cut in global emissions per person. If carbon emissions are to be distributed equally, the greater cut must be made by the biggest polluters: rich nations like us. The UK's emissions per capita would need to fall by 91%...
We must open immediate negotiations with China, which threatens to become the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by next November, partly because it manufactures many of the products we use. We must work out how much it would cost to decarbonise its growing economy, and help to pay. We need a major diplomatic offensive - far more pressing than it has been so far - to persuade the United States to do what it did in 1941, and turn the economy around on a dime. But above all we need to show that we remain serious about fighting climate change, by setting the targets the science demands.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
"Seeing Red: Eating Locally..."
By Barbara Kingsolver - excerpts from MotherJones
I've kept a journal for most of the years I've been gardening. I'm a habitual scribbler, jotting down the triumphs and flops of each season that I always feel pretty sure I'd remember anyway: that the Collective Farm Woman melons were surprisingly prissy; that the Dolly Partons produced such whopping tomatoes the plants fell over. Who could forget any of that? Me, as it turns out. Come winter when it's time to order seeds again, I always need to go back and check the record.
Over years, trends show up. One is that however jaded I may have become, winter knocks down the hollow stem of worldliness and I start each summer again with expectations as simple as a child's. The first tomato of the season brings me to my knees. Its vital stats are recorded in my journal with the care of a birth announcement: It's an Early Girl! Four ounces! June 16! Over the next few weeks I note the number, size, and quality of the different tomato varieties as they begin to come in: two Green Zebras, four gorgeous Jaune Flammés, one single half-pound Russian Black. I note that the latter wins our summer's first comparative taste test—a good balance of tart and sweet, with strong spicy notes... (big snip)
in high summer of 2005, about the time I was seeing red in my kitchen, the same thing was happening to some of our county's tomato farmers. They had learned organic methods, put away the chemicals, and done everything right to grow a product consumers claimed to want. They'd waited the three years and paid for certification. They'd watered, weeded, and picked, they'd sorted the round from the misshapen, producing the perfect organic tomatoes ordered by grocery chains. And then suddenly, when the farmers were finally bringing in these tomatoes by the truckload and hoping for a decent payout, some grocery buyers backtracked. "Not this week," one store offered without warning, and then another. Not the next week either, nor the next. A tomato is not a thing that can be put on hold. Mountains of ripe fruits piled up behind the packinghouse and turned to orange sludge, swarming with clouds of fruit flies.
These tomatoes were perfect, and buyers were hungry. Agreements had been made. But pallets of organic tomatoes from California had begun coming in just a few dollars cheaper. It's hard to believe, given the amount of truck fuel involved, but transportation is tax-deductible for the corporations, so we taxpayers paid for that shipping. The California growers needed only the economics of scale on their side, a cheap army of pickers, and customers who would reliably opt for the lower price.
As simply as that, a year of planning and family labor turned to red mush.
Our growers had been warned that this could happen—market buyers will almost never sign a binding contract. So the farmers took a risk, and took a loss. Some of them will try again, though they will likely hedge their bets with Delicata squash and peas as well. Courage, practicality, and making the best of a bad situation are much of what farming is about. Before the tomatoes all rotted away, Appalachian Harvest found a way to donate and distribute the enormous excess. The poor of our county were rich in tomatoes that summer.
"We were glad we could give it away," one of the farmers told me. "That's who we are. But a lot of us are barely making ends meet ourselves. It seems like it's always the people that have the least who end up giving the most. Why is that?"
In Charlottesville, Asheville, Roanoke, and Knoxville, supermarket shoppers had no way of knowing how much heartache and betrayal was wrapped up in those cellophane two-packs of California tomatoes. Maybe they noticed the other tomatoes were missing that week, the ones with the "Healthy Farms, Close to Home" label. Or maybe they just saw "organic tomatoes," and dropped them into their carts on top of the cereal boxes and paper towels. Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used. They either will or they won't. And the happy grocery store music plays on.
I've kept a journal for most of the years I've been gardening. I'm a habitual scribbler, jotting down the triumphs and flops of each season that I always feel pretty sure I'd remember anyway: that the Collective Farm Woman melons were surprisingly prissy; that the Dolly Partons produced such whopping tomatoes the plants fell over. Who could forget any of that? Me, as it turns out. Come winter when it's time to order seeds again, I always need to go back and check the record.
Over years, trends show up. One is that however jaded I may have become, winter knocks down the hollow stem of worldliness and I start each summer again with expectations as simple as a child's. The first tomato of the season brings me to my knees. Its vital stats are recorded in my journal with the care of a birth announcement: It's an Early Girl! Four ounces! June 16! Over the next few weeks I note the number, size, and quality of the different tomato varieties as they begin to come in: two Green Zebras, four gorgeous Jaune Flammés, one single half-pound Russian Black. I note that the latter wins our summer's first comparative taste test—a good balance of tart and sweet, with strong spicy notes... (big snip)
in high summer of 2005, about the time I was seeing red in my kitchen, the same thing was happening to some of our county's tomato farmers. They had learned organic methods, put away the chemicals, and done everything right to grow a product consumers claimed to want. They'd waited the three years and paid for certification. They'd watered, weeded, and picked, they'd sorted the round from the misshapen, producing the perfect organic tomatoes ordered by grocery chains. And then suddenly, when the farmers were finally bringing in these tomatoes by the truckload and hoping for a decent payout, some grocery buyers backtracked. "Not this week," one store offered without warning, and then another. Not the next week either, nor the next. A tomato is not a thing that can be put on hold. Mountains of ripe fruits piled up behind the packinghouse and turned to orange sludge, swarming with clouds of fruit flies.
These tomatoes were perfect, and buyers were hungry. Agreements had been made. But pallets of organic tomatoes from California had begun coming in just a few dollars cheaper. It's hard to believe, given the amount of truck fuel involved, but transportation is tax-deductible for the corporations, so we taxpayers paid for that shipping. The California growers needed only the economics of scale on their side, a cheap army of pickers, and customers who would reliably opt for the lower price.
As simply as that, a year of planning and family labor turned to red mush.
Our growers had been warned that this could happen—market buyers will almost never sign a binding contract. So the farmers took a risk, and took a loss. Some of them will try again, though they will likely hedge their bets with Delicata squash and peas as well. Courage, practicality, and making the best of a bad situation are much of what farming is about. Before the tomatoes all rotted away, Appalachian Harvest found a way to donate and distribute the enormous excess. The poor of our county were rich in tomatoes that summer.
"We were glad we could give it away," one of the farmers told me. "That's who we are. But a lot of us are barely making ends meet ourselves. It seems like it's always the people that have the least who end up giving the most. Why is that?"
In Charlottesville, Asheville, Roanoke, and Knoxville, supermarket shoppers had no way of knowing how much heartache and betrayal was wrapped up in those cellophane two-packs of California tomatoes. Maybe they noticed the other tomatoes were missing that week, the ones with the "Healthy Farms, Close to Home" label. Or maybe they just saw "organic tomatoes," and dropped them into their carts on top of the cereal boxes and paper towels. Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used. They either will or they won't. And the happy grocery store music plays on.
"Gone" - Animal Extinction - the greatest threat to mankind
By Julia Whitty - with excerpts from MotherJones
...In the final stages of dehydration the body shrinks, robbing youth from the young as the skin puckers, eyes recede into orbits, and the tongue swells and cracks. Brain cells shrivel and muscles seize. The kidneys shut down. Blood volume drops, triggering hypovolemic shock, with its attendant respiratory and cardiac failures. These combined assaults disrupt the chemical and electrical pathways of the body until all systems cascade toward death.
Such is also the path of a dying species. Beyond a critical point, the collective body of a unique kind of mammal or bird or amphibian or tree cannot be salvaged, no matter the first aid rendered. Too few individuals spread too far apart, or too genetically weakened, are susceptible to even small natural disasters: a passing thunderstorm; an unexpected freeze; drought. At fewer than 50 members, populations experience increasingly random fluctuations until a kind of fatal arrhythmia takes hold. Eventually, an entire genetic legacy, born in the beginnings of life on earth, is removed from the future.
Scientists recognise that species continually disappear at a background extinction rate estimated at about one species per million per year, with new species replacing the lost in a sustainable fashion. Occasional mass extinctions convulse this orderly norm, followed by excruciatingly slow recoveries as new species emerge from the remaining gene-pool, until the world is once again repopulated by a different catalogue of flora and fauna.
From what we understand so far, five great extinction events have reshaped earth in cataclysmic ways in the past 439 million years, each one wiping out between 50 and 95 per cent of the life of the day, including the dominant life forms; the most recent event killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. Speciations followed, but an analysis published in Nature showed that it takes 10 million years before biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before a die-off.
Today we're living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes known as the Holocene extinction event. We carried its seeds with us 50,000 years ago as we migrated beyond Africa with Stone Age blades, darts, and harpoons, entering pristine Ice Age ecosystems and changing them forever by wiping out at least some of the unique megafauna of the times, including, perhaps, the sabre-toothed cats and woolly mammoths. When the ice retreated, we terminated the long and biologically rich epoch sometimes called the Edenic period with assaults from our newest weapons: hoes, scythes, cattle, goats, and pigs.
But, as harmful as our forebears may have been, nothing compares to what's under way today. Throughout the 20th century the causes of extinction - habitat degradation, overexploitation, agricultural monocultures, human-borne invasive species, human-induced climate-change - increased exponentially, until now in the 21st century the rate is nothing short of explosive. The World Conservation Union's Red List - a database measuring the global status of Earth's 1.5 million scientifically named species - tells a haunting tale of unchecked, unaddressed, and accelerating biocide.
When we hear of extinction, most of us think of the plight of the rhino, tiger, panda or blue whale. But these sad sagas are only small pieces of the extinction puzzle. The overall numbers are terrifying. Of the 40,168 species that the 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation Union have assessed, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, one in three amphibians, one in three conifers and other gymnosperms are at risk of extinction. The peril faced by other classes of organisms is less thoroughly analysed, but fully 40 per cent of the examined species of planet earth are in danger, including perhaps 51 per cent of reptiles, 52 per cent of insects, and 73 per cent of flowering plants.
By the most conservative measure - based on the last century's recorded extinctions - the current rate of extinction is 100 times the background rate. But the eminent Harvard biologist Edward O Wilson, and other scientists, estimate that the true rate is more like 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate. The actual annual sum is only an educated guess, because no scientist believes that the tally of life ends at the 1.5 million species already discovered; estimates range as high as 100 million species on earth, with 10 million as the median guess. Bracketed between best- and worst-case scenarios, then, somewhere between 2.7 and 270 species are erased from existence every day. Including today.
We now understand that the majority of life on Earth has never been - and will never be - known to us. In a staggering forecast, Wilson predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of all plant and animal species by 2100.
You probably had no idea. Few do. A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside science. In the 200 years since French naturalist Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after examining fossil bones and concluding "the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some sort of catastrophe", we have only slowly recognised and attempted to correct our own catastrophic behaviour....
These life-forms and their life strategies compose what we might think of as the "body" of the desert, with some species the lungs and others the liver, the blood, the skin. The trend in scientific investigation in recent decades has been toward understanding the interconnectedness of the bodily components, i.e. the effect one species has on the others. The loss of even one species irrevocably changes the desert (or the tundra, rainforest, prairie, coastal estuary, coral reef, and so on) as we know it, just as the loss of each human being changes his or her family forever.
Nowhere is this better proven than in a 12-year study conducted in the Chihuahuan desert by James H Brown and Edward Heske of the University of New Mexico. When a kangaroo-rat guild composed of three closely related species was removed, shrublands quickly converted to grasslands, which supported fewer annual plants, which in turn supported fewer birds. Even humble players mediate stability. So when you and I hear of this year's extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin, and think, "how sad", we're not calculating the deepest cost: that extinctions lead to co-extinctions because most living things on Earth support a few symbionts, while keystone species influence and support myriad plants and animals. Army ants, for example, are known to support 100 known species, from beetles to birds. A European study finds steep declines in honeybee diversity in the past 25 years but also significant attendant declines in plants that depend on bees for pollination - a job estimated to be worth £50bn worldwide. Meanwhile, beekeepers in 24 American states report that perhaps 70 per cent of their colonies have recently died off, threatening £7bn in US agriculture. And bees are only a small part of the pollinator crisis.
One of the most alarming developments is the rapid decline not just of species but of higher taxa, such as the class Amphibia, the 300-million-year-old group of frogs, salamanders, newts and toads hardy enough to have preceded and then outlived most dinosaurs. Biologists first noticed die-offs two decades ago, and, since then, have watched as seemingly robust amphibian species vanished in as little as six months. The causes cover the spectrum of human environmental assaults, including rising ultraviolet radiation from a thinning ozone layer, increases in pollutants and pesticides, habitat loss from agriculture and urbanisation, invasions of exotic species, the wildlife trade, light pollution, and fungal diseases. Sometimes stressors merge to form an unwholesome synergy; an African frog brought to the West in the 1950s for use in human pregnancy tests likely introduced a fungus deadly to native frogs. Meanwhile, a recent analysis in Nature estimated that, in the past 20 years, at least 70 species of South American frogs had gone extinct as a result of climate change...
Vacariu is the western director of the Wildlands Project, the conservation group spearheading the drive to rewild North America—to reconnect remaining wildernesses (parks, refuges, national forests, and local land trust holdings) through corridors, on a continentwide scale. The idea came into being 15 years ago, a hybridization between activism and science, when Earth First founder Dave Foreman teamed with Michael Soulé, professor emeritus at the University of California-Santa Cruz and one of the founding fathers of conservation biology.
Rewilding is bigger, broader, and bolder than humans have thought before. Many conservation biologists believe it's our best hope for arresting the sixth great extinction. E.O. Wilson calls it "mainstream conservation writ large for future generations."
To save Earth's living membrane, we must put its shattered pieces back together. Only "megapreserves" modelled on a deep scientific understanding of continent-wide ecosystem needs hold that promise. "What I have been preparing to say is this," wrote Thoreau more than 150 years ago. "In wildness is the preservation of the world." This, science finally understands...
The Wildlands Project has also identified the five most critically endangered wildlife linkages along the spine, each associated with a keystone species. Grizzlies already pinched at Crowsnest Pass on Highway Three, between Alberta and British Columbia, will be entirely cut off from the bigger gene pool to the north if a larger road is built. Greater sage grouse, Canada lynx, black bears and jaguars face their own lethal obstacles further south...
The truth is that wilderness is more dangerous to us caged than free - and has far more value to us wild than consumed. Wilson suggests the time has come to rename the "environmentalist view" the "real-world view", and to replace the gross national product with the more comprehensive "genuine progress indicator", which estimates the true environmental costs of farming, fishing, grazing, mining, smelting, driving, flying, building, paving, computing, medicating and so on. Until then, it's like keeping a ledger recording income but not expenses. Like us, the Earth has a finite budget.
...In the final stages of dehydration the body shrinks, robbing youth from the young as the skin puckers, eyes recede into orbits, and the tongue swells and cracks. Brain cells shrivel and muscles seize. The kidneys shut down. Blood volume drops, triggering hypovolemic shock, with its attendant respiratory and cardiac failures. These combined assaults disrupt the chemical and electrical pathways of the body until all systems cascade toward death.
Such is also the path of a dying species. Beyond a critical point, the collective body of a unique kind of mammal or bird or amphibian or tree cannot be salvaged, no matter the first aid rendered. Too few individuals spread too far apart, or too genetically weakened, are susceptible to even small natural disasters: a passing thunderstorm; an unexpected freeze; drought. At fewer than 50 members, populations experience increasingly random fluctuations until a kind of fatal arrhythmia takes hold. Eventually, an entire genetic legacy, born in the beginnings of life on earth, is removed from the future.
Scientists recognise that species continually disappear at a background extinction rate estimated at about one species per million per year, with new species replacing the lost in a sustainable fashion. Occasional mass extinctions convulse this orderly norm, followed by excruciatingly slow recoveries as new species emerge from the remaining gene-pool, until the world is once again repopulated by a different catalogue of flora and fauna.
From what we understand so far, five great extinction events have reshaped earth in cataclysmic ways in the past 439 million years, each one wiping out between 50 and 95 per cent of the life of the day, including the dominant life forms; the most recent event killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. Speciations followed, but an analysis published in Nature showed that it takes 10 million years before biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before a die-off.
Today we're living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes known as the Holocene extinction event. We carried its seeds with us 50,000 years ago as we migrated beyond Africa with Stone Age blades, darts, and harpoons, entering pristine Ice Age ecosystems and changing them forever by wiping out at least some of the unique megafauna of the times, including, perhaps, the sabre-toothed cats and woolly mammoths. When the ice retreated, we terminated the long and biologically rich epoch sometimes called the Edenic period with assaults from our newest weapons: hoes, scythes, cattle, goats, and pigs.
But, as harmful as our forebears may have been, nothing compares to what's under way today. Throughout the 20th century the causes of extinction - habitat degradation, overexploitation, agricultural monocultures, human-borne invasive species, human-induced climate-change - increased exponentially, until now in the 21st century the rate is nothing short of explosive. The World Conservation Union's Red List - a database measuring the global status of Earth's 1.5 million scientifically named species - tells a haunting tale of unchecked, unaddressed, and accelerating biocide.
When we hear of extinction, most of us think of the plight of the rhino, tiger, panda or blue whale. But these sad sagas are only small pieces of the extinction puzzle. The overall numbers are terrifying. Of the 40,168 species that the 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation Union have assessed, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, one in three amphibians, one in three conifers and other gymnosperms are at risk of extinction. The peril faced by other classes of organisms is less thoroughly analysed, but fully 40 per cent of the examined species of planet earth are in danger, including perhaps 51 per cent of reptiles, 52 per cent of insects, and 73 per cent of flowering plants.
By the most conservative measure - based on the last century's recorded extinctions - the current rate of extinction is 100 times the background rate. But the eminent Harvard biologist Edward O Wilson, and other scientists, estimate that the true rate is more like 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate. The actual annual sum is only an educated guess, because no scientist believes that the tally of life ends at the 1.5 million species already discovered; estimates range as high as 100 million species on earth, with 10 million as the median guess. Bracketed between best- and worst-case scenarios, then, somewhere between 2.7 and 270 species are erased from existence every day. Including today.
We now understand that the majority of life on Earth has never been - and will never be - known to us. In a staggering forecast, Wilson predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of all plant and animal species by 2100.
You probably had no idea. Few do. A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside science. In the 200 years since French naturalist Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after examining fossil bones and concluding "the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some sort of catastrophe", we have only slowly recognised and attempted to correct our own catastrophic behaviour....
These life-forms and their life strategies compose what we might think of as the "body" of the desert, with some species the lungs and others the liver, the blood, the skin. The trend in scientific investigation in recent decades has been toward understanding the interconnectedness of the bodily components, i.e. the effect one species has on the others. The loss of even one species irrevocably changes the desert (or the tundra, rainforest, prairie, coastal estuary, coral reef, and so on) as we know it, just as the loss of each human being changes his or her family forever.
Nowhere is this better proven than in a 12-year study conducted in the Chihuahuan desert by James H Brown and Edward Heske of the University of New Mexico. When a kangaroo-rat guild composed of three closely related species was removed, shrublands quickly converted to grasslands, which supported fewer annual plants, which in turn supported fewer birds. Even humble players mediate stability. So when you and I hear of this year's extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin, and think, "how sad", we're not calculating the deepest cost: that extinctions lead to co-extinctions because most living things on Earth support a few symbionts, while keystone species influence and support myriad plants and animals. Army ants, for example, are known to support 100 known species, from beetles to birds. A European study finds steep declines in honeybee diversity in the past 25 years but also significant attendant declines in plants that depend on bees for pollination - a job estimated to be worth £50bn worldwide. Meanwhile, beekeepers in 24 American states report that perhaps 70 per cent of their colonies have recently died off, threatening £7bn in US agriculture. And bees are only a small part of the pollinator crisis.
One of the most alarming developments is the rapid decline not just of species but of higher taxa, such as the class Amphibia, the 300-million-year-old group of frogs, salamanders, newts and toads hardy enough to have preceded and then outlived most dinosaurs. Biologists first noticed die-offs two decades ago, and, since then, have watched as seemingly robust amphibian species vanished in as little as six months. The causes cover the spectrum of human environmental assaults, including rising ultraviolet radiation from a thinning ozone layer, increases in pollutants and pesticides, habitat loss from agriculture and urbanisation, invasions of exotic species, the wildlife trade, light pollution, and fungal diseases. Sometimes stressors merge to form an unwholesome synergy; an African frog brought to the West in the 1950s for use in human pregnancy tests likely introduced a fungus deadly to native frogs. Meanwhile, a recent analysis in Nature estimated that, in the past 20 years, at least 70 species of South American frogs had gone extinct as a result of climate change...
Vacariu is the western director of the Wildlands Project, the conservation group spearheading the drive to rewild North America—to reconnect remaining wildernesses (parks, refuges, national forests, and local land trust holdings) through corridors, on a continentwide scale. The idea came into being 15 years ago, a hybridization between activism and science, when Earth First founder Dave Foreman teamed with Michael Soulé, professor emeritus at the University of California-Santa Cruz and one of the founding fathers of conservation biology.
Rewilding is bigger, broader, and bolder than humans have thought before. Many conservation biologists believe it's our best hope for arresting the sixth great extinction. E.O. Wilson calls it "mainstream conservation writ large for future generations."
To save Earth's living membrane, we must put its shattered pieces back together. Only "megapreserves" modelled on a deep scientific understanding of continent-wide ecosystem needs hold that promise. "What I have been preparing to say is this," wrote Thoreau more than 150 years ago. "In wildness is the preservation of the world." This, science finally understands...
The Wildlands Project has also identified the five most critically endangered wildlife linkages along the spine, each associated with a keystone species. Grizzlies already pinched at Crowsnest Pass on Highway Three, between Alberta and British Columbia, will be entirely cut off from the bigger gene pool to the north if a larger road is built. Greater sage grouse, Canada lynx, black bears and jaguars face their own lethal obstacles further south...
The truth is that wilderness is more dangerous to us caged than free - and has far more value to us wild than consumed. Wilson suggests the time has come to rename the "environmentalist view" the "real-world view", and to replace the gross national product with the more comprehensive "genuine progress indicator", which estimates the true environmental costs of farming, fishing, grazing, mining, smelting, driving, flying, building, paving, computing, medicating and so on. Until then, it's like keeping a ledger recording income but not expenses. Like us, the Earth has a finite budget.
'Interior official quits ahead of hearing"
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Interior Department official accused of pressuring government scientists to make their research fit her policy goals has resigned.
Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, submitted her resignation letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a department spokesman said Tuesday.
MacDonald resigned a week before a House congressional oversight committee was to hold a hearing on accusations that she violated the Endangered Species Act, censored science and mistreated staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service...
MacDonald, a civil engineer with no formal training in natural sciences, had served in her post since 2004. She was a senior adviser in the department for two years before that.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said MacDonald had "betrayed the mission she swore to uphold," adding that her actions "undermined both the work and the integrity of the Fish and Wildlife Service and its many dedicated employees.
Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, submitted her resignation letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a department spokesman said Tuesday.
MacDonald resigned a week before a House congressional oversight committee was to hold a hearing on accusations that she violated the Endangered Species Act, censored science and mistreated staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service...
MacDonald, a civil engineer with no formal training in natural sciences, had served in her post since 2004. She was a senior adviser in the department for two years before that.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said MacDonald had "betrayed the mission she swore to uphold," adding that her actions "undermined both the work and the integrity of the Fish and Wildlife Service and its many dedicated employees.
May Day
I put out the hummingbird feeder last week and I saw a hummer at the feeder on Thursday, April 26.
We had a pair of Baltimore Orioles last Wednesday, April 25th. I've only seen Baltimore Orioles 3 or 4 times in Indiana.
Yesterday and today we've had a Rose-breasted Grosbeak around. They seem to migrate though this time of year.
We have also had some indigo buntings hanging around - they have been more shy in my experience. I was surprised to have a chance to see them so clearly.
I got a new hanging bird feeder the other day - which was needed because the Blue Jays have been esp. aggressive lately at driving off other birds from the stationary rail where I normally put out seed.
Last night, April 30th, there were quite a few lightning bugs out. It seemed early for them - but I don't know what their usual debut date is.
We have a high of 85 forecast for today. Yesterday it got up to 87 - I think that was too hot for some of the earlier Spring plants and they have started to droop. Meanwhile - some of the deciduous trees have finally fully leafed out - fairly rapidly.
The last day it was below freezing was April 13th. I have a couple tomato plants out and a few annuals and I don't expect it to get too cold for them.
We've been having fun with our new ponds - watching the tadpoles and all. I think that the toad tadpoles died and now I'm watching the frog tadpoles.
It's funny the various things that have found our pond - I don't know where they all come from. Swimming beetle types of things, etc. Maybe they fly and swim? Some of them might be an early stage of dragonfly.
We had a pair of Baltimore Orioles last Wednesday, April 25th. I've only seen Baltimore Orioles 3 or 4 times in Indiana.
Yesterday and today we've had a Rose-breasted Grosbeak around. They seem to migrate though this time of year.
We have also had some indigo buntings hanging around - they have been more shy in my experience. I was surprised to have a chance to see them so clearly.
I got a new hanging bird feeder the other day - which was needed because the Blue Jays have been esp. aggressive lately at driving off other birds from the stationary rail where I normally put out seed.
Last night, April 30th, there were quite a few lightning bugs out. It seemed early for them - but I don't know what their usual debut date is.
We have a high of 85 forecast for today. Yesterday it got up to 87 - I think that was too hot for some of the earlier Spring plants and they have started to droop. Meanwhile - some of the deciduous trees have finally fully leafed out - fairly rapidly.
The last day it was below freezing was April 13th. I have a couple tomato plants out and a few annuals and I don't expect it to get too cold for them.
We've been having fun with our new ponds - watching the tadpoles and all. I think that the toad tadpoles died and now I'm watching the frog tadpoles.
It's funny the various things that have found our pond - I don't know where they all come from. Swimming beetle types of things, etc. Maybe they fly and swim? Some of them might be an early stage of dragonfly.
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