Nature Emergency

[Brian G Turner]

This is a pretty hard-hitting headline and report, currently on the front-page of the BBC website:

Humans 'threaten 1m species with extinction'

 

[CTRandall]

The frustrating and infuriating aspect of this is that I recall reading The Sixth Extinction ( by Richard Leakey) in the mid 90s that demonstrated--25 years ago--that scientists already had strong evidence of this happening. That's 25 years ( and who knows how many species) lost because people don't want to change.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

There was a a lot of academic and scientific interest in these and related matters in the 1970s. There was little support for what these people attempted to make public knowledge. We are picking up where these people left off. They were using their best guesses, their practical training, to attempt to see where we were going as a civilization. They also has had Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring as painful reminder of what could happen. Now we are in the unfortunate position of being able to see, if we want to, what those who attempted to speak up all those years ago could only guess at. The most ironic part of this whole situation is that never before have so many people had so much relevant information at their fingertips but most of the information is still being cherry picked. The Polar regions have already melted, they just haven't finished melting yet.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Millions Of Shoes Falling

The extinction of large species has been steadily progressing along with the spread of human civilization. Not that humans have been around since the beginning of the extinction process but in this particular cycle, humans have their thumbs on the wrong side of the scales. I'm sure it was much easier to kill a baby mastodon than an adult one. If it's bigger or stronger than us we are always actively engaged in killing off those species. Since everything bigger than us on this planet gets permanently demolished why do people believe that Poe's pendulum will stop swinging when it gets to our height? It is already swinging lower than our height so it must be some kind of oversight that it has missed us so far.

After 50,000 years the mechanism we have created has to have been imprinted into the natural system in a number of ways. I don't see of any reason why we should be immune to that mechanism. The theory of our survival only works if we are the top predator on this planet. Instead of looking at the whole process from a visual, human first point of view, if we look at the mass tonnage of the process we see that the microbial world is by far the biggest handler of the wreckage and also has a hand in leading to the downfall of the larger species.

A most graphic display of this would be the plight of the Tasmanian Devil. At first glance it seems to be an exception to the process, seeing as how the disease is so clearly evident and is apparently not something happening to everything else. However, the loss of habitat, the loss of genetic variety, the loss of older members of the populations, all contribute to poor health which leaves the door of extinction wide open to the microbial monkey wrench which is only too eager to start the disintegration process which normally starts after death.

The disintegration process might be triggered early, which is probably the humans Achilles Heel in this entire process of the progression of life as time never goes backwards by itself. As we win in the war against cancer, if such a thing exists, a whole crop of diseases are springing up, called poor man's cancer, a cancer war we are not winning. Commonly triggered by insect bites, it can also be imported into the body by simple introduction of bacteria, viruses, fungi, onto or through the skin, as well as simple ingestion.

There is now a variety of yeast fungus which is antibiotic resistant which is what is used when it gets in the bloodstream. It is fungicide resistant from extensive use of fungicides on farms. Everyone has yeast growing on their bodies. Athletes Foot is a yeast infection which is a simple overgrowth. Different species of bacteria routinely trade genes to survive the drugs we send their way. Their genetic communication protocol system makes our internet look like a child's toy. It is only a matter of time before the different species of yeasts start trading survival genes.

 

[Starbeast]

Here's a video that quickly and roughly explains what happened in the past, and where we're heading.

When I was a teenager, I would discuss with friends about the direction the world population and our planet is going. After hours of talking, we would usually end up saying, "We may live to see the horrifying decline of both, in our life time." I find myself now-a-days remarking much like the guy at the end of the bar, from the movie, The Birds. However, I still try to remain optimistic and ask God for help to save humanity and the world we all live on.​

 

[AlexH]

The frustrating and infuriating aspect of this is that I recall reading The Sixth Extinction ( by Richard Leakey) in the mid 90s that demonstrated--25 years ago--that scientists already had strong evidence of this happening. That's 25 years ( and who knows how many species) lost because people don't want to change.

I'd say it was more the idiots (like politicians or from oil companies) who either denied it or said a warming world had benefits too, like less people dying from the cold. So let's kill more people with extreme heat and unpredictable weather instead...

I bet consumerism is a million times worse than it was 25 years ago, and I sadly can't see that slowing down any time soon.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

The funny thing about the past being better does have a grain of truth in it which no one can deny. As far as the natural world is concerned the past always had less people in it. Before the emergence of email and smart phones, it was said that what was good for the country was good for business. Now that everything has become commercialized by being monetized as seen by the million times increase in consumerism, it could be said that whatever is good for serving 8 billion, is not so good for the natural world. The mind operates like an event horizon. All kinds of events getting sucked in, lots of of brights flashes on the horizon, but compared to what's going in, not much coming out.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Interesting to see this piece on the PETM - and how the warming then occurred at a slower rate than today:

 

[Harpo]

New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Starting in 2050

The climate change analysis was written by a former fossil fuel executive and backed by the former chief of Australia's military.

www.vice.com

 

[Robert Zwilling]

From New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood... serious outcomes of climate related events but almost impossible to quantify because they “fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years.”

Could be a perfect source of new stories that do more than provide entertainment but it seems like those too only fall into the business as usual pit.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

One of the things that keeps popping up is that increased CO2 and higher temperatures will create dead oceans. That is only partially true. The oceans more than likely would be devoid of any of the life we recognize by sight. But the oceans would be far from dead. They would be filled to the brim with bacteria. Extremophile organisms would fill up the oceans, they wouldn't care about the ph, the temperatures, or the sediments that would probably accumulate. There were also several different types of soft body creatures besides jellyfish that predated hard body life and would probably do just fine. Calling hot house oceans nothing but dead is a product of people thinking that anything that doesn't involve people or things people associate with living isn't worth knowing. Which could be quite understandable because we wouldn't be there to see it.

 

[Harpo]

‘Frightening’ number of plant extinctions found in global survey

Study shows 571 species wiped out, and scientists say figure is likely to be big underestimate

www.theguardian.com

 

[-K2-]

Interesting to see this piece on the PETM - and how the warming then occurred at a slower rate than today:

Thanks for that! It really works well and supports what I have been working on in simplistic terms (some of the scientific studies I've been using take hours to decipher... per sentence )

K2

 

[AlexH]

Now China won't accept our plastic, we send it elsewhere, which isn't surprising. Here are heaps of plastic in Malaysia (see the presenter near the centre for scale). This plastic will likely never get recycled. Much of our waste is sent to illegal sites, some the size of three football pitches. Of course it has a negative impact on locals, including water supplies.

From War on Plastic on the BBC.

I knew wet wipes were bad, but I didn't realise how much plastic fibres come off our synthetic clothes in the wash and enter the water system, and are in the air from us wearing them!

 

[Robert Zwilling]

The denial of US plastic trash by China started in January. It's not a question of not accepting it. The trash to be recycled is basically trash, even if you sort it all out, it gets dumped in with recyclable garbage that isn't so well sorted. It then costs extra money to handle it, plus the accepting country has to dispose of all the non recyclable trash mixed in with it. Each country is becoming responsible for it's own trash. The bottom line is that China already has to deal with home grown trash that isn't properly sorted, they don't need it from anyone else.

Then the dumpers started looking for other places to dump the trash, and at first it's okay but because of the sheer volume of it starts to pile up. Gets rejected again. Bottom line is get prepared for it to start piling up in your own country. It's a nasty part of commercialism that no one ever talks about. If the situation was examined as a math formula it would easy to see that there is no cost built into the disposal of any product. That has to come out of the profit. Whether it is nuclear waste or food containers, it's all treated the same way, let some one else do it. When 8 billion people are now being served the mistakes in planning become apparent quite easily. The proverbial carpet everything is being swept under is already 2 feet off the ground.

The wipes that say flushable are a joke. Sure they go down your pipes, then out into the street pipes, as nothing is in the pipes for them to get stuck on. Just like the supposedly clean recyclable trash, what seems small and inconspicuous meets up with all the rest of the small and inconspicuous trash. Once that hits the main lines it's time to see what serving eight billion does and sure enough, what was claimed flushable was indeed flushable, it just can't be transported through pipes with equipment or obstructions in them. Those obstructions are invisible to water but not to the crap people are flushing down the pipes.

Last year it was reported that one ran the risk of ingesting 10,000 pieces of micro plastic bits if they ate shell fish. This year it has been reported that if one regularly drinks water in plastic bottles the risk is 100,000 micro plastic bits. We want to use one use plastic so we have no choice but to pay the price, in this case it's eat the price. A fitting punishment for ignorance. There are no known health risks for ingesting micro plastic because no one is studying the problem. That's called digital logic. Perfectly true. And perfectly wrong. This story is interesting in so many ways. The researchers had to trudge through plastic debris on the land, then through the trash on the beach and peer into the plastic littered water and mud and sand around the shell fish. Not once did it apparently occur to these researchers that all the plastic debris around them was getting into our food and water. Wonder if the researchers were drinking plastic bottled water when collecting the shell fish.

The source of plastic fibers in the air is coming from a cloud of confusion. Part of the problem is that when plastic is recycled it gets brittle. Fabrics and other materials made from virgin plastic shed less than fabrics and materials made from recycled plastic. That means we shouldn't be using recycled plastic in applications that cause it to shed plastic. Using recycled plastic allows products to be made from cheaper materials. Instead of using recycled plastic to make more plastic fabrics they should be using natural substances to make more natural products that can safely shed all day long.

One possible cause for this confusion is that everyone's brains are soaking in a solution of pollution that is created by all the products, materials, and chemicals we use in everyday life. Everything sheds particles. The smaller the particle gets, the less it's movement is controlled by gravity and more by forces such as the wind or other physical currents of motion. Being relatively weightless it can easily travel half way around the world and that's all it really needs to do. Some of it does come back again and again. The plastic debris floating around is a free mass transportation system for the microbes, fungi, and viruses powered by gravity and garbage.