Decline of the Empire

Vanishing Fauna

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The journal Science has published a special issue called Vanishing Fauna (aka. The Sixth Extinction). You can read the introduction to the issue here. Let's look at some of the abstracts. This first one gives a succinct statemate of the problem.

An animal-rich future  (Joshua Tewksbury and Haldre Rogers)

The rate at which animals are vanishing from this planet is one of the signatures of this age, as sure a sign of human dominance as our impact on Earth's nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon cycles. This disappearance of animals from the world's ecosystems is generally a by-product of human activity, not an intentional act.

Animals do matter to people, but on balance, they matter less than food, jobs, energy, money, and development.

As long as we continue to view animals in ecosystems as irrelevant to these basic demands, animals will lose.

Animals do matter, but not nearly as much as economic growth does.

And what about extinctions being "generally a by-product of human activity, not an intentional act?"

Now Official — The Internet Is Total Horseshit

I thought I'd take a look at The Daily Ticker, Yahoo Finance's blog. It was gone. Shut down, presumably by Chairman Marissa or one of her toadying Silicon Valley underlings. 

Some of you may remember that I used to quote that blog and embed their videos. That was 3 or 4 years ago now, when the 2008 meltdown was still fresh in people's minds. Henry Blodget and Aaron Task were running the show then, and they had some good things to say about this god-awful mess called the United States. But no more. Yahoo watered the blog down, and then watered it down some more, and now it appears they've finally shut it down for good.

Maybe Yahoo's Daily Ticker is down only today for some reason, I don't know. But that doesn't change what I have to say.

As I said back in April, in 2014, the historical lesson is complete. There seemed to be an opportunity for real change in America after the meltdown, but it only seemed that way—that was a mirage. We now know who won and who lost. America's elites have never been in a better position to screw the rest of us than they are right now. And they've been screwing us like there's no tomorrow. I wish George Carlin were here to see it, but he probably wouldn't want to be. RIP, George.

Peak Oil Strikes Back!

I thought I'd share again today...

With all the hype surrounding U.S. shale oil production, Americans forgot to think about what they fondly call the Rest of the World (RoW). But that omission has been addressed by two British papers on the same day, the Telegraph (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard) and the Financial Times (Guy Chazan).

You may be wondering, from an American perspective, whether the U.K. is included in the RoW. You know, Iraq, Tony Blair, extreme toadying, and all that.

Rest of World? Hard to say!

Life In The Oceans — Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

I see that Newsweek has discovered, albeit only temporarily, that the oceans are in trouble. Congratulations to them! (I guess). This small miracle of insight prompted me to repost this essay, which I originally published on October 2, 2013 — Dave

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When somebody looks at the ocean they see just the surface of the ocean. It’s just a beautiful sunset over the ocean. Unless you’re sitting in a very polluted area of the ocean, you don’t really notice it that much. So most of the stuff that’s going on is beyond our eyesight. it’s underneath. And so there’s a real challenge, I think, in communicating why this ocean is important to you, personally, and particularly to the farmer in Kansas. And it’s hard to talk about or show the impact that you’ve had on it.
   — Susan Avery, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

In a rare burst of environmental news, there was lots of press coverage of the IPCC's latest climate summary for policymakers, the first such report since 2007. In the United States, the new release was not deemed sufficiently important to kick the latest government shutdown threat off the front pages, but environmentalists have learned—or need to learn—to be happy with less.

In the midst of the climate coverage there appeared a quotation and question from Scripps Oceanography researcher Tim Barnett which raises some interesting questions about the typical human stance toward the biosphere. Barnett was a reviewer for the latest IPCC release.

“Temperatures measured over the short term are just one parameter,” said Dr Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in an interview. “There are far more critical things going on; the acidification of the ocean is happening a lot faster than anybody thought that it would, it’s sucking up more CO2; plankton, the basic food chain of the planet, are dying, it’s such a hugely important signal.

Why aren’t people using that as a measure of what is going on?”

Excellent question, Tim!

A Long-Running Tragedy

From Elizabeth Kolbert's Save The Elephants.

Poaching data from Thomson Reuters.

Meanwhile, as disturbing as the recent carnage is, the long-term view is, if anything, worse. Elephants and rhinos are among the last survivors of a once rich bestiary of giants. Australia was home to thirteen-foot-long marsupials. North America had mammoths and mastodons, South America glyptodonts and enormous sloths, Madagascar massive elephant birds and giant lemurs. Before people arrived on the scene, these megafauna were protected by their size; afterward their size became a liability. The giant beasts couldn’t reproduce fast enough to make up for the losses to human hunting, and so, one after another, they vanished. In this sense, what’s happening today in Africa is just the final act of a long-running tragedy.

Mike Chase, an American conservation biologist, is currently conducting an aerial census of Africa’s elephants. He started work on the project in February, when, he told the Huffington Post, he hoped to “leave people inspired and motivated with some good news.” But the opposite has happened. At a reserve in Ethiopia, where his team had expected to find three hundred elephants, they counted just thirty-six. Now, Chase said, “I feel as though the only good I’m doing is recording the extinction of one of the most magnificent animals that ever walked the earth.”

When I read that I felt the need to share. So I did.