The recent news that many scientists have signed an open letter warning about how soon it will be too late to “save Earth” has been widely broadcast; not that this stops me from republishing the version of the news story that I read on the EarthSky blog site.
Here it is.
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Scientists warn: Soon it will be too late to save Earth
By Eleanor Imster in EARTH | HUMAN WORLD | November 16, 2017
More than 15,000 scientists in 184 countries have signed a letter urging the world to address major environmental concerns. “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out.”
A letter to all of us, signed by more than 15,000 scientists (and counting) in 184 countries, warns that human well-being will be severely jeopardized by continuing trends in environmental harm, including our changing climate, deforestation, loss of access to fresh water, species extinctions and human population growth.
Entitled World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, it was published in the international journal Bioscience on November 13, 2017.
In 1992, more than 1,700 scientists signed a World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity published by the Union of Concerned Scientists. But global trends have worsened since 1992, the authors wrote in the new letter. In the last 25 years, trends in nine environmental issues suggest that humanity is continuing to risk its future.
Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home.
The letter also says …
By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperiled biosphere.
The article was written by an international team led by William Ripple of Oregon State University led the international team of scientists who created the letter. Ripple said in a statement:
Some people might be tempted to dismiss this evidence and think we are just being alarmist. Scientists are in the business of analyzing data and looking at the long-term consequences. Those who signed this second warning aren’t just raising a false alarm. They are acknowledging the obvious signs that we are heading down an unsustainable path. We are hoping that our paper will ignite a wide-spread public debate about the global environment and climate.
Progress in some areas — such as a reduction in ozone-depleting chemicals and an increase in energy generated from renewable sources — shows that positive changes can be made, the authors wrote. There has been a rapid decline in fertility rates in some regions, which can be attributed to investments in education for women, they added. The rate of deforestation in some regions has also slowed.
The warning came with steps that can be taken to reverse negative trends, but the authors suggested that it may take a groundswell of public pressure to convince political leaders to take the right corrective actions. Such activities could include establishing more terrestrial and marine reserves, strengthening enforcement of anti-poaching laws and restraints on wildlife trade, expanding family planning and educational programs for women, promoting a dietary shift toward plant-based foods and massively adopting renewable energy and other “green” technologies.
Scientists who did not sign the warning prior to publication can endorse the published warning here.
Bottom line: A letter entitled World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, urging the world to address major environmental concerns. was signed by more than 15,000 scientists in 184 countries.
As is the way with this modern inter-connected world it was but a moment to track down said William Ripple, find his email address and ask him what he recommended as the top things that you and I should be doing now.
Not just for you and me but for all the animals as well on this very beautiful planet.
Bill’s reply is part of tomorrow’ post. See you then!
My posts of the last few days have been in the ‘cuddly, cosy’ vein of life and, as many would say, a long way from the reality of this 21st century.
The reality is tough and scary and many, including me, favour running away from scary places. I’m sure that the urge to flee and hide is a survival behaviour from long time ago. BUT!! But the only hope for us humans is to face the facts full on.
Take, for example, the Ganges River. We have all heard of this famous river (my emphasis below):
The source of the Ganges is the Gangotri glacier. Here it is:
Gaumukh, snout of the Gangotri glacier,surrounded by the Bhagirathi peaks of Garhwal Himalayas, at an altitude of over 4,000 metres. Photo: Vidya Venkat.
Scientists say dwindling snowfall affects volume of water fed to the Bhagirathi, the main source of the Ganga
After a four-hour-long trek from Bhojwasa, the final camping spot in Gangotri, when a brown, fractured pile of rocks finally came into view it was hard to believe that this was the mouth of the glacier from which the ‘holy’ Ganga emerged.
Gaumukh, the snout of the Gangotri glacier, named after its shape like the mouth of a cow, has retreated by over 3 kilometres since 1817, says glaciologist Milap Chand Sharma of Jawaharlal Nehru University.
It was nearly two centuries ago that the retreat of the glacier was first documented by John Hodgson, a Survey of India geologist.
With 10 Indian States reeling under drought and the country facing a severe water crisis after two weak monsoons, the story of retreating freshwater sources such as the Himalayan glaciers is worrying. And though a three-kilometre retreat over a period of two centuries might seem insignificant at first glance, data shows that the rate of retreat has increased sharply since 1971. The rate of retreat is 22 metres per year.
Twenty-two metres or seventy-two feet a year!
Wringing our hands is no good. All of us who care for our Living Planet have to shout out just what is going on. As George Monbiot continues to do. Take his latest essay, for example, that is republished here in full with GM’s very kind permission.
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Insectageddon
The scale and speed of environmental collapse is beyond imagination.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 20th October 2017
Which of these would you name as the world’s most pressing environmental issue? Climate breakdown, air pollution, water loss, plastic waste or urban expansion? My answer is none of the above. Almost incredibly, I believe that climate breakdown takes third place, behind two issues that receive only a fraction of the attention.
This is not to downgrade the danger presented by global heating – on the contrary, it presents an existential threat. It is simply that I have come to realise that two other issues have such huge and immediate impacts that they push even this great predicament into third place.
One is industrial fishing, which, all over the blue planet, is now causing systemic ecological collapse. The other is the erasure of non-human life from the land by farming.
And perhaps not only non-human life. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, at current rates of soil loss, driven largely by poor farming practice, we have just 60 years of harvests left. And this is before the Global Land Outlook report, published in September, found that productivity is already declining on 20% of the world’s cropland.
The impact on wildlife of changes in farming practice (and the expansion of the farmed area) is so rapid and severe that it is hard to get your head round the scale of what is happening. A study published this week in the journal Plos One reveals that flying insects surveyed on nature reserves in Germany have declined by 76% in 27 years. The most likely cause of this Insectageddon is that the land surrounding those reserves has become hostile to them: the volume of pesticides and the destruction of habitat have turned farmland into a wildlife desert.
It is remarkable that we need to rely on a study in Germany to see what is likely to have been happening worldwide: long-term surveys of this kind simply do not exist elsewhere. This failure reflects distorted priorities in the funding of science. There is no end of grants for research on how to kill insects, but hardly any money for discovering what the impacts of this killing might be. Instead, the work has been left – as in the German case – to recordings by amateur naturalists.
But anyone of my generation (ie in the second bloom of youth) can see and feel the change. We remember the “moth snowstorm” that filled the headlight beams of our parents’ cars on summer nights (memorialised in Michael McCarthy’s lovely book of that name). Every year I collected dozens of species of caterpillars and watched them grow and pupate and hatch. This year I tried to find some caterpillars for my children to raise. I spent the whole summer looking and, aside from the cabbage whites on our broccoli plants, found nothing in the wild but one garden tiger larva. Yes, one caterpillar in one year. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing – or rather, not seeing.
Insects, of course, are critical to the survival of the rest of the living world. Knowing what we now know, there is nothing surprising about the calamitous decline of insect-eating birds. Those flying insects – not just bees and hoverflies but species of many different families – are the pollinators without which a vast tract of the plant kingdom, both wild and cultivated, cannot survive. The wonders of the living planet are vanishing before our eyes.
Well, I hear you say, we have to feed the world. Yes, but not this way. As a UN report published in March explained, the notion that pesticide use is essential for feeding a growing population is a myth. A recent study in Nature Plants reveals that most farms would increase production if they cut their use of pesticides. A study in the journal Arthropod-Plant Interactions shows that the more neonicotinoid pesticides were used to treat rapeseed crops, the more their yield declines. Why? Because the pesticides harm or kill the pollinators on which the crop depends.
Farmers and governments have been comprehensively conned by the global pesticide industry. It has ensured its products should not be properly regulated or even, in real-world conditions, properly assessed. A massive media onslaught by this industry has bamboozled us all about its utility and its impacts on the health of both human beings and the natural world.
The profits of these companies depend on ecocide. Do we allow them to hold the world to ransom, or do we acknowledge that the survival of the living world is more important than returns to their shareholders? At the moment, shareholder value comes first. And it will count for nothing when we have lost the living systems on which our survival depends.
To save ourselves and the rest of the living world, here’s what we need to do:
We need a global treaty to regulate pesticides, and put the manufacturers back in their box.
We need environmental impact assessments for the farming and fishing industries. It is amazing that, while these sectors present the greatest threats to the living world, they are, uniquely in many nations, not subject to such oversight.
We need firm rules based on the outcomes of these assessments, obliging those who use the land to protect and restore the ecosystems on which we all depend.
We need to reduce the amount of land used by farming, while sustaining the production of food. The most obvious way is greatly to reduce our use of livestock: many of the crops we grow and all of the grazing land we use are deployed to feed them. One study in Britain suggests that, if we stopped using animal products, everyone in Britain could be fed on just 3m of our 18.5m hectares of current farmland (or on 7m hectares if all our farming were organic). This would allow us to create huge wildlife and soil refuges: an investment against a terrifying future.
We should stop using land that should be growing food for people to grow maize for biogas and fuel for cars.
Then, at least, nature and people would have some respite from the global onslaught. And, I hope, a chance of getting through the century.
But sometime during that panicked retreat from the house on Wikiup Bridge Way, the family dog, Izzy, bolted away.
Trying to find her amid the chaos of fire proved too dangerous.
And so this family, like countless others in California’s wine country, left more than just their home behind. When they drove through sheer walls of flame and across an uncertain wooden bridge to get to safety — they left their hearts back on Wikiup Bridge Way.
It turned out, it was the one thing they couldn’t leave behind.
A day and a half later, while the area was still smoldering and roads were still closed, Jack Weaver and Patrick Widen made the nearly-three-mile trek back to the house.
“It was incredibly important,” Weaver, who grew up in that house, tells MNN. “My mother was a wreck for having gone through that. Nobody wanted us to go back because they were worried we would get injured.”
‘I can see …’
In a video of their return, posted on Facebook and shared below, you can hear the men laboring to catch their breath amid blackened trees and still-crackling ruins.
“Izzy!” Weaver is heard calling into the smoky veil. Over and over again.
They push farther and farther ahead. “Izzy!”
“Almost to the house,” Weaver says in the video. “I can see … the gate. The gate’s still standing.”
The Weaver family home was gone. (Photo: Jack Weaver)
A moment later, he adds, “I don’t see the house at all. F$#k.”
It had burned to the ground.
But someone was still standing.
“Izzy’s here!” Weaver calls, his voice choked with emotion. “Izzy!”
“Oh my God! Come here, baby!”
The giant dog bounces into view, her tail whirring like a helicopter.
Izzy had stood faithfully by the burnt-down family home. (Photo: Jack Weaver)
“When she same running around — you can probably hear it in my voice — we were shocked and ecstatic,” Weaver says later. “I wish I could have filmed longer, the happy reunion, but I was so happy I dropped my phone.”
Since the family posted the video, it’s been shared more than 4,000 times. Maybe it’s a testament to the need for all of us to find a happy ending amid heartache.
In any case, Izzy is where she belongs now — in the arms of her family — a testament to faith under fire.
“She didn’t have a burn on her,” Weaver says. “It definitely lifted my family’s spirits.”
Izzy is back where she belongs. (Photo: Beckyjean Widen)
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YouTube also carried a video:
Well done, Izzy, and Jean and I send you fondest hugs!
(Please note that I am letting this post run until Sunday, 15th Oct.)
For many years I have both read George Monbiot’s writings, especially those published by The Guardian newspaper, and deeply respected his insight, intelligence and analysis of the world in which we now live.
So when I heard of his latest book, published by Verso Books both sides of the ‘pond’, it was ordered immediately. It was a book I badly wanted to read. I was not disappointed.
So what is Mr. Monbiot’s message?
To answer that question let me lean on a forthcoming talk being given by him in Edinburgh in eight days time. For he is speaking at a Scottish Green Party event on October 20th.
Here’s the thrust of what is to be covered at that meeting:
What does the good life—and the good society—look like in the twenty-first century?
A toxic ideology rules the world – of extreme competition and individualism. It misrepresents human nature, destroying hope and common purpose. Only a positive vision can replace it, a new story that re-engages people in politics and lights a path to a better world.
Join us for an evening of discussion with George Monbiot as he talks about his new book: ‘Out of the wreckage: a new politics in an age of crisis‘. New findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and cooperators. George argues that we can build on these findings to create a new politics: a ‘politics of belonging’.
So what does this mean for social and environmental justice campaigning in Edinburgh? How do we create a politics of belongings here in Scotland? There will be plenty of opportunity for George Monbiot and the audience to share their insights.
Doors open: 6pm
George Monbiot will speak from 7-7.30pm and there will then be a Q&A, plus a chance buy books, mingle and browse stalls.
This event is jointly hosted by Global Justice Now and the Scottish Green party.
To my mind, this book not only addresses, full on, the madness (my word) of these present times but also offers strong, positive recommendations as to how we, as in the societies of all the major nations, can turn it around and offer a decent future for future generations. That’s why I am so strongly recommending it.
For George Monbiot, neoliberalism should best be understood as a “story”, one that was conveniently on offer at precisely the moment when the previous “story” – namely Keynesianism – fell to pieces in the mid-1970s. The power of stories is overwhelming, as they are “the means by which we navigate the world. They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals”. The particular story of neoliberalism “defines us as competitors, guided above all other impulses by the urge to get ahead of our fellows”.
It should be said at once that we are desperately in need of new ideas for a society and a democracy where trust in all established institutions is at a record low and even a Tory prime minister admits the country doesn’t work for everyone. Monbiot’s ideas are clear, well-reasoned and sometimes compelling. Many will mock his attempt at a “story of hope and restoration”; even some of his Guardian colleagues call him “George Moonshine”. Human beings, his critics will say, are inherently selfish and self-maximising. Give them the opportunity to freeload off others’ efforts and they will take it.
Such objections are easily dismissed. Yes, there’s a self-interested streak in all of us but, as Monbiot observes, we also have instincts for co-operation and sensitivity to others’ needs. Think of the hundreds who volunteer to run food banks and of the thousands more who donate to them. Think of those Europeans who, at great risk to themselves, sheltered Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War. The altruistic instinct can be kindled in almost anybody. It is suppressed, however, in a society that rewards the selfish but penalises – and brands as “mugs” – those who are more mindful of our needs, and the planet’s. That society has led to loneliness, high levels of mental illness and increasingly discordant political discourse. Shouldn’t we at least try developing a society that does more to nurture the better angels of our nature?
Better still, settle down with a cup of tea, put your feet up for fifteen minutes and listen to this:
This book struck me as the most important book I have ever read in my lifetime. Why? Because it gets to the heart of what is happening today. But it offers even more than that. For instead of a shrug of the shoulders or eyes turned skywards from a friend when one mutters about the fact that we are living in ‘interesting times’, George Monbiot offers hope and guidance.
Take the very last two paragraphs from the final chapter of his book.
Coming Home to Ourselves
Through restoring community, renewing civic life and claiming our place in the world, we build a society in which our extraordinary nature – our altruism, empathy and deep connection – is released.
When we emerge from the age of loneliness and alienation, from an obsession with competition and extreme individualism, from the worship of image and celebrity and power and wealth, we will find a person waiting for us. It is a person better than we might have imagined, whose real character has been suppressed. It is one who lives inside us, who has been there all along.
“- our altruism, empathy and deep connection -”
I see these persons every day of my life. Via the pages of this blog.
Yes, I am referring to all of you who wander in and out of this place, who demonstrate your compassion, your love and your dedication to the dogs and all the other animals of this world.
Here’s what HSUS are doing for the poor dogs out in Puerto Rico.
From time to time we do donate a few cents to The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) because their size and huge support from so many people does allow them to step up to the really big needs.
And Hurricane Maria certainly left a big need in its wake for dogs.
The HSUS Animal Rescue Team (ART) assists with animal rescue and response following Hurricane Maria on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. (Photo: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/AP Images for The HSUS)
In the wake of Hurricane Maria, hundreds of dogs, as well as cats, horses and even a few pigs, are getting off the island.
Several rescue groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, have waded into the breach to rescue some of the island’s most defenseless residents: its burgeoning population of stray dogs, as well as those currently in shelters.
HSUS has a history with the territory, helping with law enforcement training and horse care, and working closely with animal shelters across the island.
“Since the storm hit, we’ve been doing our best to stay in contact, given the communication challenges, with all of our shelter partners and other partners on the island,” Inga Fricke, director of pet retention programs for HSUS, tells MNN.
Puppies under a house in Vieques, Puerto Rico. (Photo: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/AP Images for The HSUS)
This week, the organization — with help from partners like Wings of Rescue and St. Hubert’s Animal Welfare Center — began airlifting dogs from stressed island shelters to a processing center in New Jersey.
“They get vetted there, get the care they need and then get parceled out to other partners around the country,” Fricke says.
Not every animal survived Maria’s onslaught. Notably, a southeast corner of the island once teeming with strays — nicknamed “Dead Dog Beach” — was found to be desolate when rescuers arrived.
“We’re hearing from our rescuers who have a feeding area where they go every day and we are hearing that most of those dogs have perished,” Twig Mowatt, co-founder of All Sato Rescue, tells MNN.
While the organization is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mowatt is just outside of Boston, coordinating with the Humane Society of Puerto Rico to get vulnerable dogs airlifted to the mainland.
“I’m kind of like an air traffic controller these days,” she says. “My group is largely rescue and transport but we partner with the humane society for those really badly affected.”
“We were able to get dogs out on Friday and then yesterday,” Mowatt adds.
John Peaveler, an inspector with HSUS, does a field inspection in Vieques. (Photo: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/AP Images for The HSUS)
Described as “apocalyptic,” the hurricane left much of the island in the dark, without electricity or communications. And while the humanitarian relief effort is ongoing — much of the island was still without power in early October — the search for animals in distress may be even more complicated.
With an estimated 150,000 dogs in Puerto Rico and not enough animal shelters, there’s no space for dogs found roaming at large. As a result, many of them are put down immediately.
A crated dog is prepared for transport to New Jersey. (Photo: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/AP Images for The HSUS)
“We have even done several transports, even just this year, to try and alleviate some of the overcrowding and the pressures on the shelters across the island,” Fricke explains.
“But certainly our focus now, after the hurricane, is to try and remove as many of the sheltered animals as possible so we can allow them to make room for animals that unfortunately have been affected by the storm and can’t be kept by their families any more for any reason.”
With the recent earthquakes in Mexico being a glorious example of that!
Nobody would have missed out on the news of the terrible catastrophe of the recent earthquakes in Mexico.
As seen on the NBC news site.
Mexico Earthquake Death Toll Climbs as Dozens Sleep on Streets
byThe Associated Press
JUCHITAN, Mexico — The death toll from one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in Mexico rose to at least 61 early Saturday as workers scrambled to respond to the destruction just as Hurricane Katia struck its coastline.
The 8.1 quake off the southern Pacific coast just before midnight Thursday toppled hundreds of buildings in several states. Hardest-hit was Juchitan, Oaxaca, where 36 people died and a third of the city’s homes collapsed or were otherwise rendered uninhabitable, President Enrique Pena Nieto said late Friday in an interview with the Televisa news network.
It’s impossible to truly appreciate the terror of such an event unless one has had the misfortune of already living through such an earthquake. Likewise, almost as difficult to appreciate the terror of being trapped.
But thank goodness for dogs that are trained to sniff out those trapped persons. Such as Frida who saved so many lives down in Mexico. Here’s the account of Frida’s special deeds as carried on the Care2 site.
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Frida, the Heroic Rescue Dog, Saves Lives After Mexico’s Earthquake
Photos and videos of a rescue dog named Frida have gone viral — complete with her cute-yet-necessary work uniform: doggie goggles, vest and four protective, Velco-strapped booties. She has become a four-legged symbol of hope during these dark times in Mexico.
Although, contrary to some early news reports, Frida didn’t really rescue 52 people after the devastating 7.1 earthquake struck Mexico Sept. 19, the 7-year-old yellow Labrador retriever has nonetheless become a media sensation.
What’s true is that prior to the earthquake, Frida (she’s named after the artist Frida Kahlo) had helped rescue 12 people and recover the bodies of 40 people during her career as a disaster rescue dog with the Mexican Navy’s (SEMAR) Canine Unit.
Working with 14 other dogs in the unit, she has located 12 victims of the Sept. 19 quake so far.
Frida’s first mission after the earthquake struck was to find survivors at the Enrique Rebsamen School in Mexico City. Eleven children were found alive by other emergency workers. Tragically, 19 children and six adults did not survive.
Frida suffered from exhaustion after searching the school Sept. 20, her handler, Israel Arauz Salinas, told the Los Angeles Times. After napping and drinking plenty of water with electrolytes, she was in better spirits the following day and ready to go back to work.
Frida has two colleagues in the Canine Unit, Evil and Echo, who are both one-year-old Belgian Malinois dogs. Because Frida is getting on in years, Evil and Echo enter collapsed buildings before she does. If they find someone, Frida enters and spends no longer than 20 minutes inside the building.
The disaster rescue dogs can reach areas that are inaccessible to human responders, including spaces that are less than 20 inches high. When they find a victim who’s alive, the dogs bark. Otherwise they stop and slowly approach the body. “They act afraid,” Salinas told the L.A. Times. “That indicates to us that there is a cadaver.”
Like the other dogs in the Canine Unit, Frida began training when she was just two months old. The skills the dogs show in training determine whether they will go on to detect people, narcotics or explosives.
To train dogs to find people, they are first taught to fetch toys and balls. Once they learn how to do that, their trainers run with the toy or ball in their hands. The dogs learn to associate the smell of the person with the reward of the ball, Salinas told the L.A. Times. Before they’re ready to be dispatched to disaster areas, the dogs train for about three hours a day for a year.
Just two weeks before the Sept. 19 earthquake, Frida helped locate the body of a policeman after a massive 8.1 quake struck Juchitan. She also worked in Ecuador after an earthquake there in April last year.
Before Frida won the hearts of the rest of the world, even the president of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto, was a fan of hers (or at least the person in charge of his official Twitter account was).
“She is @Frida, belongs to the #SEMAR_mx and has helped save 52 lives in various natural disasters at the national and international levels,” says a @PresidenciaMX tweet on Sept. 13.
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I’m going to finish off today’s post with a recent video aired by Quebec News. (Actually, a series of still photographs.)
Quebec NEWSPublished on Sep 21, 2017
Thousands of emergency services, military, and civilians are currently searching through rubble across the country for survivors. Among them are Frida, a rescue dog who has saved 52 people throughout her career, according to the office of Mexico’s President. Frida’s adorable outfit has a purpose. The goggles are to protect her eyes from smoke and debris, while the boots protect her feet from rough terrain. A massive 7.1 earthquake rocked Mexico earlier this week,It was the second major earthquake to hit Mexico in two weeks
Our English guests, Mark and Debbie, who stayed with us after traveling to Warm Springs, South-East of Portland, Oregon, to view the eclipse took the following three photographs.
See the crescents in the dappled shade of a near by bush. 10 minutes before totality.
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Totality – August 21st, 2017.
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Our English guests.
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Then you will love the next one. Sent in by Neil Kelly from Devon, England.
Madison wears sunglasses to view the eclipse along the Cumberland River, Nashville, USA
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And another beauty courtesy of Neil K.
Last but not least ….
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Back to the stars!
The rising moon a little after 5am on the 19th August.
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And there hanging above that rising moon was Venus!
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Finally, back to Tanja Brandt whose most beautiful photographs will be gracing these Picture Parades in the future.
We all know that so many things in life have two sides to them. As in a positive and negative side. Which ‘side’ we look at has more to do with ourselves, again as you all know.
So when I republished an essay from Patrice Ayme a little over a year ago about the loss of the ice in Antarctica I was in harmony with Patrice’s gloomy stance:
I have written for years that a runaway Antarctica was certain, with half the icy continent melting rather spectacularly on an horizon of two centuries at most, and probably much less than that. This rested on the fact that half of Antarctica rests on nothing but bedrock at the bottom of the sea. At the bottom of what should naturally be the sea, in the present circumstances of significant greenhouse gas concentrations.
But Lady Luck comes into view and we have this: (Courtesy of Mother Nature Network.)
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Global warming is making Antarctica green again, and it’s stunning
At current rates, it’s not crazy to think that the Antarctic peninsula could eventually become forested again.
From white to green: plant life is booming in Antarctica as the climate warms. (Photo: Matt Amesbury, University of Exeter/Flickr)
When you think of Antarctica, you probably imagine a frigid, windswept, icy, inhospitable domain; the whitest, most barren canvas on Earth. That’s pretty much the way the Southern continent has been for at least the last 3 million years, since the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels approached their current levels. But times, they are a-changing.
The effects of global warming are beginning to radically alter the Antarctic landscape in some surprising ways. Scientists say it’s like looking back in time, to an epoch when this bleached terrain was actually green. Mossy mats are rapidly spreading across the thawed, exposed soils at unprecedented rates, transforming the land from a place of desolation, to a place of viridescence.
At the very least, we’re getting a peek at Antarctica’s future, which like its past was green and filled with plant-life, reports the Washington Post.
“This is another indicator that Antarctica is moving backward in geologic time — which makes sense, considering atmospheric CO2 levels have already risen to levels that the planet hasn’t seen since the Pliocene, 3 million years ago, when the Antarctic ice sheet was smaller, and sea-levels were higher,” said Rob DeConto, a glaciologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
“If greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, Antarctica will head even further back in geologic time… perhaps the peninsula will even become forested again someday, like it was during the greenhouse climates of the Cretaceous and Eocene, when the continent was ice free.”
So far, the greening of Antarctica is mostly limited to the peninsula, where two different species of mosses are fanning out at a startling clip, at four to five times the rate seen just a few decades ago. They gain a footing in the summers, when the frozen ground thaws, then freeze back over in the winter. But these layers-upon-layers are thickening, generating an increasingly detailed record of Antarctica’s warming climate.
It’s perhaps only a matter of time before grasses, bushes, perhaps even trees begin to sprout. As beautiful as a forested Antarctica might be to imagine, it’s important to remember that this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Climate change is an ambiguous beast; Antarctica might be getting greener, but deserts elsewhere in the world are expanding, sea levels are rising, and weather is becoming more severe.
“These changes, combined with increased ice-free land areas from glacier retreat, will drive large-scale alteration to the biological functioning, appearance, and landscape of the [Antarctic peninsula] over the rest of the 21st century and beyond,” wrote the authors of the study, which was published in the journal Current Biology.
Lead author Matthew Amesbury added: “Even these relatively remote ecosystems, that people might think are relatively untouched by human kind, are showing the effects of human induced climate change.”
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Sorry to drag out this old saw of mine, but it is so perfect: “I can predict anything except those things that involve the future”!
Because I am still staying with the Lady Luck theme but this time going from the vastness of the Southern polar regions to something a little closer to home. (Again, seen on Mother Nature Network.)
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Pit bull on ‘death row’ at shelter gets new life as police dog
Leonard recently became Ohio’s first ever pit bull K-9. Jenn Savedge May 19, 2017
Leonard found his forever home with Ohio’s Clay Township police force. (Photo: Union County Humane Society/Facebook)
When Leonard, a stout young pit bull, arrived on the doorstep of the Union County Humane Society in Ohio a few months ago, the staff had little hope for his prospects of being adopted. Leonard was deemed “aggressive,” and that meant he was more likely to be euthanized than sent home with a new family. But Jim Alloway, the center director, saw something different in the dog. And thanks to his observation, Leonard has a future that includes work, play and lots of belly rubs.
As luck would have it, Alloway has an extensive background of working with police dogs. He realized Leonard’s aggression was really a very strong desire to play. Whenever someone was holding something, Leonard wanted it and would try to grab it. As a pet in the average family, this may not be a desirable trait. But this strong “prey drive” made him a great candidate for training as a police dog.
So Alloway called Storm Dog K-9 training. After an initial round of testing, Mike Pennington, the owner of the training facility, agreed to take Leonard on and train him to sniff out narcotics. (Leonard wasn’t a good candidate for tracking and catching suspects because he loves people way too much.)
Before his training with Pennington, Leonard didn’t even know basic commands. But after a few weeks of hard work — which his trainers said he absolutely loved — Leonard was fully certified as a police dog, becoming Ohio’s first pit bull K-9 officer.
Leonard was paired with Terry Mitchell, Clay Township’s Chief of Police. Mitchell told the local ABC affiliate that he was unsure at first about the idea of using a pit bull as a K-9. But the pair bonded immediately.
“I scheduled a time to come down and see him, and after about 10 minutes, I knew this was the dog for us,” Mitchell said.
Leonard officially started work with the force this week. When he has his police vest on, Mitchell says the pup is all business and ready to tackle his narcotics-sniffing job. Off-duty though, Leonard is just a sweet, playful pup, hopping on Mitchell’s lap for evening naps. Oh, and according to Mitchell, he snores horribly.
Leonard — and Mitchell — couldn’t be happier.
ooOOoo
Wonder how long it will be before we have happy ex-rescue dogs frolicking through the forests of Antarctica!!
The creators of “SKYGLOW,” a crowd-funded project showing the impact of urban light pollution through time-lapse videos, photos and a book, have another stunning video to share. In “Kaibab Elegy,” filmmakers Gavin Heffernan and Harun Mehmedinović visit Grand Canyon National Park and capture a rare weather event.
In the mesmerizing video, clouds build inside the canyon almost like bubbling water filling a jacuzzi as the sun rises and sets in the background, creating the pinkest sky you’ve ever seen. Those clouds roll like waves in the ocean and crash against the cliffs. This phenomenon is called full cloud inversion, and it happens when cold air is trapped in the canyon and topped by a layer of warm air, which combines with moisture and condensation.
“We were extremely lucky to be there to capture it, and it’s a collection of unique footage not found anywhere else,” Mehmedinović says.
He and Heffernan, who journeyed 150,000 miles around the globe for their new book and video series, work with the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit fighting to preserve the dark skies around the world.
Why can’t we leave nature to do what’s best for our world!
Now, I would be the first to ‘tut-tut’ a little over my sub-heading. For here I am sitting in front of a computer in a room in a reasonably-sized home that undoubtedly has denuded the natural world formerly underneath the present foundations.
Thirteen acres orientated West-East.
Plus, as the property boundary shown on the above picture confirms, about 50% of our acreage is no longer wilderness.
Ergo, it is impossible for humans to live on this planet without there being consequences that conflict with the natural order of the wild.
But homes to live in are one thing. A planned madness for the Lake District in Northern England is another thing altogether.
The attempt to turn the Lake District into a World Heritage site would be a disaster
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 9th May 2017
If this bid for power succeeds, the consequences for Britain will be irreversible. It will privilege special interests over the public good, shut out the voices of opposition and damage the fabric of the nation, perhaps indefinitely. No, I’m not writing about the election.
In the next few weeks Unesco, the UN’s cultural organisation, will decide whether or not to grant World Heritage status to the Lake District. Once the decision is made, it is effectively irreversible.
Shouldn’t we be proud that this grand scenery, that plays such a prominent role in our perceptions of nationhood, will achieve official global recognition? On the contrary, we should raise our voices against it. World Heritage status would lock the Lake District into its current, shocking state, ensuring that recovery becomes almost impossible.
Stand back from the fells and valleys and try to judge this vista as you would a landscape in any other part of the world. What you will see is the great damage farming has inflicted: wet deserts grazed down to turf and rock; erosion gullies from which piles of stones spill; woods in which no new trees have grown for 80 years, as every seedling has been nibbled out by sheep; dredged and canalised rivers, empty of wildlife and dangerous to the people living downstream; tracts of bare mountainside on which every spring is a silent one. Anyone with ecological knowledge should recoil from this scene.
This photo was used as the frontispiece of the “State of Conservation” section of the bid documents. It is meant to show how beautiful the fells are. If we saw it anywhere else, we would recognise it as an environmental disaster.
The documents supporting the bid for world heritage status are lavishly illustrated with photos, that inadvertently reveal what has happened to the national park. But this slow-burning disaster goes almost unmentioned in the text. On the contrary, the bid repeatedly claims that the park is in “good physical condition”, and that the relationship between grazing and wildlife is “harmonious”. Only on page 535, buried in a table, is the reality acknowledged: 75% of the sites that are meant to be protected for nature are in “unfavourable condition”.
This is another photo from the bid document, showing St John’s Beck in Thirlmere. The beck is notorious for its flashy response to rainfall – rising dangerously fast. It’s not hard to see why. As the photo shows, it has been dredged and canalised on behalf of the farmers in the valley, and now contains almost no natural features that can slow the flow.
This great national property has degenerated into a sheepwrecked wasteland. And the national park partnership, that submitted the bid, wants to keep it this way: this is the explicit purpose of its attempt to achieve world heritage status. It wants to preserve the Lake District as a “cultural landscape”. But whose culture? Whose landscape? There are only 1080 remaining farms in the district. Should the entire national park be managed for their benefit? If so, why? The question isn’t raised, let alone answered.
I can see the value and beauty of the traditional shepherding culture in the Lake District. I can also see that the farming there, reliant on subsidies, quad bikes and steel barns, now bears little relationship to traditional practice. As the size of landholdings has increased, it looks ever more like ranching and ever less like the old system the bid describes. The bid’s claim that farming there is “wholly authentic in terms of … its traditions, techniques and management systems” is neither intelligible nor true. Remnants of the old shepherding culture tend to be represented ceremonially, as its customs are mostly disconnected from the farm economy.
Shepherding is not the only cultural legacy in play. The other is that the Lake District is the birthplace of the modern conservation movement. Inspired by the Picturesque and Romantic movements, much of our environmental ethic and the groups representing it, such as the National Trust, originated here. Attempts to preserve natural beauty in the district began in the mid-18th century, with complaints against the felling of trees around Derwent Water. Today, the national park cares so little for this legacy that, as the bid admits, “there are no data available” on the condition of the Lake District’s woodlands.
The small group favoured by this bid sees environmental protection as anathema. Farmers’ organisations in the Lake District have fought tooth and nail against conservation measures. They revile the National Trust and the RSPB, whose mild efforts to protect the land from overgrazing are, with the help of a lazy and compliant media, treated like bubonic plague. As one of these farming groups exults, world heritage status “gives us a powerful weapon” that they can wield against those who seek to limit their impacts. If the plan is approved, this world heritage site would be a 230,000-hectare monument to overgrazing and ecological destruction.
30 years ago, this was a bare sheep pasture (with a couple of seeding birch trees). This is a photo I took (with my failing phone) on a hill elsewhere in Britain. It gives an idea of what parts of the Lake District fells could look like if they were allowed to recover.
This is not the only sense in which the bid is unsustainable. Nowhere in its 700 pages is Brexit mentioned. It was obviously written before the referendum, and has not been updated. Yet the entire vision relies, as the bid admits, on the economic viability of the farming system, which depends in turn on subsidies from the European Union.
Without these payments, there would be no sheep farming in the Lake District: it operates at a major loss. European subsidies counteract this loss, delivering an average net farm income of £9,600. Unsurprisingly, people are leaving the industry in droves: the number of farms in the national park is declining by 2% a year. And this is before the payments cease.
What is the national park partnership, that prepared this bid, going to do – march people onto the fells at gunpoint and demand they continue farming? Or does it hope that the government, amid the massacre of public investment that will follow Brexit, will not only match but exceed the £3bn of public money currently being passed to UK farmers by the European Union? Your guess is as good as mine. This omission alone should disqualify the bid.
The failure to mention this fatal issue looks to me like one of many attempts to pull the Herdwick wool over Unesco’s eyes. The entire bid is based on a fairy tale, a pretence that the rural economy of the Lake District hasn’t changed for 200 years. If Unesco grants world heritage status on these grounds, it will inflict irreparable harm on both our natural heritage and its own good standing.
The hills, whose clothes so many profess to admire, are naked. The narrative we are being asked to support is false. The attempt to ensure that the ecological disaster zone we call the Lake District National Park can never recover from its sheepwrecking is one long exercise in woolly thinking.
When one reads this one is left with a feeling of great sadness. A sadness that our ‘movers and shakers’ can’t resist the urge to meddle. Can’t understand the beauty that is found in nature in the raw.
Earlier on I illustrated how our own property has ‘interfered’ with the wilderness of this most beautiful Oregonian countryside. But as I hope to show you with the following photographs taken on our property back in 2014 that wild beauty can be hung on to in some measure.
Looking upstream along Bummer Creek from the driveway bridge.
I have sent a message to Unesco asking if the views of the public are being taken into account and, if so, how those views are to be communicated to Unesco. If you wish to contact them then the details are on this page: http://whc.unesco.org/en/world-heritage-centre/
Any replies from Unesco will be posted here.
UPDATE 0815 PDT May 22nd.
My email yesterday to Unesco was ‘bounced back’ as an invalid email address (despite me using the email address on the Unesco website!!).
But following George Monbiot’s reply to me, giving me the name of James Bridge (jbridge@unesco.org.uk) at Unesco, I have now sent Mr. Bridge the following email:
Dear Mr. Bridge,
I write as a British citizen, born a Londoner in 1944, to protest in the strongest possible terms to the proposal to turn the English Lake District into a World Heritage Site. This is your Tentative List reference http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5673/.
Would you please provide me with the details of where or whom within Unesco I can write setting out in detail my objections to this proposal?
Your soonest reply would be very much appreciated.
Sincerely,
Paul Handover
I won’t hold my breath over getting a quick reply.
Learning from Dogs 