http://www.dailygazette.com Global warming threatens to decimate many species Experts say evolution cannot keep pace with rapidly rising temperatures BY MICHAEL CASEY The Associated Press
BALI, Indonesia — More than 3,000 flying foxes dropped dead, falling from trees in Australia. Giant squid migrated north to commercial fishing grounds off California, gobbling anchovy and hake. Butterflies have gone extinct in the Alps. While humans debate at U.N. climate change talks in Bali, global warming is already wreaking havoc with nature. Most plants and animals are affected, and the change is occurring too quickly for them to evolve. “A hell of a lot of species are in big trouble,” said Stephen E. Williams, the director of the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity & Climate Change at James Cook University in Australia. “I don’t think there is any doubt we will see a lot of [extinctions],” he said. “But even before a species goes extinct, there are a lot of impacts. Most of the species here in the wet tropics would be reduced to ... 15 percent of their current habitat.” Globally, 30 percent of the Earth’s species could disappear if temperatures rise 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit — and up to 70 percent, if they rise 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, a U.N. network of scientists reported last month. It wouldn’t be the first time. There have been five major extinctions in the last 520 million years, and four of them have been linked to warmer tropical seas, according to a study published last month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a British scientific journal. The hardest hit will include plants and animals in colder climates or at higher elevations and those with limited ranges or little tolerance for temperature change, said Wendy Foden, a conservation biologist with the World Conservation Union, which catalogs threatened species. Butterflies that lived at high altitudes in North America and southern France have vanished, and polar bears and penguins are watching their habitat melt away. The carbon dioxide emissions that are a leading cause of global warming also turn oceans more acidic, killing coral reefs and the microscopic plankton that blue whales and other marine mammals depend on for food. “In the long run, every species will be affected,” Foden said. A few will benefit, chiefly those that breed quickly, already exist in varied climates and are able to adapt swiftly to changing conditions, scientists said. Think cockroaches, pigeons and weeds. The spread of a deadly fungus that thrives in warmer conditions has decimated some frog populations in South America, Africa and Europe. Then there are Australia’s flying foxes. More than 3,500 gray-headed and black flying foxes — huge bats — died in 2002 after temperatures rose above 107 degrees Fahrenheit in New South Wales, according to a report published last week in the Royal Society B journal. The rising temperatures are related to global warming, said the author, Justin Welbergen of the University of Cambridge. “It got really hot and suddenly started raining foxes from the trees,” said Welbergen, who witnessed the die-off. “It was quite gruesome. This colony had between 20,000 and 30,000 animals and about 10 percent of those individuals died.” In Australia’s Queensland state, temperatures are projected to rise 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, an outcome that could drive half the species to extinction in a mountainous stretch of tropical rain forest, Williams said. Even a 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit increase would reduce by half the habitat of the Thornton Peak nursery frog, golden bowerbird and the spotted-tail quoll, a cat-like mammal. “There are many species and plants that are restricted to the higher altitude areas,” he said. “It doesn’t take much of an increase in temperature to push them off the mountain. They can’t go anywhere.” As temperatures rise, animals are seeking cooler climes. In a study of more than 1,500 species, University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan concluded that 40 percent had shifted their ranges, mostly toward the poles. A dozen bird species have moved about 12 miles north in Britain, and 39 species of butterflies have shifted north by as much as 125 miles in Europe and North America, according to another study that Parmesan took part in. Millions of Mediterranean jellyfish have turned up off Northern Ireland and Scotland. The Humboldt squid, which can grow up to 7 feet long, has moved up the California coast as ocean waters warmed. “It’s the latest in a long series of bad news for fishermen,” said Stanford University’s Lou Zeidberg, adding that squid have been found as far north as Alaska in the past five years. With warmer weather, 60 percent of plant and animal species are migrating, breeding and blooming earlier in the spring, Parmesan said. But not all are, and that could upset relationships between birds and the insects they feed on as well as insects and the flowers they pollinate. ROB GRIFFITH/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A gray headed flying fox pants in an effort to cool down at Cabramatta Creek in an outer suburb of Sydney, Australia, during a very hot summer day in this 2006 photo. In 2002, more than 3,000 flying foxes dropped dead because of the heat.
More than 3,000 flying foxes dropped dead, falling from trees in Australia. Giant squid migrated north to commercial fishing grounds off California, gobbling anchovy and hake. Butterflies have gone extinct in the Alps.
And this didn't happen 10,000 years ago???? and who knows that???
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Globally, 30 percent of the Earth’s species could disappear if temperatures rise 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit — and up to 70 percent, if they rise 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, a U.N. network of scientists reported last month. It wouldn’t be the first time. There have been five major extinctions in the last 520 million years, and four of them have been linked to warmer tropical seas, according to a study published last month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a British scientific journal.
First of all, how the hell do they know what 'really' happened 520million years ago? Is it fact or theory? And obviously, if this did IN FACT happen some 520million years ago....civilization seemed to continue on. In fact, there is an on going concern of over population. So where is the problem?
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
I'd like to know how they think ANYTHING was around 520 million years ago. My account says it's only been about 5,000, maybe 6,000 years total that the Earth's been in existence. But that's science for you, throwing fact out the window.
I hope to God civilization hasn't existed for millions of years, cause I would be very depressed to think that we have only come this far! And what the heck have we learned? We're still hating and killing each other over nonsense! And babies are still being born and people are still dying. The only difference there is that now we kill our babies before they are born and people DO live longer but not better. Oh and perhaps we have made some diseases extinct but new ones are popping up all of the time! So what have we learned? NOTHING! There are just so many ways to invent the wheel. We are all still the same, we just appear to be more intelligent. I always wondered...who the heck was the first person to think of eating something that came out of a chicken's butt? (eggs) Now that was brilliant, when you really think about it!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
U.S. won’t bow to climate pressure Negotiator rejects caps, says America will forge own path BY CHARLES J. HANLEY The Associated Press
BALI, Indonesia — The United States will come up with its own plan to cut global-warming gases by mid-2008 and won’t commit to mandatory caps at the U.N. climate conference here, the chief U.S. negotiator said Saturday. “We’re not ready to do that here,” said Harlan Watson, the State Department’s senior climate negotiator and special representative. “We’re working on that, what our domestic contribution would be, and again we expect that sometime before the end of the major economies process.” That process of U.S.-led talks was inaugurated last September by President Bush, who invited representatives of 16 other “major economies” such as the Europeans, Japan, China and India to Washington to discuss a future international program of cutbacks in carbon dioxide and other emissions blamed for global warming. Environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of using those parallel talks to subvert the longrunning U.N. negotiations and the spirit of the binding Kyoto Protocol, which requires 36 industrial nations to make relatively modest cuts in greenhouse gases. The United States is the only major industrial country to have rejected Kyoto and its obligatory targets. The U.S. leadership instead favors a more voluntary approach, in which individual nations determine what they can contribute to a global effort, without taking on obligations under the U.N. climate treaty. Watson’s comments reaffi rmed that the Bush administration views its own talks as the main event in discussions over climate change. The European Union, on the other hand, has committed to binding emissions reductions of 20 percent by 2020. Midway through the two-week Bali conference, many of the more than 180 assembled nations were demanding such fi rm commitments from Washington as well, as the world talks about a framework to follow Kyoto when it expires in 2012. “It would be useful for Annex I, non-Kyoto countries” — code for the U.S. — “to indicate what level of effort” they’ll make, said M.J. Mace, a delegate from the Pacific nation of Micronesia, whose islands are threatened by seas rising from global warming. The conference’s main negotiating text, tabled for debate on Saturday and obtained by The Associated Press, mentions targets, but in a nonbinding way. Its preamble notes the widely accepted view that industrial nations’ emissions should be cut by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to help head off climate change’s worst impacts — expanding oceans, spreading droughts, dying species, extreme weather and other effects. Even mentioning such numbers in the conference’s key document may set off renewed debate next week, when environment ministers and other ranking leaders join the talks, which are meant to launch a two-year negotiation for a post-Kyoto deal. Delegates here made progress in the first week on such secondary matters as establishing a system for compensating tropical forest nations for reducing deforestation, a major source of carbon emissions. They’re expected to approve work on measuring forest cover, emissions and related factors. “I’ve observed a strong willingness on the part of countries to get a successful outcome in Bali,” the U.N. climate chief, Yvo de Boer, told reporters in assessing the fi rst week. American negotiator Watson said the Bush administration is planning probably four more meetings in the major economies series before a “leaders’ meeting” in mid-2008 presents a final outcome. Asked how the U.S.-organized process would complement the U.N. treaty talks, he said, “We think if we could get agreement among these 17 economies, or a good portion of them anyway, that would certainly contribute to that discussion in terms of any sort of interim goals or targets that might be discussed.” But he acknowledged it remained unclear how the two tracks would merge.
Seaweed touted as global warming solution Slimy plant can soak up carbon dioxide BY JOSEPH COLEMAN The Associated Press
BALI, Indonesia — Slimy, green and unsightly, seaweed and algae are among the humblest of plants. A group of scientists at a climate conference in Bali say they could also be a potent weapon against global warming, capable of sucking damaging carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at rates comparable to the mightiest rain forests. “The ocean’s role is neglected because we can’t see the vegetation,” said Chung Ik-kyo, a South Korean environmental scientist. “But under the sea, there is a lot of seaweed and sea grass that can take up carbon dioxide.” The seaweed research, backed by scientists in 12 Asian-Pacific countries, is part of a broad effort to calculate how much carbon is being absorbed from the atmosphere by plants, and to increase that through reforestation and other steps. Such so-called “carbon sinks” are considered essential to controlling greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the atmosphere and are blamed for global warming. The conference in Bali is aimed at launching two-year negotiations for a new global warming pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012, and a major topic of discussion is the use of Earth’s natural resources to remove carbon from the air. While most of the attention to carbon sinks has been on forests, the seaweed scientists say the world should look to the oceans, where some 8 million tons of seaweed and algae are harvested from wild or cultivated sources every year. That solution is a largely Asian one — and it’s not without complications. Critics say a challenge will be keeping the carbon, once absorbed, from re-entering the atmosphere. And it’s unclear how a vast increase in seaweed production would affect navigation or fisheries. China is by far the world’s largest producer of seaweed, followed by South Korea and Japan. The Asia-Pacific seas, where seaweed is used in soups, sushi and salads, accounts for 80 percent of global production. Proponents say seaweed and algae’s rapid rate of photosynthesis, the process of turning carbon dioxide and sunlight into energy and oxygen, make it a prime candidate for absorbing carbon out of the environment. Some types of seaweed can grow 9 to 12 feet long in only three months. Lee Jae-young, with South Korea’s fisheries ministry, said some seaweeds can absorb five times more carbon dioxide than plants on land. The oceans account for 50 percent of all the photosynthesis on the earth, said John Beardall, with Australia’s Monash University. “These are very productive ecosystems. They’re drawing down a lot of carbon,” Beardall said. South Korea and Japan are leaders in the research. Seoul last year approved a $1.5 million a year project to investigate the possibilities. The Japanese government and a group of companies are also looking into setting up a huge cultivation area in the waters off the country’s west coast. In a presentation on the sidelines of the Bali conference on Friday, Beardall argued more efficient cultivation methods could greatly boost production in nations with long coastlines. While the group is not recommending a specific target for expansion of seaweed cultivation, Beardall estimated that the Philippines could conceivably increase its annual output by more than 100 times with more intensive production techniques.
Seaweed touted as global warming solution Slimy plant can soak up carbon dioxide BY JOSEPH COLEMAN The Associated Press
Gee, there's a surprise, don't ALL green plants soak up carbon dioxide? Isn't that the whole idea of what plants feed off of? Carbon Dioxide? Well, I'd tell Mr. Gore that if he gets rid of all the Carbon Dioxide and doesn't let us make anymore, just think what that means. First, no breathing. You can inhale (which Bill Clinton swears he never did), you just can't exhale, CO2. And then we have the cars that they want to run off of ethanol made out of corn. Does anybody know the first thing that the corn plants would need to grow? That's right, CO2. And he's getting the Nobel Peace Prize for telling us we shouldn't breathe or drive and feed the plants?
And I'd like to throw Al Gore a personal thanks for Global Warming, as I realize that it is probably the reason I had to scrape ice off my windows on the car this morning to go to work. Good thing it wasn't 80 degrees in December like he said it's going to be. What happened, Al?
I think he is just drumming up business for himself and his investors---his books, speeches and the companies he is invested into etc etc.......he is no different than a TV Evangelist,,,so who is right???
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Gore: Make peace with planet Nobel winner urges China, U.S. to act BY DOUG MELLGREN The Associated Press
OSLO, Norway — Saying it’s “time to make peace with the planet,” Al Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday with a call for humanity to rise up against a looming climate crisis and stop waging war on the environment. The United States and China — the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases — will stand accountable before history if they don’t take the lead in that global challenge, the former vice president said. “Without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the Earth itself,” Gore said in his acceptance speech. “Now, we and the Earth’s climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: ‘mutually assured destruction.’ It is time to make peace with the planet.” Gore was awarded the prize for sounding the alarm over global warming and spreading awareness on how to counteract it. His co-winner, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was represented by the panel’s leader, Rajendra Pachauri. They received their Nobel gold medals and diplomas at a gala ceremony at Oslo’s city hall, while the Nobel prizes for medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and economics were presented in a separate ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden. Gore urged government officials at a U.N. cli- mate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to prepare the ground for quick negotiations on an emissions-limitation treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Gore and Pachauri will leave for the U.N. meeting Wednesday. “I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty,” Gore said. In a speech that quoted Churchill, Gandhi and the Bible, Gore said the world’s biggest producers of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — the United States and China — must stop blaming each other for the stalemate over warming. Instead, they should take the lead in solving a problem for which they bear a large responsibility, he said, or be “accountable before history for their failure to act.” He drew a parallel between leaders who ignore the climate crisis and those who didn’t act as Nazi Germany rearmed before World War II. “Too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: ‘They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent,’ ” Gore said. He likened the current “planetary emergency” to wartime. “We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war,” he said. Although Pachauri described the threat largely in measured, scientific terms, he warned of a grim fate if greenhouse gas emissions are not limited. A warming climate could lead to swamped coastlines, disruptions to food supply, spread of disease and loss of biodiversity, he said. “Neglect in protecting our heritage of natural resources could prove extremely harmful for the human race and for all species that share common space on Planet Earth,” Pachauri said in his acceptance speech. “It is within the reach of human society to meet these threats.” Before presenting the award to Gore and Pachauri, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel awards committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, praised them for moving climate to the top of the world agenda. “We thank you for what you have done for Mother Earth,” Mjoes said. Gore’s wife, Tipper, in the audience with their four children, smiled broadly when he accepted the award, which includes a $1.6 million stipend to be shared equally between the two winners. The audience, including Norway’s King Harald V and Queen Sonja, rose for sustained applause. Gore urged world leaders to put a new climate treaty in place by 2010 — two years earlier than planned. Heads of state should meet every three months to negotiate the treaty because global warming must be slowed, he said. “The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions,” said Gore. “Either they will ask: ‘What were you thinking; why didn’t you act?’ Or they will ask instead: ‘How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?’ ” In an appearance on British Broadcasting Corp.’s “Hard Talk” program, Gore said he hoped the new climate treaty will impose a global cap on greenhouse gas emissions, and he said businesses should be taxed on the amount of gases they emit. Gore also called on wealthy nations to build “a constructive partnership” with poorer countries to spread the availability of technology being designed to reduce gas emissions and improve energy efficiency. He noted climate change has not been a big issue in the U.S. presidential campaign, but he said he was “far more optimistic now than I’ve ever been before” because he felt more and more people are coming to adopt his view of global warming’s threat. “We’re close to it. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer and closer to it,” Gore said. The Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901, are presented each year on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of their creator, Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel. In Stockholm, the winners of the other Nobel prizes received their awards from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf and were feted at a white-tie banquet in city hall. The 2007 awards in medicine, chemistry and physics honored breakthroughs in stem cell research on mice, solid-surface chemistry and the discovery of a phenomenon that lets computers and digital music players store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks. Three U.S. economists shared the economics award for their work on how people’s knowledge and self-interest affect their behavior in the market or in social situations such as voting and labor negotiations. One of the economics winners, Leonid Hurwicz, 90, and the literature prize winner, 88-year-old British author Doris Lessing, were unable to attend. They will receive their awards at later ceremonies in Minnesota and Britain. ODD ANDERSEN/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Nobel Peace Prize laureates Al Gore, left, and Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, greet members of the public from the balcony of the Grand Hotel in Oslo, Norway, on Monday.
So,,,,I ask,,,,if global warming exists as such that his book points out due to greenhouse gasses....then,,,it would stand to reason that 10million years ago(according to some other think tanks in the field) that global warming along with an ice age happened......so, would the farts of the dinosaurs be the blame??????
Can someone just say---"I dont really know what is the cause. I have a difficult time putting my pants on one leg at time, brushing my teeth and listening to my ipod."
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Wouldn't it really be amazing that this global warming was SUPPOSE to happen! That perhaps there is a greater power that already knows the future and is preparing this earth for something, that we, as stupid humans are trying to control? Perhaps this is the natural cycle of this planet that it is suppose to go through and here we go trying to change it. I'd LET IT GO!!!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
The global warming cycle has repeated itself throughout the earths history when there weren't any humans on the earth. In my opinion this global warming panic is just a way to scare people into buying expensive carbon credits which I think is a fraud aimed to line the people selling the credits pockets with gold. In the long run some of the ideas that these global warming extremists are going to force some of the people living in the poorer nations of the world to starve to death.
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