It’s fashionable to fret about how climate change will harm polar bears and penguins. But scientists now predict that, at least among insects, global warming will take its biggest toll in the tropics–home to more than half the world’s species.
Climate change models agree that temperatures will increase more near the poles than near the equator. Where it’s currently chilly, a couple of degrees of initial warming could launch a positive feedback loop: as snow and ice melt, they can’t reflect heat from the earth, which then warms even more. Because tropical warming will be less extreme, scientists sometimes suppose that tropical species will suffer less from climate change.
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CAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 3 (Tierramérica) - “When we harm nature, we are harming ourselves,” says Aaron Bernstein, a doctor at Harvard Medical School and one of the authors of the upcoming book “Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity”.
“Few people realise that our health is directly tied to the health of the natural world,” Bernstein told Tierramérica
Bernstein and Harvard colleague Eric Chivian wrote and edited contributions from more than 100 leading scientists in their new book, launched Apr. 28 by Oxford University Press and available in May.
Written for a general audience, “Sustaining Life” draws on the latest scientific evidence to make a persuasive case that the current extinction crisis, with species vanishing every day, is a serious threat to humanity equal to, if not greater than, climate change.
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Environmental issues, particularly global climate change, enjoyed a star turn a few years ago, mainly as the result of some very bad weather and a newly hirsute Al Gore and his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.
For a time, as the initial presidential contenders began their campaigns, there seemed to be an historic number of pols willing to accept the premise that climate change was a reality and that environmental issues were at the forefront of voters’ minds.
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It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.
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LONDON, April 29 (Reuters Life!) - Are you feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of global warming and battered by the constant stream of warnings about coming calamity?
Oxford University professor Norman Myers has a message that might help you square your shoulders and face the future.
“If you feel you are too small to make a difference then you haven’t been in bed with a mosquito,” Myers said.
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DURHAM, N.C. th Tropical moist forests are home to a majority of the Earth’s terrestrial species, yet human activities such as logging, road building and agriculture destroy between one and two million square kilometers of these vital habitats every decade. But a new paper by a trio of Duke University researchers, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers cause for cautious optimism th with a major caveat.
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Protected areas don’t always protect as well as they should, study reveals
Conservation projects often hinge on areas of land being given protection, but little is known about how well many protected areas actually do their job. Studying four of the world’s major moist tropical forests, a group of Duke University researchers led by Stuart Pimm found that inaccessibility can be a tree’s best friend. Protected areas within the Amazon and Congo forests, for example, nestle within largely well-forested surrounding areas, which keeps them relatively safe. The Atlantic Coast and West African protected areas, by contrast, are more fragmented: unfortunate, given their status as biodiversity hotspots. The study, published this week in PNAS, nonetheless throws welcome light on the way that large scale conservation initiatives work, or don’t. Source: Joppa LN, Loarie SR & Pimm SL (2008) On the protection of “protected areas”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0802471105
Image © Joe Gough
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HANOI (AFP) — Asia’s rainforests are being rapidly destroyed, a trend accelerated by surging timber demand in booming China and India, and record food, energy and commodity prices, forest experts warn.
The loss of these biodiversity hot spots, much of it driven by the illegal timber trade and the growth of oil palm, biofuel and rubber plantations, is worsening global warming, species loss and poverty, they said.
Globally, tropical forest destruction “is a super crisis we are facing, it’s an appalling crisis,” said Oxford University’s Professor Norman Myers, keynote speaker at the Asia-Pacific Forestry Week conference in Hanoi.
Tags: N. Myers · Conservation
Stuart Pimm
The “old media” — the main way I communicate my ideas and results has served me very well, thank you very much. With colleagues, I write my papers, they are reviewed, modified, submitted again, and published — typically a couple of years after we first obtained the key results. It’s a complicated game. For some, there’s an urgent need to see their results in print quickly. Frankly, most science can wait a bit.
The main issue is fame. Getting cited is important — in fact, it can be everything, a life-or-death issue as far as a career is concerned. Here’s the problem: most papers are never cited or cited only by their authors. Their authors totally fail to communicate. Read journals and you’d understand why. There are thousands of papers published each month in my field, I can’t read them all, and for many that I do, I wish I’d done something else, like watching paint dry. Finding the signal amid the noise is hard work.
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Tags: Conservation · S. L. Pimm
How would you define the significance of water in the current global context?
There is this increasing realisation that conflicts and wars over water are on the increase in villages, between states and countries.
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Tags: N. Myers · Conservation
As the press release for Mike’s book “The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today” puts it: what will our lives by like in half a century? How advanced will technology have become? How will the world be better and how will it be worse?
These are just some of the intriguing questions legendary CBS newsman Mike Wallace puts to 60 of some of the world’s brightest, imaginative and forward-thinking individuals in the world —including more than 15 winners of the Nobel and other equivalent prizes in the many sciences the Nobels do not cover. 2006 Heineken Prize winner for Environmental Sciences, Stuart Pimm, is one of them.
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Tags: Conservation · Media · S. L. Pimm
A really inconvenient truth.
By Iain Murray
In 2002, thanks to soccer star David Beckham, the world was introduced to the “metrosexual.” Two years later, and with less mainstream-media attention, we got our first exposure to “Intersex.”
Intersex is not some new perversion or a weird combination of science fiction and pornography. It is an unfortunate condition that is affecting freshwater fish all over the developed world. It occurs when fish of one sex also exhibit sexual characteristics of the other sex.
Tags: N. Myers · Conservation
By Tom Turner
June 17, 1987, is not a date most people will remember for long. On that day, the last dusky seaside sparrow in the world was found dead of old age in its cage in Florida. His species had fallen victim to the space program, a mosquito-abatement project, fire and Walt Disney World. It is the latest species to be declared officially extinct. It won’t be the last.
Tags: N. Myers · Conservation · Saving Species
What would it take to convince you that your town should play host to the world’s most feared human and animal pathogens? Believe it or not, five states are locked in fierce competition over a proposed bioterror lab that would have them doing just that.
Tags: Conservation · Economics
Dear DukeReads members,Thank you for joining DukeReads’ fifth online chat, on Guns, Germs, and Steel with Stuart Pimm and Frank Stasio. It is great that so many of you participated. If you would like to watch a video from the session, please click
http://quicktime.oit.duke.edu/news/dukereads_pimm.mov
(If the video does not load, try pasting the link directly into your web browser. Please note that you will need QuickTime installed on your computer to watch the video.)
Tags: S. L. Pimm
My sense is that Jeffrey Smith is actually winning. Pushing consumers ever closer to the tipping point of lining up with their European counterparts and rejecting GMO foods. Jeffry Smith continues to evangelize causing wonderment not just in environmental circles, but also in publishing circles as well. To avoid having his research squashed with kill fees, he has been self-publishing to resounding success. Of course their are a number of international best selling authors at any given point in time. There aren’t many self-published authors with international bestsellers.
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Tags: Conservation · Media
AP probe found traces of meds in water supplies of 41 million Americans and I guess that means we’re drinking it all up.
Tags: Conservation
NEW YORK, March 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A total of 63 leading U.S. restaurant, food, beverage and candy companies - including such household names as McDonald’s, Campbell Soup, Kellogg, Kraft Foods, Sara Lee, PepsiCo, Wendy’s and Hershey’s - are the focus of a major Web-based campaign at http://www.dontplantgmobeets.org/ seeking to block the April 2008 planting of genetically modified sugar beets. The genetically modified sugar beet crop would be used to make the sugar contained in thousands of the most widely consumed food products in the U.S., according to the Web site created by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) - a broad-based coalition of nearly 300 faith-based investors with over $100 billion in invested capital.
More here.
Tags: Conservation
Santa Monica may soon join cities such as San Francisco and Oakland in banning single-use plastic carry-out bags.
The Santa Monica City Council, on February 26th, unanimously directed the city attorney to draft an ordinance banning the distribution of single-use plastic carry-out bags to customers at all stores within Santa Monica, regardless of size or type. Read it here.
Tags: Conservation
Tags: Media · Politics
