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Seeing the Future Dimly

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

By David L. Brown

One of the news websites, Fox News (here), today featured excerpts from a number of predictions made 25 years ago by “science thinkers,” predicting conditions in our time of 2012. I recognize the names of most of these “science thinkers” and they are actually “science fiction writers,” but that’s okay because they’re in the business of imagining the future as much as anyone. I’ve always had a passing interest in futurism, the attempt to predict how things will be in future times. In general, these tend to be wildly inaccurate due to the many uncertainties and the phenomenon of straight line thinking. Too often futurists tend to look at what’s been happening recently and simply project a straight line into the future.

Even a cursory look at history will knock enough holes in this procedure to make Swiss cheeses look like solid objects. Imagine the application of straight line thinking to the U.S. economy in the summer of 1929, the likelihood of war in Europe in 1913, the future well-being of the little Roman village of Pompeii in 78 AD (Mount Vesuvius erupted the following year), and so many more examples of unexpected and unpredictable events that dramatically change the future.

One thing that struck me abut these predictions was that they were for the most part pessimistic, in contrast with the usual fol-de-rol about a Jetsons future with flying cars and an abundance of everything. Here are some excerpts with my comments:

Isaac Asimov: “Assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet and widespread hunger.”

Isaac’s view was fairly accurate, even though he was a little on the low side on population (it’s actually just something over 7 billion). He was dead on about the looming hunger, hastened by this year’s worldwide drought.

Jack Williamson: “If we had a time-phone, now in 1987, we would beg you to forgive us. We have burdened you with impossible debts, wasted and polluted the planet that should have been your rich heritage, left you instead a dreadful legacy of ignorance, want, and war.”

Of all the predictions, I nominate this one as the most accurate. I have expressed similar thoughts myself, many times. Anyone who looks around the world today with open eyes can recognize Williamson’s vision of our time.
Sheldon Glashow: “The American economy will have experienced a gentle yet relentless decline. Our children will not live such comfortable lives as we do. The spread between the rich and the poor will have grown, and crime will have become so prevalent as to threaten the social fabric. The rich and the poor will form 2 armed camps.”
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Posted in Conflict and War, Energy Technology, Essays and Opinion, Extinction, Famine, Fossil Fuels, Medicine, Politics, Population Issues, Resource Depletion, Space Exploration, Technology | Comments Off

Good News for Polar Bears (Or Maybe Not)

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

By David L. Brown

Hooray! According to Reuters, polar bear researchers have determined that the iconic bears may not be doomed after all. Here’s the lead from the article, which you can read here:

(Reuters) – All is not lost for the polar bear, despite the rapid melt of Arctic sea ice that they need to survive, researchers reported on Wednesday.

The study was reported by a leading polar bear expert associated with the U.S. Geological Survey and published in the prestigious journal Nature, so it’s gotta be good solid science, right? Well, of course. This is great news, because last we heard the bears were headed toward extinction. So let’s see what’s changed in  their favor. Um, the article goes on to state:

[the] new study concludes that significant curbs in carbon emissions would effectively cool the planet, rebuild ice and save the Arctic habitat and the bears in it.

Polar bear facepalm
Polar bear facepalm

Well, there you have it. Simple, really. Why didn’t I think of that. It’s a real Homer Simpson Doh! moment that somebody didn’t figure this out before. All we need to do is reverse global warming, by dramatically reducing carbon emissions into the atmosphere, thus allowing the Arctic ice to rebuild, and voila! No problemo for those white bears. Heck, we can probably do that by tomorrow, or at least by Wednesday.

And while the article doesn’t mention it, I expect that fairies will  appear to make sure there are plenty of seals for the bears to eat, and unicorns will be seen prancing among the ice floes spreading multi-colored confetti to brighten the picture even more. For the polar bears, everything will be fine, just fine, so we don’t have to worry about that anymore, do we? Whew!

Seriously, sometimes you have to wonder don’t you? Personally, I’m still standing by the prediction I made about five years ago that the Arctic Ocean would become essentially ice free in the summer of 2015. You know,  due to reality and all? Yeah, that, the inconvenient thingy.

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Posted in Climate Change, Extinction, Melting Planet | Comments Off

The Tragedy of the Bat

Monday, April 5th, 2010

By David L. Brown

01_fungusbatBats have always gotten a bum rap. These furry little flying creatures have been associated with vampires, witches and ghouls for generations, and they’re the first to be blamed for rabies and other diseases. In fact, nearly all bats are harmless and do much good for humanity. The only exception is the vampire bat of Central and South America, a blood sucking species. Most bats are either insectivores or fruit-eaters, and the North American varieties are generally good neighbors, not fearsome monstrosities as many people imagine.

Now, bats are in trouble. So-called white nose syndrome is caused by a fungus that grows a white coating on the muzzles of bats and results in their death. It’s spreading from the Northeastern U.S., where it was first noticed near Albany, NY, in 2006. So far, the little brown bat has been the major victim of the widening plague, but other species also seem to be at risk. The photo at left shows an infected bat with the fungus in evidence not only on its muzzle but on its wings and ears as well.

According to an article in New Scientist magazine, the suspect in the disease is the fungus itself, Geomyces destructans, although scientists speculate that it may be a secondary opportunity infection riding piggy-back on some other disease pathogen.

Unlike many if not most people, I have a warm place in my heart for bats, which I have often observed in their busy evening task of swooping up millions of mosquitoes. Back in my youth I belonged to the University of Missouri campus spelunking club. (That’s a fancy name for cave exploring.) We used to crawl, wade, raft, or rappel into holes in the ground as a form of weekend sport, but also for science because we searched out and mapped caves in the limestone-rich region of central Missouri.

I have two personal anecdotes to report relative to bats. First is a memory of a late afternoon when I emerged after a lone venture into a  cave that was host to a large colony of bats. As I walked toward the oval opening, facing west across a small valley, sunset was fading and twilight was descending. The bats were beginning to stir, and soon I was standing in the mouth of the cave in the midst of a stream of bats leaving for the evening. Hundreds of them were swooping and dodging around me, a virtual river of bats, as I stood with my hands stretched overhead.

Yes, I realize that for some of you this would have been a nightmare scenario, but to me it was a marvelous experience of nature. The bats, of course, have built-in sonar navigation systems that would make a submariner jealous. They would never hit someone, any more than they collide with each other or run into the sides of their cave. The sonar is so good they can zero in on insects as tiny as gnats and mosquitoes, which are their foods of choice.

The second anecdote is a sad one. We once owned a house in Prescott, Arizona, in the high Ponderosa pine country. It featured a deck with a western view, and my wife and I enjoyed sitting there at dusk watching the bats swoop and dodge, catching the mosquitoes that would otherwise be feasting on us. The little colony of bats had found a home beneath the roof eaves of our house, and we were glad to have them there.

After a few years we moved away, but kept the house and rented it out. It wasn’t long before I got a call from the rental agent. The new tenants had complained that the house was “infested with bats,” and were insisting that an exterminator be hired to eliminate them. “Infested!” I cried. “Those are our bats!” I asked him to explain to the tenants, but nevertheless the ignorant fools insisted that the bats be killed. To this day I hope they were eaten alive by mosquitoes every time they tried to enjoy the deck. Disgusted, when the tenant’s lease ran out we insisted that they leave (they didn’t want to, but life is sometimes cruel) and sold the house. I still have bittersweet memories of those bats and their evening acrobatics.

Anyway, there’s my little collection of bat stories. They are often maligned, feared, and murdered for no good reason. In reality, they are an important part of the natural cycle of nature, helping to control those flying insects that, ironically, do suck our blood.

Posted in Disease and Pandemics, Diversity Loss, Extinction | Comments Off

Sushi — Or Not Sushi? That Is the Question

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

By David L. Brown

How can we tell when a species is endangered? One clue is when people are willing to pay an arm and a leg to eat the unfortunate few remaining members.

tuna-sushiRecently a 511 lb. northern bluefin tuna, one of the most sought-after fish in the world for sushi, was sold at Tokyo’s Tuskiji fish market for $175,000. By that afternoon, customers at Kyubey, a nearby star-rated restaurant, were chowing down on the tuna’s fatty belly meat. The story was reported by Scientific American on-line, here.

The idea that a single fish could be worth $342.50 a pound is astonishing, especially considering the number of people on Earth who go to bed hungry each night. It is a fact that many struggle to survive on as little as a dollar a day. For one of those unfortunate individuals, (should they become immortal) $175,000 could equal their income for 480 years, or about 20 generations. Or, conversely, it would be equal to the income of 480 impoverished people for an entire year. Just one fish.

There is growing evidence that the norhern bluefin may be in danger of extinction. The SciAm article reported on a move toward banning harvest of the increasingly rare fish, one of the top predator species of the ocean. Only the northern bluefin would be affected, not the Pacific and southern varieties—but it appears the northern bluefin is the one most loved by diners, especially in Japan which imports 80 percent of the bluefin catch in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

Markets and the effects of greed and avarice are more powerful than nature, common sense, and human self-preservation all added together, at least for the time being, so with demand for bluefin sushi so high that it can support stratospheric prices it seems likely that protecting the fish will be difficult or impossible. One problem is that even experts have difficulty telling the difference between the three varieties of bluefin (although sushi eaters apparently can, or at least believe they can).

Listing as an endangered species does not necessarily have much effect. The demand for rhinoceros horns for dagger handles among Arabs and potions among aging Chinese and Vietnamese has forced many rhino species to the very edge of extinction. Modern-day poachers hunt rhinos with AK-47s and sometimes from helicopters, quickly removing the horns with chainsaws and leaving the bodies to rot. The market for rhino horns has continued to thrive even though several major rhino varieties have been  placed on the world endangered species list (CITES) and even China banned the sale of rhino horn 17 years ago.

In a similar way, it seems likely that greedy fishers, fish mongers, and restaurant operators will find ways around a bluefin tuna ban. After all, the mindset of our present world economy seems to be that money is the root of everything that is good and the environment be damned. The plundering of nature will continue apace as long as humans have a yen (or dollar, euro or pound) for rare delicacies from the sea.

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Posted in Diversity Loss, Environmental Activism, Extinction, Ocean Depletion | Comments Off

Financial Meltdown Mirrored at North Pole

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

by Val Germann

The world’s financial markets and “The Top of the World” are exhibiting a frightening similarity as winter ends: both are melting down.   In a few days the G-20 nations will sit down for a talk as the planet’s flagship currency, the U.S. Dollar,  liquefies around their ankles.  That sinking feeling has to be shared by the world’s polar bears, forced onto land and even to cannibalism by the liquefaction of the Arctic’s ice.  As a contributor to a current article on the TERRADAILY website says:

“We don’t have hard evidence about climate change but we have evidence about the numerous symptoms of climate change on polar bears.”

And those symptoms are very bad news indeed, starting with a continuing decrease in the size and weight of the bears, down more than ten percent over the last quarter-century.   One cause of this sad decline could well be the fact that the bear’s hunting season is three weeks shorter than it was in 1980.  Another is that the loss of sea ice is forcing the bears to swim ever farther in pursuit of seals, their primary food.

Even more disturbing is a new and dangerous behavior on the part of pregnant  bears:

Faced with the growing uncertainty concerning the ice, pregnant polar bears are increasingly denning on land, researchers have noticed.  In northern Alaska, two-thirds of bears now choose to den on land in order to give birth early in the year, an inverse proportion of what was observed a few years ago.  “They are refugees rather than immigrants. This is not a chosen exile, this is a forced exile,” Derocher told AFP.

The bears are much more vulnerable on land than on ice and their food sources farther away.  But even more shocking, and revealing, is the following change in polar bear behavior:

Climate change also appears to have altered the bears’ behavioural patterns.  Several recent incidents of cannibalism in Alaska have observers worried.  “We knew of polar bears killing and eating other polar bears,” Steven Amstrup, a research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told AFP.  “But the difference was that this time the polar bears were clearly deliberately hunting other bears, attacking for example females in their denning area” in northern Alaska, he said.

It surely cannot get much worse than that, attacking and killing the pregnant females of your own kind.  The future for the world’s polar bears must be bleak indeed if this behavior does not stop, and soon.

But that is not likely to happen because, as one expert said:

“Any of these symptoms taken alone might not be so worrying but seen in their totality it shows a bleak picture of how climate change is impacting polar bears already now,” said Geoff York, a polar bear expert at the World Wildlife Fund.  “And it’s only forecast to get worse,” he said.

And so it may be true that the polar bear is going the way of Lehman Brothers, or that particularly ursine financial entity — Bear Stearns.  Those companies were “eating their own,” too, just as the polar bear seems to be doing, most likely with similar ultimate results.

**

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Climate Change, Communications, Extinction, Melting Planet | Comments Off

Hawking Again Calls for Star Trek Future

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

By David L. Brown

Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s most celebrated scientists, has once again stated that “the long-term future of the human race must be in space.”

According to a report on CNN.com/europe, Hawking recently said:

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next 100 years, let alone next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.”

He added: “…I’m an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space.”

He has gone on record before saying that humans should migrate to other solar systems and learn to “live in space.” More than two years ago on June 15, 2006, in an essay on this site titled “Man’s Natural Home Will Always Be Earth” (use the search field at upper left to find it) I challenged his ideas, pointing out:

[…]please note that I am not taking exception to Hawking’s warning that there are serious threats to us here on Earth. […] What I disagree with is the false hope that human beings can somehow become like the mythical gods and travel and live throughout the universe. Science and common sense alike offer a wealth of well-reasoned evidence why this cannot be.

[…]there is strong reason to believe that the Earth is the only true home than humankind can ever have. The idea that other alien planets could be converted into mirror images of our own planet — which is itself the product of billions of years of unique geologic and biologic evolution — is patently impossible for any mortal beings, whether humankind as we now exist or some future race of supermen that we can only imagine. Humans are not simple machines that could be transplanted into strange and generally hostile environments without ill effect.

Hawking’s statements indicate to me that he holds a very deep seated pessimism about the future of the Planet Earth. When faced with a dismal situation, it is a natural instinct to imagine a better future. However, as I pointed out over two years ago, and as my novel The Star Phoenix addresses as its main theme, the only natural home that humanity can ever have is right here on Earth. There are no real options for the human race other than to get back in balance with Nature, or to become extinct. Those are the choices facing the human race, at least in my opinion. Sadly, we are a long way down the road toward option two.

If I could believe in the promise of a Star Trek future, with friendly Earth-like planets circling distant suns just waiting for human pioneers to arrive and settle down in comfort, I would be glad to agree with Dr. Hawking’s advice. But logic tells me that the only way humans could ever live on another planet would be to sterilize whatever life it might have, since it would surely be inimical to Earth life forms, and create from scratch a new environment completely duplicating that of Earth.

Does that sound practical, or even possible? It took Nature more than four billion years of geological and evolutionary processes to create the vastly intricate and inter-connected thing that is life on Earth. How long would it take mere humans to do the same thing — should it be even remotely possible?

Unfortunately I must conclude that those who see a future in space for humans, and Dr. Hawking is only one of many, are clinging to an impossible promise that has its roots in faith, not reality. If there is a difference between such beliefs and those based on the Book of Genesis, it is only in a matter of degree.

The Earth will survive the on-going mass extinction event that is presently under way. But many species will not, and human beings might well be among those to disappear. As I wrote a few weeks ago on this weblog:

Like rebellious children, humankind has set itself against Mother Nature. If we are to survive at all, we must make peace and beg Her forgiveness. Only when we live once again in balance with the environment from which we sprang can we maintain a place on this, our very own Planet Earth.

I sometimes think I sound like a broken record, but this is a serious question. There are too many people, using too many resources for the Earth as we know it to survive. There must and will be change, and in the end the Earth will always win. We cannot defeat Nature, for she is our Mother, not our enemy. We can only survive in peaceful cooperation with Her.

To dream of flying to the stars, living on some asteroid, building pleasure palaces at L5 nodes, or joining some Galactic Federation where our descendants can rub elbows with bizarre alien creatures in some Star Wars cocktail lounge is nothing but fantasy and delusion.

Unless Stephen Hawking knows something that none of the rest of us know — and it would have to be a very BIG something along the lines of the literal existence of God — the future of humankind lies in only one place in the Universe, and that is right here on the Planet Earth.

Hawking does know that we are in trouble here, and that must be the reason he rambles on about a future somewhere else. I share his pessimism, but regretfully cannot share the hopeful optimism with which he attempts to offset it.

Posted in Essays and Opinion, Extinction, Space Exploration | Comments Off

Few Options for Keeping the Earth Cool

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

By David L. Brown

Those who have read my novel The Star Phoenix know that it is set in a future world devastated by climate change, social upheaval, plagues and other unfortunate events. Only a few humans survive and a small group wanted to leave the Solar System in search of another place to live. I won’t give away the plot line, but the subject of planetary engineering or “terraforming” played a crucial role.

Now this excerpt from the October 6 edition of The Economist draws attention to the possibility that a similar plight may await the Earth. The opening graf of an article titled “A Changing Climate of Opinion” talks of the science fiction concept of planetary engineering as it might be applied to Mars or Venus in order to make them habitable by human beings. The next paragraph follows:

It is an intriguing idea. It may even come to pass, though probably not in the lifetime of anyone now reading such stories. But what is more worrying—and more real—is the idea that such planetary engineering may be needed to make the Earth itself habitable by humanity, and that it may be needed in the near future. Reality has a way of trumping art, and human-induced climate change is very real indeed. So real that some people are asking whether science fiction should now be converted into science fact.

These are grim words coming from The Economist. You don’t even have to read between the lines to parse out the core message: The Earth may SOON become UNINHABITABLE.

We have written plenty over the past couple of years about the many aspects of climate change and other significant threats to the future of civilization and perhaps even the continued existence of humanity. Many voices have spoken out in warning, and despite the continued drumbeat of denial there seems to be every reason to be afraid, very afraid.

The article in The Economist (subscription required) goes on for several pages to discuss the possibilities of planetary engineering applied to the Earth. The source is a series of papers produced by The Royal Society, Britain’s oldest scientific academy, “outlining some of the options, and suggesting a few experiments to test whether they would work.” Unfortunately, it is thin beer indeed. In fact, it is rather pathetically free of any truly innovative ideas. The article admits that “[T]inkering with the atmosphere or the oceans on the scale required to do this would be highly risky and extraordinarily complex.”

A great deal of wordage is spent examining the idea of priming the oceans with particles of iron to increase the growth of plankton, thus drawing greenhouse gas (GHG) out of the atmosphere. That idea is unproven and has obvious problems. For one thing, it would likely increase the acidity of the ocean with possibly dire results. Never mind Texas, it REALLY doesn’t pay to mess with Mother Nature. The brilliant idea of introducing rabbits into Australia is mentioned as an example of unanticipated effects that so often result when we meddle in Her realm.

Another idea: Plant more trees. Umm, sure, let’s do that … but just where are we going to plant them? In the Sahara Desert? And, oh, what about the fact that we are already cutting down rain forests everywhere? Is that a mistake then? How many trees do we have to plant to balance the amount of GHG produced by burning fossil fuels that took hundreds of millions of years for natural process to sequester in the Earth? Far too many, I fear, plus we need all the arable land to grow food for the nearly seven billion mouths we have to feed.

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Posted in Climate Change, Essays and Opinion, Extinction, Melting Planet | 1 Comment »

Rock Meeting Hard Place On Extinction Express

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

By David L. Brown

The evidence continues to mount that the Earth is entering into a mass extinction event that could dwarf even the one that ended the age of dinosaurs. One of the most ominous clues is the widespread die-off of amphibians.

Why frogs, toads and salamanders should be disappearing is puzzling. After all, amphibians have been around for 250 million years and survived the extinction event 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs bit the dust. There seems to be no single answer, but the suspicion is that it all has to do with the changes Man has brought to the planet.

Frogs may be the “canary in the mine” for many other species, which already have either disappeared or are in danger of doing so. According to an article this morning on the ScienceDaily.com web site:

“There is no consensus among the scientific community about when the current mass extinction started,” [David] Wake [professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley] said. It may have been 10,000 years ago, when humans first came from Asia to the Americas and hunted many of the large mammals to extinction. It may have started after the Industrial Revolution, when the human population exploded. Or, we might be seeing the start of it right now, Wake said.

But no matter what the start date, empirical data clearly show that extinction rates have dramatically increased over the last few decades, Wake said.

The global amphibian extinction is a particularly bleak example of this drastic decline. In 2004, researchers found that nearly one-third of amphibian species are threatened, and many of the non-threatened species are on the wane.

According to Wake, a virulent fungus is a major cause of frog extinctions, but he said that global warming and habitat constriction are two other major killers of frogs. He added that the amphibians in the Sierra Nevada that he studies are also affected by pesticides carried by the wind from nearby croplands. “The frogs have really been hit by a one-two punch,” he said, “although it’s more like a one-two-three-four punch.”

How can the advent of humanity be having the effect of driving tens of thousands of species into extinction. After all, the last time anything like that occurred, it took this to do the job:

dinoextinctpic.jpg

How can we little ol’ harmless humans be doing anything to equal such a devastating event? Well, the answer is that we are dealing the environment with death by a thousand cuts. Remember that a trickle of water can carve a deep canyon, one tiny grain of stone at a time. Similarly, ever since the dawn of agriculture about ten thousand years ago, Humankind has been changing the Earth, one bit at a time. Each time a tree is felled, the Earth grew a little poorer. Each time a factory ship dredges the fish from the sea, the Earth dies a little. Each time a new power plant is fired up and begins to belch carbon dioxide into the air, the planet’s ecosphere shrinks by just a wee bit.

Now that there are nearly seven billion of us crowding almost every square kilometer of Earth, what was a trickle has become a torrent. Unlike a tiny stream that can take millennia to carve even a modest canyon, a surging tsunami can cause major change quite quickly.

That is a fair analogy to what is happening today, as the heavy footprint of humanity weighs on the once rich and diverse flora and fauna of our dear Mother Earth.

Unfortunately, we are like passengers who happily boarded a train to see where it would go, and now it has run out of control and is crashing off the tracks. The on-going extinction is running full steam ahead, and only now are we realizing that we are riding on the Extinction Express. As the diversity and richness of life on Earth continues to diminish, will even we humans be able to avoid the long, cold sleep of extinction? That is truly a question that we should consider.

What can we do about this? Sure, there could be some solutions, but there is woefully little sign of the kind of major commitments it would take to achieve them. Without strong motivation to change, it looks like we’ll continue to ride the train to oblivion.

The novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick is about extinction. It is set in a future world when virtually all animal life has been destroyed and only humans remain. Humans still yearn for animal companionship, and robots are used to replace the extinct creatures. For example the hero of the book, police agent Rick Deckard, keeps an artificial sheep on the roof of his apartment building. (The movie Blade Runner was based on this book, although it does not include this critical part of the story from which the book’s title came.) At the end of the book (not the movie) Deckard goes into the desert and thinks he has found a living toad. He takes it home with great excitement. But when he shows his wife the toad, she turns it over and shows him the cleverly concealed compartment where the batteries go.

There’s one thing we can say about extinction, and that is that it lasts for a long, long time. In fact, it’s like diamonds which, as the de Beers company has always told us, are forever.

Posted in Climate Change, Diversity Loss, Extinction | 1 Comment »

Catch 22 and the Polar Bear’s Dilemma

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By David L. Brown

It’s official — the U.S. Department of the Interior has added the polar bear to the list of endangered species. The story is here on the N.Y. Times news site, which reports:

…the long-delayed decision to list the bear as a threatened species may prove less of an impediment to industries along the Alaskan coast than many environmentalists had hoped. While further protecting the polar bear from direct or immediate threats — like hunting — the Interior Department added stipulations, seldom invoked under the act, that will make it relatively easy for oil and gas exploration and development activities to proceed.

The decision builds on scientific evidence about the retreat of sea ice, which the bears use as a platform to hunt seals and as a pathway to the Arctic coasts where they den. But it does not directly link the threat to the bears to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Mr. Kempthorne [Dick Kempthorne, secretary of the Interior] said the Endangered Species Act was “never meant to regulate global climate change” and that it would be “inappropriate” to use the polar bear listing that way. He said he made the decision because “sea ice is vital to polar bears’ survival,” and scientific models show the rapid loss of ice will continue.

The secretary, who earlier in his political life was a strong opponent of the Endangered Species Act, added: “This has been a difficult decision. But in light of the scientific record, and the restraints of the inflexible law that guides me,” he made “ the only decision I can make.”

Many fear that so-called “environmentalists” such as members of activist organizations like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, will use the listing of the polar bear as an excuse to bring legal action against any and all sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the U.S. As the statement above from the Interior secretary shows, the administration is aware of those possibilities and has attempted to put up firewalls against actions that could be detrimental to the economy. However, the fact that the Arctic sea ice is rapidly melting could no longer be ignored, and because the polar bear depends on that ice it is ipso facto endangered.

The problem with this is that there is nothing that humankind can do to change the basic fact. The “Big Melt” is well underway and will continue no matter what we do, even if all GHG emissions could be stopped in their tracks. The polar bear is not only endangered, it is probably doomed to extinction in its natural habitat because that habitat is going to disappear.

This situation is different from past examples of the effects of the Endangered Species Act, in which steps could be taken to preserve the environment required by the species in question, whether a spotted owl, some rare fish or amphibian, an insect or plant. Those have included such steps as preventing forest cutting, dam building, road construction, or real estate development that would impact he species’ habitat.

In the case of the polar bear, the only thing that we could do to mitigate the bear’s plight would be to reverse climate change and reinstate the Arctic environment. That is not possible.

Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch 22 introduced the concept of bureaucratic nonsense concerning the fitness of military pilots to fly combat missions during World War II. The “catch” was that if someone were crazy he would not be allowed to fly — but if he were to admit that he had a problem, that would be considered as proof of sanity and he would be required to continue to fly. The term “catch 22″ therefore came to mean something self-contradictory. The case of the polar bear as an endangered species is a good example. No matter how crazy human-induced global climate change becomes, or what steps are taken to attempt to reverse it, those bears will continue to fly into possible extinction, just like Heller’s fictional pilots.

Here is more from the N.Y. Times article:

Few natural resource decisions have been as closely watched or been the subject of such vehement disagreement within the Bush administration as this one, according to officials in the Interior Department and others familiar with the process. After the department missed a series of deadlines, a federal judge ruled two weeks ago that the decision had to be made by Thursday.

Barton H. Thompson Jr., a law professor and director of the Woods Institute of the Environment at Stanford University, said Wednesday that while the Interior Department gave itself “sufficient room” to list the polar bear, it did not provide “environmental organizations with a mechanism for trying to address climate change.”

He said that lawsuits challenging the connection between a factory’s greenhouse-gas emissions and the threat to individual polar bears might provide difficult to win.

“Interior has a reasonable case here that the connection is just too far removed,” he said.

The provision of the act that the department is using to lighten the regulatory burden that the listing imposes on the oil and gas industry — known as a 4(d) rule — was designed to permit flexibility in the management of threatened species, as long as the chances of conservation of the species would be enhanced, or at least not diminished.

Kassie Siegel, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of three groups that originally sued to have the polar bear listed as threatened, said Wednesday that the decision was an acknowledgement of “global warming’s urgency,” but that it fell short of helping the polar bear.

“The administration acknowledges the bear is in need of intensive care,” Ms. Siegel said. “The listing lets the bear into the hospital, but then the 4(d) rule says the bear’s insurance doesn’t cover the necessary treatments.”

The really good news in all of this is that the Bush administration, by this action on behalf of the polar bear, has finally and irrevocably agreed that global warming is real and that climate change is taking place. Although belated, this is a giant step forward so I guess it is better late than never.

It remains to be seen whether the bears can change their lifestyle to survive on land without the sea ice that is rapidly disappearing. As the Arctic Ocean becomes more ice free, 24 hour Summer sunlight will warm the open waters even more, leading to melting of adjacent tundra and dramatic changes in the region’s ecology. Most scientists believe the bears are incapable of adapting to such rapid and significant change, and they are probably right.

Posted in Climate Change, Diversity Loss, Extinction, Politics | Comments Off

Where Have the Bees and Butterflies Gone?

Monday, April 16th, 2007

By David L. Brown

When I was a child in post-World War II America we had no videogames or even television, and like many others at that time I collected butterflies. Many times I would go forth with my net into a bright summer morning eagerly seeking new additions to my growing display of lepidoptera, the order of insects that also includes moths and skippers.

In those days butterflies were in profuse abundance. Every flowering bush was surrounded by a colorful cloud of wings, each puddle of water ringed by thirsty insects, every field of blooming clover teeming with busy lives.

It is a matter of serious concern to me that the picture is quite different today. Where once the sight of dancing clouds of butterflies was a common delight, today a glimpse of the occasional wandering Monarch or Tiger Swallowtail is a rare event.

I have also noticed a dearth of honeybees, those busy little workers that flit from flower to flower spreading pollen and gathering the nectar from which to make their honey. In my youth, wherever flowers were blooming there was always the buzzing hum of busy bees at work. We harvested their honey for our table each year. Today, even though my backyard is filled with flowering plants only an occasional bee is seen.

I have often wondered where those insects have gone. Now the current issue of New Scientist magazine brings even more distressing news, at least for the bees. The story reports how late last year beekeepers in Florida suddenly found that entire colonies of bees were vanishing almost overnight. Soon similar mysterious disappearances were being reported in 22 Southern states.

The article quotes May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who said: “Bustling honeybee colonies, tens of thousands strong, were emptying in only a matter of days.”

According to Danny Weaver, president of the American Beekeeping Federation (ABF), up to half of the nation’s approximately 2000 commercial beekeepers have reported losses that fit the model of the syndrome, which has been termed “colony collapse disorder” (CCD).

Insect scientists are puzzled by the rapid rate of bee extinction, in which entire hives are suddenly found to be empty. One commercial beekeeper reported that the bees from 11,000 of his 13,000 hives have mysteriously gone missing. Another reported the total loss of virtually all of his 10,000 colonies.

According to Maryann Frazier, an apiculture (beekeeping) extension worker at Penn State University quoted on the ABF website, “This has become a highly significant yet poorly understood problem that threatens the pollination industry and the production of commercial honey in the United States.”

Researchers are puzzled, for there seems to be no easy explanation for the sudden outbreak of CCD. Investigators are eyeing a variety of suspects, including pesticides and viral, bacterial and fungal infection. So far there is no answer, and as spring arrives beekeepers in the northern part of the country will soon know whether CCD has spread to their cold climate areas as well as across the South.

The disappearance of bees is more serious than just the loss of honey, because it also threatens production of fruits and vegetables that rely on bees for pollination. A surprising number of crops depend on bee pollinators, including apples, almonds, blueberries, cantaloupe, cucumbers, squash and watermelon to name just a few.

According to one estimate, up to one-third of the human diet is affected directly or indirectly by bee pollination. The annual value of honeybee pollination to U.S. agriculture is approximately $9 billion, and bees play an important role around the world.

The New Scientist article also quoted Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota, St. Paul: “The bees are really at the base of a lot of agriculture and if they go tumbling down, what’s going to happen on top of that?”

Washington is beginning to notice the problem. The House Agriculture Committee scheduled a hearing on CCD with the ABF’s Danny Weaver and others from the industry scheduled to testify.

Weaver told New Scientist that he plans to ask the Department of Agriculture to double its funding for the nation’s four bee research labs. He noted that bee science gets just $8 million of the $93 billion the government spends each year on agricultural research.

Meanwhile, what about all those butterflies that are gone missing? That seems to be a problem worldwide, even in the faraway South Pacific. A recent press release from the Monarch Butterfly NZ Trust asks: “What’s happening to New Zealand’s butterflies?” The organization’s Jacqui Knight says that people contact her each day to inquire about the shortage of butterflies.

“Insects spread pollen, kill pests, clear away waste and improve our soil,” Knight says. “They do a lot of work in Nature’s background that we don’t imagine.”

The growing awareness of the problem could lead to some solutions. Although small and easily overlooked, insects are a wonderful and valuable part of our world. Someday soon I hope I can once again gaze with delight upon clouds of butterflies and listen to the busy hum of hard-working bees.

Posted in Diversity Loss, Extinction | 1 Comment »

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