The Current Mass Extinction

Is the biosphere today on the verge of anything like the mass extinctions of the geological past? Could some equivalent of meteorite impacts or dramatic climate change be underway, as humankind's rapid destruction of natural habitats forces animals and plants out of existence?

Increasingly, researchers are doing the numbers, and saying, yes, if present trends continue, a mass extinction is very likely underway. The evidence is pieced together from details drawn from all over the world, but it adds up to a disturbing picture. This time, unlike the past, it's not a chance asteroid collision, nor a chain of climatic circumstances alone that's at fault. Instead, it is chiefly the activities of an ever-growing human population, in concert with long-term environmental change.

The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria, and fungi, not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone.

The typical rate of extinction differs for different groups of organisms. Mammals, for instance, have an average species "lifespan" from origination to extinction of about 1 million years, although some species persist for as long as 10 million years. There are about 5,000 known mammalian species alive at present. Given the average species lifespan for mammals, the background extinction rate for this group would be approximately one species lost every 200 years. Of course, this is an average rate -- the actual pattern of mammalian extinctions is likely to be somewhat uneven. Some centuries might see more than one mammalian extinction, and conversely, sometimes several centuries might pass without the loss of any mammal species. Yet the past 400 years have seen 89 mammalian extinctions, almost 45 times the predicted rate, and another 169 mammal species are listed as critically endangered.

Think of the Rain Forest as the Earth's lungs.
Rain forests are being destroyed at a rate
of some 50 million acres per year.
In time, we humans will all be emphysemic.

Therein lies the concern biologists have for many of today's species. While the number of actual documented extinctions may not seem that high, they know that many more species are "living dead" -- populations so critically small that they have little hope of survival. Other species are among the living dead because of their interrelationships -- for example, the loss of a pollinator can doom the plant it pollinates, and a prey species can take its predator with it into extinction. By some estimates, as much as 30 percent of the world's animals and plants could be on a path to extinction within 100 years. These losses are likely to be unevenly distributed, as some geographic areas and some groups of organisms are more vulnerable to extinction than others. Tropical rain forest species are at especially high risk, as are top carnivores, species with small geographic ranges, and marine reef species.

Earth's population will double
in about 40 years to some
10 billion in 2050.

Humanity's main impact on the extinction rate is landscape modification, an impact greatly increased by the burgeoning human population. Now standing at 5.7 billion and growing at a rate of 1.6 percent per year, the population of the world will double in 43 years if growth continues at this pace. By draining wetlands, plowing prairies, logging forests, paving, and building, we are altering the landscape on an unprecedented scale. Some organisms do well under the conditions we've created: They tend to cope well with change, tolerate a broad range of habitats, disperse widely, and reproduce rapidly, and they can quickly crowd out more specialized local species. City pigeons, zebra mussels, rats, and kudzu and tamarisk trees -- these are examples of what biologists call "weedy" species, both animals and plants. Many weedy species will probably survive, and even thrive, in the face of the current mass extinction. But thousands of others, many never known to science, are likely to perish.

Picking through the rubble.

And what is the fate of our own species likely to be, if we really are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction? One possibility is that as diversity and abundance wither, the species causing it all -- Homo sapiens, the most dominant species in history -- could also be on the road to oblivion. But another possibility is that Homosapiens, which has proved to be a very effective weedy species itself, will persist. That's the view of paleobiologist David Jablonski, who sees us as one of the survivors, "sort of picking through the rubble" of a world that has lost much of its biodiversity -- and much of its comfort. For along with that species richness, the ecosystem is likely to loose much of its ability to provide many of the valuable services that we take for granted, from cleaning and recirculating air and water, to pollinating crops and providing a source for new pharmaceuticals. And while the fossil record tells us that biodiversity has always recovered, it also tells us that the recovery will be unbearably slow in human terms -- 5 to 10 million years after the mass extinctions of the past. That's more than 200,000 generations of humankind before levels of biodiversity comparable to those we inherited might be restored.

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

(T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men)

The old ways have blown up all by themselves,

fallen under the weight of a system that was a Potemkin village of alleged prosperity and progress based on easy credit and crazed consumerism. A financial system in which it was possible to become rich and powerful while investing and trading in nothing at all. An information system paralyzed and sabotaged by the technology that was outstripping it. A political system for which too many held open contempt. A consumer culture making things that didn’t last and that people didn’t really need. What happens to a country that has developed the peculiar habit of shopping for recreation when it runs out of money? Well, it can either screech to a halt, or it can discover that its priorities need to be recalibrated, and that “stuff” is not salvation.

Excerpt from Anna Quindlen 2011 Commencement Address at Grinnell College

Goldman Sachs Demurs

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, testified before Congress in April 2010 regarding Goldman's role in the mortgage crisis, that Goldman Sachs had no moral or legal obligation to inform its clients it was betting against the products they were buying from Goldman Sachs because Goldman was not acting in a fiduciary role. Now a fiduciary is someone who has undertaken to act for and on behalf of another in a particular matter in circumstances that give rise to a relationship of trust and confidence. So Blankfein was saying, in effect, that its clients had no reason to believe that they could trust Goldman Sachs. That certainly turned out to be true, but was it true a priori?

Apparently the courts thought so, because in April 2010, Goldman Sachs was accused of securities fraud in a civil suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that claimed the bank created and sold a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail. The move marked the first time that regulators have taken action against a Wall Street deal that helped investors capitalize on the collapse of the housing market. Goldman paid a settlement of $550 million in 2010 to settle accusations that it had misled investors who bought the Abacus mortgage security.

The Death of Innocence

Child killed in Libya

3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability

Science makes clear that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years. Evidence is growing that human pressures are starting to overwhelm the Earth’s buffering capacity.

Humans are now the most significant driver of global change, propelling the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. We can no longer exclude the possibility that our collective actions will trigger tipping points, risking abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems.

These are conclusions of the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability, May 16-19, 2011.

RealClimate reported that, "On Wednesday, 17 Nobel laureates who gathered in Stockholm have published a remarkable memorandum, asking for “fundamental transformation and innovation in all spheres and at all scales in order to stop and reverse global environmental change”. The Stockholm Memorandum concludes that we have entered a new geological era: the Anthropocene, where humanity has become the main driver of global change."

Deny, Deny, Deny

People who deny that human activities are contributing to global warming use many arguments in defense of their position, including: increased solar activity (this is a favorite); the imperfect rotation of the earth around its axis (it "wobbles"); and volcanic eruptions spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (they actually throw a lot of dust up that can cause temporary cooling). Other causes have been postulated, including some fairly esoteric ones, such as reversal of the earth's polarity, cosmic rays, and terraforming by extraterrestrials as a prelude to their invasion (they like every place to be like Florida).

As bizarre as the extraterrestrial terraforming may be, another position seems to me to be even more outlandish, viz., humans are just too insignificant a presence to cause such a major change in the environment. One of my critics argued that, "We know the global climate is on a up and down cycle of hundreds of millions of years with mini up and down cycles of hundreds and thousands of years along this path of millions of years." Yeah, I mean what impact can puny humans have on the environment?

Burning the rain forests: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/AmazonFireRise/

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

Species extinction/declining biological diversity: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2009/population-speak-out-02-26-2009.html

Purple Mountains Majesty: http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/

Los Angeles, January 29, 2004
I grew up in LA, 1938 -1961, and it didn't look anything like this; damn extraterrestrials!

It's encouraging to see that Americans generally (~70%) have come to accept the fact that the planet is warming, although it's disappointing that there is still so much disagreement over what's causing it. Even when people agree that human activities are causing warming, there is disagreement over what to do about it, if anything. Another of my critics says, "Why bother trying to reduce our emissions, when China, India, and other developing nations are more than offsetting our efforts with their emissions?"

While China is the world's greatest emitter of greenhouse gases (it took over that dubious distinction from the United States in 2006), the US ranks at the top of the GHG leader board in cumulative emissions since 1850, with the EU second. Between them, the US and the EU account for over 55% of cumulative emissions. China is a poor fourth at 7.6%, and India is further down the list at 2.2%. Thus it seems to me disingenuous to tell the world that we're not going to do anything about our emissions because China, and other developing nations, are now emitting GHGs, too.

One of the more unfortunate aspects of dumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere is that for all practical purposes, it never goes away, i.e, "carbon is forever." University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer has stated that, "The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO₂ to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far."

Thus, if we really work hard at decreasing our GHG emissions (instead of increasing them as we're doing now), our best hope is to avoid accumulating more atmospheric CO2 and maybe be lucky enough to avert a "tipping point" crisis, where positive feedback effects overwhelm current climate dynamics and, like flipping a switch, plunge the planet into climate hell.

The Earth's Hadean period, roughly 4.7 billion years ago.

Terrorism and the Death of Osama bin-Laden

Osama bin_Laden, 1957(?) - 2011

I believe that the vast majority of Americans feel, as I do, that justice was served when US special forces killed Osama bin-Laden last Sunday, May 1, 2011. Bin-Laden’s death occurred some ten years after the al-Qaeda planned and executed suicide attacks on Nine-Eleven killed nearly 3000 people.

We can all be proud of and grateful for the bravery of those who carried out the attacks and those who made them possible, from our president, to the anonymous intelligence analysts painstakingly sifting through massive amounts of seemingly disparate facts and rumors.

Eric Rudolph (2005) pleaded guilty to
bombing a Birmingham abortion clinic
and 3 other bombings, including the
1996 Atlanta Olympics

Now is the time to come together as one people and celebrate the bringing to justice of this international criminal; in ridding the world of his evil intent and deeds forever. At the same time, we must know that those bent on perpetrating indiscriminate violence to achieve their ideological views remain and they are of all stripes. In addition to Islamic extremists, Christian fundamentalists, environmental and animal rights extremists, and globalization opponents, among others, employ terror as their instrument of change. The US National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) reports that, “Approximately 11,000 terrorist attacks occurred in 83 countries during 2009, resulting in over 58,000 victims, including nearly 15,000 fatalities” (NCTC Report on Terrorism, 2009).

There is a need for effective counter terrorism measures to combat the continuing threat. At the same time, the Nation must continue to address the thorny issues that have plagued us since Nine-Eleven and our response to it. President Obama deserves credit for his leadership in the operation to eliminate Osama bin-Laden, but he has been less proactive in addressing some of these crucial issues, including the balance between our civil rights and the need for effective surveillance, intelligence gathering, and incarceration. Guantanamo remains open and detainees remain under indefinite detention. Should terrorists be tried in civilian courts or by military tribunals? And perhaps most troubling morally, the tracking down of bin-Laden has rekindled the torture debate; did “enhanced interrogation techniques” result in the identification of bin-Laden’s hideout? Do the ends justify the means?