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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Monday, February 13, 2012

13 February - Blogs I'm Following II

American Museum of Natural History, New York, USAImage via Wikipedia
American Museum of Natural History, New York, USAImage via Wikipedia
The Pacific-Antarctic Ridge is the southern ex...Image via Wikipedia
Cover of "Terra: Our 100-Million-Year-Old...Cover via Amazon
 Decline of Empire
The Sixth Extinction
Dave Cohen
“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows…
Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year — more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world’s fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit…
The road to sanity. It is only when we acknowledge that we—all of us, not just those guys over there—are the problem we’re trying to fix that we can possibly do anything about the problems we create. This is the “consciousness” solution—we need a lot more of it. This is the opposite of friedmanism, in which self-serving cheerleading is a substitute for thought & awareness. More darkly, the dyed-in-the-wool pessimist believes that with Homo sapiens, just as with any other species, what you see is what you get. In other words, Human Nature properly understood forms an insurmountable barrier to making real changes in our collective behavior. Thus over-population or the destruction of other species are non-preventable outcomes of the human condition, even if some people are aware of the need for change
Paleontologist Michael Novacek of the American Museum of Natural History explains The Sixth Extinction to an earnest but ultimately uncomprehending Charlie Rose. "What’s important from the perspective of people like myself, who study this long history of organisms, is that this is major, this is a big deal. This is something on the scale of the Cretaceous Extinction, in the ball park. And we’re in the midst of it. What an interesting time we live in, in some perverse way, you might say that we’re witnessing the major events [mass extinctions] in the history of life in our lifetime.” Novacek is the author of Terra: Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem—And the Threats That Now Put It At Risk.
Scientists identified the maintenance of biodiversity - the variety of plant and animal species and their habitats - as critical to human well-being; they rate biodiversity loss as a more serious environmental problem than the depletion of the ozone layer, global warming, or pollution and contamination. The majority (70%) polled think that during the next thirty years as many as one-fifth of all species alive today will become extinct, and one third think that as many as half of all species on the Earth will die out in that time.
[My note: This was 11 years ago. if 20% of all species alive in 1998 were predicted to go extinct in the next 30 years, I would say we're running right on, if not ahead of, schedule.]
  
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