Extinction
"Biological diversity is being lost at a rate unequalled since the appearance of modern ecosystems more than 40 million years ago. A quarter of all mammals are threatened with extinction and nearly 70% of the world’s fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted"
In the larger sense of the term "pro life", the responsibility for pro life policies to protect life on Earth looms large as the threats to the diversity of life are revealed by science.
Has the 6th Mass Extinction Arrived? / Nature
Sixth Mass Extinction Is Here: Humanity Threatened / Science Daily
De-extinction in an Anthropogenic World
June 19, 2015 / Source: Stanford University / Summary: Biologists have use highly conservative estimates to prove that species are disappearing faster than at any time since the dinosaurs' demise
Species Extinction Threat Grows
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Human's Creating Sixth Great Extinction
Sixth mass extinction: Earth's species disappearing at frightening rate, new study says
19 June 2015
In the most sobering study of extinction yet, a team of Bay Area scientists says that animal species are disappearing at an accelerating rate -- portending the sixth mass extinction in the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth. "We are entering a mass extinction equivalent to what happened to the dinosaurs" unless conservation efforts are intensified, said UC Berkeley paleontologist Anthony D. Barnosky and an author of the Science Advances report, which was published Friday. If the trend continues, "within two human lifetimes we are in danger of losing three of four species on Earth,"...
UC Berkeley's Anthony Barnosky says the "sixth mass extinction" is not yet a done deal. In his new book "Dodging Extinction," he offers these preventive actions:Spread the word that the crisis is real.
Reduce your carbon footprint.
Buy products from companies that limit deforestation by using sustainably produced palm oil, a major ingredient in food, cosmetics and soap.
Eat fish from healthy fisheries. Learn more at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch list at www.seafoodwatch.org.
Eat less meat, to reduce agriculture's clear-cutting of rainforests.
Never buy anything made from ivory.
Adopt a species, or become a "citizen scientist" for a conservation group.
Support efforts to educate women in developing nations in order to slow population growth.
Vote for leaders who recognize the importance of conservation and carbon-neutral energy policies.
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http://www.globalissues.org/article/171/loss-of-biodiversity-and-extinctions
https://www.iucn.org/iyb/about/biodiversity_crisis/
http://www.millenniumassessment.org/proxy/Document.354.aspx
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A self-reinforcing positive feedback loop is akin to a "vicious circle": It accelerates the impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD). An example would be methane releases in the Arctic. Massive amounts of methane are currently locked in the permafrost, which is now melting rapidly. As the permafrost melts, methane - a greenhouse gas 100 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a short timescale - is released into the atmosphere, warming it further, which in turn causes more permafrost to melt, and so on.
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Habitat fragmentation and its lasting impact on Earth’s ecosystems / March 2015
“There are really only two big patches of intact forest left on Earth”
... the studies showed that when patches of forest become smaller and more isolated, the abundance of birds, mammal, insects and plants decreases in kind — those pressures reduced the species’ ability to persist... On average... fragmented forests lose more than half of their species within just 20 years; in the one experiment that’s still ongoing after more than two decades, the losses are continuing to compound.
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The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, published February 2014
Wikipedia / Book: The Sixth Extinction
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BIODIVERSITY -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity
http://science.jrank.org/pages/861/Biodiversity-Species-richness-biosphere.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_action_plan
THE BIOSPHERE
The biosphere is integral to the functioning of earth systems. First, the present atmosphere is the product of respiration on the part of plants, which receive carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. In addition, transpiration, a form of evaporation from living organisms (primarily plants), is a mechanism of fundamental importance for moving moisture from the hydrosphere through the biosphere to the atmosphere....
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http://www.biodiversitya-z.org/
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
http://www.biodiversitymapping.org/visualizations.htm
https://www.cbd.int/gbo3/ - Convention on Biological Diversity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Union_for_Conservation_of_Nature
http://www.biodiversityassociation.org/
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SMALL v LARGE SPECIES
Phytoplankton obtain energy through the process of photosynthesis and must therefore live in the well-lit surface layer (termed the euphotic zone) of an ocean, sea, lake, or other body of water. Phytoplankton account for half of all photosynthetic activity on Earth. Thus phytoplankton are responsible for much of the oxygen present in the Earth’s atmosphere – half of the total amount produced by all plant life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton
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Marine Biodiversity Strongly Linked to Ocean Temperature
ScienceDaily (July 29, 2010) — In an unprecedented effort that will be published online on the 28th of July by the international journal Nature, a team of scientists mapped and analyzed global biodiversity patterns for over 11,000 marine species ranging from tiny zooplankton to sharks and whales. The researchers found striking similarities among the distribution patterns, with temperature strongly linked to biodiversity for all thirteen groups studied. These results imply that future changes in ocean temperature, such as those due to climate change, may greatly affect the distribution of life in the sea.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100728131707.htm
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LARGE "CHARISMATIC" SPECIES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_world's_100_most_threatened_species
The standard approach, when looking at threatened species, is to focus on well-known larger species.
These are often called the 'charismatic' or 'iconic' species, versus the rarely considered 'worthless' species or the species that are not even 'known', or known to be in danger ... The reality is that much of the extinction in our era is of the small species, the lesser known, the unknown and unconsidered species... whether in the rich biospheres of the rainforest or the oceans, the micro-organisms are at risk and in peril of collapse.
When we speak of plankton, as a profoundly critical keystone species, the food chain of the oceans begins with plankton, yet the disruption of the atmosphere and the heating of the ocean, or acidification, will have great consequences to the phytoplankon flagellates, who cannot move with their limited locomotion system... the increases of heat or strengthened suns rays due to changes in atmospheric conditions, and UV radiation, can have deadly consequences.
If the food chain is disrupted, endangered and/or destroyed, the rest of the food chain, the connectivity between species, will be disrupted, endangered, and/or destroyed.
This is a great challenge of the era in which we live... loss of biodiversity and a 'ripple effect' over time, a threat environment that demands strategic environmental security as a key goal, as a policy objective of awareness and sustainability.
2015 - Big Trouble Ahead for Ocean Plankton
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Re: Preparing for and preventing an "extinction event" -- or "crunchy granola"... "we're all in this together..."
Asteroid
June 30, 2015
The Greatest Threat of Extinction -- the Asteroid Threat
According to an Asteroid Day Declaration signed by scientists including Bill Nye and dozens of NASA scientists and astronauts, we've discovered fewer than 10,000 of the estimated million asteroids that could strike the Earth, or less than 1 percent.
From Nature Journal -- 367, 33-40
Impacts on the Earth by asteroids and comets: assessing the hazard
Clark R. Chapman & David Morrison
There is a 1-in-10,000 chance that a large (approx 2-km diameter) asteroid or comet will collide with the Earth during the next century, disrupting the ecosphere and killing a large fraction of the world's population. Although impacts of this magnitude are so infrequent as to be beyond our personal experience, the long-term statistical hazard is comparable to that of many other, more familiar natural disasters, raising the question of whether mitigation measures should be considered.... [To read this story in full you will need to login at Nature]
...we've put very little into asteroid defense. [Economists Alex] Tabarrok and [Tyler] Cowen say this is largely because asteroid defense is what economists call a "public good." A public good is an economics term for something that is a) non-excludable, meaning that people who don’t pay can’t be prevented from using it and b) "non-rival," meaning that when I use it, it doesn't reduce your ability to use it.
If the U.S. government, or a private company, pays for asteroid defense, other people in other places will enjoy the benefits, too.
“This is a classic case of a public good," Tabarrok says. "Meaning that, if you protect one person, you basically protect the entire planet. If we push the asteroid away, we’ve saved everyone. But for that very reason, no one really wants to pay for it. They want the other guy to pay for it."
Markets are great at providing excludable, rival goods, like jeans, hamburgers and contact lenses. But they are not as good at ensuring that people have access to public goods...
Tabarrok who advocates for "Planetary Defense" says his hope is that private efforts in space will one day soon focus on mining asteroids for valuable resources. If you have miners and private developers working with asteroids in space, that could inadvertently make it easier to defend the planet against an asteroid collision.
"The idea that the whole planet is potentially under threat from an asteroid does make us think that the world is our home, and we’re all in this together – Spaceship Earth, to get a little crunchy granola. And that makes us think a little more about our fellow travelers, our fellow world residents, that we’re all in this together.”
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