At least Bush loves the enviornment....

[NoCalMike 0]

No, I'd say it was a pretty shitty movie based on a less-than-stellar book.

-=Mike

Well forget about the movie then, instead how about addressing the point of the latter half of this thread.

[Guest MikeSC]

No, I'd say it was a pretty shitty movie based on a less-than-stellar book.

        -=Mike

Well forget about the movie then, instead how about addressing the point of the latter half of this thread.

We are incapable of destroying the planet. That is a fact.

 

We have no clue what damage we may --- or, equally likely, may NOT --- be doing to the environment. That is a fact.

 

Bush isn't championing the pumping of nuclear waste into the ground, so this is all a red herring.

-=Mike

[NoCalMike 0]

No, I'd say it was a pretty shitty movie based on a less-than-stellar book.

         -=Mike

Well forget about the movie then, instead how about addressing the point of the latter half of this thread.

We are incapable of destroying the planet. That is a fact.

 

We have no clue what damage we may --- or, equally likely, may NOT --- be doing to the environment. That is a fact.

 

Bush isn't championing the pumping of nuclear waste into the ground, so this is all a red herring.

-=Mike

Well that latter half of the thread was quick to dismiss "destroying the world" theories faster then you usually do.

 

I was referring to the fact that you seem to want to refute that pollution, excess garbage, toxins etc...being released into the water and air has no effect on the enviornment and/or people's health in general. People breathing highly polluted air and eating fish from lakes/rives full of water that contain dangerous levils of toxin, regardless of enviornmental effects, you can't honestly say this isn't bad for HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

[Guest CronoT]

No, I'd say it was a pretty shitty movie based on a less-than-stellar book.

         -=Mike

Well forget about the movie then, instead how about addressing the point of the latter half of this thread.

We are incapable of destroying the planet. That is a fact.

 

We have no clue what damage we may --- or, equally likely, may NOT --- be doing to the environment. That is a fact.

 

Bush isn't championing the pumping of nuclear waste into the ground, so this is all a red herring.

-=Mike

Well that latter half of the thread was quick to dismiss "destroying the world" theories faster then you usually do.

 

I was referring to the fact that you seem to want to refute that pollution, excess garbage, toxins etc...being released into the water and air has no effect on the enviornment and/or people's health in general. People breathing highly polluted air and eating fish from lakes/rives full of water that contain dangerous levils of toxin, regardless of enviornmental effects, you can't honestly say this isn't bad for HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

Cal, he's going to keep ignoring it until it comes up and take a nice big shit on his dinner plate.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Q for EricMM:

 

Everyone is saying that volcano eruptions pollute much more than humans. Isn't part of the thinking behind global warming that it can lead to increased seismic activity which could lead to things like volcano eruptions which could lead to global cooling. Sorry, I'm not very well read in science/ecology.

[Guest MikeSC]

No, I'd say it was a pretty shitty movie based on a less-than-stellar book.

        -=Mike

Well forget about the movie then, instead how about addressing the point of the latter half of this thread.

We are incapable of destroying the planet. That is a fact.

 

We have no clue what damage we may --- or, equally likely, may NOT --- be doing to the environment. That is a fact.

 

Bush isn't championing the pumping of nuclear waste into the ground, so this is all a red herring.

-=Mike

Well that latter half of the thread was quick to dismiss "destroying the world" theories faster then you usually do.

 

I was referring to the fact that you seem to want to refute that pollution, excess garbage, toxins etc...being released into the water and air has no effect on the enviornment and/or people's health in general. People breathing highly polluted air and eating fish from lakes/rives full of water that contain dangerous levils of toxin, regardless of enviornmental effects, you can't honestly say this isn't bad for HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

Who said it was a good thing?

 

World of difference between the eradication of life and shangri-frickin'-la.

-=Mike

[EricMM 0]

I dunno smitty that seems a little farfetched to me.

 

AFAIK, global warming will just move weather patterns somewhat, create more precipitation in some areas and less in others, with all that that entails for farmers around the world.

 

Yes, Volcanos release an ungodly amount of CO2, sulpher (I think) and other pollutants into the atmosphere. But they aren't as common as everyday. And they're not good things. Why should we create a million little volcanoes everyday?

 

Mike we really can't argue this any further. If you won't see that Bush is in favor of lowering environmental restrictions on things like poisons, dumping, deforestation, and other things negative to environments, then you won't. But it would probably be your dumbest hour.

[Ripper 0]

His dumbest hour? Now that is reaching, dude. Cops should be able to stop black people for being black, anyone that ever uses unemployment is being a lazy freeloader, any man that has had anal sex with a woman is gay.....saying polution doesn't hurt the planet is up there but COME ON.

[Kahran Ramsus 0]

Everyone is saying that volcano eruptions pollute much more than humans. Isn't part of the thinking behind global warming that it can lead to increased seismic activity which could lead to things like volcano eruptions which could lead to global cooling. Sorry, I'm not very well read in science/ecology.

 

Not a chance. Volcanic activity is completely determined from convection currents in the mantle and/or plate boundaries. It has nothing to do with the atmosphere at all, but what is coming up from underneath.

 

AFAIK, global warming will just move weather patterns somewhat, create more precipitation in some areas and less in others, with all that that entails for farmers around the world.

 

It will, and it will influence the length of growing seasons as well. For example, in Saskatchewan it will become significantly drier and production will go down, like during the Depression. But in Ontario, because of the longer summers, the farmers there would benefit. These are all localized, of course. On a more global scale, the further away from the equator you go, and the further west you go, the bigger an impact global warming will have. Aside from the arctic regions (Antarctica is cold because of the West Wind Drift and wouldn't be affected greatly by atmospheric changes), the areas that would be most affected in a negative way would be Peru, the Pacific Coast of the US, Western Europe (especially France & Spain), and Western Australia. Western Africa likely would, but climate conditions are so shitty there now that I don't think it matters too much.

[NoCalMike 0]

His dumbest hour? Now that is reaching, dude. Cops should be able to stop black people for being black, anyone that ever uses unemployment is being a lazy freeloader, any man that has had anal sex with a woman is gay.....saying polution doesn't hurt the planet is up there but COME ON.

Aww, Ripper with some golden oldies

[Guest BrokenWings]

Hey, you can only eat four fish per month (and stay healthy, anyway) from Lake Superior, but that must be from all the volcano's we've had around here recently!

[Kahran Ramsus 0]

Hey, you can only eat four fish per month (and stay healthy, anyway) from Lake Superior, but that must be from all the volcano's we've had around here recently!

That has nothing to do with global warming, which is what Mike is talking about.

[NoCalMike 0]

Hey, you can only eat four fish per month (and stay healthy, anyway) from Lake Superior, but that must be from all the volcano's we've had around here recently!

That has nothing to do with global warming, which is what Mike is talking about.

Actually I think if you read the latter half of the thread, the discussion has gone from global warming to overall pollution/toxins/poison in general.

[EricMM 0]

Someone's sarcasm detector is broken.

 

Anyways, that book Mike (NoCal) referenced raises a valid point that Mike (theSC) hasn't addressed. Other cultures in history have ruined their environments to the point where they effectively destroyed themselves.

 

Where do you get off saying we're better than that? You KNOW we have a greater capacity to influence our environment than ever before. And while some of our leaders advocate restraint in this regard, to go back to our original topic of this thread, others feel restraint would be too "costly."

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

I dunno smitty that seems a little farfetched to me.

 

AFAIK, global warming will just move weather patterns somewhat, create more precipitation in some areas and less in others, with all that that entails for farmers around the world.

 

Yes, Volcanos release an ungodly amount of CO2, sulpher (I think) and other pollutants into the atmosphere.  But they aren't as common as everyday.  And they're not good things.  Why should we create a million little volcanoes everyday?

 

Mike we really can't argue this any further.  If you won't see that Bush is in favor of lowering environmental restrictions on things like poisons, dumping, deforestation, and other things negative to environments, then you won't.  But it would probably be your dumbest hour.

My bad. I'm really poorly informed in this area. I DO remember reading that *somehow* global warming could lead to global cooling.

[The Czech Republic 0]

For example, in Saskatchewan it will become significantly drier and production will go down, like during the Depression. But in Ontario, because of the longer summers, the farmers there would benefit.

So then that's okay, because the only provinces that matter are Ontario and Quebec, right?

[Kahran Ramsus 0]

Hey, you can only eat four fish per month (and stay healthy, anyway) from Lake Superior, but that must be from all the volcano's we've had around here recently!

That has nothing to do with global warming, which is what Mike is talking about.

Actually I think if you read the latter half of the thread, the discussion has gone from global warming to overall pollution/toxins/poison in general.

The rest of us, but Mike doesn't seem to be.

 

My bad. I'm really poorly informed in this area. I DO remember reading that *somehow* global warming could lead to global cooling.

 

No. In theory, enough melted ice could weaken (or push south) the Gulf Stream, which some people seem to think will result in another ice age.

 

But there are two problems with this theory:

 

1) The Gulf Stream largely affects North-Western Europe. It doesn't reach up north enough along the North American coast to make much of an impact. The areas that it does directly affect in NA (Florida & The Carolinas) are far enough south that they would be warm anyways. It also has nothing to do with the Pacific at all. So movement in the Gulf Stream would affect the British Isles, northern France, parts of Scandinavia, and not much else.

 

2) There isn't nearly enough ice in the north to overpower the Gulf Stream like that. It would be a different story if there was a continent like Antarctica sitting on the north pole, but flow from the Arctic Basin is restricted and Greenland isn't nearly big enough.

 

In a global warming scenario, the world would indeed get warmer, not cooler.

 

So then that's okay, because the only provinces that matter are Ontario and Quebec, right?

 

It would benefit the eastern US too. New York, Ohio, New England & Pennsylvania in particular.

[The Czech Republic 0]

So then that's okay, because the only provinces that matter are Ontario and Quebec, right?

 

It would benefit the eastern US too. New York, Ohio, New England & Pennsylvania in particular.

Well according to liberals, the Northeast is the only part of the country that matters east of the Rockies.

[SuperJerk 0]

I'm fairly bothered by the idea that someone can justify pollution by claiming humans don't have the power to destroy the planet. The article this thread was based on, and the subsequent points made by me, HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH GLOBABL WARMING OR ANY OTHER APOCALYPTIC ENVIRONMENTAL THEORY. Jesus, its like some of you are speaking another language or something.

 

I never said mankind had the power to destroy the planet. I just said we had the power to put our own health at serious risk by dumping toxins into our own food, water, and air supplies.

[Kahran Ramsus 0]

I'm fairly bothered by the idea that someone can justify pollution by claiming humans don't have the power to destroy the planet. The article this thread was based on, and the subsequent points made by me, HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH GLOBABL WARMING OR ANY OTHER APOCALYPTIC ENVIRONMENTAL THEORY. Jesus, its like some of you are speaking another language or something.

 

I never said mankind had the power to destroy the planet. I just said we had the power to put our own health at serious risk by dumping toxins into our own food, water, and air supplies.

And I agree with you. Mike seems to be arguing another topic.

[SuperJerk 0]

So I've noticed.

[EricMM 0]

And not posting in this thread anymore. hmmm...

 

One thing is, if global warming would lead to higher sea levels, with an exanded ocean and higher rainfalls in some areas, possibly even polar melting, some flood plains areas around the world would just be flooded.

 

And a lot of shorefront property as well. But it's not like it would be immediate. People would see it coming and have chances to move. But it wouldn't be a GOOD thing for people who don't WANT to move.

[Kahran Ramsus 0]

Sea levels vary naturally. They don't remain constant. Eventually they would have to move anyways. It is the risk of living near water.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Scientists announced in the July 21, 1999, edition of the journal Nature findings that suggest that global warming can sometimes lead to cold weather or even a worldwide freeze.

 

Scientists have long known that a severe cold spell occurred after the end of the Pleistocene glaciation, approximately 8,200 years ago. The cause, however, has been a mystery. The authors of the Nature article write that the centuries long cold spell might have been caused by meltwater from the disappearing glaciers, cooling the North Atlantic.

 

The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered parts of North America with ice up to two miles thick for more than a million years. When the Earth began to warm 10,000 years ago, it retreated back toward the poles. The ice sheet left in its wake at least two lakes containing more water than the Great Lakes combined.

 

In the Hudson Bay, ice held the water in place like a plug in a bathtub. When the plug finally melted, trillions of gallons gushed into the Labrador Sea, flowing out at 100 times the rate water leaves the Mississippi.

 

The conclusions of the authors are the result of a study by University of Colorado and Canadian researchers who examined evidence of this huge flood in the Hudson Bay region of Quebec and Ontario.

 

Independent research showed that global temperatures dropped significantly within several hundred years of the flood. Until this study, nobody could pinpoint if these two events were connected, said the study's lead author, University of Colorado geologist Don Barber. The scientists used radiocarbon dating of clams in the flood sediment, and other evidence, to correlate the two events.

 

The Atlantic Gulf Stream normally acts like a conveyor belt to deliver warm tropical water to temperate regions. By adding so much cold fresh water in such a short time, the flood shut down the Gulf Stream, said Richard Alley, a climate expert at Penn State University.

 

Temperatures in Greenland and Europe dropped by 6 to 15 degrees for at least 200 years, according to ice core data.

 

The authors conclusions demonstrate how global warming can, paradoxically, provoke a global freeze. If a modern glacier such as the Greenland Ice Sheet melts as a result of rising temperatures in the next century, it could trigger a similar flood and climate fluctuation, the researchers said.

[Red Hot Thumbtack In The Eye 0]

Slightly related to the topic at hand

 

What would happen to our planet if the mighty hand of humanity simply disappeared?

By Alan Weisman

 

DISCOVER Vol. 26 No. 02 | February 2005 | Environment

 

Given the mounting toll of fouled oceans, overheated air, missing topsoil, and mass extinctions, we might sometimes wonder what our planet would be like if humans suddenly disappeared. Would Superfund sites revert to Gardens of Eden? Would the seas again fill with fish? Would our concrete cities crumble to dust from the force of tree roots, water, and weeds? How long would it take for our traces to vanish? And if we could answer such questions, would we be more in awe of the changes we have wrought, or of nature’s resilience?

 

Rest of Article (long):

A good place to start searching for answers is in Korea, in the 155-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide mountainous Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, set up by the armistice ending the Korean War. Aside from rare military patrols or desperate souls fleeing North Korea, humans have barely set foot in the strip since 1953. Before that, for 5,000 years, the area was populated by rice farmers who carved the land into paddies. Today those paddies have become barely discernible, transformed into pockets of marsh, and the new occupants of these lands arrive as dazzling white squadrons of red-crowned cranes that glide over the bulrushes in perfect formation, touching down so lightly that they detonate no land mines. Next to whooping cranes, they are the rarest such birds on Earth. They winter in the DMZ alongside the endangered white-naped cranes, revered in Asia as sacred portents of peace.

 

If peace is ever declared, suburban Seoul, which has rolled ever northward in recent decades, is poised to invade such tantalizing real estate. On the other side, the North Koreans are building an industrial megapark. This has spurred an international coalition of scientists called the DMZ Forum to try to consecrate the area for a peace park and nature preserve. Imagine it as “a Korean Gettysburg and Yosemite rolled together,” says Harvard University biologist Edward O. Wilson, who believes that tourism revenues could trump those from agriculture or development.

 

As serenely natural as the DMZ now is, it would be far different if people throughout Korea suddenly disappeared. The habitat would not revert to a truly natural state until the dams that now divert rivers to slake the needs of Seoul’s more than 20 million inhabitants failed—a century or two after the humans had gone. But in the meantime, says Wilson, many creatures would flourish. Otters, Asiatic black bears, musk deer, and the nearly vanquished Amur leopard would spread into slopes reforested with young daimyo oak and bird cherry. The few Siberian tigers that still prowl the North Korean–Chinese borderlands would multiply and fan across Asia’s temperate zones. “The wild carnivores would make short work of livestock,” he says. “Few domestic animals would remain after a couple of hundred years. Dogs would go feral, but they wouldn’t last long: They’d never be able to compete.”

 

If people were no longer present anywhere on Earth, a worldwide shakeout would follow. From zebra mussels to fire ants to crops to kudzu, exotics would battle with natives. In time, says Wilson, all human attempts to improve on nature, such as our painstakingly bred horses, would revert to their origins. If horses survived at all, they would devolve back to Przewalski’s horse, the only true wild horse, still found in the Mongolian steppes. “The plants, crops, and animal species man has wrought by his own hand would be wiped out in a century or two,” Wilson says. In a few thousand years, “the world would mostly look as it did before humanity came along—like a wilderness.”

 

The new wilderness would consume cities, much as the jungle of northern Guatemala consumed the Mayan pyramids and megalopolises of overlapping city-states. From A.D. 800 to 900, a combination of drought and internecine warfare over dwindling farmland brought 2,000 years of civilization crashing down. Within 10 centuries, the jungle swallowed all.

 

Mayan communities alternated urban living with fields sheltered by forests, in contrast with today’s paved cities, which are more like man-made deserts. However, it wouldn’t take long for nature to undo even the likes of a New York City. Jameel Ahmad, civil engineering department chair at Cooper Union College in New York City, says repeated freezing and thawing common in months like March and November would split cement within a decade, allowing water to seep in. As it, too, froze and expanded, cracks would widen. Soon, weeds such as mustard and goosegrass would invade. With nobody to trample seedlings, New York’s prolific exotic, the Chinese ailanthus tree, would take over. Within five years, says Dennis Stevenson, senior curator at the New York Botanical Garden, ailanthus roots would heave up sidewalks and split sewers.

 

That would exacerbate a problem that already plagues New York—rising groundwater. There’s little soil to absorb it or vegetation to transpire it, and buildings block the sunlight that could evaporate it. With the power off, pumps that keep subways from flooding would be stilled. As water sluiced away soil beneath pavement, streets would crater.

 

Eric Sanderson of the Bronx Zoo Wildlife Conservation Society heads the Mannahatta Project, a virtual re-creation of pre-1609 Manhattan. He says there were 30 to 40 streams in Manhattan when the Dutch first arrived. If New Yorkers disappeared, sewers would clog, some natural watercourses would reappear, and others would form.Within 20 years, the water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s subway tunnels would corrode and buckle, turning Lexington Avenue into a river.

 

New York’s architecture isn’t as flammable as San Francisco’s clapboard Victorians, but within 200 years, says Steven Clemants, vice president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, tons of leaf litter would overflow gutters as pioneer weeds gave way to colonizing native oaks and maples in city parks. A dry lightning strike, igniting decades of uncut, knee-high Central Park grass, would spread flames through town.

 

As lightning rods rusted away, roof fires would leap among buildings into paneled offices filled with paper. Meanwhile, native Virginia creeper and poison ivy would claw at walls covered with lichens, which thrive in the absence of air pollution. Wherever foundations failed and buildings tumbled, lime from crushed concrete would raise soil pH, inviting buckthorn and birch. Black locust and autumn olive trees would fix nitrogen, allowing more goldenrods, sunflowers, and white snakeroot to move in along with apple trees, their seeds expelled by proliferating birds. Sweet carrots would quickly devolve to their wild form, unpalatable Queen Anne’s lace, while broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower would regress to the same unrecognizable broccoli ancestor.

 

Unless an earthquake strikes New York first, bridges spared yearly applications of road salt would last a few hundred years before their stays and bolts gave way (last to fall would be Hell Gate Arch, built for railroads and easily good for another thousand years). Coyotes would invade Central Park, and deer, bears, and finally wolves would follow. Ruins would echo the love song of frogs breeding in streams stocked with alewives, herring, and mussels dropped by seagulls. Missing, however, would be all fauna that have adapted to humans. The invincible cockroach, an insect that originated in the hot climes of Africa, would succumb in unheated buildings. Without garbage, rats would starve or serve as lunch for peregrine falcons and red-tailed hawks. Pigeons would genetically revert back to the rock doves from which they sprang.

 

It’s unclear how long animals would suffer from the urban legacy of concentrated heavy metals. Over many centuries, plants would take these up, recycle, redeposit, and gradually dilute them. The time bombs left in petroleum tanks, chemical plants, power plants, and dry-cleaning plants might poison the earth beneath them for eons. One intriguing example is the former Rocky Mountain Arsenal next to Denver International Airport. There a chemical weapons plant produced mustard and nerve gas, incendiary bombs, napalm, and after World War II, pesticides. In 1984 it was considered by the arsenal commander to be the most contaminated spot in the United States. Today it is a national wildlife refuge, home to bald eagles that feast on its prodigious prairie dog population.

 

The Statue of Liberty, if not first felled by an earthquake, would likely be flattened by glaciers that have advanced on the region three times in the past 100,000 years.

 

However, it took more than $130 million and a lot of man-hours to drain and seal the arsenal’s lake, in which ducks once died minutes after landing and the aluminum bottoms of boats sent to fetch their carcasses rotted within a month. In a world with no one left to bury the bad stuff, decaying chemical containers would slowly expose their lethal contents. Places like the Indian Point nuclear power plant, 35 miles north of Times Square, would dump radioactivity into the Hudson long after the lights went out.

 

Old stone buildings in Manhattan, such as Grand Central Station or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, would outlast every modern glass box, especially with no more acid rain to pock their marble. Still, at some point thousands of years hence, the last stone walls—perhaps chunks of St. Paul’s Chapel on Wall Street, built in 1766 from Manhattan’s own hard schist—would fall. Three times in the past 100,000 years, glaciers have scraped New York clean, and they’ll do so again. The mature hardwood forest would be mowed down. On Staten Island, Fresh Kills’s four giant mounds of trash would be flattened, their vast accumulation of stubborn PVC plastic and glass ground to powder. After the ice receded, an unnatural concentration of reddish metal—remnants of wiring and plumbing—would remain buried in layers. The next toolmaker to arrive or evolve might discover it and use it, but there would be nothing to indicate who had put it there.

 

Before humans appeared, an oriole could fly from the Mississippi to the Atlantic and never alight on anything other than a treetop. Unbroken forest blanketed Europe from the Urals to the English Channel. The last remaining fragment of that primeval European wilderness—half a million acres of woods straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, called the Bialowieza Forest—provides another glimpse of how the world would look if we were gone. There, relic groves of huge ash and linden trees rise 138 feet above an understory of hornbeams, ferns, swamp alders, massive birches, and crockery-size fungi. Norway spruces, shaggy as Methuselah, stand even taller. Five-century-old oaks grow so immense that great spotted woodpeckers stuff whole spruce cones in their three-inch-deep bark furrows. The woods carry pygmy owl whistles, nutcracker croaks, and wolf howls. Fragrance wafts from eons of mulch.

 

High privilege accounts for such unbroken antiquity. During the 14th century, a Lithuanian duke declared it a royal hunting preserve. For centuries it stayed that way. Eventually, the forest was subsumed by Russia and in 1888 became the private domain of the czars. Occupying Germans took lumber and slaughtered game during World War I, but a pristine core was left intact, which in 1921 became a Polish national park. Timber pillaging resumed briefly under the Soviets, but when the Nazis invaded, nature fanatic Hermann Göring decreed the entire preserve off limits. Then, following World War II, a reportedly drunken Josef Stalin agreed one evening in Warsaw to let Poland retain two-fifths of the forest.

[Red Hot Thumbtack In The Eye 0]

Continued...

 

THE WILDS OF NEW YORK

 

If humans were to vanish from New York, how soon would nature take over? Scientists predict that within . . .

 

-10 years Sidewalks crack and weeds invade. Hawks and falcons flourish, as do feral cats and dogs. The rat population, deprived of human garbage, crashes. Cockroaches, which thrive in warm buildings, disappear. Cultivated carrots, cabbages, broccoli, and brussels sprouts revert to their wild ancestors.

 

-20 years Water-soaked steel columns supporting subway tunnels corrode and buckle. Bears and wolves invade Central Park.

 

-50 years Concrete chunks tumble from buildings, whose steel foundations begin to crumble. Indian Point nuclear reactors leak radioactivity into the Hudson River.

 

-100 years Oaks and maples re-cover the land.

 

-300 years Most bridges collapse.

 

-1,000 years Hell Gate Bridge, built to bring the railroad across the East River, finally falls.

 

-10,000 years Indian Point nuclear reactors continue to leak radioactivity into the Hudson River.

 

-20,000 years Glaciers move relentlessly across the island of Manhattan and its environs, scraping the landscape clean.

 

To realize that all of Europe once looked like this is startling. Most unexpected of all is the sight of native bison. Just 600 remain in the wild, on both sides of an impassable iron curtain erected by the Soviets in 1980 along the border to thwart escapees to Poland’s renegade Solidarity movement. Although wolves dig under it, and roe deer are believed to leap over it, the herd of the largest of Europe’s mammals remains divided, and thus its gene pool. Belarus, which has not removed its statues of Lenin, has no specific plans to dismantle the fence. Unless it does, the bison may suffer genetic degradation, leaving them vulnerable to a disease that would wipe them out.

 

If the bison herd withers, they would join all the other extinct megafauna that even our total disappearance could never bring back. In a glass case in his laboratory, paleoecologist Paul S. Martin at the University of Arizona keeps a lump of dried dung he found in a Grand Canyon cave, left by a sloth weighing 200 pounds. That would have made it the smallest of several North American ground sloth species present when humans first appeared on this continent. The largest was as big as an elephant and lumbered around by the thousands in the woodlands and deserts of today’s United States. What we call pristine today, Martin says, is a poor reflection of what would be here if Homo sapiens had never evolved.

 

“America would have three times as many species of animals over 1,000 pounds as Africa does today,” he says. An amazing megafaunal menagerie roamed the region: Giant armadillos resembling armor-plated autos; bears twice the size of grizzlies; the hoofed, herbivorous toxodon, big as a rhinoceros; and saber-toothed tigers. A dozen species of horses were here, as well as the camel-like litoptern, giant beavers, giant peccaries, woolly rhinos, mammoths, and mastodons. Climate change and imported disease may have killed them, but most paleontologists accept the theory Martin advocates: “When people got out of Africa and Asia and reached other parts of the world, all hell broke loose.” He is convinced that people were responsible for the mass extinctions because they commenced with human arrival everywhere: first, in Australia 60,000 years ago, then mainland America 13,000 years ago, followed by the Caribbean islands 6,000 years ago, and Madagascar 2,000 years ago.

 

Yet one place on Earth did manage to elude the intercontinental holocaust: the oceans. Dolphins and whales escaped for the simple reason that prehistoric people could not hunt enough giant marine mammals to have a major impact on the population. “At least a dozen species in the ocean Columbus sailed were bigger than his biggest ship,” says marine paleoecologist Jeremy Jackson of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “Not only mammals—the sea off Cuba was so thick with 1,000-pound green turtles that his boats practically ran aground on them.” This was a world where ships collided with schools of whales and where sharks were so abundant they would swim up rivers to prey on cattle. Reefs swarmed with 800-pound goliath grouper, not just today’s puny aquarium species. Cod could be fished from the sea in baskets. Oysters filtered all the water in Chesapeake Bay every five days. The planet’s shores teemed with millions of manatees, seals, and walrus.

 

Within the past century, however, humans have flattened the coral reefs on the continental shelves and scraped the sea grass beds bare; a dead zone bigger than New Jersey grows at the mouth of the Mississippi; all the world’s cod fisheries have collapsed. What Pleistocene humans did in 1,500 years to terrestrial life, modern man has done in mere decades to the oceans—“almost,” Jackson says. Despite mechanized overharvesting, satellite fish tracking, and prolonged butchery of sea mammals, the ocean is still bigger than we are. “It’s not like the land,” he says. “The great majority of sea species are badly depleted, but they still exist. If people actually went away, most could recover.”

 

Even if global warming or ultraviolet radiation bleaches the Great Barrier Reef to death, Jackson says, “it’s only 7,000 years old. New reefs have had to form before. It’s not like the world is a constant place.” Without people, most excess industrial carbon dioxide would dissipate within 200 years, cooling the atmosphere. With no further chlorine and bromine leaking skyward, within decades the ozone layer would replenish, and ultraviolet damage would subside. Eventually, heavy metals and toxins would flush through the system; a few intractable PCBs might take a millennium.

 

During that same span, every dam on Earth would silt up and spill over. Rivers would again carry nutrients seaward, where most life would be, as it was long before vertebrates crawled onto the shore. Eventually, that would happen again. The world would start over.

----------------------

 

Failing that, I'm sure the world could deal with our population being mowed down to about a billion.

 

I'd approve of that anyway.

[Justice 0]

Posted per request from a friend.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1490248,00.html

 

Why global warming is not natural

By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent

Report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science

 

 

 

THE strongest evidence yet that global warming has been triggered by human activity has emerged from a study of rising temperatures in the oceans.

The rise in marine temperatures — by an average of 0.5C (0.9F) in 40 years — can be explained only if greenhouse gas emissions are responsible, research has shown. The results are so compelling that they should end controversy about the causes of climate change, one of the scientists who led the study said yesterday.

 

 

 

“The debate about whether there is a global warming signal now is over, at least for rational people,” said Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “The models got it right. If a politician stands up and says the uncertainty is too great to believe these models, that is no longer tenable.”

 

Dr Barnett’s team examined seven million observations of temperature, salinity and other variables in the world’s oceans collected by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and compared the patterns with those predicted by computer models of potential causes of climate change.

 

Natural variation in the Earth’s climate, or changes in solar activity or volcanic eruptions, which have been suggested as alternative explanations for rising temperatures, could not explain the data collected in the real world. Models based on man-made emissions of greenhouse gases matched the observations almost precisely.

 

“What absolutely nailed it was the greenhouse model,” Dr Barnett told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Washington. Two models, one designed in Britain and one here in the US, got it almost exactly. We were stunned.”

 

Climate change has affected the seas in different ways in different parts of the world: in the Atlantic, rising temperatures can be observed up to 2,300ft below the surface, while in the Pacific the warming is seen only up to 330ft down.

 

Only the greenhouse models replicated the changes that have been observed in practice. “All the potential culprits have been ruled out except one,” Dr Barnett said.

 

The results, which are about to be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, should increase pressure on the US Administration to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which came into force this week, he said. “It is time for nations that are not part of Kyoto to re-evaluate and see if it would be to their advantage to join,” he said. “The debate is not — have we got a clear global warming signal; the debate is — what we are going to do about it.”

 

In a separate study a team led by Ruth Curry, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Connecticut, has established that 20,000 sq km of freshwater ice melted in the Arctic between 1965 and 1995. Further melting on this scale could be sufficient to turn off the ocean currents that drive the Gulf Stream, which keeps Britain up to 6C warmer than it would otherwise be.