Category: Biodiversity / Biodevastation
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Mass Death of Sequoias Is the Harbinger of Earth Systems Collapse
Climate change is killing giant sequoias in numbers that portend ecological disaster unless radical action is taken to reverse the impacts of the climate crisis. Sequoias, once deemed “unburnable,” began to be widely destroyed by fire in 2015, and then in 2020 and 2021, California fires tripled in area covered. A climate change threshold has been crossed.…
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Breakdown of the Marine Food Web
For the first time, a significant loss at the base of the marine food web has been detected. The Scottish research vessel Capepod reported the findings in equatorial waters of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a disturbing discovery, but first a look at the marine food web, starting with the lowest organisms: (1) phytoplankton — plant-like…
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Greenland Threatens
Greenland is sending signals to coastal metropolises around the world that it’s never too early to start building seawalls. These are not mixed signals from the big ice island. Rather, they are straightforward signals indicative of rapid breakdown of average ice thickness of 5,000 feet sooner than ever thought possible. Stating the obvious, it’s horrible…
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Will Egypt Drain the World’s Second Largest Wetland?
“With 35% loss globally since 1970, wetlands are our most threatened ecosystem, disappearing three times faster than forests. Wetlands’ services for climate mitigation, adaptation biodiversity, and human health outweigh all other terrestrial ecosystems.” (Source: Wetlands are Being Lost at Alarming Rates, Global Wetland Outlook, 2021) Sudd is Africa’s largest freshwater wetland at roughly 3,500…
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Nationalize or Neutralize: How to End the Fossil Fuel Industry
Most talk about the climate crisis comes at it from the “demand side” — how to reduce demand for fossil fuels (FF) by replacing them with renewable electricity or becoming more efficient in the use of FF. We need to look at it from the “supply side” too. Ongoing extraction of oil, methane (natural gas)…
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India – Birds Drop out of the Sky, People Die
In case you have lingering doubts about the reality of human-caused global warming, hop on an airplane to parts of India or Pakistan and spend a few days. And, as long as you’re there, maybe be a good citizen and pick up a few of the dehydrated birds that drop out of the sky. Then,…
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World Drought Gets Worse, Cities Ration
The planet is wheezing, coughing and sputtering because of vicious attacks by worldwide droughts aided and abetted by global warming at only 1.2C above baseline. Some major metropolises are rationing water. What’ll happen at 1.5C? It’s not as if droughts are not a normal feature of the climate system. They are, but the problem nowadays…
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Climate Change is Killing Trees
A long time ago in the Milky Way galaxy on a planet named Earth the trees died. It only happened once in the planet’s history. It was during the Permian-Triassic 252 million years ago. Henk Visscher, PhD, Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, makes a living studying exposed fossil beds of the transitional period of…
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Wood Pellet Manufacturing in a Rainforest
The wood-pellet industry has full-scale operations smack dab in the heart of British Columbia’s Inland Temperate Rainforest, the last rainforest of its kind in the North. The fabled rainforest contains cedars of up to 12–15 feet in diameter and up to 2,000 years old. Its extraordinarily rich ecosystem is home to 2,400 plant species and…
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Antarctica on Edge
East Antarctica, often times referred to as “the final frontier of global warming,” is making headlines once again. A few weeks ago East Antarctica’s temperatures soared by 50F–90F above normal. (Ref: Antarctica Crushes Records, March 23, 2022) A couple of weeks later East Antarctica’s Conger Ice Shelf (1,200 sq km) completely collapsed and two additional…