Skip to main content

Home/ Open Intelligence / Ecology/ Group items tagged extinction

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Jan Wyllie

Coral reefs 'will be gone by end of the century' [11Sep11] - 0 views

  • Coral reefs are on course to become the first ecosystem that human activity will eliminate entirely from the Earth, a leading United Nations scientist claims. He says this event will occur before the end of the present century,
  • "a new first for mankind – the 'extinction' of an entire ecosystem"
  • The predicted decline is mainly down to climate change and ocean acidification, though local activities such as overfishing, pollution and coastal development have also harmed the reefs. The book, Our Dying Planet, published by University of California Press, contains further alarming predictions, such as the prospect that "we risk having no reefs that resemble those of today in as little as 30 or 40 more years"
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Coral reefs are important for the immense biodiversity of their ecosystems. They contain a quarter of all marine species, despite covering only 0.1 per cent of the world's oceans by area, and are more diverse even than the rainforests in terms of diversity per acre, or types of different phyla present
  • And reef disappearance has tended to precede wider mass extinction events, offering an ominous "canary in the environmental coal mine" for the present day,
  • "But the overall message we agree with. People are not taking on board the sheer speed of the changes we're seeing."
D'coda Dcoda

Climategate part 2? A worrying conflict of interest [17Jun11] - 0 views

  • a press release for the report which suggested that renewable sources alone, without nuclear power, could provide 77 per cent of the world’s energy supply by 2050.
  • The supporting documents, which weren’t released until over a month later, reveal that this claim was based on a large real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption over the next 40 years (highly unrealistic as India and China grow their economies).
  • Now it appears that there are more apparent conflicts of interest in the IPCC’s energy report
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • eter Bosshard, Policy Director of the campaign group International Rivers, contacted me to point out that the scenario for 77 per cent renewables included (against standard practice) large hydropower projects among the technologies to be promoted.
  • Most environmentalists believe that more large scale dams are not the right approach to generating electricity in a sustainable way.
  • While water is a renewable resource, the ecosystems that are destroyed by hydropower projects are not. Not least due to dam building, rivers, lakes and wetlands suffer from a higher rate of species extinction than any other major ecosystem.
  • Not only this but because of the decomposing organic matter found in reservoirs, dams emit greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2. In some cases, it is claimed, these emissions can be higher than those of thermal power projects with the same electricity output.
  • Ivan Lima of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research  estimate that the total methane emissions from large dams at 104 million tons per year.
  • Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, and Lima’s figure amounts to more than 4 per cent of the total warming impact of human activities – roughly equal to the climate impact of the global aviation sector
  • So why is the IPCC contravening international standard practice to promote hydropower?
  • Well this may be total coincidence but in addition to several independent scientists, the IPCC selected a number of authors to write the section of hydropower who have a vested interest in growing the sector.
  • Of the nine lead authors there are representatives of two of the world’s largest hydropower developers, a hydropower consultancy, and three agencies promoting hydropower at the national level.
  •  
    The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been compromised again.
1 - 4 of 4
Showing 20 items per page