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POPSEarth On Track For Epic Die-Off, Scientists Say "If we redouble our conservation efforts, we can stem the tide of extinctions and have those species around in the future," Barnosky said. "There is a bit of urgency here. By demonstrating that we have already lost 15 to 42 percent of mammalian diversity, the question is, do we really want to lose any more? I think the answer to that is pretty obvious."
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POPSDominic Lawson: Roll up, roll up for the great Copenhagen emissions-fest And that's not counting the media flying in from everywhere. The very concept that politicians have the power to restrict climate change to 2C or 3C is as absurd as waving a magic wand. No wonder many people are skeptical about what they are doing. It doesn't change the sad facts of glacier melting, water poisoning, mass extinction, deforestation etc.etc. which are the direct consequences of industrial civilisation.
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POPSAppalachian Mountains Rock Ice Age, 460 Million Years Ago
By the time humans first walked their slopes, the Appalachian mountains had worn down from prehistoric peaks over 16,000 ft (5,000 m) high to 6,500 ft (2,000 m) today. Today, the plant and animal life of the Northern Appalachians is still recovering from the last glacial period, which ended 10,000 years ago. The Southern Appalachians were never buried beneath the great ice-sheets of that frigid time, providing refuge for native species. Often spreading a couple hundred miles wide, the chain's north-south alignment allowed easy migration of animals fleeing the glaciers. Had these mountains been aligned east-west, like the European Alps, they would have presented a barrier to migration, a trap that would have ensured mass extinctions. The Appalachian Mountains are a long system of mountains, stretching from Newfoundland in Canada all the way to Alabama in the southern United States. (the full trail in the United States is 2,174 miles long)
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POPSA Tale of Two Soundbites “Mao’s responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin.” Hey, that’s pretty impressive when they can’t get your big final-score death toll nailed down to closer than 30 million. Still, as President Obama’s communications director might say, he lived his dream, and so can you, although if your dream involves killing, oh, 50–80 million Chinamen, you may have your work cut out.
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POPS"New Species Discovered in Midst of 6th Mass Extinction" more (at source): In addition are the known species that we’ve managed to directly or indirectly annihilate, like the Yangtze river dolphin (image above), declared functionally extinct two years ago, or the dusky seaside sparrow, which gave its last flutter in 1987. Experts say that at least half of the world’s current species will be completely gone by the end of the century. Most biologists say that we are in the midst of an anthropogenic mass extinction. Numerous scientific studies confirm that this phenomenon is real and happening right now. Should anyone really care? Will it impact individuals on a personal level? Scientists say, “Yes!
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POPSSome Day Soon: No More Just One Little Fish in the Sea Why - there are millions, billions, gazillions of creatures in the sea? When humans start thinking industrial farming in the sea without any concern for unforeseen consequences - just for Dollars, Euros, Yen, and Yuan then at some point there could be just one little fish in the sea and no human left to catch it - but nothing left for it to do but die. Too many species have already been fished out and it will not take too many opps for factory-fish farming to accidentially put something in the water that will lead to a mass extinction event that may well include us too! Oh, and what has modern agriculture already done for the Gulf? There is a 70-mile dead zone extending out from where the Mississippi River enters the Gulf. And it "grows" each year.
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POPSThe scale of destruction Kashmir earthquake, 2005 178 megatone TNT Caused damage in Islamabad, 65 miles away. Mount St. Helena eruption, 1980 500 megatons TNT Devastaled several hundred square mil areas San Francisco eartquake, 1906 1 gigaton TNT Caused $5.6 billions in property damage Krakatoa eruption, 1883 5.6 gigatons TNT Worldwide effects included the destruction of 165 villages and towns 10 km asteroid impact, 65 millions years ago 100.000 gigatons. TNT Caused final extinction of dinosaurs and many other species An asteroid impact with the Earth may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Alvarez Asteroid Theory explains the huge K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) mass extinction 65 million years ago by a large asteroid hitting the Earth off the Mexican Yucatan peninsula. This impact would have caused severe climactic changes leading to the demise of many groups of organisms, including non-avian dinosaurs.
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POPSPew Brings Survivors to Congress to Advocate Protections for Sharks This wasteful practice is banned in the U.S., but loopholes in the law hamper its effectiveness, and many other countries still allow finning. "You are more likely to be killed by lightning than a shark. Up to 73 million sharks are killed around the world annually. In contrast, only a handful of people die every year from the 50-70 shark attacks worldwide." A recent report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classified 35 out of 64 known pelagic (open ocean) shark and related ray species around the world as Threatened or Near Threatened with extinction. According to the report, overfishing is the primary reason for the threatened status of a number of shark species in U.S. waters, including great whites, three species of thresher sharks, makos, porbeagles, oceanic whitetips, and three species of hammerheads. In advocating for the Shark Conservation Act, introduced by Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) in April and passed by the House of Representatives
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POPSfacing the #reality of #collapse #extinction Facing the reality of death (mass extinctions), rather than collapse, might be a more accurate description of the experience the world is going through. However, apart from intimations of a light at the end of the tunnel coming from reports of near death experiences, death is beyond our ken leaving its reality an open question. So the question is more about accepting death (which we must all do, anyway), than facing collapse.
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POPSIs Language a Technology? What about the innate need to express ourselves and communicate driving us to learn and to create language? Language is also a very significant factor in natural selection. Are some languages more evolved than others? More successful? Or are they all of equal value? Can the contemporary mass extinction of languages be any more justified or allowed, than the mass extinction of species?
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POPSNature's problem-solving services endangered Economic growth beyond what contributes to human well being is wasteful of biodiversity, as well as resources. From a sustainable scale perspective, the rate at which new species evolve, relative to the current rate of extinction, determines whether the level of biodiversity is sustainable. After each of the previous mass extinctions, it took 5-10 million years for biodiversity to return to its previous level. A mass extinction caused by humans will have irreversible repercussions that will extend 2-3 times the period that humans have been on the earth.
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POPSSupersize' lions roamed Britain "The team found that these remains from the Pleistocene Epoch (1.8 million years ago to 10,000 years ago) could be divided into two groups: the American Lion which lived in North America, and the Cave Lion which lived in northern Europe, Russia, Alaska and the Yukon."
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