This
month's show features Dr. Paul Ehrlich for the third time on Nature
Bats Last. Dr. Ehrlich is the Bing Professor of Population Studies in
the Department of Biology of Stanford University and president of
Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology
(https://ccb.stanford.edu/paul-r-ehrlich). He is a renowned biologist
and ecologist best known for his warnings about the consequences of
human population growth.
Many
of our worst fears were confirmed when Guy McPherson's book “Going
Dark”, back in 2014.
The
film "22 After" is even more hard-hitting.
Nothing
that was said back then has proved inaccurate. In fact, things are a
whole lot worse.
Going Dark
I have had several "off" days where I have felt unable to turn the computer on, still less to bring the latest news the media refuses to carry. This has also corresponded with days where there are less major headlines. That has made me want to come back to basics.
My knowledge of the world was largely shaped by an early exposure to the Population Bombby Paul and Anne Ehrlich. I went on to be interested in other things in the intervening years but have always come back to the same.
The "neo-Malthusianism" of the Ehrlichs was "disproved" by the green revolution which greatly increased the amount of food available while also contriщuting hugely to the further destruction of human habitat.
At other times temporary fixes have been found to keep the inevitable at bay - through destruction of the environment by fracking, tar oil etc and by printing money - all designed to put a bandaid on and keep the world economy" going for a bit longer. It is hard not to imagine that Donald Trump's assault on the living planet at every level, all to maintain the fiction of a functioning economy and society going for a while longer.
It is also not difficult to see that Trump and the American Deep State in general are not making things worse in a way that is almost beyond our imagination and actually accelerating the species' headlong rush to extinction.
Do I think that the near-term extinction of the human species (and by this I mean within one generation, probably sooner is inevitable?
No, I don't - the human intellect and science cannot possibly see the entire web of causation.
However, I regard it as highly likely on the time line line presented, based on all the data available to us,
Through a discussion with a friend about what we intended to do about our dependants, our horses etc. I discovered a video that I was unaware of.
The film 22After is excellent for concentrating the mind on some extremely unpalatable possibilities. I work well with the world of ideas and the printed word so this "in-your-face" presentation is a little too much for my sensibilities but I recognise that people learn in very different ways so that if film and the audio-visual is your preferred medium then this is for you - if you have the stomach.
WARNING - this film is not for the faint-hearted.
Another
version of this is available HERE Here is a description from the filmmaker -
A
few weeks before Christmas last year my worst fears were confirmed
when Guy McPherson's latest book “Going Dark” arrived in the mail
as a present. Some present! In the book McPherson lays out a very
convincing argument that humankind is doomed. As a student of
politics, the environment, the environment of politics and maybe most
importantly the politics of environment I had long suspected
something was terribly wrong. I was filled with a deep sense of
foreboding that grew by the day! Half-hearted efforts to increase
automobile fuel mileage standards by a few percentage points over the
next two decades while denying human driven climate change seemed the
very definition of obscenity.
That's
when it hit me! The reason politicians were doing virtually nothing
to stop the headlong rush towards environmental catastrophe was
because they knew nothing could be done. It was a huge, concerted
effort at plausible deniability between government at the highest
levels and big energy. If the asteroid is streaking towards Earth and
there's nothing to be done...than why do anything?
Why
indeed!
So
I decided to make a movie about the fate that almost certainly awaits
us. That movie is “22 After”. I realized early on that this
topic, the end of all humanity in the next few decades (otherwise
known as Near Term Human Extinction), is an absolute 'buzz kill' at
parties, family get-togethers, around the water cooler, etc. And if
even talking about NTHE is that toxic why waste precious time trying
to find the investors that would be needed to hire professional
actors, film crew, editors, etc.?
The
answer was to do a zero-budget docu-drama. And that's what you see in
“22 After”. I wrote the script in a few weeks, put out a call for
volunteer actors, and handled the camera and editing myself. I spent
most of my professional career as a TV News reporter so I have a fair
amount of writing ability, can shoot and edit video in a pinch, and
am not shy when it comes to asking favors.
We
started weekend filming in February and were all wrapped up by May. I
finished editing by the end of June and “22 After” was done. We
entered in a couple of film festivals but after a two month wait to
find out we didn't make it into the first of those I decided to pull
the plug and make the movie public for the benefit of several hundred
social media followers who had been supportive from the outset.
For
the time being I have decided to keep the viewing of “22 After”
completely free as it sounds somehow obscene to ask people for money
to tell them the worst news they will ever hear. In the future I may
change my mind but only to raise funds to spread the word; people
need to wake up, plans need to be made.
But
for now the best payment I can hope for is for you the viewer to tell
everyone you know “watch this movie”.
I have stopped posted basic articles on "climate change for beginners" so if this is is at all new for you, or if you want a lot of information in one place I can do no more than recommend Pauline Schneider's film "Going Dark", from about the same time as 22After.
Here is another more recent summary of our knowledge from Guy McPherson.
It is many years since I watched this series the Crash Course by Chris Martenson. Here are two segments on why all this is inevitable. It can be summarised in one phrase "you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet"
When
I was at secondary school in 1972 we did a subject in social studies
about how the ‘stork would pass the crow’ by the year 2000 and
the population (which was 4 billion at the time) would surpass the
abiity of the world to feed itself. I was so fascinated that I found
and read the work by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, “the Population Bomb”.
Back
then I could t scarcely have imagined that 46 years later that Paul
Ehrlich would be coming into my livingroom with a message that, if
anything, is more dire than it was back then.
Here
is yesterda’s broadcast with some other supplementary material that
will bear out what Prof.Ehrlich and Kevin are saying.
Prof.
Paul Ehrlich and Kevin Hester in conversation
Today’s
guest on Nature Bats Last is Professor Paul Ehrlich. Professor
Ehrlich and show host Kevin Hester discuss the unfolding Ecological
Armageddon and the book “The Annihilation of Nature” co-written
with Anne Ehrlich and Gerado Ceballos.
Prof.
Paul Ehrlich and Dr. Sandra Kahn interviewed
Today’s
guests on Nature Bats Last are Dr Sandra Kahn and Professor Paul
Ehrlich co-authors of the recently released book “JAWS: The Storyof a Hidden Epidemic”.
The
Present Mass Extinction: How do the Tropics Fit?
This
was a special interview for me because I became aware of Paul Ehrlich
and “the Population Bomb” way back in 1971 or 72. In fact,
reading that was the very first contact with the environmental
movement. It has taken a few years to come back again but that early
exposure (when the population was less than 4 billion), has been
hugely influential.
This
was a special event for me because Prof. Ehrlich is very familiar
with (and talks about) this part of the world – Australia, New
Zealand and the Pacific islands.
Not
only that but Prof. Ehrlich puts in a plug for Marlborough wines!
A
wide-ranging conversation that fearlessly goes where most fear to
tread.
Kevin
Hester talks to Prof. Paul Ehrlich on Nature Bats Last
Paul
R. Ehrlich and Michael Killen Discuss Trump, Scientists and Climate
Change
This video is Paul R.
Ehrlich and Michael Killen Discussion about Trump, scientists, and
climate change. ...in front of Michael's 'Resilience of America.'
Paul R Ehrlich is an
American biologist, best known for his warnings about the
consequences of population growth and limited resources. Stanford
Professor Emeritus. Awards: MacArthur Fellowship, Eminent Ecologist
Award, Crafoord Prize in Biosciences
Michael Killen is a
California talk show host, artist who created ‘Sustainability’
and ‘Resilience of America” both 24 ft. and displayed by
California Gov. NASA, US Dept. of Commerce, US Dept. of Interior, and
Stanford. …founded and ran the market research company, Killen &
Associates, Inc. for 35 years
Biological
Annihilation: Earth's Sixth Mass Extinction Event is Under Way
Earth is entering its
sixth mass extinction event, posing a "frightening assault on
the foundations of human civilization," says a new study
co-authored by Professor Gerardo Ceballos at the University of Mexico
Donald
Building
on research in which they showed that two species have gone extinct
per year over the past century, a team of biologists analyzed the
population trends for 27,600 vertebrates around the world.
They
found that nearly a third of the animals they looked at were on the
decline.
In
a closer look at 177 well-studied mammals, the team found that all
had lost 30 percent or more of their home ranges, and 40 percent had
lost at least 80 percent of their habitat
What
was amazing that this actually made it onto the midday news on Radio
New Zealand. Will wonders never cease!
Stanford researcher warns sixth mass extinction is here
There
is no longer any doubt: We are entering a mass extinction that
threatens humanity's existence. That is the bad news at the center of
a new study by a group of scientists including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing
Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the
Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Ehrlich and his
co-authors call for fast action to conserve threatened species,
populations and habitat, but warn that the window of opportunity is
rapidly closing.
Life
on Earth is in trouble. That much we know. But how bad have things
become – and how fast are events moving? How soon, indeed, before
the Earth’s biological treasures are trashed, in what will be the
sixth great mass extinction event? This is what Gerardo Caballos of
the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his colleagues have
assessed, in
a paper that came out on Friday.
These
are extraordinarily difficult questions. There are many millions of
species, many elusive and rare, and inhabiting remote and dangerous
places. There are too few skilled biologists in the field to keep
track of them all. Demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that any
single species is extinct is arduous and painstaking (think how long
it took to show – to most people, at least – that Loch Ness
probably does not harbour a large monster).
And
it’s not just a case of making a head-count of modern extinctions.
This needs to be compared with a long-term “baseline” rate of
extinctions in our planet’s long geological history. This can only
be extracted via the equally painstaking and difficult work of
excavating and identifying millions of fossils from the almost
endless rock strata. Not surprisingly, different studies made so far
on different fossils have yielded different baseline rates.
Caballos
and colleagues have thought through these difficulties, and come up
with probably the most robust estimate yet of how severe the modern
crisis is.
They
have been deliberately conservative – they’re well aware of the
dangers of crying wolf on a topic of such importance, and where
passions run so high. For a start, they limit themselves to the
best-studied group of organisms, the vertebrates. Then, they take a
high estimate of background extinctions to compare with, to make the
modern figures as undramatic as possible. And then, they either
consider only those animals known to be extinct (the “highly
conservative” scenario), or they add in those extinctions in the
wild that are likely to have happened, but are not yet verified.
Even
with this caution, the figures are still shocking. Rather than the
nine extinctions among vertebrates that would be expected to have
occurred in normal geological circumstances since 1900, their
conservative estimate adds in another 468 extinctions, spread among
mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish.
Examples of lost
species would include the Yangtze
dolphin and
the Costa
Rica golden toad.
Depending on the group, extinction rates are 10 times to more than
100 times higher than normal. A sixth mass extinction, therefore, is
beginning. They estimate that it would grow to rival the last great
catastrophe of the past, when the dinosaurs and much else died out
65m years ago, in as little as three human lifetimes.
Once
more, this is a conservative estimate. It simply considers the kill
mechanisms operating today, of habitat loss, predation, pollution and
so on. The Caballos projection does not try to factor in, for
instance, the effects of global warming, or of ocean acidification.
Once these kick in in earnest, they will sweep many species out of
their habitability zones, and ratchet up the extinction rate still
further.
In
terms of scale, we are now living through one of those brief, rare
episodes in Earth history when the biological framework of life is
dismantled. It is in every sense a tragedy – but, in itself, it
might be viewed as just one more episode of biological destruction in
our planet’s history. The Earth has been here before – and will
be here again, before its life is completely extinguished a billion
or so years into the future.
This
particular perturbation to the biosphere, though, has some very
special features. Indeed, there has been nothing remotely like it in
our planet’s history. By coincidence, one of the authors of the
Caballos study, Anthony Barnosky of the University of California at
Berkeley, was involved in another study published the same week, a
study that sought to put its finger on exactly what is so different –
and so weird, in planetary terms, not to put too fine a point on it –
about what is happening to the biosphere right now.
This
second study, led by Mark Williams, a palaeontologist at the
University of Leicester, identified some quite extraordinary
novelties at the heart of current events. First, past extinctions
have been driven by what are now becoming very familiar horsemen of a
planetary apocalypse: massive volcanic outbursts to choke the
atmosphere and poison the seas; the mayhem caused by major asteroid
impact; and the wrenching effects of rapid climate change. None of
these has really figured in the current biological crisis – not
even climate change, which is still only in its early stages.
Instead,
the extinctions are being driven by the effects of just one single
species,Homo
sapiens.
Such a mass extinction has not occurred before (with the possible
exception, 2.5bn years ago, when a type of microbe evolved
photosynthesis to spew out oxygen, a gas that would have been highly
toxic to the other microbes living then, and these would have been
pushed to the fringes of life on Earth – where they still remain).
Even more extraordinarily, this single species is land-living, but
has managed to become the top predator in the oceans too, causing
populations of whales and fish to collapse.
In
all, our single species now commandeers somewhere between 25% and 40%
of primary productivity on Earth. It is a productivity, that over
large areas of land, is “hyper-fertilised” by the extraction of
millions of tons of nitrogen from the air, in the Haber-Bosch
process,
and by digging comparable amounts of phosphate from the ground.
These
super-fed crops are fed, highly efficiently, to farm animals, that we
eat in turn. The scale of this operation is a large reason for the
scale of the ongoing mass extinction of other organisms.
The
scientist Vaclav Smil, of the University of Manitoba, has calculated
that simply measured by mass, humans now make up a third of land
vertebrates, and the animals that we keep to eat – cows, pigs,
sheep and so on – make up most of the other two thirds. All the
wild animals – elephants, giraffes, tigers and so on – are now
less than 5% by mass. It’s a measure of how they have been pushed
to the fringes by humans.
Humans
change things in other ways – they now direct the evolution of the
animals that are useful to them, by breeding and by genetic
engineering: again, it’s a planetary novelty. The energy our
species obtains from photosynthesis is not enough, and so we mine
stored photosynthetic energy from the ground, as hydrocarbons, in
enormous amounts, and use that to power our machines.
These
machines – cars, planes, computers and much else – have, together
with their human software, been termed the technosphere by the
geologist Peter Haff of Duke University. He views it as an emergent
system with its own internal dynamics (and which humans currently
drive but don’t really control) – in effect an offshoot of the
biosphere. Whatever it is, it is evolving at lightning speed by
comparison with biological evolution.
The
changes to the Earth’s biology do, therefore, include a rapidly
developing mass extinction event, as charted by Gerardo Caballos and
his colleagues.
But
this may be seen as part of a much more thoroughgoing transformation.
Fundamental new patterns are emerging that may be compared, say, with
the change, half a billion years ago, when a biosphere consisting
only of microbes gave way to one dominated by multicellular animals.
Could
this new planetary pattern develop – perhaps well enough to help
prevent a mass extinction? Currently, the technosphere is more a
parasite than a partner of the biosphere – it is terrible at
recycling, for instance.
But
some aspects might help alleviate the worst effects of global
warming. For instance, humans have caused the greatest
trans-migration of species in history. Some of these invasive species
may be well adapted to new higher temperatures.
And better use of
energy and materials can reduce pressure on remaining natural
ecosystems.
Averting
a mass extinction is still possible – but we don’t have much
time.
The
author is professor of palaeobiology at Leicester University
NOT
THE FIRST TIME
Previous
mass extinctions
Geological
history includes many periods when species have died in large
numbers. In each of the following, more than half the Earth’s
species disappeared:
1 End-Ordovician,
443 million years ago.
This
coincides with very rapid glaciation; sea level fell by more than 100
metres, devastating shallow marine ecosystems; less than a million
years later, there was a second wave of extinctions as ice melted,
sea level rose rapidly, and oceans became oxygen-depleted.
2 Late
Devonian, c 360 million years ago.
A
messy prolonged event, again hitting life in shallow seas very hard,
and an extinction that was probably due to climate change.
3 Permian-Triassic
mass extinction, c 250 million years ago.
The
greatest of all, ‘The Great Dying’ of more than 95% of species,
is strongly linked with massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia that
caused, among other effects, a brief savage episode of global
warming.
4 Triassic-Jurassic
mass extinction, c 200 million years ago.
This
has been linked with another huge outburst of volcanism.
5 Cretaceous-Tertiary
mass extinction 65 million years ago.
This
killed off the dinosaurs and much else; an asteroid impact on Mexico
probably did the damage, but the world’s ecosystem may have been
weakened by volcanic outbursts in what is now India.
Study
reveals rate of extinction for species in the 20th century has been
up to 100 times higher than would have been normal without human
impact
Here's
More Proof Earth Is in Its 6th Mass Extinction
Mei
Xiang, a giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) at the Smithsonian's
National Zoo in Washington, D.C. There are fewer than 2,500 mature
giant pandas left in the wild, according to the IUCN. Credit: Abby
Wood, Smithsonian's National Zoo
Diverse
animals across the globe are slipping away and dying as Earth enters
its sixth mass extinction, a new study finds.
Over
the last century, species of vertebrates are dying out up to 114
times faster than they would have without human activity, said the
researchers, who used the most conservative estimates to
assess extinction
rates.
That means the number of species that went extinct in the past 100
years would have taken 11,400 years to go extinct under natural
extinction rates, the researchers said.
Much
of the extinction is due to human activities that lead to pollution,
habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species and increased
carbon emissions that drive climate change and ocean acidification,
the researchers said. [7
Iconic Animals Humans Are Driving to Extinction]
"Our
activities are causing a massive loss of species that has no
precedent in the history of humanity and few precedents in the
history of life on Earth," said lead researcher Gerardo
Ceballos, a professor of conservation ecology at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting professor at Stanford
University.
Ceballos
said that, ever since he was a child, he struggled to understand why
certain animals went extinct. In the new study, he and his colleagues
focused on the extinction rates of vertebrates, which include
mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes.
Scientists found that species
are dying off more than 100 times faster than they would without
human activity. Credit: By Karl Tate, Infographics Artist
First,
they needed to establish how many species go extinct naturally over
time. They used data from a 2011
study in the journal Natureshowing
that typically, the world has two extinctions per 10,000 vertebrate
species every 100 years. That study based its estimate on fossil and
historical records.
Moreover,
that background extinction rate, the researchers found, was higher
than that found in other studies, which tend to report half that
rate, the researchers said.
Then,
Ceballos and his colleagues calculated the modern extinction rate.
They used data from the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN), an international organization that tracks threatened
and endangered species. The 2014 IUCN Red List gave them the number
of extinct and possibly extinct vertebrate species since 1500.
These
lists allowed them to calculate two extinction rates: a highly
conservative rate based solely on extinct vertebrates, and a
conservative rate based on both extinct and possibly extinct
vertebrates, the researchers said.
According
to the natural background rate, just nine vertebrate species should
have gone extinct since 1900, the researchers found. But, using the
conservative, modern rate, 468 more vertebrates have gone extinct
during that period, including 69 mammal species, 80 bird species, 24
reptile species, 146 amphibian species and 158 fish species, they
said.
"Every
time we lose a species, we're eroding the possibilities of Earth to
provide us with environmental services," Ceballos told Live
Science.
Researchers
typically label an event a mass extinction when more than 5 percent
of Earth's species goes extinct in a short period of time,
geologically speaking. Based on the fossil record, researchers know
about five mass extinctions, the last of which happened 65
million years ago,
when an asteroid wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs. [Wipe
Out: History's Most Mysterious Extinctions]
"[The
study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering
the sixth great mass extinction event," study researcher Paul
Ehrlich, a professor of population studies in biology at Stanford
University, said
in a statement.
Bye-bye,
birdie
At
this rate, a huge amount of biodiversity will be lost in as little as
two to three human lifetimes, Ceballos said. And it can take millions
of years for life
to recover and
repopulate the Earth, he said.
Species
make up distinct populations that can spread over a continent. But
some vertebrate populations have so few individuals left that they
cannot efficiently play their role in the ecosystem, Ceballos said.
The snow leopard (Panthera
uncial) is endangered; its numbers have declined by at least 20
percent over the past 16 years, mainly due to poaching and loss of
habitat and prey, according to the IUCN. Credit: Dennis W.
Donohue | Shutterstock.com
For
instance, elephant populations are now far and few between. "The
same [goes for] lions, cheetah, rhinos, jaguars — you name it,"
Ceballos said.
"Basically,
focusing on a species is good because those are the units of
evolution and ecosystem function, but populations are in even worse
shape than species," he dded.
However,
there is still time to save wildlife by working with conservationists
and creating animal-friendly public policy, he said.
"Avoiding
a true sixth mass extinction will require rapid, greatly intensified
efforts to conserve already threatened species, and to alleviate
pressures on their populations — notably, habitat loss,
over-exploitation for economic gain and climate change," the
researchers wrote in the study, published online today (June 19) in
the journal
Science Advances.
The
study supports other findings on Earth's high extinction rate, said
Clinton Jenkins, a visiting professor at the Institute of Ecological
Research in Brazil, who was not involved with the study.
In
2014, Jenkins and his colleagues published a study in the journal
Science that came to the same
broad conclusions detailed
in the new study, but in last year's study, they also included
flowering and cone plants. That study found that current extinction
rates are about 1,000 times higher than they would be without human
activities.
"This
latest study is further evidence of a human-induced mass extinction
now underway," Jenkins told Live Science. "Much
like the situation with human-caused climate change, years of
research have built an enormous scientific case that humanity is
driving a mass extinction. What the world’s many species now need
are actions to reverse the problem."
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