Saturday, December 10, 2016

Climate Change and It's Not Good News

Likely you have known we're losing diversity in the animal kingdom and the researchers have worked to quantify the extent of it.  (Science Daily:  Climate change is already causing widespread local extinction in plant and animal species)

Extinctions related to climate change have already happened in hundreds of plant and animal species around the world.  New research, publishing on December 8th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, shows that local extinctions have already occurred in 47% of the 976 plant and animal species studied.

- Science Daily

Ithaka draws no science from the pop news channels (e.g. CNN, Fox, Guardian, etc, etc) because we want science and not some dork's opinion about the science.  We have no opinion on the matter except it sucks to see so little is done about it.


None of this science is particularly good so I will present the articles on a roll here.


This one isn't so much related to climate change as irresponsible fishing but that type of behavior is widespread internationally.  Mexico is close to wiping out one species of dolphin.  (Science Daily:  Fishery bycatch rapidly driving Mexico's vaquita to extinction)

Intense fishing that began in the 1940s for totoaba, a large fish whose swim bladder is highly prized in China, had driven both species onto the endangered list by the 1980s -- the totoaba as the fishery's target and the vaquita as an unintended bycatch.

To save the vaquita, the Government of Mexico has set aside half of the small porpoise's range as a no-fishing refuge and implemented a two-year ban on all gill net fishing in the range of the species. The government is compensating local fishers and related industries at a cost of about $74 million.  Scientists and government officials hoped that these actions would reverse the decline.


- Science Daily

The Chinese involvement in this is largely irrelevant except to demonstrate the demand but the root of it is in the technique of gill-net fishing.  We don't need the editorial since any thinking adult has heard it already.  Hopefully the steps Mexico is taking will work.


Ah, I thought I had one more article so these ones are bad but that's the lot of it for the moment.


There's no editorial since the information presented says it all.  Whether anyone does anything about it is their choice to make and my preference is they will get cracking on dealing with it.

No comments: