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Within 50 years, a third of all plant and animal species could be caught up in a mass extinction, as a consequence of climate change driven by ever-rising temperatures. What is new about this warning is the method, the precision, the timetable and the identification of a cause.
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A third or more of all species could be gone by 2070
by Tim Radford
Within 50 years, a third of all plant and animal species could be caught up in a mass extinction, as a consequence of climate change driven by
ever-rising temperatures. What is new about this warning is the method, the precision, the timetable and the identification of a cause.
Within 50 years, a third of all plant and animal species could be caught up in a mass extinction, as a consequence of climate change driven by ever-rising temperatures. What is new about this warning is the method, the precision, the timetable and the identification of a cause.
And – entirely felicitously – support for the prediction is backed by a series of separate studies of individual species survival in a world rapidly warming because of human commitment to fossil fuels.
Tiny marsupial insect-hunters in Australia could, on the evidence of direct experiment, fail to adapt to ever-higher thermometer readings, and quietly disappear.
As frogs and other amphibians in Central America are wiped out by invasive fungal pathogens – perhaps assisted by climate change – a set of snake species that prey upon them have also become increasingly at risk.
And directly because the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, the polar bears of Baffin Bay in Canada are thinner than they were 30 years ago, and have fewer cubs. That’s because Ursus maritimus hunts its seal prey on the sea ice. And as the winter ice forms later and melts earlier each decade, the bears have begun to go hungry.
Biologists, ecologists and conservationists have been warning for four decades that planet Earth could be on the edge of a sixth Great Extinction, as a simple consequence of the growth of human numbers and human economies, and the parallel destruction of natural habitat.
They have also repeatedly warned that climate change driven by human-triggered planetary heating would inevitably accelerate the losses.
Repeated surveys
But researchers from the University of Arizona have now confirmed the climate connection by using another approach: they decided to look directly at the numbers. They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they selected data from 538 species and 581 places around the globe: they chose these numbers and sites because they could be sure that specific animal and plant species had been repeatedly surveyed over intervals of at least a decade.
They also factored in the changes in local climate conditions at each site, and isolated 19 different variables in the climate machine to work out what it could be about global heating that would directly pose the most significant threats. They also considered the options open to their chosen species: could these, for instance, migrate easily, or tolerate longer periods of extreme heat?
And then they did the calculations. They found that 50% of the chosen species went extinct locally if temperatures rose by more than 0.5°C, and 95% if the mercury reached an additional 2.9°C.
In the last century, the planet has warmed by 1°C above the average for most of human history and prehistory. Right now, thanks to ever-increasing fossil fuel use and continued forest destruction, the planet could be more than 3°C warmer by 2100.
But the researchers also found that the climate factor most closely linked to the extinction of any population was simply the maximum annual count – the hottest daily highs in summer.
This also implies that extinction could be two or even four times as frequent in the tropics as in the temperate zones: it is in the tropics – the reefs, the rainforests, the wetlands and savannahs – that the world’s species are concentrated.
Antechinis flavipes, or yellow-footed antechinus, is a native Australian: it is not exactly a mole, or a mouse, or a shrew. It is a little marsupial carnivore with an unhappy love life: males mate in a frenzy and then tend to die from stress-related immune system breakdown.
It is also sensitive to temperature. When the mercury drops, the creature can go into a torpor and once comatose can even sleep through a bushfire.
Norwegian scientists report in the journal Frontiers in Physiology that they exposed 19 captive juveniles to spells of cold (17°C) and hot (25°C) temperatures, measured their growth and metabolic rate, and observed changes in behaviour. They conclude that, while individuals of the species can cope with short periods of high temperature, they may not have any way of surviving extended heat extremes.
Which is a problem for antechinus, because all the predictions for Australia – and indeed most of the planet – is that as the century proceeds and ever more greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere, the hottest spells will become hotter, more frequent and more extended.
North American researchers have been tracking the polar bears who hunt seals and mate in Baffin Bay, between north-eastern Canada and Greenland, for almost three decades. They report in the journal Ecological Applications that when sea ice retreats, the bears wait on Baffin Island and live on their accumulated fat.
In the 1990s, the average stay on land – and away from the bears’ preferred prey – was 60 days. In the last decade, this rose to 90 days. Sampled females proved to be thinner than they had been, and were more likely to have one cub rather than two, all because unseasonally high temperatures in the Arctic mean that the hunting season on the ice is becoming ever shorter.
In 2004, the population of amphibians in a national park in Panama started to perish on a huge scale, and an estimated 30 species of frog and other creatures all but vanished in the wake of a pathogen fungus outbreak.
US scientists report in the journal Science that they set out to look at their wildlife observational data before and after the outbreak to measure the effect on the region’s snake species that prey on amphibians.
Rarely observed snakes
Even though the scientists logged 594 surveys in the seven years before the outbreak and 513 in the six years that followed, they had to use mathematical techniques to come up with probabilities of local snake extinction, because snakes are hard to observe at any time. Of the 36 snake species recorded there, 12 have been observed only once, and five only twice.
The bad news is there is an 85% probability that there are now fewer snake species than there had been, simply because of the disappearance of amphibian prey.
The study also highlights another worry for conservationists and ecologists: extinction of species is happening at an accelerating rate, but biologists still cannot put a number to the total of species at risk. Most of them have never been described or named. Like some of the snakes of Panama, they will have gone before scientists even knew they were there.
The climate connection with the worldwide loss of amphibian species is still uncertain. The certainty is that climate change will make life too hot for many species that – because what was once wilderness has now been cleared for cities, quarries, farms and commercial plantations – can no longer shift to cooler terrain.
John Wiens of the University of Arizona, one of the authors behind the research that predicts massive extinctions by 2070, thinks there is something that can be done.
In 2015 in Paris more than 190 nations vowed to act to contain global warming to “well below” 2°C. “In a way, it’s a ‘choose your own adventure,’” he said.
“If we stick to the Paris Agreement to combat climate change, we may lose fewer than two out of every 10 plant and animal species on Earth by 2070. But if humans cause larger temperature increases, we could lose more than a third or even half of all animal and plant species, based on our results.”
Originally published in Inside Climate News
Indigenous people may be the Amazon’s last hope
by Robert T. Walker, Aline A. Carrara, Cynthia S. Simmons, & Maira Irigaray
In Roraima state, the Raposa Serra do Sol people live on land rich with gold, diamonds, copper and a slew of lesser-known metals that Bolsonaro regards as strategic to Brazil’s metallurgical economy. Royalty payments to Native peoples who open their land to miners could be substantial. So far, however, indigenous groups are united in their resistance to federal and corporate interference. They may be the Brazilian Amazon’s last hope.
by Robert T. Walker, Aline A. Carrara, Cynthia S. Simmons, & Maira Irigaray
Brazil’s divisive President Jair Bolsonaro has taken another step in his bold plans to develop the Amazon rainforest.
A bill he is sponsoring, now before Congress, would allow transportation infrastructure to be built on indigenous territory. Such lands cover 386,000 square miles of the Brazilian Amazon – one-fifth of the jungle. Here, Native people are constitutionally entitled to exercise sovereignty over resource use.
The right-wing Bolsonaro administration says “opening” the Amazon will boost its economy. But environmentalists, indigenous leaders and other concerned Brazilians say that the move will promote mining, logging and other damaging activities.
As evidence, they cite Bolsonaro’s appointment of a Brazilian general who last year served on the board of the Canadian mining giant Belo Sun to lead Brazil’s federal agency for indigenous peoples.
Our research on social movements in the Amazon takes us to areas affected by infrastructure development. There, we have witnessed the disheartening aftermath for Native people and met the indigenous leaders fighting to save their homelands.
Riches now in reach
The Amazon possesses a wealth of minerals including gold, diamonds, iron ore, manganese, copper, zinc and tin. But the region is so remote, with its southern edge lying 1,000 miles from Rio de Janeiro, that resource extraction was long limited by transportation costs.
This began to change in the 1970s, when Brazil’s military government built several new highways through the Amazon. It paid little heed to the desires or safety of the 140,000 Native people living there.
Terrible abuses occurred, including the military’s systematic killing from 1967 to 1977 of up to 2,000 Waimiri-Atroari people to make way for a road to the Amazonian capital of Manaus.
The territorial aggressions culminated in the 1980s, when up to 40,000 wildcat miners invaded the Yanomami homeland looking for gold. An estimated 20% of the resident indigenous population perished from disease and violence over a seven-year period. Today there are about 900,000 indigenous people in Brazil.
After democracy was restored in 1985, Brazil got a new constitution that codified indigenous rights, including the right to aboriginal homelands. Because so much of the Amazon is indigenous territory, indigenous sovereignty became instrumental to Brazilian environmental policy.
The connection between indigenous communities and conservation is global. Indigenous people make up 5% of the world’s population, but their homelands hold 85% of its biodiversity. This can make indigenous people extremely effective environmental defenders, because in fighting for their ancestral territory they protect some of the world’s most pristine places.
A world in peril
At the turn of the millennium, Brazil was generally considered a good steward of the Amazon.
About a decade into the 21st century, however, environmental policy began to weaken to allow more infrastructure development in the Amazon. By 2016, some 34,000 square miles of the Brazilian Amazon had lost its previously protected status or seen protections reduced.
Indigenous sovereignty, however, was never called into question – until now. Since taking office in January 2019, Bolsonaro has also cut funds for the enforcement of Brazil’s strict environmental laws, leading Amazon deforestation to spike.
Brazil’s president has long seen protected indigenous land as a treasure trove of resources. In 2015 then-Congressman Bolsonaro told the newspaper Campo Grande News that “gold, tin and magnesium are in these lands, especially in the Amazon, the richest area in the world.”
“I’m not getting into this nonsense of defending land for the Indians,” he added.
Bolsonaro defends his current efforts to build in the Amazon as a means of assimilating native Brazilians so they will no longer need their territorial homelands.
“The Indian has changed, he is evolving and becoming more and more a human being like us. What we want is to integrate him into society,” he said in a video posted to social media in January.
The statement prompted a lawsuit by indigenous Brazilians accusing the president of racism, a crime in Brazil.
Resistance as conservation
Accelerating deforestation under Bolsonaro has sparked violence in the Amazon.
Seven indigenous land activists were killed in 2019, according to the Brazilian not-for-profit Pastoral Land Commission, the most in over a decade. Indigenous environmental leaders in the Colombian and Ecuadorian Amazon have also been murdered.
Such killings mostly go unsolved. But Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples Association says one indigenous activist killed in 2019, Paulo Guajajara, was gunned down by illegal loggers in November for defending Guajajara territory as part of an armed group called Guardians of the Forest.
“We are protecting our land and the life on it,” Guajajara told Reuters shortly before his murder. “We have to preserve this life for our children’s future.”
Indigenous Brazilians have also defended their land in court. In 2012, the Munduruku sued to stop the construction of mega-dams and waterways in the Tapajós River Valley – projects that would have ended life as they know it. Federal prosecutors agreed, filing in support of the Munduruku and calling for the suspension of the largest dam’s environmental license.
Under legal pressure, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources in their April 2016 decision curtailed the entire infrastructure plan, conserving 7% of the Amazon Basin.
Amazon’s last hope
Not every indigenous Brazilian is a born environmentalist. Many mix traditional livelihoods like hunting, fishing and gathering with agriculture and ranching.
Like other farmers who clear forest to plant more crops, indigenous farmers stand to benefit from Bolsonaro’s environmental deregulation. The president recently announced his administration would offer credit to indigenous soybean farmers who want to expand their operations.
In Roraima state, the Raposa Serra do Sol people live on land rich with gold, diamonds, copper and a slew of lesser-known metals that Bolsonaro regards as strategic to Brazil’s metallurgical economy. Royalty payments to Native peoples who open their land to miners could be substantial.
So far, however, indigenous groups are united in their resistance to federal and corporate interference. They may be the Brazilian Amazon’s last hope.
The authors are associated with the Department of Geography at the University of Florida. Published under a Creative Commons license.
Originally published in The Conversation
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Indian Resistance Against Hindutva Fascism
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From Gujarat 2002 to Delhi 2020, India witnesses continuous deterioration of the constitutional, secular, liberal values of a democratic state. The social, political and cultural normalisation of violence against Muslims and silence of the Supreme Court is unprecedented in independent India.
Canadian Punjabi Press Club condemns attacks on journalists in Delhi and threats against Sherwani
by Press Release
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My advice to newly diagnosed patients is that they should keep calm, understand their own treatment, take a second opinion if not convinced, and also seek help of support groups. Everyone should be vigilant of their symptoms, as early detection saves lives.
On the movies Parasite, Joker and of Class Struggle
by Priyanka Krishna
This is where the Parasite falls in glory and the Joker despite being shoddy and lazy in some of its arguments scores and gives language to resistance. What Parasite forgets in this moving social critique as compared to Joker is that
art while powerful to lay bare the politics of the current also has the power to change. A strong metaphor can rouse a revolution or be appropriated in one as can be seen in scores of people identifying with the Joker and wearing joker masks across protests from South America to France in the world today.
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