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1/3 of Amphibians Dying Out
Death Metal sends in a Scientific American article reporting that 2,000 of 6,000 amphibian species are endangered worldwide. A combination of environmental assaults, including global warming, seems to be responsible. "... national parks and other areas protected from pollution and development are providing no refuge. The frogs and salamanders of Yellowstone National Park have been declining since the 1980s, according to a Stanford University study, as global warming dries out seasonal ponds, leaving dried salamander corpses in their wake. Since the 1970s, nearly 75 percent of the frogs and other amphibians of La Selva Biological Station in Braulio Carrillo National Park in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica have died, perhaps due to global warming. But the really bad news is that amphibians may be just the first sign of other species in trouble. Biologists at the University of California, San Diego, have shown that amphibians are the first to respond to environmental changes, thanks to their sensitivity to both air and water. What goes for amphibians may soon be true of other classes of animal, including mammals."
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/1012-frogs.html Strange, and I thought the big threat was coming from the fungi that are devastating species. Good thing they tied the threat to global warming, now we can all do something about it! ::smirk::
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
Been reading too many oil company lackeys' "studies", eh? Guess everyone in the field is a gullible fool compared to you, random anonymous Internet poster.
Sun Not a Global Warming Culprit, Study Says
Solar Variability Unlikely To Have Caused Recent Warming
Don't Blame Sun for Global Warming, Study Says
Solar Activity Not Causing Warming
EXTINCTION CRISIS FOR AMPHIBIANS
this time its not our fault... but maybe we can help them (or... is it not nice to fool with Mother Nature?)
The Admin and the Engineer
Everyone who is remotely interested in the topic can find everything elsewhere with Google, so arguing about global warming (never mind anthropogenic global warming) here is not likely to produce anything useful. Duly note, however, that most mainstream publications are now assuming AGW when talking about other issues: at a purely social-awareness level, AGW has won.
In the meanwhile, Wikipedia on frogs croaking. Note that TFA is similar, despite what TFS suggests: mostly discussion about pollutants and diseases, with a nod to the obvious factor of climate change as one possible cause of habitat destruction.
The cause of worldwide amphibian population declines is the Chytrid Fungus. However many do think that global warming is making the situation happen faster and to a more serious degree. Here is some quick links if you want to read more on the subject ...
From Nat Geo:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080401-frog-fungus.html
The NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/science/04frog.html
The CDC:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol10no12/03-0804.htm
The real question is, do they taste good fried?
Yes, but that's not the reason they are crunchy. They are crunchy because we don't take out the bones.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Since there are already many comments already posted I doubt this will get read and I suspect the OP is a troll, but this is really an unpalatable level of ignorance.
Amphibians aren't a "species," they're an entire class of interesting, ecologically important animals. Their continued existence is in our best interest for a number of reasons;
First, amphibians tend to be important bell weather species in their habitats. Since they take in water in the first part of their life cycles, they are important barometers of the amount of pollution in an environment.
Second they are ecologically important. As predators we depend on them to keep the number of insects down. In a world without amphibians I suspect insect borne human disease will become more rampant. They also are important food sources for larger animals.
Third, it is not a issue of "adaptation." Most scientists seem to agree the biggest threat facing amphibians is pollution (again because part of their life cycle is spent completely in water and even after that their skin is porous). While factors like global warming, UV radiation, etc. are no doubt important, the trend seems to be pollution being a major factor.
A note to my third point - you are almost as bad as Creationist "scientists." You say amphibians should "evolve," but you fundamentally don't understand how evolution works. It takes time for a species to do so and moreover, it has to respond to environmental conditions (changes in the environment, in predators or prey), not to pollution.
Fourth, amphibians are hugely important in human science. The chemicals they produce, the aspects of embryonic life they can teach us, and the clues they might give us to the move that fish made onto land is of large scientific importance. Not to mention the fact that a number of problems now affecting amphibians is sure to (if it hasn't already - it would seem harder to gauge with completely aquatic life than it would with amphibians) be a problem for fish and other scientifically and commercially important wildlife.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
We have such special machines named pyromether and thermometer. The lattrer one we use at surface, to measure local temperature and guess what, most of them are averaging to highter temperatures every year. But the real juice we get from the first one, we put them on satelites and measure the temperature averaged on a big area, and guess what, the global average temperature is going up too.
We can't be completely sure. But we can be some 80% to 99% sure that the bigest part of it is man-made. We know, from looking at other planets, from physics and chemistry, and from observing correlations (note that the two fist imply causation) that dumping CO2 at the atmosphere causes global warming. We are also able to make calculations, see how much CO2 we put at the atmosphere, and comare it with how much CO2 goes there naturaly. It is not hard to go from there to a conclusion, since our output is almost an order of magnitude highter.
See, no circular logic. Now, you won't listen anyway, so continue beliving what you want, should I advice you to put all your economies at realstate too? It can only go up.
Rethinking email
(Mostly) incorrect. Nuclear fuel can be reprocessed extensively. Current light water reactors use very little of the energy in uranium, less than 1%. A fast breeder reactor uses 99.5%. This is a huge difference in efficiency (and thus, waste) and it is accomplished by reprocessing. One type of FBR, the Integral Fast Reactor, produces waste at the end of the fuel cycle that is reduced to normal levels of radioactivity after 200 years. The amount produced is tiny compared to LWRs.
In other words, Ihmhi is correct in saying that the fuel can be reprocessed and reused until there is only a small amount of unusable waste. The waste presents a radioactivity hazard so storing it underground might be the best solution, but dealing with the waste of a FBR is trivial as compared with the waste of a LWR.