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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."
The rule for species survival is simple: adapt or die. There are historical events of much greater scale and effect than this global climate change will be. If a species can't adapt, then it will die out. A species that can't adapt to a minor change in environment was probably doomed to extinction anyways regardless of Man's contribution to global climate change.
Nature rule, Danial-san.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Global Warming is a giant scam. Plenty of Ice core samples going back half a million years ago in Greenland and Antarctica confirm wild swings, often in very short spaces of time (decades) in global temps. No connection either btw to CO2 levels either.
Duh, it's SOLAR OUTPUT that determines temps. Which does indeed vary (we may be in for some real cooling too).
Amphibians are terribly sensitive to pollution, including precipitates from air pollution, particularly mercury and sulfuric acid from the Coal that China burns like crazy, and drifts over most of the US. Habitat loss is also terrible.
We have serious problems with pollution and habitat loss, none with "Global Warming" which is nothing but a scam to take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools.
True, we all went along fine before that... o_O
so let's find out.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
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.
So maybe we're seeing why the dinosaurs died out. They were too sensitive to environment change. They couldn't adapt to the changes in climate and died.
The article starts out blaming man and herbicides, but then has to conclude that even areas free from herbicides, such as national parks "provide no refuge." So that is blamed on global warming (no doubt man-made), causing the ponds to dry out. Neither of these are supplemented with facts, but is all speculative. Frogs and salamanders are dying, so we must be causing it.
Even though we may want to, there is no way we can save every species from extinction. We talk time and again about survival of the fittest in science class, yet we can't seem to acknowledge that species must adapt or die. Animal species that are hardy will thrive. Those who are not will not. We could have the perfect ecosystem for frogs and salamanders, and that would threaten some other species that found the weather too damp or warm to thrive. We blame ourselves for everything, when in fact there's no evidence that, if we all vanished tomorrow, animals wouldn't continue to die out as they always have.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
What's the point of evolving amphibious capability if not for greater environmental tolerance?
Who said evolution has to make sense?
99.999% of all the species that have ever existed are extinct!!!
IT IS NATURAL FOR PLANTS AND ANIMALS TO GO EXTINCT!
Let's say you had a group of tool wielding apes who had advanced to such a high level of technology that their activities changed the environment, and upset millions of years of evolution and balance. Despite detecting this early on, they failed to adapt the way the transport themselves, the amount of natural resources they needlessly consume, and did nothing to change course.
Let's say those apes did not survive the correction that the environment made to re-establish equilibrium. Wouldn't that be a tragedy.
You can make all the excuses you want for yourself, but your children don't exist on rhetoric, they exist on planet earth. If you're even willing to take a chance on continuing the path that has led to the decline of every single system of life on earth since the industrial revolution, you're mad, or a fool, or both.
The epidemic of cancer is certainly proof that something that we are doing to the planet it making it and us very ill, let alone the undeniable evidence, built up over the last fifty years, that wherever industrial developments are, vibrant ecosystems are not.
This is the kind of ignorance that will kill us. Just so you know, the incidence of disease is not independent of climate.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
People die of natural causes all the time, therefore murder never happens, right? The overwhelming scientific consensus it that the warming is proceeding much faster than in the past and that this caused at least in part by human activity. If you have strong evidence to the contrary please contact your local oil company, they will be only too happy to help you get it published.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Personally, I wouldn't take advice on the law or public policy from two jokers who make a living from misdirection and yelling profanity at reasoned arguments.
Furthermore, I wouldn't cite as evidence of how horrible the ESA is a video that builds part of its argument around the notion that there is no mass extinction event going on right now in an article about a mass extinction event going on right now.
Good Lord, give me back the past 30 minutes of my life. What an irritating mishmash of profanity, name-calling, and irrational conservative talking points. Lindy's story was kind of sad, but the impact of the story was blunted severely by all the smug, sneering, venomous, and immature posturing that overlay it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It is perfectly natural for plants and animals to go extinct.
But there ought to be cause for concern when so many are about to go extinct at once. Whether or not it's a natural disaster or a human-caused disaster can be debated until the cows come home, but the planet is changing right now, causing irreparable damage.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
But even the containment of Chytrid might not be enough to save amphibians, which face a barrage of other threats including pollution, the introduction of alien species, habitat destruction, over-collection, and climate change.
Gosh, I guess we shouldn't worry at all then! I mean, if Chytrid is screwing them over, it's not like we should bother with climate change. I mean, why put out a cancer patient on fire? The cancer's going to kill 'em anyway.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
In addition to what the previous person responding to your post mentioned, it's worth noting that some researchers think the most likely origin of the spread of this fungus to a wide range of habitats is due to widespread use of a research frog species from Africa, though there is some evidence that puts some doubt on that.
Another prominent theory is mentioned in the article you linked:
In Costa Rica's Cloud Forest Preserve of the Tropical Science Center, biologist J. Alan Pounds and his colleagues recently reported the total disappearance of the Monteverde harlequin frog, along with one golden toad species -- caused, he said in the journal Nature, by their increased susceptibility to chytrid disease as rising global temperatures have weakened their ability to resist the toxin.
In other words, chytrid is likely to either be an invasive species introduced around the world by human actions or a species that amphibians were previously able to resist before rising temperatures weakened them. Or both. Either way, saying "this time its [sic] not our fault" is disingenuous at best.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm a pretty green-leaning person and the last thing I want to do is deprive people who have devoted the best years of their life studying herpetology from getting grant money to make a living, but I think amphibian decline research is bordering dangerously on public relations BS pseudo-science.
Amphibian populations are notoriously hard to measure accurately. Populations rise and fall wildly. When you go out to do your first sample, if you're not careful there's often a heavy bias to picking the area with the highest population, so when you do your followup study and that pond has returned to a normal population, it looks like you've detected population decline. That's not to say amphibians aren't wildly vulnerable to all the usual things humans do to an environment: drain it, pave it, spray it. But rather than get half the environmentally-sensitive population panicking randomly about crisis, I'd rather see 1% or 0.1% of the population deeply educated in field biology as serious hobby, keeping long-term consistent records of observations and measurements.
( by the way, the best way to completely destroy a long term population study of a pond is to dredge it and add fish to make it "look more natural" )
You are aware that the interactions between living organisms are far more complex than "I don't eat it, therefore it doesn't matter", right?
The problem with this type of reasoning is that we have evolved to a stage where we can "beat" any other species. Human-level intelligence has transformed evolutionary competition into a straight out massacre. We also have the ability to change the environment in ways which are effectively catacylsmic from the point of view of evolution - if you radically alter the environment over the course of a few decades or even centuries, then there is nowhere near enough time for a typical vertebrate to adapt via natural selection to a hostile environment.
If we are indeed affecting the climate, as seems likely, then I find it plausible to think that we could quite easily end up wiping out most species on earth, save for a few super-hardy ones. Unfortunately we will probably survive ourselves, which hardly seems fair. If you want to compete until the end, I hope you like the sound of a future filled with cockroaches, feral cats, rabbits, rats and flies because those are the types of animals which will thrive in a man made environmental apocalypse.
I would like to think that if we are intelligent enough to realise that we have the power to exterminate the other varieties of life on earth, then we are also intelligent enough to realise why we shouldn't (including both cold rational reasons and aesthetic/moral reasons).
Do you really believe that it is ok on any level if, say, every last tiger dies as a result of human impact on the environment? What if we go out and shoot them all? Because we could, and it sounds like you're saying that would be good and proper, or at least 'evolutionarily correct' in some way.
Read Pynchon.
Heres an idea.. give me a reason why a specific species is worth protecting, and then if you convince me, I'll even fucking help you to save it.
You should qualify that one. Here is a species for you: Homo sapiens. Gotcha. (Wink)
How about this one: wheat. Gotcha again.
Diversity? Thats crap. There are so many species on this planet that we can't even count them.
Here is a question for you: What is the bare minimum number of species you might be comfortable with?
Here is another question for you: If you whittle down the biodiversity of this planet to only a few "essential" species--what will be the consequences? Please cite your sources when you answer. The biased speculation of a non-scientist doesn't count.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Although I greatly enjoy Penn and Teller's views on a variety of subjects, particularly civil liberties, many of their more science-centered episodes rely on rampant misinformation. As a paleontology graduate student trained in both mass extinctions and the geology of climate change, I find the responses on Slashdot disturbing. The current biodiversity crisis and the anthropogenic impact on climate are as true as the theory of evolution. For a website where I regularly see creationist science regularly and rightfully dismissed, I am confused how you have allowed yourselves to otherwise ignore modern science. The question of whether it is prudent to stop the current biodiversity crisis, i.e. the extreme increase in extinction rates across all taxa, is another matter. No biologist today can easily say what impact the loss of any one species will have: likely none per case, but potentially a great deal. Our society depends on working ecosystems. Go read about current fishery crises if you are otherwise confused on that matter, or on the incredibly scary "source/sink" dynamics of population ecology. The fact of the matter is that we don't know enough what removing so many "insignificant" taxa will have on the ecosystem. Are you aware of the great diversity of animals that live below your own feet, in the soil below you? What if they were lost? At this point it is likely too late to stop the "sixth mass extinction" entirely, but we have time to make the impact less. With no data on the possible outcome, but the potential for enormous risk, it seems imprudent to not take action. Preserving species also means preserving their ranges, because taxa with small ranges are much more likely to go extinct (see anything by Dave Jablonski). Ranges also shift greatly during climate change. When I saw that episode of Penn and Teller several years ago, I was sad for the girl in the wheelchair, but that plot of land in Florida might actually mean the difference between that bird going extinct or not. Crazy, but, yeah, true. Penn and Teller in that episode, if I remember rightly, offer to kill every chimp on earth to save an AIDS-infected junkie. A polarizing statement but : can anyone really say the research value of the global chimp population is really that low? Thankfully, we don't have to kill a junkie to save chimps. In fact, we don't have to kill anyone to save any animals. We just have to make our lives slightly less pleasant and be willing to say some things are hands off. Amazing, huh? Then we avoid the otherwise unpredictable effects. (TFA is remarkable for being able to put hard numbers to our fears, saying how many taxa of a particular group are in danger.)
Since you apparently don't understand the difference, I'll spell it out for you:
You put your hand on the hot plate. It burns.
Experimental variable: location of hand
Extraneous variables: none
Valid conclusion (if it's reproducible): Moving your hand to the hot plate caused it to burn.
Amphibians are dying out.
Experimental variable: "Global warming"
Extraneous variables: f***ing everything
Valid conclusion: none
Now, this isn't a perfect argument: you can do things like argue that all the extraneous variables are obviously not really important given what we know about ecology or whatever -- but it certainly demands a more reasoned response than ignorant mocking.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
You are dead on, but the human race can't really see past its nose as a whole, especially when things are going well--and if you have time to type drivel on /., things are going well.
I'd be amazed if any of the self professed "conservatives" who spew ignorance and misinformation in this thread realize the extent and long-reaching consequences of something even as concrete as the current credit crisis--and this hits them (and me) right in the pocket book.
But take comfort in the fact that humans will eventually suffer the same fate as the rest of Earth's creatures, opening the door for a biological rebound in 50 million years that brings with it a whole plethora of cool new critters.
Just callin' it like I see it.
No, the real question is.... ...why the fuck should we care?
Diversity? Thats crap. There are so many species on this planet that we can't even count them. The loss of even hundreds of thousands of species is statistically insignificant.
Heres an idea.. give me a reason why a specific species is worth protecting, and then if you convince me, I'll even fucking help you to save it.
Biodiversity is very important. Aside from the fact that losing an entire species forever is an extremely sad thing to happen there are practical implications. For example many of the medicines we use today were discovered by people going into the Amazon, brining back everything they could find, and seeing which of the weird things they found could fight different illnesses on a petri dish. Lose the diversity and you lose all those undiscovered opportunities. In a more general sense loss of diversity within a species leads to increased susceptibility to stressors, this may impact upon economically important species (known as well as unknown) as well as rare frogs.
Also, you don't know what statistically significant means so don't use that term. While the loss of hundreds of thousands of species is important is itself, but is more significant as a marker of the loss of environment leading to the losses of all those undiscovered species and damage to an ecosystem that we rely on but don't really understand.
The overwhelming scientific consensus it that the warming is proceeding much faster than in the past and that this caused at least in part by human activity.
The earth has experienced many periods of warming and cooling even within historic times, let alone during geologic time. Many of these warming and cooling periods were actually fairly rapid; the earth's climate could be called a metastable system that often experiences fairly rapid change between a number of more stable states. It's just simply untrue that the speed of recent climate change is unprecedented.
That said, what I think you meant to say is that warming is proceeding much faster than in the recent past - and with that minor edit, that's quite true. The prevailing scientific opinion is that human activity is at least partly to blame, possibly helping to accelerate and amplify a natural cyclical change into a warmer state.
But on the other hand, global warming has not yet had a major effect on most temperate and tropical habitats (as opposed to arctic and alpine habitats). For most amphibian loss, it's necessary to look at other causes - which, FWIW, is all that the parent article was saying.
Will someone please explain to me how global warming is causing mass extinctions? I believe that the average temperature has gone up something like one degree in the last several decades, which is no more than the amount of variation you would see from year to year anyway.
So say the average temperature in some amphibians environment is 70 degrees F. During the last several hundred years, the temperature could have been anywhere from 60-80 degrees and the amphibians were fine. Now the average has gone up to 71 degrees and they're dying out? I don't buy it.
or else!
We produce megatonnes of material toxic to all known organic life every hour of every day. Irreprable damage is being caused by this, as is evident by the massive increase in endangered and exterminated species. Once lost, it will never be regained. There is no remedy for these damages.
Global Warming is real. The only questions are:
How much of it is really caused by us?
And
How much of it actually harmful?
So far, what I see in the media isn't really convincing. I still believe that what we see today can and did happen in earth's history and is therefore rather natural.
Cutting back on our production of harmful and questionable stuff and especially cutting back on what of it we release into nature is surely a good thing. Common sense dictates that just dumping anything in too big quantities anywhere can't be good. But we must be careful not to confuse useful behavior with what this blatant reactionism demands of us. Reactionism and outcry are ALWAYS easily abused tools to sell stuff. Be it a political agenda or newspapers.
Simple: people here dismiss anything that makes them feel uncomfortable: the idea that there may be an omnipotent, omniscient God makes them uncomfortable, so they dismiss anything that relies on that idea (creationism, afterlife, absolute morality, etc.); likewise, the idea that a materialistic, consumerist lifestyle may be destroying the planet makes them feel uncomfortable, so they dismiss anything that relies on that idea (global warming caused by pollution, USA being the world's worst polluter, importance of biodiversity, etc).
Is there such a thing as "clean nuclear energy"? Nuclear energy can be advantageous, and even cleaner than other power sources, but as long as it produces waste that takes millenniums to decay or millions to be reprocessed, calling it "clean" sounds like an oxymoron.
If only it were that simple.
1. Evolution takes time.
If you don't have damn good DNA repair mechanisms, different cells in your body change randomly to do different things than what's needed, and you die. (E.g., of cancer.) So there's an upper cap on how often mutations can happen, which puts an upper cap on how fast you can evolve. Heck, even small-ish evolutions in tens of thousands of years are called accelerated evolution.
We're talking about "since 1970" here, which isn't even a blip at evolution scales. _No_ species ever evolved in 38 years.
2. Evolution really works like in the joke about the guys camping, and one of the guys putting on his sports shoes when they see a pissed off tiger: you don't have to outrun the tiger, you have to outrun the other guy. You don't have to be the fastest gazelle, you just have to outrun the slowest when the lions drop by.
What I'm indirectly getting at is that it worked in situations where there was a slow changing equilibrium between hunter and prey, or between species and environment. On the whole, the species still has to be survivable in the short run. It doesn't work for "bang, you're dead!" situations. And normally they do get that short term survivability. Even a species whose become relatively unfit, gets breaks as its lowering numbers also causes the predator population to drop, and buys the prey some more time. Or viceversa, a relatively unfit predator gets a break as the prey over-multiplies and eventually it gets enough of a meal even from sick prey or corpses.
The natural selection will then keep culling from the lower end, and over millions of years, the species gets better.
No species can evolve into something better if you keep hunting it into extinction within decades, or dump poison into its water, or cut down its habitat and replace it with a parking lot. Or if you keep hunting it past the point where predator-prey equilibrium would have allowed it to rebound, that's it, really. Game over.
3. While I sorta see your point about climate change,
A) it doesn't apply for situations when we pollute a place overnight, or when we cause an eutrophication and the algae bloom suffocates everything else
B) you also have to remember that climate change is a bit over-sold these days. It's the #1 best selling sin, and _everything_ gets blamed on it first. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but that it does get blamed for more than it actually caused.
In this case, we don't _know_ whether these frogs died because of climate change or, say, because of pollution. As more and more third world and developing countries industrialize, they pollute more and more. And again, let's not forget that while the carbon cult is obsessed with CO2 only, early unregulated industry puts out a lot more immediately poisonous stuff. Both in the air _and_ in the water, which, as mentioned, is the amphibians' problem: they depend on both.
Seriously, half the world still doesn't have any filters on their factories, or any other environment protection, or still uses lead in its pipes and gasoline. You start worrying about the quality of air when you already have other more stringent QOL components covered. When you're dirt poor, you care more about getting food, clean water, medicine, and a job. As long as even those are hit and miss, or in a lot of places more miss than hit, you don't give a fuck about that factory dumping toxic stuff into the air or water. Lead in the air (e.g., from leaded gasoline) might affect you later, while lack of food will kill you right now.
As little as a new factory starting production, can poison the water of several species over night. Sure, someone out there will scream about all the CO2 from it, as if that were all that could possibly ever matter, and in the long run maybe it even is, but it will be the other chemicals that kill in the short run. Or if that factory produces fertilizers, again, you _could_ worry about the CO2 it produces, but that's an eutrophication event waiting to happen,
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Temperature measurements just in California are worthless anyway -- too small of an area. Do you know how many measurements they're averaging those with? How big of a temperature shift you'd expect from a misplaced thermometer? Whether the standard deviation of the global temperature average those measurements were included in shifted significantly?
No, I'll tell you what you did. You came to a conclusion, and then looked for evidence to support it. Then you had the gall to question scientists, who at least use much better reasoning.
Well, that's a classic example of missing the point.
What is a species after all? Depending on how you define it you can manipulate the numbers. A species by itself isn't very important.
What is going on is a loss of genetic information in the natural world. Does it matter? Depends on your timeframe. Over the long term, of course it doesn't matter, where the long term is on the million year scale. Over the short term, say the next thousand years, it will matter a great deal.
Why does diversity matter?
You don't get an efficient, flexible ecosystem by stocking it with aggressive, weedy species. Even if the individual species is flexible, the system becomes less flexible. The net genetic information in a place represents the ability of the system to adapt. I remember a study described in Science News a few years back that showed diverse patches of prairie adapted more efficiently to annual variations in temperature and rainfall than less diverse patches.
Diversity is information and information is wealth. It's just wealth we take for granted, and therefore we don't bother to count it. It therefore doesn't show up on corporate balance sheets and GDP calculations, but that doesn't mean it isn't wealth.
We could dam the Merced and turn Yosemite into a reservoir; we could turn the Grand Canyon into an endless trash pit for the refuse of the nation. These moves would probably give us a net gain in GDP, because the kind of wealth these places represent is not tracked by standard accounting.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
>>>we can be some 80% to 99% sure that the bigest part of it is man-made.
And what about the previous warming events of circa 3000 BC and 300-1200 AD? Those were not man-made and yet they happened. What caused them? How do you know it's not the same cause now?
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I don't see what the big problem is. You said yourself that dumping millions of tons of anything anywhere is probably a bad idea. My response to you is that whether human caused global warming is real or not shouldn't change our behavior. We should strive very hard not dump millions of tons of stuff into our atmosphere. The 'climate change' debate is just a distraction.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
the fact that losing an entire species forever is an extremely sad thing to happen
Extremely sad! Remember guys, losing an entire species is entirely IRREVERSIBLE! There is no undo if we fail to act on biodiversity! One day, maybe millions of years from now, the earth's climate will be back to normal cycling. If we destroy the biodiversity, we can NEVER EVER get that biodiversity back. New species originate at an extremely slow background rate, a rate which has been decreasing since the Cambrian (the time of the Burgess Shall fauna). True, mass extinctions are generally followed by a burst of recovery, but there is also usually a delay of millions of years (see stuff by Dave Bottjer, Peter Ward, Doug Erwin...).
I do know how many are used for the surface record. Its well documented and the data is available online. What isn't well documented is the placement of those thermometers. The scientists harping on climate change simply don't give a shit, which is obvious since they dont even bother visiting these sites to see what problems may exist.
Not as much as if there were hundreds of misplaced thermometers just in the USHCN. Didn't expect a big problem with the quality of the surface record, did you? The problems the scientists say do not exist are now well documented with photographic evidence. This is a classic case of garbage in garbage out. Maybe its warming significantly, maybe it isn't. We don't know because the data we have just plain sucks.
I suggest you begin your research at http://www.surfacestations.org/
The biggest pusher of the "climate change" scare is the IPCC, a political organization trying to heavily regulate industry on a global scale. If it looks like an attempt at a power grab, it probably is.
"His name was James Damore."
So, the earth was truly flat prior to approximately 2300 years ago? You advocate that discovery of a thing causes it to spontaneously exist, such that prior to human discovery it did not exist, or was something else entirely?
This is your support for the statistical insignificance of special extinction? You correlate human discovery of new species with human ovservation of lost species and claim that significance of one grants you accurate knowledge of significance in the other. This calls into question your understanding of the term (which I'm sure you'll look up right now and finally present a well-founded retort), as well as your entire decision-making methodology.
You play fast and loose with your support arguments. If you are unwilling to ground and source your claims, then it is obvious that the conclusions you spout are more important to you than their factuality. The only conclusion to be drawn from your arguments is the existance of your own emotional ass-primate.