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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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PufNFWo9mm0
The endangered species act is a national disgrace.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Has someone told phelps? Has to be said. :)
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.
True, we all went along fine before that... o_O
...and it is filled with concrete and hairless apes.
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!
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
Expansion is what is causing the contraction of numbers in Yellowstone. Yellowstone itself is a super volcano and its magma has been pushing the surface up for a very long time, heating the ground, air and water around it. They have literally found fish cooked in the water around the park in recent years and not geyser water. Trees have died after having their roots cooked. The heat from the rising magma there far exceeds anything global warming could do in that vicinity. If it ever erupts again there will likely be widespread destruction from the eruption followed by some global cooling.
Yellowstone would not be a good example to use when blaming global warming for dried up pools there, though perhaps not totally unrelated. TFA used it for an example of a location with dead salamanders etc in dried out pools without mentioning the more likely cause being the super volcano heating everything above it, very poor form indeed.
What's the point of evolving amphibious capability if not for greater environmental tolerance?
Who said evolution has to make sense?
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.
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.
It's incredible what kind of nonsense gets modded insightful. A scam by whom? By the national academies of science of all developed countries: http://royalsociety.org/displaypagedoc.asp?id=20742 Why would they take part in a scam? What would just about all major scientific organizations and a vast majority of individual scientists involved in climate research have to gain by putting their reputations on the line in order to "take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools"? What would they have to gain from it?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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.
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").
Is there anything global warming can't do?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
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").
How did amphibians survive the much greater temperature swings in Earth's history? They've been around for a long time. Were there partial extinctions and then they rediversified?
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").
"Good thing you didn't quote the same source twice to pad your results." I'm assuming that was sarcasm, because of the two National Geographic articles. The two articles refer to two different studies and were published almost a year apart. If you want to argue editor bias or something like that, that's one thing. However the grandparent was making a legitimate attempt to back up his claim with multiple sources. Just because that's a rarity around here is no cause to try to spin his/her motives. And again, if you weren't being sarcastic, I apologize, but then that line was kind of random.
Why would they take part in a scam?
Same reason they take part in the evolution scam. It's part of their left-wing athiest agenda. Basically, they hate God, and love nothing more than to hurt Jesus. Those sick fucks.
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" )
Great, now we can't eat humans anymore?
"Duh, it's SOLAR OUTPUT that determines temps."
Can someone explain how the GP's ignorance could possibly be considered insightful? Or at least tell me how such mind-boggling ignorance is different to that displayed by creationists and flat-earthers.
"Gaia-worship"
"Gaia" is sometimes seen as a god by the fanatics on both sides of the pro/anti environment 'wedge'. However the word/concept is a synonym for "biosphere" and was coined by "the father of Earth Science" James Lovelock. It posits that the biosphere can be considered as a single organisim (ie: a unique organic system fed by energy from the Sun), it has absolutely nothing to do with projecting human/spiritual qualities onto said organic system.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think the basis of your argument deserves the kind of consideration that your point itself does.
The industrial junk we've been pumping out can't be good; I don't think you'll find many people that are pro-pollution... The problem with your argument is studies show cancer has been decreasing for decades -- not just mortality, but also the diagnosis and development of. Considering detection has certainly improved and pollution has certainly NOT improved, it should be on the rise in a big way. Why the discrepancy? It did increase during the 70s and 80s, but was that because of better detection rates? It is easy to write it off as such, but who knows... I don't -- and neither do you.
Unfortunately, that's the problem. We don't have much reliable data to follow because the data itself has been a work in progress for decades. For example, whether or not you believe they have an agenda, the National Cancer Institute shows this downward trend, and it continues. I'm sure if you went back to 1930 or something, cancer rates per capita were far, far lower though; however, you cannot get accurate numbers because many people would have not been treated or improperly diagnosed. It's pretty easy to fudge the numbers and statistics to indeed lie.
As I'm sure you know though, the problem with 'the evidence' is it is difficult to concretely prove... either way. There are just too many variables to take in account with living organisms to do meaningful, empirical tests that prove something without a shadow of a doubt. Sadly, not many people will listen until such links can be made unequivocally.
In short, I wouldn't use cancer as your 'undeniable evidence', but your point/intentions are good and I personally agree with you, although probably to a lesser degree.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Why would they take part in a scam? What would just about all major scientific organizations and a vast majority of individual scientists involved in climate research have to gain by putting their reputations on the line in order to "take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools"? What would they have to gain from it?
Research grant money? Note that they are forecasting those dramatic effects tens years in the future. How convenient. If it does now warm as predicted, they will a) be retired long time ago anyway b) claim the measures taken based on their advice fixed the problem. And it is now "climate change" anyway and climate changes all the time, means they cannot be wrong. Very litte reputation is in danger here, really. The only possible danger for them is radical global cooling - with emphasis on "radical" - otherwise they can always find many apologies why it is not warming as fast as predicted (which it is not, in fact - since 1998, temperatures hardly changed, if not dropped).
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.
Spoilers: I was quoting National Geographic because it had a concise summary of the article. You can find the fulltext of the two separate studies on Google.
Why would they take part in a scam? What would just about all major scientific organizations and a vast majority of individual scientists involved in climate research have to gain by putting their reputations on the line in order to "take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools"? What would they have to gain from it?
Great book of Gaia worship: Earthpage 10:23: and those scientists who take of the cause of the great Gaia and torment thine gullible fools shall finally be granted the ability to bear children and grow fruit from thine earthly nipples. So it is written.
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.
It's fairly clear that the main issues involved with recent amphibian declines are pollution, habitat loss, and disease. Global warming is at most a distant fourth, and the reason is not hard to find: temperatures just aren't changing that much in most places, yet amphibian decline is extremely widespread and includes nearly every habitat. The places where temperature changes have been most extreme are in high mountain regions and the high arctic, neither of which are prime amphibian habitat - not that there aren't a few there, but most of them live at lower altitudes and latitudes.
Blaming global warming for every bad thing that happens reminds me of the old saying that when your only tool is a hammer, the entire world looks like a nail. It is a terrible oversimplification to a single issue which can hardly be the cause of everything that goes wrong in the world. Pollution - especially the acidification of the aquifers in many parts of the world - is too often overlooked by many people who want to blame everything on global warming.
That said, "global warming" is hardly a scam, although the data are extremely difficult to analyze and the precise degree of man's involvement in it is still open to some debate; but it appears very likely that both natural cycles and man-made causes have been at work. However it certainly makes sense to do what we can to limit its effects, especially since we only have one planet we can call home.
The real world is rarely simple.
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.
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.
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.
I recall as a kid how my grandmother's yard was littered with American toads. She was certainly in the right place for wildlife. Right next to a state park. Two acre pond in the back yard. Woods all around. The lawn seemed to dance as I pushed the mower back and forth. If I saw anything less than a few dozen toads while mowing the front lawn, something was wrong.
My grandmother is gone and my parents have since moved into that house. Now it's a treat for my kids if I can find a toad or two there.
My own home has much the same problem. I'm on a wooded lot, backed up against a city greenway with a stream in the back yard. There is plenty of habitat for the toads, plenty of food. Every now and then we'll see one. The neighbors who have been here 30 years say that during the summer the houses would have treefrogs all over them. I have yet to see a single treefrog. And taking my kids back in the greenway to look for salamanders, we have yet to find a single one while flipping over rocks and rotten logs.
I still have my doubts about man's part in changing the climate. But something is wrong. The amphibians are like the canary in the coal mine. And it doesn't take an expert to see that they are disappearing fast.
Did anybody else read that as "1/3 of amphibians dining out"? I was wondering how so many of them could afford to do that, when most of us are having to cut back.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
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
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
RTFA
RTFA
RTFA
The problem seems to be chemicals affecting hormonal response, pH change causing fungal plagues, and excessive loss of habitat. Climate change merely increases the habitat destruction. The pH induced fungal plagues currently eradicating some of our plant species don't get much press, IMO that may be the larger problem. Here on /. the perception problem is observable, clearly some of Y'ALL aren't paying attention.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
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...).
(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.
You realize, don't you, that without scientifically rigorous documentation, your observation of mere physical reality means nothing to the willful ignorati. I too, have observed the same phenomena. I miss toads.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Here's a further question, however. The article hints at multiple factors, but then incessantly intones global warming, global warming, global warming! Actually, the article seems reasonably noncommittal about it, but the summary was excerpted primarily the global warming references.
Has the estimated 2/3 of a degree change in average temperatures over the last century really resulted in dramatic devastation of seasonal ponds or merely tended to shift their latitude and/or elevation slightly (trust me, dried out tadpole corpses already existed back in the 80's when Stanford started this study and I was catching critters in seasonal ponds)? What about increased human water use lowering the water table, and development altering drainage patterns. And don't forget other factor cited like pesticide use and changing pH in waterways.
I don't have anything against global warming science, but in this case, it doesn't sound like they have actually confirmed a link between global warming and the factors cited.