We've Moved!

November 09, 2009

The Earth Pub has now merged with the brand new Discovery News Earth page. So please head on over there to follow your favorite bloggers and catch up on the latest Earth happenings.

The Red List Grows Longer

November 06, 2009

The IUCN Red List details the state of the planet's threatened species. Long story short, the list's latest update paints a pretty dire picture, one forecasting extinctions that extend far beyond the poster animals gracing your World Wildlife Fund Christmas cards.

According to BBC News, 21 percent of known mammals are at serious risk, 30 percent of amphibians, 70 percent of plants and 35 percent of invertebrates. That’s 17,291 species in need of serious assistance, mostly in the form of habitat conservation.

The reports comes out only months before 2010, the target year set by the Convention on Biological Diversity to reduce such losses. The IUCN's Director of the Biodiversity Conversation Group, Jane Smart, thinks the latest Red List "shows the 2010 target […] will not be met. It's time for [g]overnments to start getting serious about saving species."

Fortunately, the Red List isn't just species' names written in blood; it also includes information about each species' particular threats, its ecological requirements and ways to reduce extinctions. Conservation groups and governments use the list to plan their protection strategies and legislation.

The Convention itself suggests that the monetization of biodiversity, combined with the more traditional means of conservation or habitat protection, will better preserve it. The group reasons that "biodiversity will be better protected through actions that are justified on their economic merits. The development of tools for the valuation of biodiversity is a priority."

A threatened animal you're probably already familiar with: an Amur tiger. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Climate cools over Wall Street

November 04, 2009

In the nick of time, just as the world's diplomats are about to sit down and try to do something about our changing climate, the Wall Street Journal has discovered global cooling.  And so, of course, it says here, "The Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up."

The key fact, the basis for the column by the newspaper's environment editor, is a set of statistics that shows that global temperatures have declined since 2006.  Now, to people in the business of climate science, citing statistics of two years' duration must sound like the setup for a joke -- you know, like, "Boy, it's cold outside, and they talk about global warming!"

But no, Jeffrey Ball isn't trying to tell a joke.  He is serious about this, evidently, and expects to be taken seriously. This cooling, he wrote, "has reignited debate over what has become scientific consensus: that climate change is due not to nature, but to humans burning fossil fuels."  But has it, really?

The way Ball frames the "debate," it is not a matter of scientific data or even knowledge, but one of dueling beliefs.  On one side are scientists "who don't believe in man-made global warming" who cite the "cooling" statistics as "evidence for their case" and on the other are scientists "who do believe in man-made warming" who "dismiss the cooling as a blip." This sounds like a game anybody can play.

At the center of this conflict is the computer model, as Ball sees it:  "A few years of cooling doesn't mean that people aren't heating up the planet over the long term.  But the cooling wasn't predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science.  That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect."

(Personally, I think there is something terribly ironic about the Wall Street Journal's slant on the "imperfection" of climate models.  I mean, here is a stellar group of economic journalists who failed to foresee the worst market collapse in their lifetimes now feeding off the fact that climate models imprecisely foretell the future.)

Anyway, this may come as a surprise to Jeffrey Ball, but climate scientists have been in agreement about the imperfection of climate models before he was environment editor of the Journal, before he was covering the oil industry for the paper in Dallas, and even before he was covering the auto industry for them in Detroit. Of course they are imperfect!  They are computer simulations of an extremely complex and not totally-understood planet.

The truth is, even if climate models were perfect -- and in fact, they are pretty darn good -- they would not necessarily predict year-to-year changes in global temperature, because that is not what they are designed to do and not what climate scientists want from them. 

In the end, the problem with this column is not that the subject was handled so badly, but that it was written at all, because there is not such thing as a two-year climate trend.

Here is an experiment you can try at home:  Look at the graph from NOAA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies depicting the profile of global temperatures since 1880 and try to discern a significant departure from the long-term upward trend any time in the last 50 years or so. Squint your eyes if you want to, but still, I think you will find that it doesn't help.  What does help is closing your eyes entirely.

Earth to Wolf: Please Mess With Texas, Michigan, Wyoming...etc.

November 03, 2009

Here's a guest post from master science writer, eclectic veterinarian and my good friend Cynthia Mills:

On safari in Botswana, miles away from cities, towns, even villages, I looked out over the grassy savanna and saw… litter. Everywhere I looked there were white things, marring the pristine grasslands. On first glance it all looked like the Styrofoam clam shells reminiscent of fast food living.

Upon closer inspection I found out that I was both wrong and right. The gleaming white flotsam wasn’t Styrofoam, but it was litter—I was seeing the bones of the fast—well, speedy anyway—food of Africa, gazelles and impala.

This was all brought to mind by the publishing of a recent paper in Ecology. Researchers Bump, Vucevitch

Crossing China by Foot -- A Whiskery Trek

If you now or have ever suffered from wanderlust, here's a five-minute video you'll adore. This dude walks across China and records not only the beautiful people and scenery, but his hair growth in time lapse. Now I want to see the full length version of his travels.

The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

Tributyltin -- The Poison That Makes Us All Fatties?

October 31, 2009

Chances are you've never heard of Tributyltin (TBT) unless your a chemist, biologist, or work in the commercial shipping industry. But as I was reporting my story earlier this week on how the economic crisis is increasing the potential for ships to spread invasive species, I was amazed to learn how pervasive, and deadly, the poison is to life in the oceans.

Even more shocking: TBT could be contributing to the obesity epidemic.

Wait, what? Throughout the late 1980's and 1990's TBT was a popular way to keep barnacles and other critters from accumulating on cargo ships. TBT was incorporated into a paint that shipping operators used on their fleet. It worked like a charm, because it released slowly over time and was a potent destroyer of mussels, clams, lobsters, and other crustaceans.

In typical human fashion, no one thought about what happened to TBT after it did its job on boat bottoms. Turns out, it got into coastal waters and wreaked havoc with local sea life, causing female animals to grow male sex organs, or in higher doses just killing stuff en masse. Yuck.

In 2001, people got smart and put together an international ban on TBT that is slowly taking effect, but the chemical is still out there.

Fast forward to last year, when researchers found that lab rats became massively obese when they ingested TBT. So let's see, we have a poison that makes animals who eat it really fat. And it's all over the world's oceans, and in marine life that people like to eat. Uh oh.

**Nerdy caveats: of course there is a lot of dispute over whether there is even an 'obesity epidemic,' and of course people get fat from eating too much McDonald's, etc. And the data on TBT and obesity are admittedly preliminary. I'm not blaming obesity on people who painted ship hulls with TBT. Yet. I'm just saying, this is interesting, and that the story on TBT ain't over.

Image: Washington Post

Why Dinosaurs are Disappearing

Earlier this week, paleontologists Mark Goodwin and John Horner published a finding that has experts in the dinosaur world scratching their heads: the head-butting specialist Pachycephalosaurus is the same animal as two other dome-headed dinosaurs, Dracorex and Stygimoloch (pictured bottom, top left and right, respectively). Blasphemy!

But besides this eye-glazing argument about dinosaur taxonomy, Horner & Goodwin a bigger vision. They think as many as 1/3 of all dinosaur species may be mere redundancies, simply fossils of the same species frozen at different stages of life.

Horner & Goodwin's claim isn't their first-- last month the researchers along with Horner's grad student John Scannella proposed that Torosaurus was just a full-grown version of a Triceratops -- but it could reshuffle the dino deck, significantly decreasing the number and diversity of terrible lizards who lived in antiquity.

Image: UC Berkeley

Muck in Arctic lake sends a signal

October 30, 2009

If Earth were behaving the way we have all grown up expecting, its climate swaying to the timeless rhythms of its orbital path around the sun, the Arctic would not be warming.  Its sea ice would not be thinning and there would be no talk of an Arctic of "ice-free summers" or a Northwest Passage anytime soon.

If astronomical circumstances were still in charge, the Arctic would be 8,000 years along the path of a 12,000-year cooling trend. That pace and direction of natural variability is driven by a wobble in the planet's tilt in relation to the sun, a well-known cycle that completes itself every 21,000 years or so.

While the energy of sunlight striking the far north continues to decline, the character of the Arctic climate has abruptly changed. According to new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the change began to show up about 1950 in sediment cores recently extracted from the bed of a small lake on the east coast of remote Baffin Island, west of Greenland.

"The past few decades have been unique in the past 200,000 years in terms of the changes we see in the biology and chemistry recorded in the cores," said Yarrow Axford, a University of Colorado-Boulder researcher and lead author of the study.  "We see clear evidence for warming in one of the most remote places on Earth at a time when the Arctic should be cooling because of natural processes."

The researchers say the change was signaled by the abrupt decline in the abundance of several types of mosquito-like midges that flourish in very cold climates.  Two species of the cold-loving midges have completely disappeared from the sediment cores.  At the same time, a species of diatom, a lake algae shown here in an electron microscope image courtesy of Canadian researcher Cheryl Wilson, has abruptly increased, possibly a result of declining ice cover on the lake.

Perhaps you want to ask, what exactly does the minute contents of the muck in the bottom of a remote Arctic lake have to do with anything important to those of us living in the temperature zones of the Northern Hemisphere?  No one can say exactly, of course.  That's not the way science works -- or Earth.  One thing is certain, though.  If this abrupt climate change turns out to be a singular, benign episode without serious portent for the rest of the planet, a lot of earth scientists are going to be surprised.

Between Smog and a Hot Place

Here's an infernal matter that comes up periodically, with news of fresh research on the matter: Does cleaning up some sun-light reflecting air pollutants actually exacerbate global warming? The latest word? Yep, cleaning up the air will make it harder to meet climate goals, but that's no reason not to try.

South Park Slams "Whale Wars" (hold for applause)

The latest episode of the Comedy Central show "South Park" hits pretentious anti-whaling activists where it hurts: in their diet.

If you haven't seen Animal Planet's newish reality show "Whale Wars," you should. Between general ineptitude on the high seas and an incredible display of misguided, virulent (and at times violent) idealist wrath directed at the Japanese whaling fleet, it is entertaining.

But as the makers of South Park point out, not a lot actually gets accomplished. In real life, the former Greenpeacer Paul Watson and his band of (vegan? vegetarian?) pirates spend a lot of time looking for the Japanese, a little time bothering them. Mostly they preen, talking into the camera about their extreme dedication to the cause, and trying to figure out how to turn a dangerous game of maritime cat and mouse in the Southern Ocean into an international media sensation.

Of course, South Park breathes in all of this nonsense in and spits it back hilariously in their (and our) faces. The Japanese are bloodthirsty samurai monsters, the activists dithering media divas (even South-Park-Larry-King has a few choice words for them).

I'm not going to detail all of the well-placed criticism underpinning the terrific jokes in this episode. But the show ends neatly, bringing an absurd argument home to the average eater, who may or may not believe that killing whales is okay (spoiler alert): 

The South Park children succeed in convincing the Japanese people to stop senselessly murdering Dolphins and whales. How do they manage this? By convincing them that chickens and cows are far more deserving of their wrath. As screaming robed warriors descend on cattle pastures and chicken coops, spearing helpless livestock, one of the characters says "Good job, son. Now the Japanese are normal like us."

Image: Treehugger