U.S. border wall – a looming crime against wildlife
Before getting to the matter of barbed wire fences in Europe, let’s address the never=ending saga of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico—which the Trump administration keeps alive despite budget-busting increases in defense spending and, not coincidentally, the cost of beefing up border security with police and ICE agents.
A wall substantial enough to keep out immigrants would also stop the comings-and-goings of animals across the U.S.-Mexico border: more environmental havoc by the Trump administration. Scientists have risen up in opposition, now having accumulated more than 2,500 signatures in support of a paper describing the damage to wildlife that the wall would entail. Read about it at: Wildlife-hostile border wall
PREFACE: Since I began this post in April, there have been some signs indicating the situation with local amphibians is not quite as bad as I originally portrayed – see the Addendum at the bottom. (But it’s still bad.)
It can happen here – is happening
A typical reader of this blog will know that, worldwide, amphibians—principally frogs and toads—are being ravaged by lethal fungal diseases and diminished habitat. Some species have already gone extinct, and many are sure to follow. The foremost villain in these fungal epidemics is world trade in animals. When one thinks of trade in exotics, one usually thinks of highly visible animals—colorful birds (or uniquely gifted birds such as the African Gray parrot), big cats, rare dog breeds, snakes, lizards, and such. But amphibians, despite small size, are valued by collectors for their calls and colors. And any one of them, usually from the tropics, may carry a disease that will lay waste to the toads and frogs in your neighborhood, should it escape. Even in an absence of local release, local populations are vulnerable to the plague creeping across all populations at a rate comparable to the spread of Dutch Elm Disease 50 years ago.
Something like that may have happened in or near our neighborhood in semi-rural Virginia. For whatever reason, this year our spring nights have gone silent in the absence of calls by amphibians—primarily the Gray Treefrog and the Cope’s Gray Treefrog, whose calls you may be familiar with. You can listen to their overlapping calls in the last 15 seconds of this sweet little clip:
Of course, on YouTube you can listen to a host of frog and toad calls as varied as their physical sizes and colors. Probably more varied—the diversity is astonishing!
Surprise! More sneaky public relations by Big Fossil.
When you hear “GAO,” don’t you think the Government Accountability Office—the federal watchdog group that is tasked with keeping government officials honest?
I do. Or at least I did, until I read about The OtherGAO—the “Government Accountability and Oversight” non-governmental organization. The IRS has given public charity status to this group that is “promising to publish documents about the people and groups behind ongoing court cases against the energy industry and its impact on the global climate.”
Thanks to DeSmog Blog, we hear that part-founder of “GAO,” and Competitive Enterprise Institute lawyer, Chris Horner, announced that the bogus GAO isn’t “going to get into the science debate and other arguments. . . . ” Instead, they are going to lift the veil off those treacherous, subversive environmental groups, lawyers, and climate scientists who are suing the fossil fuel industry.
To seek good environmental news nowadays feels like seeking fragments of Earth-friendly flotsam bobbing on toxic seas of human depredation of our living world. But at times glimmers of hope help ward off despair.
(It’s sad indeed that we have to consider tiger numbers in the three-to-four thousands as a success, when at the beginning of the last century the number the tiger population was estimated at 100,000.)
Note there are six existing subspecies of tiger (according to National Geographic), of which there are stunning pix and capsule descriptions to be found here.
“Subspecies” are populations of tigers that are separated by geographic range and/or morphology; all can viably interbreed, but they do not cross paths. Bengal tigers—the ones you’re most likely to see in a zoo—make up about 70% of the aggregate number of wild tigers. With the other 30% split up among the remainder, the risk that any single subspecies could get wiped out is great. Indochinese and South China tigers are especially imperiled.
Let’s not assume that the transportation and freight industries are all on board with every environmentally hostile move made by the Trump administration—in particular the moves of that mendacious boot-licker of fossil fuel interests, Scott Pruitt.
Check out this January 28 piece from The Energy Collective on backlash from the freight industry at Pruitt’s proposal to exempt certain heavy polluters from existing emissions regulations:
Note especially the comment of one experienced heavy duty truck dealer referring to “days years ago when our truck shop was so thick with the exhaust from the trucks you could not see the other side of our shop.” Here’s a guy (I assume a guy) who had first-hand, concrete visual evidence of the damage from heavily polluting vehicles of the past in his own shop—someone for whom environmental unfriendliness is more than a mere leftist catchphrase. Imagine what he’s telling his grandchildren about Scott Pruitt. (And maybe the entire Trump administration.)
Researchers measure disconnect between science and public relations at ExxonMobil
Most readers of this blog are aware of a discrepancy between what ExxonMobil scientists have been reporting for decades, in a purely scientific context, and the company’s position as reflected in public statements and media “advertorials.”
But how big is the discrepancy?How about, enormous.
Two Harvard researchers undertook to pin down the magnitude of the discrepancy quantitatively—chiefly by content analysis—and the results surprised even me. The thrust of the analysis rested on the frequency with which ExxonMobil scientists published scientific papers supporting the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming and Climate Change, versus the public statements and advertorials in media such as the New York Times.
So much of the damage from Anthropogenic Global Warminggoes on literally and figuratively beneath the surface. Such is the case with many of the world’s kelp forests, where legions of heat-loving, kelp-munching sea urchins are reducing once-luxuriant kelp forests to vast tracts of sea floor populated almost exclusively by sea urchins—”urchin barrens.” The action is not where the kelp lie at the surface, it’s where the sea urchins dwell cloaked from view on the ocean floor.
For a quick visual of the onslaught’s progression, scroll down to the set of three photos in this report from Yale Environment 360: Kelp devastation off Tasmania
For those of you who have taken my repeated advice to subscribe (free) to the electronic Yale Environment 360 (highly recommended), you may have already got this message about one more wound torn in the living body of the planet.
With so much human misery brought to our attention every day, it’s hard to put these less dramatic, less heartbreaking events in perspective. It’s only plants! But you can’t help but look at the 3-photo sequence of the kelp forest being wiped out, without a deep sense of loss. (That is, anyway, if you are the typical reader of this blog.)
I know this is obvious, but not to take it off our radar screens for a second: climate chickens coming home to roost, and who’s going to take care of them? Not the fossil fuel companies.
The U.S. Congress is presently debating, how much should the government provide for disaster relief and recovery due to hurricanes—around Houston, in Florida, in the Virgin Islands, and most disastrously, Puerto Rico. The Congress is reluctant, because a precedent for paying now points the way to astronomical payments to come. They know that named hurricanes are just the tip of the climatic disaster iceberg (sorry for the incongruous metaphor) .
Anyone who has, with an open and analytical mind, paid attention to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and Climate Change, has connected the dots between profligate burning of fossil fuels and catastrophic weather events.
The dice are loaded against Earth from the activity of that warm and friendly object that bestows most of the energy we use, our Sun. The worst effect of the Sun will be its roasting to death all life on earth a billion or so years hence. But that warming is nothing to worry about for the next few million years (this warming has virtually nothing to do with climate change on a scale of centuries, such as 2,000-10,000 A.D).
Short-term, the biggest wallop the Sun has in store for us is a Coronal Mass Ejection.
Just do a web search on Coronal Mass Ejection and you’ll get, along with a fascinating description and analysis, an eyeful of bad news about what CME’s could do to Earth–and what they havealreadydone, the most dramatic recent manifestation being the 1859 “Carrington Event” (named after the astronomer who witnessed the flare accompanying the CME). In 1859, telegraph wires were jolted to a degree that knocked wireless operators off their chairs, ignited fires, and took down the entire telegraph network.
Bridenstine Edges toward Confirmation as NASA Head
Recently I circulated an email warning of the potential for non-scientist, non-engineer Congressman Jim Bridenstine to be confirmed as NASA chief administrator. This is yet another Trumpian poke in the eye of the science community, and more seriously it would put a tool of the mining industry in a position to prioritize NASA’s missions.
Now, the Washington Post (September 12) reports that Bridenstine’s route to confirmation is being eagerly groomed by industry groups and key members of Congress. See: Bridenstine Advancing, Science in Retreat I recommend you let your Senators know it matters to you that this man not only is lacking in scientific and engineering credentials, but also has an agenda to shift NASA’s priorities away from space exploration and toward space exploitation. To wit:
What Bridenstine Wants: New Kinds of Craters on the Moon
The Post reports Bridenstine as saying, “From the discovery of water ice until this day, the American objective should have been a permanent outpost of rovers and machines. . . .” To what end, pray tell, Congressman? We can get some clues from a report under the aegis of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on “The Lunar Gold Rush: How Moon Mining Could Work.” See: JPL on Mining the Moon
