"I don't care who ya are, that there's funny!"
Posted on 06/17/2007 8:36:46 AM PDT by rface
Scientists estimate there are 10 to 30 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them unidentified. Each year as many as 50,000 species disappear. Most die off, Tilman says, because of human activity.......
Scientists say wildlife extinction rates are soaring. The die-off, they claim, threatens the planet's web of life or biodiversity which sustains farming, forestry and oceans. At a Paris meeting last week scientists called on world leaders to catalog and save species. One of the speakers was University of Minnesota ecology professor David Tilman. He's known around the world for his research showing the effects of human activity on the environment.
St. Paul, Minn. — The 1200 scientists and others at the international meeting sponsored by the government of France issued a statement at the end of the 5-day-long event. It said in part, "Biodiversity is being irreversibly destroyed by human activities at an unprecedented rate. . . (demanding) urgent and significant action."
New plant and animal species are emerging, University of Minnesota ecology professor David Tilman says, but not nearly fast enough to make up for the toll caused by human activity.
"That's sort of a 1 million to 4 million year process, and yet we are causing species to be lost at rates of 100 to 1000 times faster," he says.
Tilman says the rate of extinction is approaching what scientists assume happened 65 million years ago. That's when many believe a giant meteorite struck the earth, causing a dramatic climate change that led to mass extinction.
"Thirty million years (later) things were pretty much back to normal, different species, dinosaurs were gone, mammals were here," he says.
Unlike then, Tilman argues, we can't count on time to heal the earth's wounds.
Scientists estimate there are 10 to 30 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them unidentified. Each year as many as 50,000 species disappear. Most die off, Tilman says, because of human activity. "We take natural habitats convert them to agriculture, to suburbia, to roads, to monoculture forestry. We fish the oceans so heavily we literally have these trolling nets that scrape the bottom of the ocean clean," he says.
Dave Tilman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the country's top scientific body, the author of four books and more than 140 scientific papers.
Unlike some scientists, he doesn't hesitate to give his opinion on what his research means. Tilman says human behavior is affecting the environment and that our treatment of the earth amounts to a form of theft.
"What that means morally is that future generations will have a lower quality of life because we overexploited the habitat now," he says.
Tilman cites meat production as one of our most wasteful practices. He says raising grain as feed for beef cattle requires vast amounts of land and uses up lots of petroleum to make fertilizer to raise the crops.
"We're using an organism, cattle, that are highly specialized on living on low quality food, and we're giving them high quality food which their guts aren't able to handle very effectively," he says.
A wiser practice which preserves biodiversity, Tilman argues, is raising cattle on grassland that resembles the prairie. Ten years of research by Tilman and others at the Cedar Creek Natural History Area 30 miles north of the Twin Cities shows pasture with plant variety is more productive, releases cleaner water and tolerates extreme weather better.
Tilman argues saving the planet's biodiversity will require modifying human preferences for driving bigger vehicles, eating more meat and generally consuming more of everything around us.
He says we can't count on the market place alone to send the right signals for preserving biodiversity.
He says the next phase of his research will attempt to show ways for finding a balance.
"Might we be able to not only produce more pulp in a more diverse forest for paper production but maybe have that forest provide other services, cleaner water, store more carbon so we can remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping get rid of some of our effects of burning fossil fuel. . . finding ways we can use biological diversity as a tool to help society have a more sustainable world?" he asks.
Two specific proposals emerged at the Paris meeting he attended. One is a 25-year-long effort to catalog all of the earth's species, and another is to spend $25 billion to save the 25 most threatened environments including the Amazon forest.
The irony is that if humans became extinct, you ain't seen nothing yet in the way of what would become extinct, most of the cultivated plants because the weeds would choke them all out and pests (and the strongest predators) consume any that were left.
I think a lot of people are doing the best they can to strike a good balance between preserving the environment and quality of human life. Some are just quietly doing their own thing to make things better, not making some political brouhaha out of it.
Before there were any humans, when was that?, way way back, a lot of things went extinct. We do know that. Humans had NOTHING to do with it.
<<< If you haven’t identified it how do you know it went extinct? >>>
You beat me to it!
This is an old environazi tactic of saying that 50,000 species are perishing every year. And of course 49,999 of them are killed by the fact that SUV’s exist. What they are not saying is where this number came from. I had reserched it a few years ago and the number came from a “scientist” who guessed how many might be dying each year. Then the figure is reported to the MSM in a press release from Greenpeace and years later accepted as fact.
What they of course never mention is the 99.99% of all the species that have ever lived on earth for billions of years are already extinct. And therfore that species extinction is a natural function of the earth and always has been.
They use computer models to simulate the extinction rates...Specifically, it must be the use of one of those as-yet un-refined, work-in-progress, non-converging Global Climate Models (GCM) driving yet another as-yet un-refined, work-in-progress, non-converging Species Extinction Model (SEM) ...
"I don't care who ya are, that there's funny!"
I wonder how many NPR types eat "organic" food (what a stupid term, btw; what the hell is "inorganic" food?) despite the fact that it requires 20-30 percent more land to grow, and habitat destruction (the same NPR types will claim) is a major factor in species extinction?
A Watermelon, Green on the outside, Red on the inside.
Very, Very Red.
Oooh. Then we could drive them to market on horseback.
Wait, better yet we could kill them with stone spear points and slaughter them in place, using their hides to construct our rude, smoky, greasy huts.
I can't answer your question, but I know they probably make pretty good salaries, and have plenty of time to try to make the rest of us feel guilty. I'll wager they consume a higher share of the world's resources than I do, bet none of them live in non-air-conditioned homes, heating bills in Minnesota are horrific, and they probably don't drive a 91 model little car like I do.
Just as an aside, I usually avoid the interstate, have for so many years (agoraphobia has gotten worse the last 15 years) now except for a couple inner city freeway-type routes you have to use now (and nobody around here calls them freeways) decided I would give it a go about 10:30 Friday night, about a 10-mile stretch of it, and man has the traffic gotten worse. It was scary, and I had to push to keep the minimum speed limit because I seldom have to drive very fast, somebody tailgated me so bad I had to speed up, and the semis were unfriggin real. They were coming nonstop in the westbound lane, not so many passing me in the easbound lane, and having to have my window open because my ac is broken, they made a whistling sound as they sped by which I don't remember hearing before. I was wondering how many of them were Mexican trucks and was also wondering if I would make it home.
The “50,000 per year” figure comes from their unknown, unknown guesstimate.
“Biodiversity is being irreversibly destroyed by human activities at an unprecedented rate. . . (demanding) urgent and significant action.”
Now that they have brainwashed the great unwashed masses on global warming, the eco-socialists are on to their next fiction - the destruction of biodiversity by man!!
I can tell you one course they don't take, and that's statistics.
As with global warming, they have no numbers that rise above the statistical background noise to show that anything is happening, much less that it's man made.
If we have no idea how many species are out there, we have no idea of how many are "disappearing", unless it's something large and noticeable, like the dodo bird or passenger pigeon. Too bad they're gone, but the world is doing okay without them.
Most "species" out there are bugs and bacteria that we will never notice, or miss, even if they're under our feet. We don't even have enough DNA evidence on them to determine whether they're vanishing, or just evolving into another bug or bacterium.
These "ecology professors" are amazingly weak on hard science and mathematics. They spout vague numbers about species, and then "hard" numbers on how many are being killed by American SUVs. That does not compute.
At first I thought he was going to turn out to be a PETA-Vegan.
After looking at his picture, I’ve decided he’s probably a meat-eater after all.
Favorite dish: cock-au-vin.
I’ve asked the staff in stores that sell so called “organic” where I might find the “inorganic” section. Being high school kids they usually don’t know what I’m talking about. They are still trying to process “organic.”
” ...But he puts it down,saying it would be a good meal but IT’S PROTECTED!!...”
“How is an alligator a protected species if there are millions??”
Because THEY TASTE LIKE CHICKEN! Purdue and Tyson have a little deal with the EPA.
Let me tell you about my "organic" meal: Years ago, we started having a vegetable garden. We had a bumper crop of broccoli, and picked a bunch, put it in a big Corning Ware thing with butter and salt and pepper, and cooked it up..Absolutley delicious. After a second meal, we found DOZENS of little tiny GREEN caterpillars the same color as the brocolli all over the bottom of the container.
The NEXT year, Sevin™, Diazinone, Agent Orange, we did not care after the "Diet of Worms"!!!!!
I can't say anythung about calculus & physics, but back ca 1975, just out of curiosity, and because I had room for electives, [and had long had a stomach full of the 'humanities' side of the campus] I took a class called Ecological Chemistry.
It dealt with applying basic chemistry concepts to the environment. It did not require any chemistry beyond a year of high school chem as a prerequisite.
The sad thing is, for those who only took it, it satisfied the chemistry requirement for many of the life sciences majors.
You mean that other creatures will change and if its beneficial, they'll stay that way? Then we will say they evolved, when all they really did was change and not die off as a result.
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