File photo – Don Colgan, Head of the Evolutionary Biology Unit at the Australian Museum, speaks under a model of a Tasmanian Tiger at a media conference in Sydney as seen in this May 4, 2000 file photo regarding the quality DNA extracted from the heart, liver, muscle and bone marrow tissue samples of a 134 year-old Tiger specimen (R) preserved in alcohol. The last known Tasmanian Tiger died in 1936 after it was hunted down and wiped out in only 100 years of human settlement. (Reuters)
Multiple reports of Tasmanian Tiger sightings are starting to flow in from everyday citizens in Australia. Several people have recently claimed they’ve spotted the animal, which isn’t a tiger at all — and, despite looking very much like a species of dog, isn’t of canine lineage either — but a carnivorous marsupial. Spotting an interesting creature in Australia isn’t exactly a rare occurrence, but there’s one problem with these reports in particular: the Tasmanian Tiger is supposed to be extinct.
The last known Tasmanian Tiger was captured in its native Australia in 1933 and lived for a few years in a zoo before dying, and its death has long been thought to be the final nail in the species’ coffin. Australians have occasionally claimed to have spotted the dog-like animals over the years, but the sightings were typically rare and attributed to nothing more than misidentification. That’s all changed now, as several “plausible sightings” are beginning to give life to the theory that the animal never actually went extinct at all.
Now, scientists in Queensland, Australia, are taking action in the hopes of actually finding evidence that the Tiger is still around. If confirmed, it would be an absolutely monumental discovery, considering the animal’s history. The team plans to set up cameras in areas where reported sightings have taken place in the hopes of confirming the claims.
In the late 1800s there were actually bounties on Tasmanian Tigers in Australia, and the creatures were hunted to the brink of extinction before any action was taken. By that point, the species was thought to be doomed, and when the last captive animal died it was assumed that was the end of the road. Now, it appears that might not be the case after all.
A Lord Howe Island woodhen Gallirallus sylvestris. Credit: Toby Hudson
Bringing back extinct species could lead to biodiversity loss rather than gain, according to work featuring University of Queensland researchers.
UQ scientist Professor Hugh Possingham said the research suggested further stretching already-strained conservation budgets to cover the costs of de-extinction could endanger extant species (species still in existence).
“If the risk of failure and the costs associated with establishing viable populations could also be calculated, estimates of potential net losses or missed opportunities would probably be considerably higher,” Professor Possingham said.
“De-extinction could be useful for inspiring new science and could be beneficial for conservation if we ensure it doesn’t reduce existing conservation resources.
“However, in general it is best if we focus on the many species that need our help now.”
“Given the considerable potential for missed opportunity, and risks inherent in assuming a resurrected species would fulfil its role as an ecosystem engineer or flagship species, it is unlikely that de-extinction could be justified on grounds of biodiversity conservation.”
The study was led by Dr Joseph Bennett, formerly of the ARC Centre for Environmental Decisions at UQ and now of Carleton University, Canada.
It analysed the number of species governments in New Zealand and New South Wales could afford to conserve.
“We based cost estimates on recently extinct species and similar extant species,” Dr Bennett said.
The Lord Howe pigeon, eastern bettong, bush moa and Waitomo frog were among the extinct species included in calculations.
The researchers found reintroducing some recently extinct species to their old habitats might improve biodiversity locally, but government-funded conservation for 11 focal extinct species in New Zealand would sacrifice conservation for nearly three times as many (31) extant species.
External funding for conservation of the five focal extinct NSW species could instead be used to conserve more than eight times as many (42) extant species.
Although the technology for de-extinction is still some way off, the research found that careful thought would be required about what species to reintroduce, and where.
Professor Possingham is Chief Scientist with The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organisation, and a scientist with UQ’s School of Biological Sciences, The Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science at UQ, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) and the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program Threatened Species Recovery Hub.
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits~ Albert Einstein
People often ask why I speak and write about abrupt climate change leading to near-term human extinction. If we can’t fix it, why bother knowing? It’s unclear who we are or what it means to fix this particular predicament.
Actually, people more frequently send me hate mail accusing me of profiting by lying about our demise than asking questions with civility. It’s analogous to claiming a fire lookout gets paid by the number of fires she spots.
I wish. I wish I were lying. I wish I were profiting. I’m not.
I have no idea why I am compelled to defend my conclusions, all of which are supported by abundant evidence. I suppose my inner teacher believes I can overcome profound, willful ignorance with evidence. This thought alone indicates my unrepentant optimism regarding the human condition.
Few people accuse their oncologist of profiting after she issues a fatal diagnosis. Once the patient recovers from the shock, he sometimes thanks the honest doctor. And if said medical doctor misunderstands the evidence and offers an incorrect, hopeful diagnosis, then filing a legal claim of malpractice is warranted. Indeed, it’s expected in the United States, the most litigious society in the history of the planet.
I pursue and promote the truth, based on evidence. The evidence comes primarily, and almost exclusively, from the very conservative refereed journal literature. I’m not referring to my truth, a notion rooted in the naively postmodern palaver that we each have our own truth, and that each version of the truth is equally valid. Nor am I referring to the evidence-free religious concept of Truth rooted in patriarchy.
My detractors include unscientific people afraid to face evidence, lovers of the omnicidal heat engine known as civilization, and others who lack the credentials necessary to collate and organize relevant evidence. Few people turn to their plumber for advice about cancer. Yet many people seek and believe diagnoses about climate change from wholly unqualified sources.
I’m routinely accused of horrible intentions and terrible acts. There is no supporting evidence. None is needed when the hate is spewed online from a culture dominated by willfully ignorant, small-minded people with questionable intelligence writing for an audience with similar talents. I won’t even venture into the topic of trolls paid to promote disaster capitalism at every cost.
Were I better-known, I suspect I’d make the list of finalists among the most-hated people in the world. It’s a goal, in any event.
As I’ve been saying for years, people are stupid. Most of ’em, most of the time.
Among the offenders are offensively ignorant and ill-informed, office-bound modelers who inexplicably believe field observations ought to fit models, rather than the reverse. Among the worst offenders are armchair prognosticators with video cameras and the ability to post online their ever-changing opinions unattached to evidence. Field observations and refereed journal literature are anathema to those who promote the dominant narrative. The latter notably include the folks who benefit from the omnicidal heat engine affectionately known as civilization.
The best critique of my work is a three-year-old series of ad hominem attacks disguised as a blog post. It was written by a self-proclaimed science educator without a Ph.D. degree. No thought is given to his lack of credentials, his motives, the unprofessional quality of his analysis, or the dated nature of his work. Other critics post on blogs or selfie videos, presumably to counter the hundreds of journal articles on which I rely.
My work relies upon evidence. It is rooted in reason. I am a rationalist. Contrary to the cries from my critics, ever eager to attack the messenger rather than evaluate the message, I am not mentally ill. The entire culture is insane. The inmates, who are operating the asylum, believe they are the sane ones.
I’ve been deemed insane since voluntarily leaving my high-pay, low-work position at a major research university. Taking action based on principle, rather than money, seems crazy to people afflicted with a bad case of the dominant paradigm.
In contrast to my critics, I do not benefit from my work in any way. It has cost me thousands of dollars for every dollar I’ve received in return. It has cost me the ability to do what I love. It has cost me everybody I loved from my former life.
I am motivated by evidence, as I wrote two years ago. In presenting the results, in simple language, I make the evidence accessible to the public. For this, I am insulted. My work is disparaged. I am attacked incessantly.
My attempts to respond kindly sometimes fail, although I can and do distinguish between being nice and being kind. In contrast to the mass of humans I encounter, I recognize niceness and kindness are sometimes mutually exclusive.
The essay linked above from two years ago is sufficient. It lacks discussion of my inner teacher, constantly struggling to get out. I’ve written and spoken extensively about that topic. No further elucidation is warranted.
Indeed, no further elucidation is warranted regarding my extensive body of work. None will suffice for those who deny evidence. I will continue my attempts to disengage from discussions operating strictly within an evidence-free zone, recognizing that such a step will nullify nearly every prospective conversation.
Hatred will continue to flow my way not because of evidence, but rather due to the opposite: It is more comfortable to deny evidence than to ponder one’s own death. The processes of cultural “dumbing down” and acceptance appreciation of ignorance and stupidity have led to our demise. How could it have been otherwise?
I’m tentatively scheduled to tour Ontario, Canada, in November 2017 with possible support from Sudbury, Hamilton, Montreal, and Ottawa. If you’d like to throw your hat into the ring, please send a message to booking@crawfordsattractions.com. To keep costs down, as part of this tour I am seeking hosts and venues in and near Burlington, Vermont.
I’ve received recent requests for a workshop focused on emotions rather than evidence. Such a workshop is described here. It is available in your hometown and also in Belize.
I’m booking guests at the mud hut. For details, click here.
The next episode of NBL radio will air at 3:00 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, 7 March 2017 at PRN.fm. Thanks for your patience.
Thanks to Crawford’s Attractions for initiating a fund-raising campaign in support of speaking tours. It’s here. We’re also seeking volunteers to support my speaking tours this year. Details are provided beneath the “Coming Events” tab atop the page. If you are able to help, please send a message to booking@crawfordsattractions.com
STEADFAST: Guy McPherson … humanity will become extinct within a decade.
He’s been labelled a crackpot and has received plenty of hate mail.
But retired professor Guy McPherson stands by his controversial claims that humans will cease to exist within 10 years.
He explains his reasoning at a free public lecture in Whanganui on Thursday. The talk, Abrupt Climate Change, takes place at the Davis Lecture Theatre starting at 6pm.
Mr McPherson is a retired professor of conservation biology from the University of Arizona.
He blames climate change and the impacts already unleashed by human activity for his extreme prophecy. And it’s too late to change the apocalypse that is to come, he says.
“I can’t see humans existing within 10 years. We can do nothing to stop the planet becoming too hot to grow food and support life. It is already happening and we have less than a decade left.”
Starvation, dehydration, disease, and exposure will lead the way, he said.
Mr McPherson is out of step with mainstream climate science. Although it is widely accepted that unchecked climate change could threaten the human species at some point in time, most scientists say switching from reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy will save the worst impacts and enable humanity to survive.
Professor James Renwick, a climate scientist at Victoria University, agrees that climate change is possibly the “biggest issue humanity has ever faced”, but adds “though certainly humans won’t all die off in 10 years or even 1000 years.”
Mr McPherson cites scientific data including tipping points, positive feedback systems and exponential growth to back up his claims.
“Other scientists are specialists. They focus on a narrow topic. They do not consider the entire Earth system in their work,” Mr McPherson said.
“Climate change and its impacts are here. Expect superstorms, extreme heat, high humidity, and increased spread of deadly diseases. Plants and non-human animals will die in ever-larger numbers. Civilisation will fail, leading to greatly exacerbated impacts.”
Mr McPherson said he was not concerned that his message might alarm or distress people. “I’m a teacher. I relay evidence. I cite science. I’m not relying on a belief system.”
He says he has been labelled an extremist and worse, and regularly receives hate mail.
“I’ve been accused of many things, extremist included. I’m merely connecting a few dots based on the work of other scientists. In a culture characterised by willful ignorance and the inability to think critically, these accusations are to be expected.”
He said many people were liberated by his message. “Knowing they’ve been subjected to lies, they appreciate the truth and they act as if time is short.”
Physicist Stephen Hawking says pollution coupled with human greed and stupidity are still the biggest threats to humankind.
During an interview on Larry King Now, the science superstar told King that in the six years since he’s spoken with the talk show host people haven’t cleaned up their act.
“We certainly have not become less greedy or less stupid,” Hawking said. “The population has grown by half a billion since our last meeting, with no end in sight. At this rate, it will be eleven billion by 2100.”
Physicist Stephen Hawking says pollution coupled with human greed and stupidity are still the biggest threats to humankind.
He noted that the massive problem of pollution has only grown in the last five years.
“Air pollution has increased over the past five years,” he said. “More than 80% of inhabitants of urban areas are exposed to unsafe levels of air pollution.”
When asked what the biggest problem facing the world is, Hawking said climate change.
Hawking told King he wonders if we are past the point of no return. “Will we be too late to avoid dangerous levels of global warming?”
Functional trait diversity is increasingly used to model future changes in community structure despite a poor understanding of community disassembly’s effects on functional diversity. By tracking the functional diversity of the North American large mammal fauna through the End-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction and up to the present, I show that contrary to expectations, functionally unique species are no more likely to go extinct than functionally redundant species. This makes total functional richness loss no worse than expected given similar taxonomic richness declines. However, where current species sit in functional space relative to pre-anthropogenic baselines is not random and likely explains ecosystem functional changes better than total functional richness declines. Prehistoric extinctions have left many extant species functionally isolated and future extinctions will cause even more rapid drops in functional richness.
Stephen Hawking thinks humanity has only 1,000 years left of survival on Earth and that our species needs to colonize other planets.
The famed physicist made the statement in a speech at Oxford University Union, in which he promoted the goal of searching for and colonizing Earth-like exoplanets. Developing the technology to allow humans to travel to and live on faraway alien worlds is a challenge, to say the least. But is Hawking right that humanity has only 1,000 years to figure it out?
The dangers Hawking cited — from climate change, to nuclear weapons, to genetically engineered viruses — could indeed pose existential threats to our species, experts say, but predicting a millennium into the future is a murky business.
“While I respect Stephen Hawking enormously, speculating on how long Homo sapiens will survive before extinction is foolish,” said John Sterman, director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. “Whether we survive and thrive or descend into chaos is not something to predict or lay odds on, but a choice to be made.” [Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth]
Sustainable living?
If climate change continues apace, it will likely lead to a great deal of friction for the human species.
“There may be incredible amounts of food and water stress in some regions; combined with sea-level rise, this will lead to massive numbers of environmental refugees — enough to make the Syrian diaspora seem simple to absorb,” said Shawn Marshall, a professor of geography and a climate change researcher at the University of Calgary in Canada.
Humanity is surviving now only by depleting the planet’s natural resources and poisoning its environment, Sterman told Live Science. The nonprofit Global Footprint Network estimates that humanity uses up the resources of 1.5 Earths each year, essentially overdrawing from the planet’s natural bank account. The problems of sustainability can’t wait 1,000 years, Sterman said.
“Whether we can prevent damaging climate change, and the broader issue of whether we can learn to live within the limits of our finite world, will likely be determined this century,” he said.
Emmanuel Vincent, a research scientist at the University of California, Merced and founder of the outreach organization Climate Feedback, echoed the call to make sustainable decisions now.
“It is important to remind [people] that one cannot predict whether a catastrophic event will wipe out humans within the next thousand years,” Vincent told Live Science. “What Hawking is doing here is speculating on the risk that this will happen, and he estimates that the probability of extinction is high. While I agree that this is possible, I would like to emphasize that this primarily depends on how we manage to prevent such catastrophic outcome as a society.” [7 Iconic Animals Humans Are Driving to Extinction]
Human extinction
This doesn’t mean humans will necessarily go extinct if we make poor choices. Climate-wise, the planet is currently about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial averages, Marshall said. (The past year has set multiple modern heat records.)
In comparison, temperatures during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods were about 10 degrees C (18 F) warmer than preindustrial averages, or about 25 degrees C (45 F) compared with today’s 16 degrees C (29 F), Marshall said. Yet life was quite abundant at that time, he told Live Science.
“It would be a habitable but rather different world,” he said. “We’ll run out of fossil fuels before we evaporate the oceans away.”
So humans probably won’t manage to actually bake themselves in an oven made of greenhouse gases, though tropical areas may become too hot for habitation, Vincent said. The real question is whether humans would be able to handle the upheaval that climate change would bring as coastlines vanish, diseases spread and weather patterns change.
“On its own, I don’t see how climate change would lead to human extinction,” Marshall said. “It would have to be through the social unrest triggering nuclear warfare, or some other societal implosion as a result of the environmental degradation.”
Already, there are warning signs beyond warming temperatures. About half of global wildlife has been wiped out over the past 50 years, Vincent said. The situation is serious enough that many scientists believe the planet is in the midst of its sixth mass extinction.
“Anyone who thinks we can solve these problems by colonizing other worlds has been watching too much ‘Star Trek,'” Sterman said. “We must learn to live sustainably here, on the one planet we have, and there is no time to lose.”
(CNN)The Earth’s next mass extinction — the first caused by people — is on the horizon. And the consequences are almost unthinkably dire: Three-quarters of species could disappear.
This has happened only five times in the planet’s history — including the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs.
What’s different now is that humans are causing these changes.
How? Well, we’re burning fossil fuels and consequently heating up the planet; turning massive chunks of land into farms; spreading invasive species and diseases around the world; boosting our own numbers and consuming more and more resources; and causing all sorts of trouble for the oceans, from overfishing to filling them up with plastic. (Did you know researchers expect the ocean to beequal parts fish and plastic, by weight, as soon as 2050?)
This subject certainly is alarming, especially when you consider the global picture.
Another frightening data point in this trend toward extinction emerged on Thursday in a report from the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. The report claims 58% declines in certain vertebrate animal populations since 1970 and says that if trends continue, then two-thirds of all of these individual birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals will be gone by 2020.
Vaquita porpoise nearing extinction 01:53
Some scientists see those numbers as potentially misleading. Stuart Pimm, the Doris Duke chair of conservation ecology at Duke University, told me that 58% is “a fairly silly kind of number to report because it mixes what’s going on in the ocean with what’s going on in the land.” He continued, “It mixes studies of bird populations in Europe with mammal populations in Africa. It has very few data points in South America. The idea that you in the media can only handle a single number to summarize the state of the planet — you should be insulted by that.”
I agree with Pimm that these numbers can be misleading, but that’s only if people misunderstand them. I also spoke with Anthony Barnosky, executive director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve at Stanford University. He told me the most important thing to remember is that this report is limited in scope — it has little data from some important tropical regions, for example, and only covers animals with backbones. But it highlights an important and little-considered fact: It’s not just that species are going extinct at an alarming rate — at least 100 times what could be considered “normal,” and maybe much higher than that — but that populations of still-common animals are declining very rapidly.
“I don’t think I would quibble with the trend they’re pointing out — we’re losing individuals of species and geographic ranges at a really rapid rate,” he told me. “If you keep that up, extinction of lots of species is inevitable.”
Importantly, the WWF report deals with individual animals disappearing, not with entire species.
For first time in 100 years, tiger population growing01:12
A mass extinction, by definition, means three-quarters of all species disappear.
That could happen in 100 or 200 years, Barnosky said, but not by 2020.
Don’t look at that figure and think we have time to count our blessings. Barnosky told me we have maybe 10 to 20 years to stop the sixth extinction from becoming an inevitability. If we do nothing, expect three-quarters of species to disappear over the next century or two. In other words, what we do (or don’t do) right now will shape generations on this planet.
“Yes, species are going extinct very, very much faster than they should be,” Pimm said, “which means we are depriving countless generations to come the extremely rich diversity we inherited from our parents.”
And others experts, including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing professor of population studies at Stanford University, say the sixth extinction is already here.
“We’ve probably lost, say, 200 species — kinds of big animals — over the last couple of hundred years, but we may well have lost on the order of a billion different populations,” he said. “We are basically annihilating the life on our planet and that is the only known life we know about in the entire universe. And it’s life that shaped the planet, that made it possible for us to live here. And it’s life that still makes it possible for us to live here. (If) we don’t have the diversity of other organisms, we’re done.”
Pimm told me we have “about a human generation” to do something before it’s likely too late.
Only four northern white rhinos are left 01:10
“If we don’t start doing a lot of things to stop extinction, we are going to see very significant losses of species,” he said. “There are a lot of things we can do and I would rather concentrate on the positive (rather) than just wallow in this really appalling number” presented by the World Wildlife Fund.
“In the last 50 years, roughly, we’ve lost 50% of the individuals in these species,” Barnosky said. “If we lose another 50% in the next 50 years we’re down to 25% of the original. Basically, in a couple hundred years you’d have almost all of these species we’re talking about blinking out — if we keep going at that rate.”
We know how to slow the rate of extinction. We need to ditch fossil fuels to blunt climate change. We need to protect more of the land and ocean on behalf of biodiversity. (The biologist E.O. Wilson has called for half of the world to be protected, a bold and exciting proposition.) We need to stop the spread of invasive species, and we’ve got to get a handle on illegal trades like that in ivory, which Barnosky said could wipe out Africa’s elephants in 20 years if poaching rates continue.
The first step, however, is waking up to the crisis and its monstrous scope.
“The best way to envision the sixth mass extinction,” he told me earlier this year, “is to look outside and then just imagine that three out of every four of the species that were common out there are gone.”
I’d rather imagine a world where we stop anything close to that from happening.
(CNN)The Earth’s next mass extinction — the first caused by people — is on the horizon. And the consequences are almost unthinkably dire: Three-quarters of species could disappear.
This has happened only five times in the planet’s history — including the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs.
What’s different now is that humans are causing these changes.
How? Well, we’re burning fossil fuels and consequently heating up the planet; turning massive chunks of land into farms; spreading invasive species and diseases around the world; boosting our own numbers and consuming more and more resources; and causing all sorts of trouble for the oceans, from overfishing to filling them up with plastic. (Did you know researchers expect the ocean to be equal parts fish and plastic, by weight, as soon as 2050?)
This subject certainly is alarming, especially when you consider the global picture.
Exposing the Big Game 