The precipitous decline in large predator sharks in the Atlantic Ocean in the past decade has made ecologists worry about a trickle-down effect on the ocean ecosystem. A new study supports the case. With the large predators gone, their prey-smaller sharks and rays-are free to feast on lower organisms like scallops and clams, depleting valuable commercial stocks. Shark Crazy ‘Large sharks have been functionally eliminated from the East Coast of the U.S., meaning that they can no longer perform their ecosystem role as top predators,’ said study team member Julia Baum of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Disappearing sharks Shark populations all over the world have plummeted because of intentional fishing for their fins, which are eaten and used for medicines in Asia, and ‘bycatch,’ in whicn sharks are accidentally caught when fisherman target other species. For this study, published in the March 30 issue of the journal Science, the researchers looked at surveys of populations of 11 great shark species, conducted between 1970 and 2005. Every species had substantially declined in just those few decades. The smallest observed decline was in sandbar shark populations, which had decreased nonetheless by 87 percent. Other species, […]
The world’s richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas. But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world’s most vulnerable regions - most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor. Next Friday, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that since 1990 has been assessing global warming, will underline this growing climate divide, according to scientists involved in writing it - with wealthy nations far from the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but also better able to withstand them. Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western European countries. Those and other wealthy nations are investing in windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood barriers […]
With his curly, salt-and-pepper hair and thoughtful demeanor, Chris West looks like just another mid-career professor as he crosses the streets of Oxford University. But West, trained as a zoologist, is more an activist than an academic these days. From his cramped office around the corner from Balliol College, he directs the government’s UK Climate Impacts Program, which educates individuals and businesses in Britain about the risks they face from climate change and the ways to cope with it. Not long ago, West says, a DuPont executive boasted to him about how well his company was now treating the environment. Jolly good, West replied, but was DuPont also prepared for how the environment might treat DuPont? ‘I asked how many of his company’s 300-odd facilities around the world were located in floodplains,’ West says. Global warming will bring increased risks to anyone located in a floodplain. ‘He didn’t know,’ West recalls. ‘I said, ‘Don’t you think you should?” For years, global warming was discussed in the hypothetical–a threat in the distant future. Now it is increasingly regarded as a clear, observable fact. This sudden shift means that all of us must start thinking about the many ways global […]
WASHINGTON – A key element of the second major report on climate change being released Friday in Belgium is a chart that maps out the effects of global warming with every degree of temperature rise, most of them bad. There’s one bright spot: A minimal heat rise means more food production in northern regions of the world. However, the number of species going extinct rises with the heat, as does the number of people who may starve, or face water shortages, or floods, according to the projections in the draft report obtained by The Associated Press Some scientists are calling this degree-by-degree projection a ‘highway to extinction.’ It’s likely to be the source of sharp closed-door debate, some scientists say, along with a multitude of other issues in the 20-chapter draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While the wording in the draft is almost guaranteed to change at this week’s meeting in Brussels, several scientists say the focus won’t. The final document will be the product of a United Nations network of 2,000 scientists as authors and reviewers, along with representatives of more than 120 governments as last-minute editors. It will be […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
