Groundbreaking assessment of all life on Earth reveals humanity’s surprisingly tiny part in it as well as our disproportionate impact

This is a very silly article, replete with implicit but unargued assumptions  -- such as the implicit claim that "we" are in some way responsible to make good -- or at least apologize for -- all the damage that all humans throughout history have ever done.

From Trilobites to the dinosaurs, extinctions are what nature does.  Of all species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 percent are now extinct. And, of all the extinctions that ever happened, most by far happened long before human beings were on the scene. Humans were NOT reponsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, for instance.

And even in the human era, modern sensitivities were virtually unknown.  The megafauna of Australia were extinguished by Australian Aborigines, for instance.  I feel no guilt over that. Primitive people are often hard on the environment (pace the fictional Chief Seattle) but how am I responsible for that? It's a basic principle of natural justice that I am not to blame for the deeds of others.

Nonetheless, I am enough of a modern man to feel some regret about some recent extinctions (passenger pigeons anyone?).  But should I?  That leads us into very rarefied areas of moral philosophy that are not all congenial.  Peter Singer, for instance, is an eminence in that field and his cogitations lead him to some very objectionable conclusions, like the permissibility of infanticide.

So feeling that recent extinctions are bad is just that: feelings. A more intellectual justification for concern awaits.  Excerpts only below:


Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet.

The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds.

The transformation of the planet by human activity has led scientists to the brink of declaring a new geological era – the Anthropocene. One suggested marker for this change are the bones of the domestic chicken, now ubiquitous across the globe.

The new work reveals that farmed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals – 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.

The destruction of wild habitat for farming, logging and development has resulted in the start of what many scientists consider the sixth mass extinction of life to occur in the Earth’s four billion year history. About half the Earth’s animals are thought to have been lost in the last 50 years.

But comparison of the new estimates with those for the time before humans became farmers and the industrial revolution began reveal the full extent of the huge decline. Just one-sixth of wild mammals, from mice to elephants, remain, surprising even the scientists. In the oceans, three centuries of whaling has left just a fifth of marine mammals in the oceans.

The researchers calculated the biomass estimates using data from hundreds of studies, which often used modern techniques, such as satellite remote sensing that can scan great areas, and gene sequencing that can unravel the myriad organisms in the microscopic world.

The researchers acknowledge that substantial uncertainties remain in particular estimates, especially for bacteria deep underground, but say the work presents a useful overview.

SOURCE




Ordinary British motorists face being priced out of driving if the Government goes ahead with proposals demanding that by 2040 every car can cover 50 miles on electric power.

The warning came from Toyota to the business select committee as it heard from car chiefs about the future of electric vehicles.

A leaked government consultation called “Road to Zero” proposes the 50-mile zero emission requirement for cars in 22 years’ time.

However, Toyota Motor Europe managing director Tony Walker warned such a measure could put driving beyond the budgets of most people, saying that batteries capable of hitting the 50-mile requirement are too expensive.

“The point is that every car, from the biggest to smallest, whether it costs £10,000 or £250,000, for every car to be able to do 50 miles [on electricity] is not wise, it is reckless,” Mr Walker. “It will price the ordinary customer out of the market.”

Toyota introduced hybrid cars to the mass market with its Prius. However, Mr Walker said the company’s current hybrids are not capable of doing 50 miles on the batteries currently used, and could be wiped out by the proposal.

To meet the target he said a more expensive battery used in plug-in hybrid cars would be required - and the economics do not stack up.

“It would make the hybrid vehicles we make in the UK currently unsaleable in the UK,” he said, adding that it would be “very difficult” to keep building cars and engines in Britain if government policy had made them impossible to sell here.

Mr Walker also questioned the government arbitrarily picking dates for targets the industry must achieve.

“Are you are saying somehow you know battery costs will come down?” he asked the committee. “How come you know that and we don’t? It’s too academic and not so practical on battery cost.”

Professor David Bailey, a car industry expert at Aston University, warned that the 50-mile requirement could kill off hybrids. “Electric cars are still expensive and will remain so for at least the next 10 years, when they will start to compete with petrol and diesel,” he said. “If Government is serious about improving air quality it needs to get drivers into hybrid cars as an interim measure rather than kill them off early.”

MP on the committee were told a “technology neutral” approach should be implemented, where Government sets targets to improve air quality for the car industry to achieve and lets them find ways to achieve it, without proscribing how they should do it.

The approach was backed by BMW, with Ian Robertson, the company’s UK representative, warning consumers are “sitting in the sidelines”, with many of them afraid to buy an electric car because of uncertainty about it.

He pointed to research saying that 90pc of drivers do short trips which are easily manageable on current electric technology.  Mr Robertson called the 50-mile zero emission target for 2040 “probably achievable” for a majority of drivers.

However, he added: “But it’s against a backdrop of some customers who need to do a 500-mile drive.

“Rather than take certain technology step that says we will have no combustion engines, let’s go for the target which we all agree on which is having a very low emission target and for majority of customer a zero emission target.”

Nissan, which builds the electric Leaf car at its giant Sunderland plant, said that the biggest challenge to battery vehicles was infrastructure. Gareth Dunsmore, the company’s electric vehicles director, said there was a “chicken and egg situation” with electric cars at the moment with people worried about whether they will be able to charge them.

However, with a comprehensive recharging infrastructure he said the 2040 target would be achievable. “If you get to wherever you park and there’s charging points the discussion about whether it is a challenge to move to electrification might be a moot point,” Mr Dunsmore said. “Customer demand could take over.”

The Government said it was “categorically untrue” it plans to ban vehicles incapable of meeting the 50-mile zero-emission target, saying the Road to Zero strategy was “yet to be finalised” and that it “would not comment on leaked draft documents”.

SOURCE




Yes, a Drop in Global Temperatures, But...

A recent editorial from a typically reputable conservative publication touted a sharp global temperature drop between February 2016 and February 2018. There's no disputing the fact that records indicate a temperature drop on a global scale during that time. However, the editorial — the purpose of which was to lambast the nefarious mainstream media for purposefully ignoring this inconvenient fact — did not explain fully what is actually happening. Here's why:

Global temperature drops are typical after El Niños, which naturally warm the globe. La Niñas do the opposite. Moreover, the last El Niño (2015-16) was exceptionally strong — a.k.a. a Super Niño. Therefore, it only makes sense that a significant global temperature drop would follow, as we've just registered back-to-back La Niña years. That being the case, the fact of the matter remains that global temperatures remain above normal two years after the last El Niño and above where they were two years after other El Niños. A higher threshold is seemingly being established following each Super Niño. Before 2015-16, the last one occurred in 1997-98. A pause ensued, but that baseline was higher than the average temperature over the previous 20 years. This doesn't prove ecofascists' rationale (not to mention justify their "solutions") for global warming, but it also doesn't do conservatives any favors to borrow from the Left's playbook by cherry-picking statistics simply for the benefit of aiding a narrative.

The cause may have to do with the immense amounts of water vapor that are released during Super Niños. These events result in a longer-lasting effect in Arctic regions years later, as tiny amounts of water vapor most affect temperatures where they are climatologically lowest and the air is driest. A glance at temperatures where most life occurs reveals that temperatures have returned to near normal, but the warmer polar regions are leading to the above-normal global temperatures, primarily during the coldest times of the year. It's still very cold, but even slight warming there can skew the entire global temperature a few tenths of a degree higher. Regardless, global temperatures are still higher than they were after previous El Niños.

To its credit, the editorial in question does note that the latest temperature drop could be entirely meaningless. However, a little basic research would have precluded the editorial altogether. As meteorologist Joe Bastardi said in an email to The Patriot Post, "This is like saying you scored a couple of touchdowns and instead of being down 56-0 you are now losing only 56-14." He added, "The point is that until temperatures return to or below normal, what is all the hoopla about? The other side can rightly point to a two-year post-El Niño record high." The mainstream media should be criticized for how it handles reporting global warming. Conservative media should avoid falling into the same trap.

SOURCE





Now's the Time to Restore Integrity to EPA Regulatory Science

For decades the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has gotten away with creating regulations that lack sound scientific basis, costing Americans hundreds of billions of dollars without solid evidence that those costs were justified.

It’s done this in two ways.

Sometimes it’s simply thrown out scientific results and regulated to satisfy a political pressure group. That was largely the case when in 1972, contrary to its own scientific findings but under heavy pressure from environmentalists, it banned the use of DDT, the most effective, least expensive, safe pesticide by which to control or eradicate disease-carrying insects like mosquitos and lice.

The U.S. had already largely eliminated malaria by widespread spraying of DDT from the 1940s into the 1960s, so the ban didn’t have immediate, large-scale negative consequences here. But it has made it more difficult to combat the recent spread of other insect-borne diseases like West Nile Virus, Zika, Lyme, and spotted fever, and even malaria is making a comeback.

The greater impact of the DDT ban has been in developing countries. The EPA persuaded other federal agencies to withhold foreign aid from countries that used DDT. Most developing countries complied. The result has been hundreds of millions of cases of malaria every year and tens of millions of malaria-caused deaths over the last 45 years.

At other times the EPA has built new regulations on “secret science” — studies whose authors refuse to grant other scientists access to the data, computer code, and methodology behind them. Such studies are not subject to replication by other scientists. Yet replication is the acid test of scientific research.

“Secret science” has been especially common as the basis for pollution regulation dependent on dose/response relationships and for regulation related to anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Last month EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt requested public comment on a new rule, “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” (STRS), designed to solve that problem.

STRS provides that “When promulgating significant regulatory actions, the Agency shall ensure that dose response data and models underlying pivotal regulatory science are publicly available in a manner sufficient for independent validation.” It codifies what was intended in the Secret Science Reform Act of 2015 and the Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017 (HONEST Act), both of which passed the House but never came up for a vote in the Senate.

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation — a network of scientists, economists, and religious leaders dedicated to environmental stewardship and economic development for the poor — has issued and is gathering signatures to an open letter supporting the STRS that calls the proposed rule “badly needed to assure American taxpayers that the EPA is truly acting in their best interests.”

Opponents of STRS raise three common, and at first sight credible, objections.

The first is that peer review ensures the quality of studies published in refereed journals. But there is actually no empirical evidence that peer review works well. Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association and intellectual father of the international congresses of peer review held quadrennially starting in 1989, has said, “If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed on the market.” In fact, as John P.A. Ioannidis demonstrated in a celebrated article in PLOS/Medicine, “most scientific research findings are false.”

The second common objection is that the rule would prevent the EPA from using studies that involved confidential information, such as personal health data or corporate proprietary information. In an open letter to Pruitt, the leftist, political-activist Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) argued, “There are multiple valid reasons why requiring the release of all data does not improve scientific integrity and could actually compromise research, including intellectual property, proprietary, and privacy concerns.”

Yet Section 30.5 of the rule expressly states: “Where the Agency is making data or models publicly available, it shall do so in a fashion that is consistent with law, protects privacy, confidentiality, confidential business information, and is sensitive to national and homeland security.” Section 30.9 allows the administrator to make exceptions when compliance isn’t feasible.

A third common objection, also expressed in the UCS letter, is that “many public health studies cannot be replicated, as doing so would require intentionally and unethically exposing people and the environment to harmful contaminants or recreating one-time events (such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill).” But what need to be replicable in studies of such events are not the events themselves but the procedures used to collect and analyze data and make inferences from them.

Consider, for example, a study that used tree rings as proxy temperature measurements and purported to find that neither the Medieval Warm Period nor the Little Ice Age had occurred but that a rapid and historically unprecedented warming had begun in the late 19th century. The study became iconic for claims of dangerous AGW driven by human emissions of carbon dioxide.

No one needed to use a time machine to return to the 11th through 20th centuries and regrow trees to recognize that the authors had committed confirmation fallacy by excluding certain data and misused a statistical procedure, resulting in false results. All anyone needed was access to the raw data and the computer code used to analyze it.

Yet the lead author’s long refusal to allow access to raw data and computer code delayed discovery of these errors for years, during which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the public, and governments all over the world were led to believe its claims and formulate expensive policies based partly on them.

The UCS letter asserted that concerns about transparency and certainty raised by supporters of the rule “are phony issues that weaponize ‘transparency’ to facilitate political interference in science-based decision making, rather than genuinely address either.” But the irreproducibility crisis is real, not phony. Furthermore, enhanced transparency works against politicization, not for it. This objection is so patently invalid as to suggest that those who offer it are themselves weaponizing confidentiality to facilitate their own political interference in science-based decision making.

STRS will improve, not harm, the EPA’s mission to protect Americans from real environmental risks. It will also reduce the risks caused by unjustified but costly regulations. It should be adopted.

Via email from E. Calvin Beisner




Seventh Largest River Still Covered In Thick Ice. Blame Your SUV

News from Siberia

By this time of year, boats are usually plying the ice-free Ob, but in 2018, while the winter covering the river has begun to move like a giant monster – but it has not cleared.

Far from it. Here the thick ice is slowly drifting downstream in a northerly direction towards the Arctic yet with temperatures still of an unseasonal -5C, this could go on a while.

As our remarkable videos show, this is an awesome and eerie sight, magnetic to those lucky enough to be in the vicinity.

In Surgut, people come here before work just to glimpse the natural wonder and listen to the gentle creaking and cracking of the shifting ice. Then they come back again after work.

‘Sometimes it sounds like a rustle,’ said Anya, an enthusiastic Ob-watcher. ‘Then you hear a rumble as the ice breaks. Often it is a calm silence.’

At one moment this week, ice from the Ob literally broke out of the river from the sheer force of this natural annual pilgrimage to the direction of the end of the world (the Ob flows up the eastern coast of Yamal, a gas-rich peninsula the name of which literally means the ‘end of the world’).

It smashed the railings in Surgut with its phenomenal power. It was as if a column of ice was making an escape bid from the mighty Ob, intent on invading this famous oil city. Or as a local newspaper put it: ‘If you fail to go and watch the Ob River, the Ob will come to you!’

Not all cities on Siberia’s major rivers are so lucky with such sights. Upstream on the Ob, Novosibirsk  – the largest metropolis in Russia between Moscow and the Pacific – does not get such spectacular scenes because of a dam which tempers the water so that, although it freezes, the ice is not as thick as elsewhere.

Similarly, in Krasnoyarsk, the impact of a hydro-electric plant and huge dam on the Yenisei River – the world’s fifth longest including its tributaries – acts to take the chill out of the water. So much so it doesn’t even freeze.

The ice is closely monitored by the authorities because if it gets trapped and clogs the rivers as the melt starts and floes move downstream, a frozen dam is formed. Then flooding hits riverside settlements.

Explosives are regularly used to avoid such circumstances, but as we have seen this week on the Lena River – the planet’s 11th longest – even 17 tons of TNT is not enough.

For now, though, the folks of Surgut astride the Ob are the lucky ones.

As Eldar Zagirov, a business coach, marveled: ‘We’re in the age of new technologies – super-fast internet, Instagram, and much more. ‘And yet the inhabitants of Surgut … every day after work are rushing to the embankment, families with kids, couples, just not to miss the great ice drift. ‘It’s like the first inhabitants of these places for many centuries ago.

‘And there is something here. Something primordial, real, strong and sincere …’

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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