Posts Tagged ‘survival’

Nature Ramble

Another animal in danger.

I have posted about pangolins before, but their plight worsens, and spreads.

The damned Chinese are at it again, this time joined by the Vietnamese. Why can’t the Chinese learn something about medicine? Such quack methods are endangering our ever dwindling species.

Pangolins being eaten to extinction, conservationists warn

Scaly anteaters are now the most illegally-traded mammal in the world, with all eight species listed as threatened

An African white-bellied pangolin – poachers are turning to African pangolins because Asian populations have been denuded. Photograph: IUCN/ZSL

Pangolins are being “eaten to extinction” due to a demand for their meat at banquets in China and Vietnam and their scales for use in Chinese medicine, conservationists have warned.

In an update last week to the authoritative Red List of endangered animals, all eight species of the scaly anteaters were upgraded to threatened status.

Resembling a pine cone on legs, they are the world’s only scaly mammal, using their scales for armour to protect against predators and their long, sticky tongues to catch prey.

According to experts at the Zoological Society of London, the demand for the animals in Asia has been so great that poachers are now turning to Africa, where four of the species are found. Conservationists say there is already evidence of an underground, intercontinental trade in pangolins between Africa and Asia.

More than a million are believed to have been illegally caught in the wild over the last decade globally, giving them the unenviable record of being the most illegally-traded mammal in the world.

Source: TheGuardian Read more

Opinion:

Admittedly the pangolin is not a cuddly furry beast like the panda, therefore the world isn’t really interested.

Pangolins have a right to survive too

Pangolins have a right to survive too

Monday Moaning

It appears to be too late!

Global warming is happening and on a scale far greater than previously thought.

It also appears, that while man’s tinkering with technology and industry may have had some adverse effect, the planet itself and solar influences are a much greater threat.

We are about to become more victims than perpetrators.

Everything I read or see, whether the recent dismal US Government report, news or the evidence that I see myself, shows that we are knee-deep in crap and sinking.

Reports that tropical storms are increasing in size and strength and migrating toward the poles, and this week we have severe flooding in Bosnia, the worst in 100 years. The extreme weather patterns in the northwest USA this last winter combined with California droughts. To me it points to a greater force than man’s puny industry has ever been able to exert on the planet.

The governments, those who are, trying to curb carbon emissions amongst other measures are banging their heads against a wall, even if you consider that a little progress may delay further disasters by five minutes. It’s going to happen, and it is happening.

To give you some perspective, read this report on the Antarctic melt.

Esa’s Cryosat mission sees Antarctic ice losses double

Antarctica is now losing about 160 billion tonnes of ice a year to the ocean – twice as much as when the continent was last surveyed.

The new assessment comes from Europe’s Cryosat spacecraft, which has a radar instrument specifically designed to measure the shape of the ice sheet.

The melt loss from the White Continent is sufficient to push up global sea levels by around 0.43mm per year.

Scientists report the data in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The new study incorporates three years of measurements from 2010 to 2013, and updates a synthesis of observations made by other satellites over the period 2005 to 2010.

Cryosat has been using its altimeter to trace changes in the height of the ice sheet – as it gains mass through snowfall, and loses mass through melting.

‘Big deal’

The study authors divide the continent into three sectors – the West Antarctic, the East Antarctic, and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is the long finger of land reaching up to South America.

Overall, Cryosat finds all three regions to be losing ice, with the average elevation of the full ice sheet falling annually by almost 2cm.

Cryosat’s double antenna configuration allows it to map slopes very effectively

In the three sectors, this equates to losses of 134 billion tonnes, 3 billion tonnes, and 23 billion tonnes of ice per year, respectively.

The East had been gaining ice in the previous study period, boosted by some exceptional snowfall, but it is now seen as broadly static in the new survey.

As expected, it is the western ice sheet that dominates the reductions.

Scientists have long considered it to be the most vulnerable to melting.

It has an area, called the Amundsen Sea Embayment, where six huge glaciers are currently undergoing a rapid retreat – all of them being eroded by the influx of warm ocean waters that scientists say are being drawn towards the continent by stronger winds whipped up by a changing climate.

About 90% of the mass loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is going from just these few ice streams.

At one of them – Smith Glacier – Crysosat sees the surface lowering by 9m per year.

Read more

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While the measurements in the article are in millimetres, and tenths of a millimetre, they are not to be underestimated when you consider the vast area of the Antarctic.

All this information has to be read with the rest and the figures added to previous results.

It is my opinion that the planet is doing its own thing. Man has had a finger in the pie regardless what scientists and climate deniers say.

This brings us to the stage where we have been pushing for climate change technology and lessening our impact, but it seems that is going to be too little, too late, it’s going to happen anyway. Instead of spending billions trying to stop the inevitable, we should be spending those billions on how we are going to survive it.

The Maldives, a small island nation in the Indian Ocean, is already very concerned about their future. Kiribati, an island nation in the Pacific is not only concerned, but living the threat of their home slowly disappearing under the waves.

But these are small places of little consequence, you say. But what are we going to do when it’s Manhattan Island and New York City? Or any of the other major coastal cities around the world.

Are we going to wait for the waves to lap around our doorsteps before we wake up and smell the coffee?

If we procrastinate any longer, it’s going to be too late to save people. I am talking of hundreds of millions here, not just a few.

The current paradigm is not working!

We have to stop acting like the ostrich with our heads in the sand and pretending this is not a scenario.

 

Nature Ramble

Strange beasts on…

These are NOT snakes!

Hemeroplanes Triptolemus Moth Lavae

Hemeroplanes Triptolemus Moth Larvae

The Hemeroplanes triptolemus is capable of expanding its anterior body segments to give it the appearance of a snake, complete with eye patches. This snake mimicry extends even to the point where it will harmlessly strike at potential predators.Wikipedia

Nature Ramble

Another rarity.

I never knew this animal existed; it doesn’t get a lot of publicity.

Borneo bay cat photographed in heavily logged region

Extremely rare sighting raises hopes that larger mammals are more able to survive in logged areas than previously thought

The Borneo bay cat, as captured by the Safe tropical forest conservation project. Photograph: Oliver Wearn/Safe project

One of the world’s most elusive wild cats has been captured on camera in a heavily logged area of Borneo rainforest together with four other endangered species, suggesting that some wildlife can survive in highly disturbed forests.

The Bornean bay cat (Pardofelis badia) has been recorded on camera traps on just a handful of occasions to date and was only photographed in the wild for the first time in southern Sarawak in 2003. The cat, extremely secretive and similar in size to a large domestic cat with a long tail and either a reddish or grey coat, had been classified as extinct until new images taken in Malaysian Borneo in 2009 and 2010 gave fresh hope for its survival.

Scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Imperial College London have captured more a dozen images of this animal following a study in Kalabakan forest reserve, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, together with evidence of four other wild cat species in a heavily logged area of forest where they were not expected to thrive.

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Pardofelis badia

Pardofelis badia

 

 

Monday Moaning

Yes, I know its Tuesday; yes, I know I’m late. I didn’t get a chance to finish this yesterday.

We are Doomed

I am now 60+, I have lived my life in a time of plenty like most of my generation. The latter half of the 20th was good to us, however the 21st is another story. It appears that we are going to suffer the consequences of our lavish lifestyle.

The world has changed. The greedy have become greedier, technology has overtaken us in leaps and bounds and the rape of the planet has destroyed environments like never before.

Image: Salon

All this has a cost, and that cost is likely to be us, humanity as we know it.

Regardless of who is to blame, us or Mother Nature, climate changes are here. You don’t believe it, then just check the news (No! Not Fox, that’s not news, that’s placating the masses, pandering to the government); droughts, famines, floods, tornadoes where they didn’t have tornadoes before, Hurricane Katrina, and now Sandy.

If you don’t see this as ‘the writing on the wall’ then perhaps you deserve to perish, because perish we will.

London if the sea level rises

I won’t be here to see it, at best I’ve got 20 years left, but you will be. You will see things like London underwater; New York, the same, as all the coastal cities of the world where the greater part of our populations live.

The writing is on the wall, and yet we still frolic and play as though nothing is amiss, we still flock o the beaches on a hot day ignoring the fact that that very water is likely to be our demise.

Flood barriers to prevent a surging Atlantic Ocean to protect New York – image: Star Tribune

I saw a programme on TV last week about the flooding of coastal cities. The plans to erect great technological barriers to keep the sea at bay, the ideas of floating cities and houses.

Works of this magnitude would cost hundreds of billions each, trillions even. Tell me, where is this money coming from?

The world’s economy is bankrupt, all this talk of America’s fiscal cliff is not a fairy tale, neither is the collapse of the Euro, it’s fact. Contractors are not going to work if they’re not paid, or can’t see a profit. The state of the world’s economy just doesn’t begin to represent the cost of saving coastal cities around the globe.

So tell me, where are you all going to go?

I’ll be safely wrapped up in my turf blanket, but you will be fighting for survival.

The governments are too busy fighting internal battles; they don’t care. The religious are too busy fighting over who is right; they don’t care. Wall Street is too busy fighting over the last dollar; they don’t care.

Remember my analogy: If the planet were a dog, we are the fleas, and Mother Nature is having a good scratch…