Climate Change Blog: The Wall Street Journal could find only 16

01 Wednesday Feb 2012

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“The Wall Street Journal published an “Opinion” on January 27, entitled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming“, with sub-title “There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.” The article has 16 signatories, claimed by the editor to be scientists. The piece itself is a whiny, soap opera-type yarn detailing the horrors supposedly faced by the “growing” number of scientists who disagree with…”(read more here)

Re-posted from California Academy of Sciences – Climate Change Blog.

Mystery Fossils Link Fungi to Ancient Mass Extinction | Wired Science | Wired.com

19 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by proopnarine in extinction

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climate change, extinction, mass extinction, paleontology, Permia-Triassic

Mystery Fossils Link Fungi to Ancient Mass Extinction | Wired Science | Wired.com.

See also this older article: Fungus Feasted Off World’s Worst Extinction

Aggregating, Tagging and Integrating Biodiversity Research

04 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by proopnarine in Conservation

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biodiversity, climate change, extinction

Here’s a new paper, hot off the press, in the open access journal PLoS One. Excerpt: “Scientists are amassing details about the scope and status of life’s variation at an accelerating rate. This aids our understanding of species’ distributions and their interactions over space and time. If we are to address the consequences of global environmental change for life’s future, however, biodiversity data must be aggregated, integrated and synthesized to a much greater degree than they are at present. Here, we call attention to a new community resource and tool which provides a step in the right direction.“

Mindell DP, Fisher BL, Roopnarine P, Eisen J, Mace GM, et al. (2011) Aggregating, Tagging and Integrating Biodiversity Research. PLoS ONE 6(8): e19491. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019491

Biodiversity’s ills not all down to climate change

22 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by proopnarine in climate change

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biodiversity, climate change, coral reef, extinction, probability

“This is an excellent interview with valuable insight based on a paper in an upcoming issue of Nature Climate Change.”(Climate Change Blog: read more…)

BBC News – Coral reefs heading for fishing and climate crisis

24 Thursday Feb 2011

Posted by proopnarine in Coral reefs

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climate change, coral reef, corals, extinction, marine communities, pollution

BBC News – Coral reefs heading for fishing and climate crisis.

Ecologists fear Antarctic krill crisis : Nature News

07 Tuesday Sep 2010

Posted by proopnarine in CEG theory

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climate change, food webs, marine communities, top-down cascade, trophic level

Ecologists fear Antarctic krill crisis : Nature News.

This is an excellent example of “fishing down the web”, but with a few interesting twists. Krill are now being harvested heavily in support of fish farming ventures, which themselves are a result of overfishing in the wild. Moreover, given the increasing use of krill components in other human products, such as biomedical ones, are krill-based food products far off in a future where food shortages are a real possibility? I have very little doubt that unregulated harvesting of krill, coupled with climate change effects, will bear out the prediction of myself and others that if you thought that the removal of higher trophic level predators have bad effects on communities, YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET! Let’s lop the communal legs off and watch the show unfold. I doubt that such large and diverse communities can rebound on ecological-human timescales.