Humpback Whales Save Other Marine Animals Because They Care?

 

 

Humpback whales save other marine animals because they care! Is there a lesson here for humans - help because you care rather than to profit!

http://www.care2.com/causes/do-humpback-whales-save-other-marine-animals-because-they-care.html

Study reveals hard-working bees, pollinators need our help

Corporate control of agriculture, new viruses and climate change have been singled out among a long list of big threats to pollinators in a new horizon-scanning study co-authored by a Kiwi scientist.

The importance of bees and other hard-working pollinators, relied upon for more than a third of the world's crop production and 85 per cent of wild flowering plants, has been highlighted by countless studies and was the take-away message of the 2007 animated film Bee Movie.

But until this week, international researchers had not taken a comprehensive, global look at the risks they'll face in future decades.

In response to a range of threats, including the expansion of corporate agriculture, fresh classes of insecticides and emerging viruses, authors of a study just published in the journal PeerJ have called for new global policies of "proactive prevention" rather than trying to mitigate risks after they've emerged.

"We are increasingly adopting practices that damage these species," said the study's lead author, Professor Mark Brown from Royal Holloway University of London.

"Then, we rather absurdly look to mitigate their loss, rather than prevent it in the first place."

Brown called this an expensive and "back-to-front solution" for a problem that had consequences for our well-being.

"Most research focuses on the battles already being fought, not on the war to come."

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/climate-change/news/article.cfm?c_id=26&objectid=11691655

We're trashing the oceans - and they're making us sick

Six years ago, in a bracing 18-minute TED talk, coral reef scientist Jeremy Jackson laid out "how we wrecked the ocean".

In the talk, he detailed not only how overfishing, global warming, and various forms of pollution are damaging ocean ecosystems - but also, strikingly, how these human-driven injuries can be harmful to those who live on land.

Toxic algal blooms, for instance, can actually damage air quality near the coast. "The coast, in

 stead of being paradise, is harmful to your health," he said.

There was a recent striking example of this off the coast of Florida, when a toxic bloom that began in Lake Okeechobee - fanned by high levels of nitrogen and phosphorous pollution - spread to Florida's coast after flows from the swollen lake were released to keep water levels down.

Now, unfortunately, new research suggests yet another example. In a new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers find that Vibrio bacteria, tiny marine organisms capable of causing deadly infections in both human and also fish, are becoming more prevalent in the North Atlantic coastal region as ocean waters warm.

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(We're causing that overall trend of warming, of course, by driving climate change, though there are also natural oscillations at work here.)

Indeed, human infections caused by these critters are also on the rise. The research finds these are growing at an "unprecedented rate" along the US Atlantic coast and also the coasts of Northern Europe.

\http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11689989

Humans pushing the planet deeper into 'ecological debt'

In just over seven months, humanity has used up a full year's allotment of natural resources such as water, food and clean air - the quickest rate yet, according to a new report.

The point of "overshoot" will officially be reached on Monday, said environmental group Global Footprint Network - five days earlier than last year.

"We continue to grow our ecological debt," said Pascal Canfin of green group WWF, reacting to the annual update. "From Monday, August 8, we will be living on credit because in eight months we would have consumed the natural capital that our planet can renew in a year."

The gloomy milestone is marked every year on what is known as Earth Overshoot Day. In 1993, the day fell on October 21, in 2003 on September 22 and last year on August 13. In 1961, according to the network, humankind used only about three-quarters of Earth's annual resource allotment. By the 1970s, economic and population growth sent Earth into annual overshoot.

"This is possible because we emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than our oceans and forests can absorb, and we deplete fisheries and harvest forests more quickly than they can reproduce and regrow," the network said.

To calculate the date for Earth Overshoot Day, the group crunches United Nations data on thousands of economic sectors such as fisheries, forestry, transport and energy production.
Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions, it said, are now the fastest-growing contributor to ecological overshoot, making up 60 per cent of humanity's demands on nature - what is called the ecological "footprint".

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11688191

Climate report confirms 2015 hit record highs on global heat, green house gasses and sea levels

Warning from scientists after studies show 2015 set range of records.

  Global heat, greenhouse gases and sea levels all climbed to record highs last year, making 2015 the worst in modern times across a range of key environmental indicators, international scientists said yesterday.
A dire picture of the Earth's health is painted in the State of the Climate report, a peer-reviewed 300-page tome that comes out once a year and is compiled by 450 scientists from around the world.
The record heat that the planet experienced last year was driven partially by global warming, and was exacerbated by the ocean-heating trend known as El Nino, it said.
El Nino, which ended last month, was one of the strongest the Earth had seen "since at least 1950", said the report, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centres for Environmental Information.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11687032

Dr Jarrod Gilbert: Climate change deniers dangerously wrong

Dr Jarrod Gilbert is a sociologist at the University of Canterbury and the lead researcher at Independent Research Solutions. He is an award-winning writer who specialises in research with practical applications.

 

There is no greater crime being perpetuated on future generations than that committed by those who deny climate change. The scientific consensus is so overwhelming that to argue against it is to perpetuate a dangerous fraud. Denial has become a yardstick by which intelligence can be tested. The term climate sceptic is now interchangeable with the term mindless fool.

Since the 1960s, it has been known that heat-trapping gasses were increasing in the earth's atmosphere, but no one knew to what effect. In 1979, a study found "no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible". Since then scientists have been seeking to prove it, and the results are in.

Meta studies show that 97 per cent of published climate scientists agree that global warming is occurring and that it is caused by human activities. The American Association for the Advancement of Science compared it to the consensus linking smoking to cancer. The debate is over, yet doubt continues.

For decades, arguments denying the harms caused by smoking were made. A tobacco executive once said: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."

Such doubts can be highly effective, particularly if they allow people to support agendas that are politically or economically useful to them.

One person who has managed to successfully merge expert and popular opinions is English physicist Professor Brian Cox, whose books and television programmes explain complex scientific phenomena in highly accessible ways. He recently said that ignoring best evidence and turning against experts is "the road back to the cave".

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/climate-change/news/article.cfm?c_id=26&objectid=11681154

How we can out-sniff a kiwi-killing predator

Researchers have happened upon a clever new way to fool a notorious kiwi-killing predator - by using its own sense of smell against it.

Experiments by Auckland University and Landcare Research have revealed that stoats, the major killer of young kiwi chicks in the wild, are attracted to the smell of their two biggest enemies, cats and ferrets, raising the possibility of using their scent as a lure for traps.

It was a finding that surprised university doctoral student Patrick Garvey, who was expecting the stoats to be scared away by the smell of the larger predators, instead of being drawn to them.

This was because an earlier study he led had found captive wild stoats to be scared when cats or ferrets were near.

In the new study, food was placed in two locations where the scent of cats or ferrets was absent, and also in another area where scent was present.

Garvey found that in the area that smelled of predators, the food was actually eaten faster.

Despite the baffling finding, he felt the research represented an untapped area of predator control, effectively using mammals' tendencies to hunt by smell against them.

The ability of stoats and many other mammals to "eavesdrop" on the olfactory communication system of larger predators could be the beginning of the search to develop odour-based lures in pest trapping operations, he said.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11684713