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humans are killing species...

lucky planet

The scientists on the ground pinpointed blood poisoning as the cause, but were puzzled as to why whole herds were dying so quickly. After 32 postmortems, they concluded the culprit was the bacterium Pasteurella multocida, which they believe normally lives harmlessly in the tonsils of some, if not all, of the antelopes. In a research paper published in January in Science Advances, Kock and colleagues contrasted the 2015 MME with the two from the 1980s. They concluded that a rise in temperature to 37C and an increase in humidity above 80% in the previous few days had stimulated the bacteria to pass into the bloodstream where it caused haemorrhagic septicaemia, or blood poisoning.

The weather link raises the spectre of climate change. Just as it is rarely wise to link a single extreme weather event – whether it’s the Australian heatwave, last summer’s Hurricane Harvey or this winter’s North American cold snap – to climate change, it is equally difficult to blame an MME on global warming. But what can be said with confidence is that the sorts of extreme weather events linked to MMEs – such as the temperature and humidity rise that nearly wiped out the saiga – will become more frequent.

Australians know all about extreme weather. While much of Europe and North America has endured a bitter start to the year, the Australian summer has been a scorcher. In January, temperatures in Sydney topped 47C, the city’s highest since 1939. The toll on wildlife has been devastating. As the mercury rose, corpses of critically endangered flying foxes – or fruit bats – began to pile up under the trees in New South Wales. Horrified wildlife campaigners at one colony in Campbelltown, south of Sydney, discovered 400 dead bats. Some were still hanging from trees. Many were babies, abandoned by their parents in their own desperate search for shade.

Flying foxes are well adapted to normal Australian summers. But above 40C, they are unable to regulate their body temperature and can die from overheating. This year’s deaths were grim enough, but they were dwarfed by the MME of 2014, when at least 45,000 flying foxes were killed on one hot day in south-east Queensland. Some colonies had more dead bodies than living bats. Their corpses were piled thick on the ground as the three species there – the black, little red and grey-headed – were hit.

Events like the disaster that struck the flying foxes and saiga appear to be growing in number. The most thorough study of its kind published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015 uncovered 727 accounts of MMEs involving 2,407 animal populations since 1940. It found that not only are reports of MMEs on the increase – by about one event a year – but the number of animals killed in each event is on the rise for birds, fish and marine invertebrates.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/25/mass-mortality-event...

 

The warming events also affect Sudney's plants... leaves burn, some plants die in high temperatures, more and more often... Picture at top: Gus Leonisky from "the edge of space"...

 

warming...

chemical CO2

See:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

unusual heat over the Arctic....

Climate scientists are used to seeing the range of weather extremes stretched by global warming but few episodes appear as remarkable as this week's unusual heat over the Arctic.

Zack Labe, a researcher at the University of California at Irvine, said average daily temperatures above the northern latitude of 80 degrees have broken away from any previous recordings in the past 60 years.

"To have zero degrees at the North Pole in February - it's just wrong," said Amelie Meyer, a researcher of ice-ocean interactions with the Norwegian Polar Institute. "It's quite worrying."

The so-called Polar Vortex - a zone of persistient low-pressure that typically keeps high-latitude cold air separate from regions further south - has been weakening for decades.

In this instance, "a massive jet of warm air" is penetrating north, sending a cold burst southwards, said Dr Meyer, who has relocated to Hobart to research on the southern hemisphere, and is hosted by Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System.

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/really-extreme-global-...

trying to kneecap the science...

Last week, climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann was honored with the AAAS award for Public Engagement in Science.

Mann hardly needs an introduction here. Ever since the publication of his hockey stick study twenty years ago, Mann has been a central target of the denial machine. Deniers have attacked him with everything they’ve got: weaponized FOIAs, constant trolling, you name it. In 2010, as the FBI finished the investigation into anthrax-laced letters that killed five people in the early 2000s, someone sent Mann white powder in an envelope.

In his book on the Climate Wars, Mann describes how the denial apparatus singles out outspoken scientists and targets them for campaigns of harassment. Mann calls this the “Serengeti Strategy,” named for how pack hunters single out prey for an easy meal. But instead of gradually wearing down the subject until they give up, Mann has only gotten more attention from the press and more praise from his peers, all while continuing to publish regularly in the peer reviewed literature.

Instead of scaring Mann out of the public eye, deniers have only managed to elevate his profile.

It makes sense, then, that this award made deniers angry. They’re up in arms that Mann, who they’ve always tried to present as an outlier hated by his fellow scientists, is being thusly rewarded by his fellow scientists for exactly the behavior they’ve criticized.

Roger Pielke Jr. wrote that by awarding Mann this prize, AAAS sends a message that it’s okay to speak out about people like Pielke and his fellow “denier lites” like Bret Stephens, Rebekah Mercer, Megan McArdle and Judith Curry. Which is exactly what AAAS should be saying.

Scientists should feel not just comfortable, but obligated to correct those who use their platforms to continually make incorrect assertions about science, again and again. Scientists should correct the systematic distribution of misinformation and help inform the public of where, why and how that misinformation is being spread in the public discourse and relied on by politicians to enact anti-climate policies. Most importantly–and especially given the denial machine that attacks those who speak out on climate–academics should be supported in these education efforts by institutions like AAAS.

That, of course, is not how serial misinformers see things. Pielke’s post got tweeted by Bjorn Lomborg, excerpted by Delingpole at Breitbart and expanded on by The Federalist which was in turn reposted by Climate Depot, putting Pielke squarely in the center of the denial world’s feigned outrage machine.

To be fair, Pielke recognizes that human activity causes climate change, and even thinks a carbon tax would be the right policy to address it. But as former New York Times reporter turned New York Times columnist Justin Gillis tweeted, that’s just part of Pielke’s ploy for readership, which is why Gillis stopped quoting Pielke. “The schtick: Pretend to be part of the mainstream consensus about global warming, then draw attention to yourself by kneecapping other people,” Gillis explains. “It's an odious way to build personal brand. @BjornLomborg does it too.”

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/02/24/deniers-rage-climate-scientist-mic...

 

See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19279

not seeing the woods for the poles...

A freak warming around the North Pole is sending a blast of Arctic cold over Europe in a sign of "wacky" weather that may happen more often with man-made global warming.

Scientists say the northern tip of Greenland has had a record-smashing 61 hours of temperatures above freezing so far this year, linked to a rare retreat of sea ice in the Arctic winter darkness. 

Arctic Ocean sea ice is at a record low for late February, at 14.1 million square kilometres. That is about a million square kilometres less than normal, or roughly the size of Egypt.

Around the entire Arctic region, temperatures are now about 20C above normal, at minus 8C.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-27/arctic-warming-creates-beast-from-...

 

Read from top...

antarctica is melting...

Hidden underwater melt-off in the Antarctic is doubling every 20 years and could soon overtake Greenland to become the biggest source of sea-level rise, according to the first complete underwater map of the world’s largest body of ice.

Warming waters have caused the base of ice near the ocean floor around the south pole to shrink by 1,463 square kilometres – an area the size of Greater London – between 2010 and 2016, according to the new study published in Nature Geoscience.

The research by the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds suggests climate change is affecting the Antarctic more than previously believed and is likely to prompt global projections of sea-level rise to be revised upward.

Until recently, the Antarctic was seen as relatively stable. Viewed from above, the extent of land and sea ice in the far south has not changed as dramatically as in the far north. 

But the new study found even a small increase in temperature has been enough to cause a loss of five metres every year from the bottom edge of the ice sheet, some of which is more than 2km underwater.

“What’s happening is that Antarctica is being melted away at its base. We can’t see it, because it’s happening below the sea surface,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd, one of the authors of the paper. “The changes mean that very soon the sea-level contribution from Antarctica could outstrip that from Greenland.”

The study measures the Antarctic’s “grounding line” – the bottommost edge of the ice sheet across 16,000km of coastline. This is done by using elevation data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 and applying Archimedes’s principle of buoyancy, which relates the thickness of floating ice to the height of its surface.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/02/underwater-melting-o...

 

Read from top see also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

 

and all other related posts on this site.