Earth’s 6th Mass Extinction: Climate Crisis, Pollution, Depleting Resources Could Extinct 27% Of World Animal Life

 Countercurrents Collective | December 20, 2022

The planet has entered the sixth mass extinction. Pollution, climate change and depleting resources could drive up to 27% of the world’s animal life to extinction, a new paper has claimed. The study used a supercomputer to map out how interdependent food chains could collapse in the coming decades.

Published on Friday and authored by European Commission scientist Giovanni Strona and Professor Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University in Australia, the study (Coextinctions dominate future vertebrate losses from climate and land use change, GIOVANNI STRONA HTTPS://ORCID.ORG/0000-0003-2294-4013 AND COREY J. A. BRADSHAW HTTPS://ORCID.ORG/0000-0002-5328-7741, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abn4345) presented a series of increasingly grim scenarios. The researchers claimed that the magnitude of the coming extinctions will depend largely on how much carbon mankind emits over the coming century.

Global warming: 400 million tonnes CO2 pumped to atmosphere a year from this source the world is blind to

Gas flared at and gas facilities is greater than EU’s total import from Russia and a key source of methane emission

Down To Earth | May 06, 2022

Something that has not changed over 160 years of oil production is the deliberate burning of gas associated with it, called gas flaring. It is turning out to be a major source of methane emission, a greenhouse gas (GHG) “over 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a warming gas on a 20-year timeframe”.

The World Bank’s latest 2022 Global Gas Flaring Tracker Report underscored that the efforts to curb this global warming causing activity have “stalled” in the last one decade.

Economics for people and planet—moving beyond the neoclassical paradigm

Lina Brand-Correa, PhD *, Anna Brook, MPH, Milena Büchs, PhD, Petra Meier, PhD, Yannish Naik, MPH & Daniel W O’Neill, PhD

The Lancet | Open Access | Published: April, 2022 | DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00063-8

Summary

Despite substantial attention within the fields of public and planetary health on developing an economic system that benefits both people’s health and the environment, heterodox economic schools of thought have received little attention within these fields. Ecological economics is a school of thought with particular relevance to public and planetary health. In this article, we discuss implications of key ecological economics ideas for public and planetary health, especially those related to critiques of gross domestic product as a measure of progress and economic growth as the dominant goal for economic and policy decision making. We suggest that ecological economics aligns well with public health goals, including concern for equality and redistribution. Ecological economics offers an opportunity to make the transition to an economic system that is designed to promote human and planetary health from the outset, rather than one where social and environmental externalities must be constantly corrected after the fact. Important ideas from ecological economics include the use of a multidimensional framework to evaluate economic and social performance, the prioritisation of wellbeing and environmental goals in decision making, policy design and evaluation that take complex relationships into account, and the role of provisioning systems (the physical and social systems that link resource use and social outcomes). We discuss possible interventions at the national scale that could promote public health and that align with the prioritisation of social and ecological objectives, including universal basic income or services and sovereign money creation. Overall, we lay the foundations for additional integration of ecological economics principles and pluralist economic thinking into public and planetary health scholarship and practice.

National responsibility for ecological breakdown: a fair-shares assessment of resource use, 1970–2017

Prof Jason Hickel, PhD, Daniel W O’Neill, PhD, Andrew L Fanning, PhD & Huzaifa Zoomkawala, BS

The Lancet | Open Access | Published: April, 2022| DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00044-4

Summary
Background
Human impacts on earth-system processes are overshooting several planetary boundaries, driving a crisis of ecological breakdown. This crisis is being caused in large part by global resource extraction, which has increased dramatically over the past half century. We propose a novel method for quantifying national responsibility for ecological breakdown by assessing nations’ cumulative material use in excess of equitable and sustainable boundaries.

Ozone layer recovery may take several lifetimes. But Montreal Protocol saved the Earth

Manas Ranjan Senapati

Down To Earth | September 22, 2021

The stratospheric ozone layer absorbs a portion of the ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun, preventing it from reaching the surface of Earth.

There are two types of ultraviolet rays that reach the earth’s surface — UVB and UVA. UVB rays are responsible for producing sunburn and can cause skin cancers, crop damage, etc.

Experiments on fish suggest that 90-95 per cent of malignant melanomas (a form of skin cancer) may be due to UVA & UVB radiations. Plants are sensitive to UV radiation below 300 nanometers.

The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark

Monthly Review | Volume 73, Number 4 (September 2021)

Photo by an environmental scientist (crime) investigator of hundreds of fly-tipped tires in a disused chalk quarry in North Kent, England. By Cugerbrant – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The geologic time scale, dividing the 4.6 billion years of Earth history into nested eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages, is one of the great scientific achievements of the last two centuries. Each division is directed at environmental change on an Earth System scale based on stratigraphic evidence, such as rocks or ice cores. At present, the earth is officially situated in the Phanerozoic Eon, Cenozoic Era, Quaternary Period, Holocene Epoch (beginning 11,700 years ago), and Meghalayan Age (the last of the Holocene ages beginning 4,200 years ago). The current argument that the planet has entered into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, is based on the recognition that Earth System change as represented in the stratigraphic record is now primarily due to anthropogenic forces. This understanding has now been widely accepted in science, but nevertheless has not yet been formally adopted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy of the International Union of Geological Sciences, which would mean its official adoption throughout science.

Food systems: seven priorities to end hunger and protect the planet

Here’s how the United Nations should harness science and technology to improve nutrition and safeguard the environment.

Joachim von Braun , Kaosar Afsana , Louise O. Fresco & Mohamed Hassan

Nature | August 30, 2021

School children in Madagascar eat lunch provided as part of a nutrition initiative run by the World Food Programme. Credit: Rijasolo/AFP/Getty

The world’s food system is in disarray. One in ten people is undernourished. One in four is overweight. More than one-third of the world’s population cannot afford a healthy diet. Food supplies are disrupted by heatwaves, floods, droughts and wars. The number of people going hungry in 2020 was 15% higher than in 2019, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and armed conflicts¹.

Our planetary habitat suffers, too. The food sector emits about 30% of the world’s greenhouse gases. Expanding cropland, pastures and tree plantations drive two-thirds of the loss in forests (5.5 million hectares per year), mostly in the tropics². Poor farming practices degrade soils, pollute and deplete water supplies and lower biodiversity.

The IPCC Report: Key Findings and Radical Implications

Beyond the headlines: what climate science now shows about Earth’s future. Can we act in time?

Brian Tokar

The UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released its latest comprehensive report on the state of the earth’s climate. The much-anticipated report dominated the headlines for a few days in early August, then quickly disappeared amidst the latest news from Afghanistan, the fourth wave of Covid-19 infections in the US, and all the latest political rumblings. The report is vast and comprehensive in its scope, and is worthy of more focused attention outside of specialist scientific circles than it has received thus far.

The 2,000 stars where aliens would catch a glimpse of Earth

Alexandra Witze

Nature | June 23, 2021

An illustration of Earth from space illuminated by the Sun. Stars with a past or future view of Earth as a transiting exoplanet appear brightened.Credit: OpenSpace/American Museum of Natural History

Astronomers have pinpointed more than 2,000 stars from where, in the not-too-distant past or future, Earth can occasionally be detected transiting across the face of the Sun.

If there are aliens living on planets around those stars, with at least a similar level of technological advancement to our own species, then they would theoretically be able to spot us. They could even have observed as the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere increased over the past several hundred years, since the industrial revolution.

The Longest Known Earthquake Lasted 32 Years

EARTHQUAKE 

Stephanie Pappas

Scientific American | May 26, 2021

Credit: Tim Phillips Getty Images

A devastating earthquake that rocked the Indonesian island of Sumatra in 1861 was long thought to be a sudden rupture on a previously quiescent fault. But new research finds that the tectonic plates below the island had been slowly and quietly rumbling against each other for 32 years before the cataclysmic event.

This decades-long, silent earthquake—known as a “slow-slip event”—was the longest sequence of its kind ever detected. It was too subtle and gradual to be noticed during its course, but a new study indicates it may have precipitated the massive 1861 temblor of at least magnitude 8.5, which in turn triggered a tsunami that killed thousands of people. The new study could help today’s scientists watch for dangerous quakes more effectively.