Sunday, July 27, 2003

Humanity at Risk Ross Gelbspan writes: It is not news that climate shapes history. What is news is that the heating of our atmosphere has propelled our climate into a new state of instability. This new era of climate change could well be the most profound threat ever facing humanity. The most predictable casualty of climate change is stability -- in our political systems, our economic organizations and our weather. Perhaps because we are not experiencing heat waves of record-setting duration the public is happy to believe that global warming is a non-event. What most people don't understand is that prolonged, detectable warming is preceded by a period of unstable climate marked by extreme and unseasonal weather. (07/27/03) Beyond Democracy Timothy Wilken, MD writes: In modern representative democracies, we find the majority rule mechanism used to select our representatives, to make decisions within committees and to make decisions within the legislative bodies. In the United States, we elect one president, 100 Senators and 435 Congressman. This is one President for ~276 million Americans. There are two Senators for each state. Senatorial representation would vary from one Senator for ~16 million Californians down to one Senator for ~350,000 Delawarians. The members of the first House of Representatives were elected on the basis of 1 representative for every 30,000 inhabitants, but at least 1 for each state. At present the size of the House is fixed at 435 members, elected on the basis of 1 representative for about 500,000 inhabitants. Our representatives do not even know us. If any Congressman met with 10 of his constituents every day for 365 days a year, it would take over 137 years for him just to meet all of them. And Congressmen are only elected for two year terms. If our Congressman don’t even know us how can they represent us? So if we carefully examine modern representative democracy scientifically, we discover it is an oliarchy. In other words, we are ruled by the few. When we go to the poles to elect a President, we are simply electing the leader of the few who rule. Majority rule democracy ends for we the people the moment we exit the voting booth. And, our elected leader will have no need of our opinion for four years. (07/27/03) The Sky is Rising? Nature -- The sky isn't falling in, say scientists - it is rising. And it's our fault. The top of the troposphere - the atmosphere's lowest layer - has risen by several hundred metres since 1979, mostly because of transport and industrial emissions, reckon Ben Santer, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and colleagues. The troposphere's height could even serve as a kind of barometer for the extent of global environmental change. ... Santer's model increased the tropopause's altitude in line with observations only when all of the factors were included. But it suggests that changes in the levels of greenhouse gases and ozone could account for most of the rise seen in the later half of the twentieth century. (07/27/03) Whale Loss Underestimated BBC Nature -- Several great whale species were once far more abundant than records suggest, geneticists say. They think there were about 10 times more fin and humpback whales in the North Atlantic than modern estimates claim. ... The geneticists, from the universities of Stanford and Harvard, US, report their findings in the magazine Science. To estimate the size of whale populations before commercial hunting began, they studied genetic variation in the maternally-inherited mitochondrial DNA of North Atlantic fins, humpbacks and minkes. They found a "surprisingly high" degree of variation, implying a correspondingly large population size for those species in the past. ... Their own study of fin whales, second in size only to the 30-metre blue whale, concludes that the IWC's historic estimates are far too low. The commission thinks there were once about 40,000 North Atlantic fins, and that they have recovered to an all-time high of about 56,000. But the authors' genetic comparison of 235 fins shows a pre-whaling population of probably about 360,000 animals. They reach a similar conclusion with humpbacks, which the IWC estimates now number about 10,000, half the apparent historic high of 20,000 whales. Roman and Palumbi compared DNA samples from 188 humpbacks to reach their own historic estimate of about 240,000 animals. (07/27/03) Killing Fields BBC Environment -- Scientists, from Singapore, Japan and Australia, reporting their findings in the journal Nature, found "substantial rates of documented and inferred extinctions, especially for forest species", with butterflies, fish, birds and mammals all affected. The authors say: "Observed extinctions were generally fewer, but inferred losses often higher, in vascular plants, phasmids (stick and leaf insects), decapods (crustaceans), amphibians and reptiles. Forest reserves comprising only 0.25% of Singapore's area now harbour over 50% of the residual native biodiversity." They think the rate at which habitats are disappearing is so great that south-east Asia will lose up to two-fifths of all its species over this century, at least half of them endemic species found nowhere else on Earth. They used both historical and modern checklists of species occurring in Singapore to estimate how many had become extinct, in relation to large-scale habitat loss, since the British arrived in 1819. Since then more than 95% of the estimated 540 square kilometres of original vegetation has been entirely cleared. Less than 10% of the remaining 24 sq km of forest is primary growth. ... The overall loss of biodiversity, they calculated, was at least 28% - 881 of 3,196 recorded species. Butterflies, freshwater fish, birds and mammals lost 34-43% of all species. About a quarter of all vascular plants, freshwater decapods and phasmids have disappeared. (07/27/03) Weakening the American Dollar To anyone with a sense of history, the Bush administration’s decision to continue weakening the dollar must seem disquieting. It may be defensible as economic policy or simply as acceptance of the inevitable. After all, huge U.S. trade deficits (now approaching $600 billion annually) have flooded the world with so many dollars that a sizable currency decline was, at some point, likely. ... However, it is generally believed that dollar wise, strong is good and weak is bad. These generalizations sound simple enough, but they can be confusing when talking about money. This morning Terence R. Wilken discusses America's weakening dollar. (07/26/03) 7:15:20 AM

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