Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature'
The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century. The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times.
bolsonaro spells catastrophe for the amazon
Far-right congressman Jair Bolsonaro, whose hostile campaign rhetoric has earned him comparisons to U.S. President Donald Trump, won Brazil's presidential election Sunday, a development that has raised concerns about the future of human rights and environmental action in the world's sixth-largest greenhouse gas emitter, CNN reported. Like Trump, Bolsonaro has made homophobic, sexist and racist statements and emboldened right wing groups who share his views. Also like Trump, he has talked tough about prioritizing his nation's economy over environmental regulations, at one point even threatening to withdraw Brazil from the Paris agreement, as the Huffington Post reported, though he has since walked that back.
Capitalism is killing the world's wildlife populations, not 'humanity'
The latest Living Planet report from the WWF makes for grim reading: a 60% decline in wild animal populations since 1970, collapsing ecosystems, and a distinct possibility that the human species will not be far behind. The report repeatedly stresses that humanity’s consumption is to blame for this mass extinction, and journalists have been quick to amplify the message. The Guardian headline reads “Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations”, while the BBC runs with “Mass wildlife loss caused by human consumption”. No wonder: in the 148-page report, the word “humanity” appears 14 times, and “consumption” an impressive 54 times. There is one word, however, that fails to make a single appearance: capitalism.
People who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learn more
By guest blogger Tom Stafford We all know someone who is convinced their opinion is better than everyone else’s on a topic – perhaps, even, that it is the only correct opinion to have. Maybe, on some topics, you are that person. No psychologist would be surprised that people who are convinced their beliefs are superior think they are better informed than others, but this fact leads to a follow on question: are people actually better informed on the topics for which they are convinced their opinion is superior? This is what Michael Hall and Kaitlin Raimi set out to check in a series of experiments in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
collapse of civilisation
A shattering collapse of civilisation is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich. In May, it will be 50 years since the eminent biologist published his most famous and controversial book, The Population Bomb. But Ehrlich remains as outspoken as ever. The world’s optimum population is less than two billion people – 5.6 billion fewer than on the planet today, he argues, and there is an increasing toxification of the entire planet by synthetic chemicals that may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change.
50 Years Ago, The Sugar Industry Paid Researchers To Blame Everything on Fats
In the 1960s, the sugar industry quietly funded research that blamed fats for all the diseases we now know sugar causes The sugar industry secretly funded a famous study blaming fats for coronary heart disease, while downplaying the role of sugar, researchers discovered last year while digging through old records. study, published in in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1965, made headlines just as scientists around the world were starting to make the association between sugar and heart disease, seemingly intended to get them to look the other way. The link today is crystal clear and uncontroversial. Now the same researchers have found documents revealing the industry also covered up its own study linking sugar to cancer a few years later. The study, dubbed Project 259, was funded by the sugar industry’s national trade organization, then called the Sugar Research Foundation.
A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
Back in 1961, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner outlined a thought experiment that demonstrated one of the lesser-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The experiment shows how the strange nature of the universe allows two observers—say, Wigner and Wigner’s friend—to experience different realities. Since then, physicists have used the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment to explore the nature of measurement and to argue over whether objective facts can exist. That’s important because scientists carry out experiments to establish objective facts.
domino hothouse
A domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, shifting currents and dying forests could tilt the Earth into a “hothouse” state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile, a group of leading climate scientists has warned. This grim prospect is sketched out in a journal paper that considers the combined consequences of 10 climate change processes, including the release of methane trapped in Siberian permafrost and the impact of melting ice in Greenland on the Antarctic. The authors of the essay, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, stress their analysis is not conclusive, but warn the Paris commitment to keep warming at 2C above pre-industrial levels may not be enough to “park” the planet’s climate at a stable temperature.
His Last Words Were: “They poisoned me”. Meet The Man Who Invented The Car That Runs On Water
In today’s world, with each passing day, we outdo ourselves with respect to technology. And one of those technological marvels which demonstrate how far we’ve come is a car that is fuelled with water. This modern marvel derives its energy directly from water and needs nothing more to function. Sadly, crony capitalism has ensured that this next step in scientific evolution is never really made available to the masses. If a water-powered car becomes mainstream, fuel companies and oil industries will soon become redundant and lose billions of dollars each year.
Our oceans broke heat records in 2018 and the consequences are catastrophic
Last year was the hottest ever measured, continuing an upward trend that is a direct result of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. The key to the measurements is the oceans. Oceans absorb more than 90% of the heat that results from greenhouse gases, so if you want to measure global warming you really have to measure ocean warming.
worrying rise in global co2
The level of climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is forecast to rise by a near-record amount in 2019, according to the Met Office. The increase is being fuelled by the continued burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests, and will be particularly high in 2019 due to an expected return towards El Niño-like conditions. This natural climate variation causes warm and dry conditions in the tropics, meaning the plant growth that removes CO2 from the air is restricted. Levels of the greenhouse gas have not been as high as today for 3-5m years, when the global temperature was 2-3C warmer and the sea level was 10-20 metres higher.
Amazon is the invisible backbone behind ICE’s immigration crackdown
In June, when the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) began separating migrant children from their parents, several tech companies came under fire for providing the agency with the software that helped them do it. At the center of the criticism was data mining company Palantir, which designed the Investigative Case Management system. The ICM is a critical component of ICE’s deportation operations—it integrates a vast ecosystem of public and private data to track down immigrants and, in many cases, deport them. Little is known about how the software actually works or how extensively ICE uses it.
