The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

This is an unconventional book review as it consists of two posts at The Moderate Voice.

Part One: The Sixth Extinction

Photo I took of Pacific Tree Frog that appeared in the LA Times

I have just started reading The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert.  There have been five previous massive extinctions in the past.  Over at the Wonk Blog they have an interview with the author.  I have read chapter 1 and it concerns the extinction of amphibians world wide.  The fact that amphibians were disappearing was noted more than a decade ago.  The cause remained a mystery until recently.  It is the result of human activity but has nothing to do with climate change.  In his book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Charles Mann documents how plants and animals from the New World altered the planet and our diets.  This only increased in the 20th century with air travel and large ocean freighters.  The impact was not always positive which brings us back to the amphibians.

The first clue to the mysterious killer that was claiming frogs from Queensland to California came— perhaps ironically , perhaps not— from a zoo. The National Zoo, in Washington , D.C., had been successfully raising blue poison-dart frogs, which are native to Suriname, through many generations. Then, more or less from one day to the next, the zoo’s tank-bred frogs started dropping. A veterinary pathologist at the zoo took some samples from the dead frogs and ran them through an electron scanning microscope. He found a strange microorganism on the animals’ skin, which he eventually identified as a fungus belonging to a group known as chytrids. Chytrid fungi are nearly ubiquitous; they can be found at the tops of trees and also deep underground. This particular species, though, had never been seen before; indeed, it was so unusual that an entire genus had to be created to accommodate it. It was named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis— batrachos is Greek for “frog”— or Bd for short. The veterinary pathologist sent samples from infected frogs at the National Zoo to a mycologist at the University of Maine. The mycologist grew cultures of the fungus and then sent some of them back to Washington. When healthy blue poison-dart frogs were exposed to the lab-raised Bd, they sickened. Within three weeks, they were dead. Subsequent research showed that Bd interferes with frogs’ ability to take up critical electrolytes through their skin. This causes them to suffer what is, in effect, a heart attack. Kolbert, Elizabeth (2014-02-11). The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Kindle Locations 198-209). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

As it turns out one explanation of the spread is the wide scale importation around the world of North American Bull Frogs (for food) and the African Clawed Frog (used for pregnancy tests).  Both carry but are resistant to the fungus and their spread would not have been possible without air transport.
I have personally witnessed this 6th extinction. Just 5 or 6 years ago the Pacific Tree Frog was common here on the West Coast.  Their chirping or croaking was a way of life.  If you were unfortunate enough to have one outside your bedroom window in the summer you probably wouldn't get a very good nights sleep.  Three or four years ago they simply disappeared.  The North American Bull Frog was not indigenous to this area but had been introduced several years ago - a possible explanation.
There are many similar examples.  The introduction of the European earth worm nearly destroyed the North Eastern hardwood forests before the Revolutionary war  is is still causing problems in the entire northern half of the United States.  The Fox and Eastern Gray squirrels are spreading across the country from the North East probably hitching rides on trucks and trains.  The result is the Western Gray squirrel is threatened.  When debris from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan started washing ashore here on the west coast the major concern was not radiation but invasive species.
I guess the question is can human beings survive the 6th extinction they are responsible for?

Pacific Tree Frog

Part Two:The Anthropocene
There is widespread agreement that we are in a new geological era, the Anthropocene.  I just finished The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and it is all about the Anthropocene.  There are some who think this era started when man began to use fossil fuels a few hundred years ago but they are wrong.  Homo Sapiens and yes even Neanderthals altered the world tens of thousands of years ago.  The extinction of large mammals  can be associated with human migration.  Being large was a survival advantage until smart hunters came along.  We were also responsible for the extinction of our retaliative, the Neanderthal, but not before we had had enough sex with them to leave all of us of with European or middle eastern descent with 3 to 6 percent Neanderthal genes.  It's estimated that up to 90% of the Native American population was killed not by European weapons but European diseases.
Human caused global climate change may only be the most important because it may result in man's own extinction.  There have been shifts in the climate of the planet before but the thing that makes this different is the speed it's occurring. The ocean is dying, because of acidification  the corral reefs will all be dead by 2050.   The combination of entire ocean ecosystems dying and over fishing will result in the starvation of millions and perhaps billions who depend on the sea for food.   It is also estimated that up to 50% of all species on earth in 1900 will be extinct by 2050.  While it's easy to blame the Koch brothers and Exon/Mobile how many of us are willing to give up our energy intensive life style?  This post has been written from both my desktop and laptop computers. I have a large screen TV and I stream movies and TV shows. I don't drive or own a car but this is because of vision problems and I probably would if I could.  So I plead guilty, I'm   part of the problem.

Book Review - A Great Aridness

A few months ago I did a post on an article by William deBuys  Exodus From Phoenix.  This article was just an introduction to his book A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest.
DeBuys says that this book did not start out to be a book on climate change but as a general environmental history of the Southwest.  It was already becoming obvious that the growth in the Southwest could not continue, this was especially true of the Phoenix area but applied to the entire region.  He could see that the environmental factors that were the subject of the book were being exacerbated by climate change and that end was going to come a lot sooner.

It becomes at once obvious that William deBuys loves the desert Southwest.  His prose is almost poetic sometimes making it a wonderful read.  It is full of history and science, politics and human stories.

Lake Mead

So what's the problem?  The problem is the lack of water.  The dams on the Colorado River no longer fill up.  As the area continues to grow the available water continues to decline.  This is not the first drought to hit the area and not even the first to bring an advanced society down. He gives us a history of the 12th century drought that brought down several advance societies in Arizona.  Of course it's not just man made climate change man has had other impacts.  Because of mismanagement the forests are more susceptible to forest fires.  Of course climate change plays a part in this too - dryer and warmer winters make insect infestation more severe.  
I recommend this book to everyone.  There are human stories as well as history and science.  While the desert Southwest is on the frontlines climate change is already impacting us all.

Book Review - Climate Myths

Hurricane Sandy

We are seeing the impact of global climate change almost daily.  There is of course the drought in the Midwest of the United States as well as part of the Russia, two the the largest grain producing regions in the World.   The East Coast of the United States was hit by Hurricane Sandy in October of 2012 and then a nor'easter in February of 2013 resulting in millions of dollars in damage.  The Phoenix, AZ area may be on it's way to becoming one of the first climate change ghost towns.  As summer ends in Australia it was the warmest on record with 123 records broken in 90 days.  That's just a few of them.  In spite of this the energy industry has been successful at creating doubt and blocking legislation by creating a series of myths about climate change.  Dr John J. Berger successfully destroys those myths in Climate Myths: The Campaign Against Climate Science.

Chapter one deals with the disinformation campaign  of the oil, coal and other large industries in the U.S. to give talking points to climate change deniers.

For decades, the oil and coal industries and some of their largest industrial customers have conducted a sophisticated and wildly successful multimillion dollar campaign based in the U.S. to convince the American public that climate change is not a serious threat.  The impetus for the campaign has been to protect industry profits by blocking any action designed to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide and other global heating gases produced in burning fossil fuels.

This has always amazed me.  Are these executives so concerned about profits today that they will risk their children and grand children's future.  There is really on one explanation - they are sociopaths.

This disinformation has come from various right wing think tanks and trade groups that produce papers that appear to be based on science but unlike the "real" papers produced by scientists are never peer reviewed.  Chapter two introduces us to the activities of these organizations.

The rest of the book is a look at eleven myths of the climate change deniers and explains why they are disinformation.

Myth One

The scientific foundation for concerns about climate change is uncertain and unproven.  The evidence is contradictory and inconclusive.

Myth Two

Even if humans added substantially to the atmosphere's carbon dioxide concentration carbon dioxide is not a powerful enough gas to cause global warming.  Other gases such as nitrous oxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, and even water vapor are far more powerful.  

Myth Three

Human burning of fossil fuels is not the source of observed increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration above naturally occurring levels.  Increases are caused by natural processes, such as the outgassing of the Earth's mantel.

Myth Four

Climate varies naturally.  We are in a natural warming cycle that has little or nothing to do with human influence.  There have been warm periods in the past, such as the Medieval Warm Period, that prove the world heats and cools naturally, unaffected by greenhouse gas emissions from human industrial activity.  Indeed, periods of warming may actually be caused by natural fluctuations in cosmic rays or solar radiation.  

Dr Berger dismantles these four myths and the seven others.  The trick here is that there is a little real science in most of these myths giving them the appearance of real science.  The problem isn't what they say so much as what they don't tell you - what they leave out.

I don't have any faith that anything is going to be done to mitigate climate change in time.  We are already past the point of no return.  I'm 67 years old and will not be impacted but the children and grandchildren of the executives responsible for this disinformation will be.

This is a quick easy read that will make it possible for you to refute the talking points of the change deniers and I recommend it.

Dr Berger's website.

Note
I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Climate Myths: The Campaign Against Climate Science
by John J. Berger

The Day We Found The Universe

Astrology began to morph into astronomy in 1543 with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus' "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres."  It was here, much to the dismay of theologians, the Earth lost it's place as the center of the universe.  The transformation was complete about 60 years later when Galileo Galilei demonstrated his telescope.  It was over two hundred years later that astronomy morphed into cosmology.  That transformation is what The Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak is all about.

While the earth may have been demoted by Copernicus further demotions  were to follow.  At the start of the 20th century it was thought that the sun was in the center of our galaxy, The Milky Way and that The Milky Way was the only galaxy.  All that was about to change. 

In early 20th century America there were wealthy men who were willing to donate money for bigger and bigger telescopes.  Astronomers had been looking at spiral nebulae. With the larger and more powerful telescopes it became obvious that those spiral nebulae were actually spiral galaxies just like our own Milky Way.  It was also determined that the earth's sun was not in the center of the Milky Way.    So we had a double demotion - the earth was not in the center of this galaxy and the Milky Way was not even the only galaxy. 

In addition to the more powerful telescopes the cosmologists  had another powerful new tool, color spectrum analyzers.  But in addition to the tools there were the personalities and Bartusiak gives them all some time.  While everyone has heard of Edwin Hubble who has an orbiting space telescope named after him how many have heard of James Keeler who was both a master with spectroscope but helped make the reflecting telescope the tool of choice.  And there was Henrietta Leavitt who's study of  Cepheid variables made it possible for male astronomers to determine the size of the universe.  There are of course many more - some hardly known but most forgotten by history.

Now if you still think the earth is 6,000 years old and that the sun orbits the earth this book is not for you.  But if you are interested in the history of scientific thought this is a wonderful book.  Bartusiak is a wonderful science writer and this book is the result of extensive research to find the important players that have been forgotten.  Even in serious scientific circles there are personality conflicts, egos and competition and Bartusiak makes that a part of the story.

The Day We Found the Universe
by Marcia Bartusiak

The Journey Of Man

Unlike probably any other creature on the earth humans need to know their origins. Until recently the need was filled by creation myths and every culture on earth had one. Over the last 150 to 200 years archaeologists, anthropologists and biologists started to replace those myths with science. In The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey explains how modern geneticists have mapped the migration of humans from Africa to occupy almost every land mass on earth in over the last 50,000 years.

Like the Abrahamic creation myth most of us a familiar with this scientific version of creation has an Adam and an Eve.

Eve lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago. We come to this conclusion by looking at mitochondrial DNA which is passed from mother and child. The mtDNA changes little over time which is why Eve does not really play a part in this detective story.

Adam also lived in Africa but about 90,000 years after Eve. It's Adam's Y chromosome that provides the evidence for tracing man's journey from it's African origin. Reproduction is all about copying DNA. Whenever anything is copied errors occur. Those errors, 18 to 20 of them, are used to trace the migration of the human race from Africa. We can't know what made this Adam so special that he became the father of the modern human race although Wells makes a guess. It would appear there were two separate migrations - one along the shores of the Indian Ocean and a second north through the middle east.

Although this is a wonderful scientific detective story it may be even more important because it makes as look at the concept of race. We know that the first migration around the Indian Ocean shows a darker population but this journey was primarily in the tropics where darker skin would be an advantage. Another thing we can't know is if the population of pre-migration Africa was dark skinned or if that is an adaptation to changing climatic conditions after the migration.

Humanity is by nature tribal. We are constantly looking for ways to define the tribe we belong to. What we can learn from the detective story described in the Journey of Man is that "race" is no more real than religion, political views or country of origin. We are indeed one race - the human race. If the human race is to survive we must recognize we are all part of the same tribe.

The Journey Of Man reads like a good detective novel but it is packed with good science as well. I highly recommend it.

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey
by Spencer Wells