Truly horror-movie stuff from Elizabeth Kolbert (author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change) in the May 25 cover-dated New Yorker on how scientists used to think that extinctions happened slowly over time, but now realize that mass extinctions can just happen on, like, Tuesday–the dinosaurs didn’t get advance notice, nor all those billions of trilobites, once so damned common that I have a fossil of one on my desk here–you can’t give a dead trilobite away, even if it is 250 million years old. Kolbert then goes into great detail as to how the frogs are all dying off, attacked by a malevolent fungus, and the bats are disappearing as well (also a fungus, but not the same one), and these are two of the most successful, longest-established organisms on the planet, and see how a biological age can end right under your nose, without your really noticing it?

Currently, a third of all amphibian species, nearly a third of reef-building corals, a quarter of all mammals, and an eight of all birds are classified as “threatened with extinction.” These estimates do not include the species that humans have already wiped out or the species for which there are insufficient data. Nor do the figures take into account the projected effects of global warming or ocean acidification. Nor, of course, can they anticipate the kinds of sudden, terrible collapses that are becoming almost routine.

As the French say, merde. A paragraph like that makes it kind of hard to pretend that humans can ride along atop the biosphere as it collapses, surf the death wave. What biosphere?

A few years ago, an otherwise intelligent but conservatively-oriented fellow I know told me that global warming was a myth. Holy Moly, just forget the propaganda and see with your eyes. If you don’t, pretty soon people who didn’t believe in global warming are going to be consigned to the realm of myth… followed by the people who did believe in it, followed by just… people.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 3:11 pm and is filed under The Political Mindscape, Things We Read Today. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.