Month: September 2020

In recent years the BBC has stopped trying to cover over the threat to the natural world in their world famous documentaries. This once as you can see, deals with the fact that there are so many species currently threatened with extinction on earth- and virtually all are our fault either directly through hunting and ecosystem loss, or indirectly through climate change.

A significant portion of the world carbon emissions are taken up bye the rain forests of the tropics. This is something we rely on-without this we would need to become substantially carbon negative around the world to halt runaway global warming from the natural carbon emissions from various sources.

The largest single un-broken piece of ice in the Arctic existed in Greenland, but it has just got significantly smaller. The piece that broke off is not exactly small, measuring around 110 square miles in size. This huge peace is already started to break into far more smaller pieces.

The 20 targets set back in 2010 wide-ranging and covered many different areas. Some examples of the the targets included cutting rates of habitat loss, managing fish stocks sustainably and preventing harmful pollution, among others. 

Of the 20 targets 6 thought to have been partially, met the rest were failed completely.

The UK government claim to have done well, having hit as many as a third of its targets. I would say this is an astoundingly low bar to clear,who in their right mind with sit a test get 33% and feel that they had done well? the more it seems that the government is mocking itself off in a way that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. RSPB looked at how the government had done, they felt that the government had only met 3 of its targets, indeed in six of its areas it has actually gone backwards (the government rejected this critique).

3 of the most significant failures were insufficient funds for nature conservation, not enough space set aside for wildlife and declining wildlife populations.

Of the first, far from increasing funding the government has cut the funding on wildlife populations by £250 million. Given our rhetoric to other countries this is totally unacceptable.

In terms of space for wildlife,on paper the UK protects 28% of its land and 24% of its sea territory. Anyone with any sense can see this is rubbish, for instance the government claims all of the land in all national parks are being kept for wildlife,while there is nice areas of wildlife in the country’s national parks to say the whole area is wild is absolutely insane. 

Similarly on its claim to be protecting endangered species this is all so rubbish. 41% of the British wild species has declined in the last 10 years with 1-in 10 threatened with extinction.

A spokesman for the governmental department defra pointed to the fact of the UK is the first country in the world to legislate a legally binding rules requiring us to hit net zero carbon dioxide emissions.

“[We] are leading the world by setting ambitious goals for nature and biodiversity in our landmark environment bill as well as introducing new ways to reward farmers for protecting the environment, and investing £640m in the Nature for Climate fund,” the spokesperson said.

I personally think this is rubbish, in particular over the last decade the government has constantly said there is something else they need to be concentrating on, first recovery from the 2008 market crash, and now the pandemic. both of these are certainly urgent things that need to be taken care of, however these essential environmental requirements both in terms of biodiversity loss and climate change cannot wait for the UK to stop messing around with other things.

We must make our politicians act, they must act now not simply set targets to be met in 3 decades.

The National oceanic and atmospheric administration is an important body whose job it is to produce the majority of the government’s climate change research. It is therefore highly concerning that they have recently chosen David Legates to run this organisation. He is a longtime climate change denier, indeed in 2007 was one of the authors of a paper that specifically questioned the previous findings about how climate change is destroying polar bear habitat.

Why would coronavirus boost the snake population in Melbourne Australia? It would appear that it hasn’t, because of the lockdown people have spent far more of their time in the gardens and have therefore mowed their lawns and tidied up their flower beds.

As such it’s not that there are more snakes than in a normal year, but that people have spotted them.

Given the large number of highly deadly snakes that live in Australia care must be taken. However it is socially another strange boost that a wild population has had due to the coronavirus epidemic.

From two boats losing their rudders, to merely having passengers knocked around or bruised, this action seems to be intentional. The latest attack by an Orca on a boat ended with the Orca ramming the boat 15 times – that is not accidental. At the same time about 70 miles South another boat was attacked in a similar way.

Albino animals occur amongst most different species of animal. Albino animals are almost always far lighter white compared to the standard colour for their species. Generally this is caused by some sort of failure in the pigmentation. This young seal is living in the Siberian Sea of Okhotsk .

Permanent ice caps are melting at increasingly rapid rates. The permanent ice that covers Antarctica Greenland and large parts of Canada lock up vast quantities of water that would otherwise be part of the ocean. 

In most cases I would say that the answer to this is relatively simple. If we were the cause of an animal going locally extinct we should bring it back. Obviously if there is none of that species left this is impossible. In a number of species at the moment, we might not have reached complete extinction, we might have simply reached no more members of that species in the wild.