The Thwaites glacier is an important glacier in western Antarctica. It is already thought to account for about 4% of global sea level rise. This glacier has suffered a rapid retreat from the land shelf in just 6 months – a process that can naturally take several centuries.
The bigger problem that Thwaites glacier currently brings, is the fact that this glacier seems to largely be the dam wall, holding much of the ice back. As a result, while Thwaites glacier can increase water levels by an alarming amount, a collapse is predicted to increase global sea levels by between 90cm and 300cm.
In other words, this glacier alone, with a full collapse, as much as 5% of the worlds population will have to move as their home will be under water. Unfortunately far more people may well find that their way of live is no longer possible.
Regular readers of this blog will remember me mentioning this not long ago, unfortunately the last 6 months has shown the situation to be far worse.
Wild Jaguars are a native resident of the USA. Once roaming as far north as the Grand canyon, they roamed over around 1/3 of its lands. It is not a natural migration therefore that has therefore meant that Jaguars are extremely rare in the USA.
Currently there are about 173,000 Jaguars living in the wild, meaning that taken as a whole, the Jaguar is far away the safest of the big cats (Lions who come in second, have a population of around 20,000). However, if you look at the part of the Jaguar population that lives in north America, their position becomes far more precarious.
Currently, it is thought that Mexico contains a wild jaguar population of about 4800.
With the Brazilian election to occur during October, and Jair Bolsonaro widely seen as a failure in many ways – as well as having favoured specific groups at the detriment of the rest of the population, it is considered highly unlikely that Jair Bolsonaro will get a second term.
Lions have been lost from a huge area in Africa. Already extinct in 26 countries in Africa, there are perhaps as few as 15,000 lions left. Furthermore, most of these are in a small handful of reserves.
Between the Selous, Serengeti, Ruaha, Kruger and the greater Kalarhari zambezi transfrontier park are represented perhaps as high as 14,000.
This means that other reserves that still host lion tend to have very small populations with the inherent risks of inbreeding that this brings.
You will notice that on this list of lion ecosystems, none are in west Africa. This is unfortunately not a mistake. Recent analysis of the Genetics of western African lions has proved something that has been suspected for centuries. The west African lion is not the same species as the eastern and southern lion, in fact these populations are relict populations left behind as the Asiatic lion was pushed back into its home in India. In actual fact the “Asiatic lion” or “Indian Lion” once had a huge range that took in much of Europe, north Africa and Asia.
As the largest lizard in the world the Komodo dragons hold a fascination for humans, as it is the only place where lizards still rule
The concern by those who work in tourism with the Komodo dragons seems quite justified. They fear that this enormous increase in price will put off people from visiting, and therefore completely destroy the tourism industry.
It should be noted that this is merely the fee to visit the islands, anything the guides charge is on top of that.
Most of the historical oil and gas has been used by North America and Europe.
As a result, Europe and America have to take a large amount of blame for the current carbon dioxide crisis that is pushing global warming. While it is true that the majority of the world’s pollution will increasingly moved towards Asia, almost all of the historical emissions come from just these two continents. Having depleted many of the largest Isle and gas reserves around Europe, many European countries are not pushing into Africa. Africa is incredibly rich in oil and gas, and quite reasonably politicians in these countries argue ‘why shouldn’t we extract them and help our country grow’.
Around much of the world, as the various European countries expanded their empires, one of the first things that Europeans did, was to create reserves to protect the wildlife, and required the local people to move out.
Many tribes have incredibly small footprints on the ground, ad look after their environment far better than many conservationists would succeed
In many of these places, the local tribes were forcefully thrown of their land, and begrudgingly given small areas often with little value compared to where they lived before.
Now there is a difficult issue: those people who are living their lives in the same way that they have lived for thousands of years, are often fantastic for the reserve. However, in many places these people will turn to harvesting the wildlife in a totally different way, leading to many local extinctions.
The Caspian tiger once lived in 12 countries, from the west in Turkey, to the east in central Asia. Seemingly, across this range, they did not have consistent populations but the tigers lived on the shores of lakes in the region, with 15-20 valleys being their strongholds.
The Kazakhstan delta is mostly ready for a return of the Tiger, with just the missing prey base needing addressing, this is well in hand
On the whole, the Caspian tiger lived in relative harmony with humans up until the Russian invasion. The Russians brought with them, the custom of keeping livestock, which brought the humans into direct competition with the tigers. As a result, Russia started paying a bounty for every tiger killed. This was incredibly successful, such that by the 1940 they were exterminated. The hunting was banned in the 1940s but too late to save these tigers.
After this, the tigers former home was taken over and converted into farmland, so the few that survived the hunting, soon lost what home was left.
In the 1990s as Russia fell, WWF started working to help the ecosystem recover. As a result in the late 2000s a satellite analysis was carried out on the area, and one area stood out – a delta of the Lli river in Kazakhstan. It was found that if the prey base was first helped to recover (animals such as boar and deer) then this area could easily support tigers.
Now, it is true that the Caspian tiger went extinct 70 years ago. However, recent genetic analysis has shown that the Caspian and Amur tigers are not distinct enough to be classed separately – they are essentially one subspecies, with a large range. It is true that Caspian tigers tend to have had shorter fur, but tigers are able to adjust in this way, so tigers that are moved to warmer climates will grow less fur and be able to thrive.
Given Kazakhstan being the most advanced of the countries in the area, with relatively high living standards, they should be able to carry out the plan. The delay until 2026 is to allow time for the prey base to build up to sensible levels.
Most of Sweden is still covered in forest. I have visited the country, and have enjoyed exploring it. Never the less, an alarming study has shown that most of the forestry – about 97% relies on clear cutting ancient woodland, and then replanting it with monocultures of trees, not all of which are native.
Sweden so called environmental forestry may be nothing of the sort. Clear cutting old growth, and replacing it with non-native monocultures is not the same thing
Clearly Sweden must buck its ideas up, or change fast. I have commented on the low density of bears and wolves. In the past, this has been put down to the countries large number of hunters, but perhaps this is an early warning about what is happening to these forests.
Might this hit the IKEA brand? certainly if they wish to survive, they are going to have to change their behaviour dramatically.
No one knows how the melomys got to Bramble cay a small island 31 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea, but they did. In 2015 they became the first mammal to go extinct purely as a result of climate change, as their little island home at the end of the great barrier reef sink beneath the waves.
In 1978 a few hundred were counted, in 1998 just 100. In 2002 and 2004 just a few dozen were found. The amount of lady plants shrink by 97% between 2004-2014, and when a survey was carried out in 2014 no specimens could be found.
