Each day 100 living species become extinct, 1,000 acres of peat bogs are excavated and 150,000 acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed. Each day, 2 million tons of toxic waste is dumped in to our rivers and seas, 22 million tons of oil are extracted and 100 million tons of greenhouse gases are released.
Today large scale habitat destruction, massive soil depletion, extensive deforestation lead to worldwide disruption of natural cycles and the irreversibility of extinction. Today instances of mass extinction occur with greater frequency, greater rapidity and greater impact than at any other time.
This destruction, damage and loss comes at an enormous cost.
A recent report for the United Nations has found that 3,000 of the world’s biggest corporations caused $2.2 trillion of ecocide in 2008. Read more here
A coal mine. Coordinates: South 03' 09", East 115' 18".
@David S. You’re being very naive if you believe for one moment the so called “deniers” will be spared by these lunatics. The agenda behind this legislation has nothing to do with improving the lot a humanity. It has more to do with control. No one in their right mind denies deforestation of the amazon is scandalous. But the insidious agenda behind their machinations are revealed not only through their attemps to character assassinate some of the leading climatologists who disagree with them(Professor Lindzen at MIT for example) but also by labelling people who disagree with them as deniers. When I was young I often heard people expressing their shock at how the Germans allowed Hitler to seduce them and lead them to the brink of total destruction. The same applies to the youth today who are being brainwashed by a cadre of left wing ideologues which will have even more dangerous and far-reaching consequences for the world if we let them succeed.
Considering the more than 90 million of tons of greenhouse gasses belched daily into our atmosphere, the terrible human and ecosystem consequences resulting from this, and the apocalyptic risks of continuing to emit greenhouse gasses at such destructive levels, those doubting that Global warming is ecocide simply reflect the success of the powerful lobbies in spreading doubt and confusion on this topic.
I like this quote from James Cameron
“Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their ass I’m not sure they could hear me”
Let’s make it clear. There is global warming – the signs are very clear. And yes there is a maquination exploiting and fueling the anti global warming movement (See Annie Leonard’s Story of Cap and Trade). At least in Europe governments are pushing “green taxes” and forcing citizens to pay for the industrialists inertia. You are already paying for water. Is this one step towards paying for air?
But don’t let this distract us from the fact that we are polluting our planet disproportionately – and that CO2 (nevermind methane) is a part of it no matter how small.
i like the way George Carlin the comiedian put it… “if you think a few plastic bags, and some tin cans are going to hurt the earth… i know what it is, the erarth has been here for billions of years and will continue to be here for billions of years. when all is said and done, the earth will be fine… its the the people that are fucked!”
Rest in peace George…
The discussion over whether global warming is happening or not will be disputed for eons – whilst I for one believe it is happening none of us have time to deal with the ‘distractors’ who need ‘convincing’.
No reasonable person can agree the rape of the earth’s resources is acceptable – and the earth is not a bottomless pit. We may have many serious adverse weather conditions to deal with before we even get to the bottom of the pit! If we can’t live one-planet lives now, what hope is there for the extra billions arriving in the next few decades?! Each of us need to take responsibility for our actions and shame others more selfish than ourselves into doing the same.
That claim that 100 species a day go extinct does not sound remotely plausible. It sounds like an extrapolation from Wilson’s work on extinction rates which was recently severely criticised in Nature journal.
Can anyone here name me half a day’s species – 50 species – that have gone extinct in the last YEAR, never mind the last day, week, or month?
Anyone?
Re: Mike’s challenge (Dec 30, 2011)on extinction rates.
Mike you’re right that it likely is lower than E O Wilson predicted, however rather than asking for species’ names, you might ask if the error is significant.
A New Scientist article (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028136.300-calculations-may-have-overestimated-extinction-rates.html) describing the study that reported the error ended with those same skeptical scientists saying the difference is essentially negligible. :
“The pair’s analysis explains why. Using the reverse SAR method, biologists have assumed that a species is lost with the destruction of an area of habitat equivalent to the area needed to first encounter it. But in reality, the species is lost only with destruction of the habitat area that includes every individual of the species, which is always larger. Consequently, the SAR method loses species too fast.
The duo developed a model relating extinction rate instead to the entire area occupied by a species. Using the forest data, and extensive data sets on birds, they found that the SAR gave extinction rates that were between 83 and 165 per cent higher than those their method produced (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09985).
Similarly detailed information does not exist for most of the world’s species, making it difficult to apply Hubbell and He’s model more generally. “As a rule of thumb, we might correct traditional extinction rates by dividing them by factor of 2 to 2.5,” says He.
Jean-Christophe Vié, deputy head of species survival at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, agrees better baseline data on species is badly needed. He says IUCN doesn’t use the SAR method. But, he points out, “a twofold miscalculation doesn’t make much difference to an extinction rate now 100 to 1000 times the natural background”.
Hubbell and He agree: “Mass extinction might already be upon us.”