Mass Extinctions
By Mark Howell
Amazingly, even in Key West and even to this day, there is still at least one media executive who apparently insists on calling global warming a “hoax.”
We do feel compassion for lost souls but none for their thinking itself.
The rationale behind climate denial is linked to to a companion denial over species extinction, which humankind has clung to for most if its history, including through recent centuries, despite the evidence of the fossil record.
Luke Mitchell, who teaches at New York University and City University of New York, writes that today’s paleontologists and geologists agree that Earth has experienced five major extinctions and a dozen or so lesser ones.
The first occurred 450 years ago, during the late Ordovician period and the most lethal 200 million years later during the Permian-Triassic — “the great dying when nine out of 10 marine species vanished.”
The most terrifying of the mass extinctions, however, was the fifth, the Cretaceous-Paleogene incident that began 65 million years ago when an asteroid the size of Manhattan smashed into the area of today’s Yucatan peninsular, southwest of today’s Key West and giving us the circular shape of the Gulf of Mexico.
It had the explosive impact of 100 million hydrogen bombs.
Peter Ward, a paleobiologist, describes it this way: “The worst day on Earth, when the world’s global forest burned to the ground. Absolute darkness encircled the planet for six months and acid rain seared the shells off of calcareous plankton and a tsunami picked up all the dinosaurs on the vast, Cretaceous coastal plains, drowned them and then hurled their carcasses against whatever high elevations finally subsided the monster waves.”
It is now dawning on scientists that we are at present in the middle of another event, perhaps the sixth mass extinction, “but recognition has been slow in coming.” Comments Prof. Mitchell.
Back in 1963, Colin Bertram, a marine biologist and polar explorer, warned that human expansion could destroy “most of the remaining larger mammals of the world, very many of the birds, the larger reptiles, and so many more both great and small.”
In 1979, the biologist Norman Myers published “The Sinking Ark,” backing up that theory with statistics.
In 1991, the palaeologist David Jablonski published his findings in Science Magazine that the current rate of species loss compared with that of previous mass extinctions.
In 1998, a survey by the American Museum of Natural History found that seven out of 10 biologists suspected that another mass extinction was underway.
In 2008, two of those biologists, David Wake and Vance Vredenburg, published their paper, “Are We in the Midst of a Mass Extinction?”
In 2012, a team of biologists and palaeologists writing in Nature agreed that we most certainly are: “If we continue at the current rate of destruction, about three-quarters of all living species will be lost within the next few centuries.”
Concludes Elizabeth Kolbert, author of this year’s “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” the prime culprits behind today’s unfolding extinction are human population growth; habitat conversion; impacts of exotic species; new pathogens; and, most egregiously, global warming and its consequences.”
Yet another study, published just seven years ago, itemizes some of those consequences as they most concern us here in the Keys. The 2007 study estimates that one third of all reef-building corals, a third of all sharks and rays, a fifth of all reptiles and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion. Finally, nature writer David Quammen foresees that falling survival rates in the mammalian world (excluding humans) anticipates a “weedy world” for our nation as a whole, a landscape in which pigeons, rats and squirrels live but little else survives.”
The first time a toilet bowl ever appeared in a Hollywood movie was in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” of 1960.
Quote for the Week:
I know the colors of the desert sky
are made of dust. Aridity
can force the juniper to grow
so many berries the mountain bluebirds
are drunk for a week. Let it be so for me.
Send whirlwinds if you must.
I’ll stay within whatever you ordain
to purple my endeavor. Give me a day,
an hour, a breath, a word.
Give me one word.
— Sandy McKinney,
“Logos”
[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]
February 2014 I searched on KW with my binoculars for robins. I found none but found some previously in Ft Myers area. A local Conch told me that robins feared flying over water. True?
In the 1970’s the famous psychic and author Joan Grant wrote, “Only when men think of themselves as members of a species will they evolve as a species, and increase the scope both of themselves and the resources of their environment. …The effect of a species on its environment is a sign of the evolution or devolution of the species.”