Shorebirds, the World’s Greatest Travelers, Face Extinction

A worldwide catastrophe is underway among an extraordinary group of birds — the marathon migrants we know as shorebirds. Numbers of some species are falling so quickly that many biologists fear an imminent planet-wide wave of extinctions.

A common snipe caught in an illegal net. Thousands of shorebirds
 like this one are entangled this way along the coast of China.

These declines represent the No. 1 conservation crisis facing birds in the world today. Climate change, coastal development, the destruction of wetlands and hunting are all culprits. And because these birds depend for their survival, as we do, on the shorelines of oceans, estuaries, rivers, lakes, lagoons and marshes, their declines point to a systemic crisis that demands our attention, for our own good.

No doubt you’ve seen some of these birds while on vacation at the beach, skittering back and forth along the cusp of waves as they peck with their long beaks for tiny sand flies or the eggs of horseshoe crabs. They can seem comic in their frenetic exertions, tiny Charlie Chaplins in bird suits.

But these birds are remarkable in ways that defy not only belief but scientific understanding: They are, by far, the planet’s most extraordinary global travelers. Worldwide, about 70 shorebird species travel from the top of the world to its very bottom and back each year. The smallest weigh barely an ounce. Each species has its own story, but in every case these annual migrations are among nature’s most epic dramas.

Read the opinion piece from The New York Times - “Shorebirds, the World’s Greatest Travelers, Face Extinction.”

Climate change: 1-5c closer than we imagine

Global warming of 1.5°C is imminent, likely in just a decade from now. That’s the stunning conclusion to be drawn from a number of recent studies.

So how does that square with the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” (above a late-nineteenth-century baseline)?

It doesn’t.

The Paris text was a political fix in which grand words masked inadequate deeds. The voluntary national emission reduction commitments since Paris now put the world on a path of 3.4°C of warming by 2100, and more than 5°C if high-end risks including carbon-cycle feedbacks are taken into account.

Read the RenewEconomy story by David Spratt - “Climate change: 1-5c closer than we imagine.”

Counterflow: Alternative Facts and Global Warming

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. But no one is entitled to their own facts.

Installed capacity values for 2015 (left column in each pair) and
those used in the Jacobson studies (right column in each pair). The 100%
wind, solar, and hydroelectric studies propose installing technologies
 at a scale equivalent to or greater than the entire capacity of the existing
electricity generation infrastructure. The other category includes coal,
natural gas, and nuclear, all of which are removed by 2050.

IMHO, the facts are that climate change is happening, is man-made, and is a threat to mankind. 

How much of a threat, and how imminent the threat, are things we can talk about.

The big question is what to do about it. There are some who peddle the false hope that we can fix climate change on the cheap.

No. Climate change is not going to be fixed on the cheap. Sugarcoating the requisite effort isn’t doing us any favors.

Which brings us to the widely publicized 2015 claim by four academics from Stanford University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley that we can power the entire economy at “low cost” with just wind, water and solar (WWS) resources, using electricity and hydrogen as the delivery systems. The study was led by Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, so let’s call them the Jacobson Group.[1]

Read the story by Steve Huntoon on RTO Insider - “Counterflow: Alternative Facts and Global Warming.”