*Last week, the National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) approved five permits, or, Incidental Harassment Authorizations (IHC) for oil and gas seismic surveys along much of the Atlantic Seaboard.
It’s the first oil and gas exploration in the U.S. Atlantic in 30 years. The approval, which requires a final consent from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, has hideous consequences for millions of sea creatures.
*According to famed conservationist E.O. Wilson, we have entered the Age of Eremocene, or, the age of loneliness. The whales have gone quiet. The mammals, the birds and the insects have vanished. 138 acres of ancient forests are felled every minute. The Man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction is occurring as much as 10,000 times the rate of the previous five others. Hideous.
*National Geographic’s Science Fair, directed by Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster, is an uplifting and inspirational film on the world’s future scientists.
Today, science is everywhere and within everything in our Man-made culture. In fact each month, the average child in the industrialized developed world sends 3,000 texts.
Who amongst us (that are old enough) wasn’t intrigued by the science that enabled Man’s first step on the moon?”
When you enter a dark room and flip the light switch, or flush the toilet many times each day, that’s science and engineering at a rudimentary level. Yet, most of us could not exist without these old technologies. Never mind how inextricably attached everyone is to the internet.
Keep Reading
*With 150,000 acres scorched and almost 12,000 homes in ruins, the touching animal stories from the Camp Fire in northern California, remind us of gratitude especially for the many intrepid animal rescuers.
Our pets are remarkable friends. Their unconditional love is indeed a treasure trove. Animals are unstinting companions. For some people, pets are their closest family members.
Hundreds of animal rescuers in both the north and the south of the state (which simultaneously experienced the Woolsey Fire) worked ceaselessly to help both domesticated and wild animals affected by the hellacious firestorms.
There are many heartwarming stories arising from California’s most devastating conflagration, the Camp Fire. Allow me to share just a few of them with you.
*Nature is irrefutably exhibiting the unavoidable effects from extracting and combusting fossil fuels: Death. The latest shocking reminder is the record number of fatalities from last week’s northern California firestorms.
In the meantime, the Paris-based International Energy Agency recently projected that by 2025 the U.S. will produce half the global oil and gas from its water-poisoning fracking bonanza.
Here’s what we know: Burning fossil fuels has caused atmospheric oxygen to plummet. Keep Reading
*250,000 Californians from the north and the south are currently evacuated from their communities. At least 48 people are dead with more than 7,000 structures in ruins. It’s five weeks before Christmas and once again firestorms are raging across the Golden State.
Six years of unrelenting drought in tandem with elevated (ocean and air) temperatures are most certainly a deadly combination.
Since 2010, more than 130 million mature trees have perished across the state. Water-starved coniferous trees communicate their plight to bark beetles. The insects deliver the coup de grâce.
In fact, across western North America this is a pattern that’s all too familiar: 30 billion mature dead trees. Instead of removing CO2 and giving off oxygen, gigantic tree graveyards are decomposing and contributing to the overburdened and overheated atmosphere.
No trees. No life.
*Each year, Man steals $400 billion of wild animals and ancient forests from Nature. In fact, 15 percent, or, 1.14 billion people, rise each morning to kill the planet. Much of this rapacious looting is controlled by organized crime.
Since 1970, 60% of wildlife on land is gone and it’s far worse under the sea, according to the 2018 Living Planet Report from the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF). Insect populations, too, have crashed. 250 billion metric tons annually of deadly Man-made chemicals along with the accelerated ocean heat from combustion of fossil fuels have taken a hideous toll on all earth-bound life.
Beyond toxic chemicals and unrelenting heat, destruction of habitat is also accelerating globally. For example, 104 football fields a minute of ancient forests are razed, 24/7/365.
The most perfect flying rivers and CO2 warehouses, the planet’s terrestrial climate stabilizers, are under siege like never before.
No ancient forests. No animals. No insects. No freshwater. No life.
*Since 2014, more than 872 of our brethren, the cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) have been captured and enslaved in Chinese dolphinariums, or, amusement aquariums. It’s a horrid industry that pays millions in cash to Japanese and Russian mafia to supply live cetaceans.
Already there are 244 Chinese dolphinariums with Haichang Ocean Park, Guangzhou R & F Properties, Dalian Shengya and Chimelong Group driving rapid expansion of this inhumane industry. 36 new Chinese cetacean prisons are scheduled to open between 2019-2021.
This insatiable lust for more dolphins is stoking the monstrous drive-hunts that are taking place at this very moment off the shores of Taiji, Japan. Every morning, my colleagues at Sea Shepherd, the Dolphin Project and others awaken to bear witness to the cold-blooded and diabolical slaying and capturing of dolphins and porpoises.
*Bats are extraordinary pollinators and insect-eating creatures. These admirable masterpieces are the unsung heroes of the night sky. The last week of October is known as Bat Week. It’s a time to celebrate these beauties and to recognize their plight.
Bats have inhabited the planet for 50 million years. There are approximately 1,300 bat species worldwide, including 47 in the U.S. and 18 kinds in Canada.
*The world’s remaining ancient forests are breathtaking “flying rivers.” They move water on almost inconceivably large scales. The ancient forests are also vital medicine chests for the bees.
The oceans are the main drivers of climate, yet new information reveals just how critical ancient forests are at creating climate and influencing it across a continent and around the globe. When ancient forests are razed, all hell breaks loose halfway around the world.
*As 2018 draws to a close our hot, overcrowded ravaged planet is bellowing a lucid S.O.S. distress code. It’s painfully obvious yet conveniently dismissed by the world leaders and the international bankers.
The latest United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report forewarns of pending extreme heat, drought, firestorms, floods, loss of coral reefs and the Amazon rainforest as well as food insecurity unless immediate actions are undertaken. Keep Reading
*Wolves are doctors of the land. Today, in America these doctors are being decimated at an accelerated rate.
This is a heartbreaking bloodbath. What man does to the wolves, he does to himself.
No wolves. No forests. No life.
*Today, most of civilization exists within congested smoggy cities. Fossil fuel air pollution, including filthy diesel fumes loaded with fine particles of nitric oxide and nitrogen oxide, are quickly crippling, dogs, bees and man.
About two decades ago in Mexico City, my colleagues began investigating an increasing number of howling frightened dogs that grew disoriented and incapable of recognizing their owners.
They examined the dog’s brains and found them coated with the protein amyloid beta, or, plaque, linked with Alzheimer’s disease. The dogs, they concluded after further experiments, had lost their minds from breathing the exhaust fumes of fossil fuel combustion.
*In 2018, we learned the ubiquitous extent of fossil fuel poisons. It is now so egregious that before a human fetus is even born, it’s toxic from fossil fuel pollution.
In April, the Health Effects Institute yearly State of the Global Air revealed that 95 percent of all humans, or, 7.2 billion people, are non-stop inhaling putrid fossil fuel air above the World Health Organization’s “safe level.”
Also in April, a research team led by the University of Montana found that 99.5 percent of 203 autopsies from Mexico City, ages ranging from 11 months to 40 years old, possessed the telltales of Alzheimer’s disease in their brainstems from breathing poisonous fossil fuel air. The scientists concluded that those children and young adults also faced an elevated risk of suicide.
Children in cities are at risk of losing their minds from breathing air, their birthright. Hideous.
*Another dead wolf, J50, of the Salish Sea, the third one in 2018. The Pacific Northwest’s picturesque sea is being lambasted by a man-made accelerated climate crisis, hideous poisons and the man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction, which has shifted into overdrive.
The Salish Sea is a global hotspot for acidification, a glaring symptom of burning more subsidized climate-destroying fossil fuels. As the sea absorbs more carbon dioxide from fossil fuels it’s rapidly deforming shellfish and coral reefs because acid melts calcium carbonate the backbone of both shells and reefs. The Salish Sea web of life is quickly unravelling.
At the top of the Salish Sea food chain, the critically endangered pods (J,K,L) of Southern Resident orcas are wasting away. The past 18 months have been horrendous.”
*The Great Barrier Reef is not only the largest network of coral reefs on the globe, but also it’s a glorious cornucopia of biological diversity, or, life.
The Reef is under siege. It’s coming undone at an unprecedented rate from accelerated man-made heatwaves, super coal tanker incessant noise, the Sixth Mass Extinction and a horrendous onslaught of man-made long-lasting toxic chemicals. Keep Reading
*Sea turtles have swum the seas for a couple hundred million years. Today all seven species are in dire shape, especially in Mexico and Australia.
According to University of British Columbia’s renowned fisheries biologist, Professor Daniel Pauley, “between 10 and 100 trillion oceanic creatures a year are being destroyed by man.” Incomprehensible.
![Shark caught in fishing net. [Extinction of Sea Turtles]](https://www.slantedonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/2018-08-Sea-Turtles-Shark-in-Net.png)
Fisheries are annihilating everything in the seas. There are 13 million miles of longlines, or, enough line for 27 return trips to the moon, with almost 2 billion legal and illegal hooks. In 2000 alone, University of Duke scientists reported that longlines mutilated 200,000 loggerhead and 50,000 leatherback sea turtles. Horrendous.
It’s not just these deadly hooked lines that are the culprits. The conservation group World Animal Protection estimates that each year fisheries disdainfully discard and/or abandon 640,000 metric tons of nets, which become ghost nets. Not only do these ghastly entanglements suffocate 308,000 cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises), but also many thousands of sea turtles.
*3,000 intrepid firefighters are battling more than 500 apocalyptic firestorms spread across the massive forested Canadian province of British Columbia.
Thick smoke is blanketing millions of urban dwellers from Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), to Seattle, WA. That smoke has spread thousands of miles eastward across Canada and the U.S.
For the elderly, the children, the outdoor workers and anyone afflicted with respiratory, e.g. asthma, or heart ailments, it’s a crisis. They are advised to stay indoors and keep windows shut tight. It’s a nightmare for all the animals. While this year’s area of scorched forests (about a million acres) is far less than the record of last year (more than three million acres), BC is in a state of emergency. Keep Reading
*There is no justification for slowly and diabolically torturing the cetaceans (whales, dolphins porpoises) in the 21st century.
In the midst of an accelerating Sixth Mass Extinction, 400,000 cetaceans are senselessly destroyed each year.
The hideous images of the current Danish Faroe Islands whale bloodbath staining the North Atlantic Ocean are unacceptable. Keep Reading
*A new book “Unprecedented Crime” by climate scientist Dr Peter Carter and researcher Elizabeth Woodworth is a vital addition to our understanding the climate in crisis.
This is a well researched and written account of the present fossil fuel-induced catastrophe befalling all life on Earth. It’s a story interwoven with reverence for our mother, Nature. With over 100 years of combined research experience, this book is rich.
The more subsidized climate-wrecking fossil fuels burned, the more extreme weather occurrences. From the horrendous hurricanes to the epic floods, heatwaves, droughts, firestorms and terrifying tornadoes, they all piled up in 2017.