The Life Slant - Page 9

Age of Extinction: Cowardly Hunters Massacre 200 Wisconsin Wolves

Many people loathe trophy hunters. Hunters have sullied the word ‘conservation’ and wreaked horrible pain and suffering upon the animal kingdom. Moreover, these worthless planet-killers are hastening the man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction.

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The Trump administration inflicted tremendous damage on Mother Earth, national monuments, old-growth-forests and our brethren and sistren, the animals. See The Gen Z Emergency for gory details.

Since 1933, wolves have been persecuted in the United States. Forty-seven years ago the Endangered Species Act saved the gray wolves in the lower 48 states from extinction.

killing wolves
Wolves have two layers of fur, an undercoat and a top coat, which allow them to survive in temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. In warmer weather they flatten their fur to keep cool.
Image credit: Public News Service
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Mayday, 5000 Bee Species Missing In Action

Bees are mysterious, smart and indispensable beings. They have stood the test of time for a 100 million years on this planet. Bees are in dire trouble today, and we know the main culprit all too well – many, many dozens of billions of pounds of man-made nerve poisons.

bees are in trouble
A 100 million year old Burmese bee entombed in amber.
Image credit: George Poinar

There are about 400,000 kinds of flowering plants that depend upon pollinators in order to successfully reproduce. Bees, hoverflies, moths, butterflies, beetles, bats, lizards, primates and birds pollinate the plants. About 20,000 bee species undertake the lion’s share of cross-pollinating the plant kingdom.

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Look How They Massacred My Game

If you never saw the Purple People Eaters browbeat quarterbacks or Joe Greene and the Steel Curtain blank opponent after opponent; if you never saw Walter Payton deliver crushing blows to prospective tacklers or Gayle Sayers dance his way to the goal line; if you never saw Paul Hornung covered in mud or an exhausted Kellen Winslow dragged off the field; if you’re not sure who the Super Bowl trophy is named after or who George Halas is or why the AFC trophy is named after Lamar Hunt, then to you NFL football may seem great, just fine, normal.  But to those of us who have been fans long enough to remember when the game was still football, today’s NFL is a sad and pale reminder of better days gone by.

New NFL Rules

From 1948 to 1960 a linebacker named Hardy Brown terrorized NFL offenses using a devastating right shoulder, which he used the way a boxer delivers a six-inch knockout punch, sending player after player from field to hospital.  During an interview for NFL Films in the 70s, after rule changes began to calm the game down, Hardy called the current state of football “a sissy game”.  As much as we hated to see him go in 1991, it’s probably better that Hardy never got a chance to see today’s much sissy-er version of the game he loved to play.

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Japan Drowns ‘Hope’, A Brutal Whale Murder

A horrible whale massacre took place last month near the infamous town of Taiji, south central Japan, renowned for its cruelty. It sickened (and rightfully so) millions of empathetic people as they helplessly witnessed cold-blooded executioners in-action.

Japan Drowns Whale

Try as it may, the minke whale could not escape from these wretched penned fishing nets.
Image credit: Ren Yabuki/LIA

On Christmas Eve 2020, a minke whale unsuspectingly swam into a pen of stationary nets near Taiji.  Ren Yabuki, an animal activist with the Life Investigation Agency, fortuitously saw it. Using a drone, he documented the whale’s plight and enlisted the global support of animal lovers to free our brethren and sistren of the sea.

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Ocean Heat, An Elephant In The Living Room

The oceans store more than 90 percent of all combustion heat. In 2020, record fossil fuel and wood pellet heat in the ocean was the energetic equivalent of detonating 315,536,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. The energy within the oceans drives the climate, which is becoming less predictable and more violent.

Planetary ice is important for reflecting incoming solar radiation back to outer space. As the world’s temperature rises, planetary ice is in peril. In fact, Earth’s ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s. The world has lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice since 1994. That is enough meltwater to fill 10.2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or, cover the entire state of California in ~200 feet of water.

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Climate Victims: Whales And Sharks

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The year 2020 set another horrible heat record in the oceans, which make up 99 percent of the planet’s biosphere, or, where life can exist. Many billions of our brethren and sistren, the animals, are already dead. It’s simply too hot.

The ocean heat is in lockstep with burning fossil fuels and wood pellets. In 2020, the world’s oceans absorbed the equivalent heat to dropping 10 Hiroshima atom bombs every second of the year (20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 {sextillion} joules).

Climate Victims
Since the 1990s the heat in the oceans has taken off as the amount of fossil fuel combustion has more than quadrupled.
Image credit: Kevin Trenberth

Allow me to remind you that the oceans drive Earth’s climate. Hence we are amid a worsening man-made climate crisis. It is never just about humans though. We share this glorious blue planet with a couple of million other life forms. All life is interrelated and we need everything that is left, alive.

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Poisoned Great Barrier Reef, Gruesome Green Turtles

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I was taught to respect my elders. The world’s largest coral reef system, or, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), is about 8,000 old. It is sacred, yet it has been horribly abused. Consequently, the GBR is terminally ill.

Great Barrier Reef
Burning fossil fuels and wood pellets and the resultant increased marine heatwaves are sweeping the planet and laying waste to reefs. Coral graveyards are expanding at a terrorsome rate. 
Image credit: Brett Monroe Garner
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Fossil Fuels Torture Dolphins to Death

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From Florida to Western Australia, our brethren and sistren, the bottlenose dolphins, are dying horribly. The culprits are the moneyed, banker-backed, government subsidized villains: Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Coal.

Each second, the heat from combusting fossil fuels is the equivalent of dropping five Hiroshima-style bombs into the oceans. Since 1994, that’s 3.6 billion atomic bombs worth of fossil fuel heat absorbed by the oceans. The oceans drive Earth’s habitable climate.

For every 1oC (1.8oF) increase, Earth’s atmosphere holds seven percent more moisture. Hence there are more extreme climate rain events today compared with a quarter century ago.

Fossil Fuels and Dolphins
Climate hurricane Harvey (2017) unloaded 27 trillion gallons of rainfall onto Houston, or, enough water to fill almost 41 million Olympic swimming pools. 
Image credit: Vox
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Aussies Dig Alberta’s Coal

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Alberta’s expensive, dirty, planetary-fricasseeing, water-ruining tar sands is a non-starter even with many billions of taxpayers subsidies that failed to prop up multi-national corporations with a nationalized pipeline. And now, 330 billion gallons of hideous carcinogenic poisons from giant tailing ponds (visible from space) are seeping into the waterways that empty into the Western Arctic Ocean.

Coal mining in Canada
Alberta’s tar sands are the world’s most destructive and poisonous Big Oil operation.
Image credit: Garth Lenz

If gooey water-contaminating oil deposits won’t work then how about dynamiting mountaintops, digging up coal and sullying another 100 billion gallons of alpine and glacier meltwater that eventually drains into Hudson Bay, the Eastern Arctic Ocean?

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Fossil Fuel Retribution: Climate Hurricanes

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The heat from fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion stored within the oceans (equivalent to dropping five Hiroshima atomic bombs every five seconds nonstop) is supercharging these god-awful climate hurricanes and climate fires.

Climate Hurricanes
Climate Hurricane Iota decimated life in its wake. It was a record 30th named tropical storm within the Atlantic during 2020. 
Image credit: Luis Guillermo Ferrebus/AP

Today, tropical storms are rapidly intensifying into hurricanes and typhoons. In addition, global heating is slowing down these tempests, which means they have become more torrential, violent and deadly.

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‘Beeautiful’ Buzzing Sistren

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Gen Zs (<26 year olds) are rescuing and breaking new ground within the queendom of our sistren, the bees.

Honeybees have a remarkably complex language. It includes dancing, headbutting and scaling vibrations. Each intriguing maneuver conveys specific and precise meaning. For example, when honeybees encounter giant Asian hornets their vibrational dialect quickly pulses up the scale. That is, the higher the pitch, the greater the peril.

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Honeybees can communicate danger better than any other of the 900,000 or so kinds of insects. That’s why scientists are paying close attention to the bees because they spotlight toxicity within the environment. It’s high time for the lawmakers globally to ban all these deadly nerve poisons that are killing bees and birds, e.g., neonicotinoids, sulfoxaflors, flupyradifurone and chlorpyrifos.

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Your #GlobalHeating Battle Line

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From climate fires and insect epidemics to megadroughts and climate hurricanes, man-made global heating is terrifying! All hands on deck.

This Monday evening, satellite data from Hurricane Eta revealed sustained winds of 190 mph (306 kph) at its core. This climate hurricane in the North Atlantic was the strongest storm so far recorded, and the only Category 5 hurricane ever to form in the Atlantic during November.

Global Heating
Eta was the twelfth hurricane and the record 28th Atlantic storm in 2020. Image Credit: Tropical Tidbits

On Tuesday, Eta delivered an unsurvivable 21-foot (6.4 m) storm surge to northern Nicaragua and southern Honduras. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), nearly 500,000 children (Gen Zs) were in danger of becoming climate refugees.

Global Heating
The Saopin Bridge along highway CA-13 in Atlántida, Honduras, buckled and then collapsed from an extreme deluge of 40 inches (1016mm) of rainfall on Wednesday (Nov. 4, 2020). Image Credit: Twitter/Policia Honduras

Meanwhile, Eta has left the ravaged landfall and is drawing energy from the warm Caribbean Sea while moving slowly northeast towards the Florida Keys.

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Nature’s Harbinger of Heat

Why has Earth’s climate changed so radically in such a short span of time? The elephant in the living room is combustion heat from fossil fuels and wood pellets chopped up from old-growth forests. That accumulated heat is being stored deep within the oceans. Over the previous 25 years, that heat is the equivalent of dropping 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bombs. The oceans drive Earth’s climate, which has become unstable with both higher highs and lower lows.

Even to the untrained eye, the effects of climate instability are highly conspicuous across western North America’s cold tolerant and hardy coniferous forests.

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Age of Extinction: Massacring Sharks Won’t Rid COVID-19

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The pharmaceutical gold rush to invent an antidote for the highly infectious airborne coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has set its sights on devouring the most perfect fish to swim the seas: the shark.

Some of the 176 coronavirus vaccine trials are using an oily animal hydrocarbon found in deepsea shark livers called squalene. Squalene is believed to improve the human response of the antigen (toxin) within the dose.

Sharks and Covid-19 vaccine
Great white sharks are the largest predatory fish on Earth.
Image credit: Michael Muller
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Trump Greenlights Destruction of America’s Amazon-like Rainforest

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Nestled along 500 miles of Alaska’s verdant Inside Passage there are spellbinding skyscraper Sitka spruce, giant western hemlocks, colossal  western redcedars and weathered 1,800-year-old yellow cedars. The hallowed old-growth temperate rainforest is ruled by the monarchs of nature, three-quarter ton grizzly bears. Altogether, some 17 million dripping, breathing, climate-making Mother Earth forested acres are guarding a whopping eight percent of all the carbon held in the United States. The Tongass National Forest is America’s Amazon rainforest. It contains about one-third of the sanctified old-growth temperate forests left on our man-besieged planet. That priceless rainforest is every American (and planetary) Gen Zs birthright, and Donald J. Trump, the chief promoter of extinction, has just signed off on the death warrants for more than half of it, some 9 million acres.

Yellow cedar tree rings are living museums. They provide an unparalleled looking glass into the climate when the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great established his capital at Constantinople in 330CE (much later becoming Istanbul, Turkey).
Image Credit: Reddit
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Vengeance: Climate Fires

* As I’m writing, the air is putrid and acrid. A fog of death has cloaked Washington, Oregon and California. Climate fires have incinerated about five million acres – a once-in-a-generation-event – and they are far from over.

The enormity and ferocity of these man-made, global heating fires is gobsmacking. The climate has reached a planetary tipping point. The only unknown is how we survive it – especially with Republicans intoxicated on Trumpism, recklessly reassured by Rupert Murdoch’s science-denying talking heads.

Four hundred and fifty million honeybees were burned to death during the December 2019 Australian climate-driven bushfires. Image credit: ABC News

*My upcoming book Gen Z Emergency has chronicled the hideous 2019-2020, worst-ever, Australian climate fires. More than one billion of our brethren and sistren, the animals, were cremated. This does not include frogs and insects, which would have elevated that number into several billions.

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China Goes Viral

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China goes viral

*The global economy has suffered and enormous punch to the gut, and the economies of many nations are coughing and wheezing while dozens of their citizens perish. The culprit in this calamity is the Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19. The origin of this pandemic (empowered by the global economy) has been traced to the city of Wuhan, in Hubei province, China, where it emerged in December of 2019.

Actually, according to Helen Davidson of “The Guardian,” COVID-19 was first detected on November 17 of 2019, and by March 13, 2020, had killed 4,702 people. The Chinese government only admitted that there was human-to-human contact on January 21 of 2020. Doctor Ai Fen of the Wuhan Central hospital lost four of her fellow doctors to the virus and is guilty of “criticizing hospital authorities for suppressing early warnings of the outbreak.” To further add to the global mayhem, Dr. Fen and whistleblower ophthalmologist Li Wenliang were risking their jobs as well as detention to reveal to the public about the conditions in Wuhan. The global economy advances (and kills) everyone equally, if not for the preparations by their nation. Keep Reading

Covid-19: The Chicken or the Egg

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*What came first is debatable when asked about the chicken and the egg. However, when we ask what happened first, labor or corporations, the answer is labor.

The president has claimed, “I am facing the biggest decision of my life.” He is referring to getting people back to work as our economy has taken a big hit because of the pandemic. Many of us were not around during the Great Depression when people were out of work; there were food shortages, confusion, health risks, and more. None of us want to repeat that era. As Americans, we must support cautious and well thought out legislation on the mobilization of our economy.

Living in a Democracy claiming freedoms has been one of the many issues creating issues on our health care providers, enforcement, getting to solutions, and understanding the impact and meaning of a pandemic. Keep Reading

Yellow Lanterns Welcoming Spring

*A magnificent plant called yellow lantern is flowering along the west coast. It’s a vibrant vernal beauty.

These western inhabitants thrive in rich mucky, wet swamps near red alders, Sitka spruce, western redcedars and grand firs.

Yellow Lanterns
It’s exhilarating to see these bursting Sitka oxygen-makers. Image credit: Reese Halter

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