Nature - Page 7

Fossil Fuel Pollution – Raging British Columbia Fires

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Fossil Fuel Pollution - Raging British Columbia Fires

*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.

Thick forest fire smoke is choking the southwest of British Columbia and the northwest of Washington state. Photo credit: NASA

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

Denmark’s Horrific Whale Bloodbath

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*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.

Faroe Islands Whale Bloodbath
This gruesome lust by Faroese for cetacean blood is cruel and inhumane. Photo credit: Alistair Ward, Triangle News

The hideous images of the current Danish Faroe Islands whale bloodbath staining the North Atlantic Ocean are unacceptable. Keep Reading

Unprecedented Crime, Climate in Crisis

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*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.

Unprecedented explains these events and then easily connects the dots.

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400,000 Whales, Dolphins, Porpoises Destroyed Annually

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*The fate of our brethren, the highly intelligent and sensitive cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises), is very grim. The hideous man-made Sixth Mass Extinction is accelerating more than 1,000 times faster than the previous five others.

Legendary biologist and animal activist Farley Mowat meticulously documented the human destruction of cetaceans in Sea of Slaughter. He estimated that humans murdered in excess of five million whales in 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.

Whaling in the Faroe Islands - Denmark
Whaling in the Faroe Islands, Denmark. Photo credit: Wikimedia

A more recent account by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) workers found that 2.9 million whales were slain between 1900-1999.

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Endless Hideous Heatwaves

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*Unrelenting heatwaves and hellfires are raging around the globe. August has commenced where July’s fury ended, more furnace-like heat.

This weekend Spain and Portugal may set an all-time European heat record eclipsing Athens, Greece, at 118.4 Fahrenheit (F), recorded on July 10, 1977.

Heatwaves in Europe
A humongous deadly heatwave is blanketing southwestern Europe. Photo credit: Met Office

It’s not just that a North African high is pumping scalding bone-dry air and mega tons of dust over the Iberian Peninsula. It’s also that the fire risk is extreme. 20 percent of Portugal is tinderbox dry.  11,000 intrepid firefighters and 56 water-bombing aircrafts are on emergency standby to combat forest fires.

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Hell-Fire: New Not Normal Firestorms

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*Help, the planet is on fire. From Siberia to the Congo Basin and the Arctic to Brazil and much in between, the onslaught of terrestrial and marine heatwaves is ubiquitous.

World Fire Map - Hell-fire

The oceans, which drive the climate, are supercharged with fossil fuel heat. 300 zettajoules of man-made heat have lambasted our planet. All life lives within a habitable range of temperatures. Once that range is exceeded, death occurs.

Instead of heeding thousands of scientific warnings urging all nations to reduce fossil fuel emissions, the opposite has occurred. Keep Reading

Climate Crisis – Heatwaves, Firestorms, Failing Crops

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Heatwave - Climate Change

*The planet is exhibiting telltale symptoms of our addiction to burning climate-wrecking fossil fuels: hellacious wildfires, unrelenting heat, sweltering Arctic temperatures and withering crops in northern Europe. We are in a climate crisis!

14 million people in the megalopolis of London braced themselves for record-breaking heat, dubbed “Furnace Friday.” Combustion-induced smog levels soared exacerbated by extreme heat. Intense demand for power had emergency services on red alert. Hospitals contended with many heatwave casualties. 90,000 lightning strikes, flash flooding and wildfires ravaged sun-baked Britain in an unforgettable week of Mother’s Nature’s unbridled overheated wrath.

Burnt Cars from Greece's July 2018 Firestorm - Climate Change
Apocalyptic fiery images of burnt cars from Greece’s firestorm of July 23, 2018. Photo credit: The Guardian

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Iceland’s Repugnant Whaling Bloodbath

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Blue Whale slaughtered - Iceland Whaling

*The direct action conservation movement Sea Shepherd revealed that on July 7, 2018, Iceland’s only fin whaling company, Hvalur hf, tortured and murdered an endangered blue whale.

For almost 50 years blues have been protected. During the 20th century, 360,000 of these glorious beauties were obliterated, including 29,000 in one year alone. Their populations have not rebounded.

Blue Whale - Iceland Whaling
At 100 feet long and 200 tons, blues are Nature’s priceless treasures.

Today, those that remain are filled with man-made poisons. The song of the largest animal to have ever lived on Earth is mostly drowned-out from humongous propellers of 100,000 ocean vessels daily, and incessant deafening air gun surveys for more climate-wrecking subsidized fossil fuels. A deaf whale is a dead whale. Keep Reading

Trees: Nature’s Masterpiece Burned For Heat

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Burning Masterpieces for Heat - Trees

*Would you dispassionately stand by and watch if every priceless Renaissance work of art in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, or Paris’s The Louvre, or 20th century masterpieces held in New York’s The Museum of Modern Art were burned for heat, one by one?

Ladies and gentlemen, our remaining ancient forests are indeed the equivalent to what the great master’s painted. They are Nature’s finest invaluable living, breathing masterpieces on our planet!

Trees - General Sherman Redwood
Each year, the largest tree on the globe, a sequoia named General Sherman, adds the comparable wood of one tree 1.5 feet (ft) wide by 65 ft high. Photo credit: Reese Halter

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Hot As Hell, Everywhere

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Hot as Hell - Boy in Water

*12 footballs fields a minute are incinerating in California’s latest wildfires,  adding to the 104 football fields furiously felled every minute, 24/7/365, on our ailing overheated planet.

When heat and drought collide firestorms erupt across the western United States and elsewhere on the globe. The higher the mercury soars, the quicker the fine fuels in the forest become tinder-dry kindling, especially amidst a drought.

Hot as Hell - Map
Photo Credit: Weather Channel

113 million Americans are blanketed by a massive heat dome. It stretches from the Mississippi Valley up to Philadelphia, Chicago and arches over to New York City, Boston, Baltimore and the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Temperatures are soaring into triple digits, 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit (F) above normal.
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Republicans Ransacking Nature

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Dead Fish - Photo credit: Warren Carlton

*Last week, along the southern border of America, refugees were separated and children were caged. Shock and outrage ricocheted around the world. Under the cover of chaos the Republicans pushed through two atrocious assaults on our mother, Nature.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order, which washed away President Barack Obama’s emphasis on ocean conservation and a plan to mitigate the climate in crisis.

Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Obama, Dr Jane Lubchenco said, “The policy reflects a shift from ‘use it without using it up’ to a very short-sighted and cavalier ‘use it aggressively and irresponsibly’.”

Trump’s policy increases slaughtering the ocean and it greenlights more subsidized fossil fuel seismic surveys. It’s in keeping with his election promise to unlock $50 trillion of U.S. oil and gas.

In so doing, Trump is impoverishing all sea life by increasing ocean acidity and decreasing ocean oxygen.

Dissolved Shells - Article: Ransacking Nature
53 percent of free-swimming snails sampled off the west coast of the U.S. had severely dissolved shells. Photo credit: NOAA

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Another Dead Wolf of the Sea

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Orcas at sunrise

*Over the weekend, Friday Harbor-based, Center for Whale Research, reported a missing Southern Resident orca, L92, presumed to be dead. That brings the critically endangered Southern Resident Salish Sea population down to 75, the lowest since 1984. It’s yet another man-made fiasco.

Allow me to remind you that we are amidst the human-driven Sixth Mass Extinction. It’s accelerating 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the five other mass extinctions. This looting of Nature has collided with the horrendous man-made persistent organic pollutants and 300 zettajoules of fossil fuel ocean heat driving the climate crisis.

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Silk Road to Hell

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Silk Road to Hell

*Despite our planetary climate emergency, the first and third largest economies on the globe are moving at the speed of light to extract and burn all available fossil fuels. The consequences are hideous.

China’s One Belt One Road, a 21st century Silk Road, is linking 71 countries with rapid rail-lines and new supertanker ports. China is spending $1 trillion on its infrastructure to add an additional $2.5 trillion to its 11 trillion GDP thereby narrowing the gap on the European Union, the second largest economy.

This plan requires mega zettajoules of fossil fuel energy. It’s an expansion of the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent, with 1,600 new coal power stations in 62 countries. Keep Reading

Bees – Nature’s Smart Superheroes

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*Bees are admirable little creatures, but they’re in terrible trouble.  Nearly 7.6 billion procreating humans need them in order to survive. That means you.

Twenty thousand species of bees pollinate about 85 percent of flowering plants, or 336,000 species, including most of the 80,000 kinds of trees on Earth. In fact, bees help us breathe because without plants, we couldn’t exist!

Bees: Forager Honeybee Nappnig
A forager honeybee napping on a lemon blossom petal in Hollywood, California.
Photo Credit: Dr. Reese Halter

Bees pollinate 75 percent of the world’s food crops and 100 percent of cotton, which clothes us. Bees account for as much as $577 billion in commerce per annum.
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While the North Pole Cooks, Trump Tweets

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Trump Tweets ignoring Climate

*There is a giant gulf today between those who promote and profit from fossil fuels, including Presidents Trump and Putin, and our life support systems – Nature. In my latest book, Save Nature Now, I’ve dubbed it “Black Gold Fever,” a contagious excitement over the riches of fossil fuels.

Consider this, there has never been such an accumulation of money on our planet controlled by a handful of people. The bulk of that wealth was derived from killing Nature at the expense of the health of our biosphere, the livable space occupied by all living organisms.

Instead of prudently protecting our home, since 1997 earthlings have burned as much fossil fuel as the previous 250 years. Keep Reading

Harpooning Nature’s Last Masterpieces: Endangered Whales

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Newly killed whales

The ocean-killing nation of Iceland intends on resuming commercial whaling on June 10. Its self-appointed quota of as many as 200 endangered fins, the second largest whales next to blues, is both illegal and morally wrong.

Whaling
Whaling is a gruesome bloodlust, a cowardly display of barbarism. Photo credit: alternews.com

In 1986, a world moratorium on commercial whaling took effect. Iceland, Norway and Japan refuse to abide by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Norway is currently the leading offender then followed by Japan and its whale-trading partner, Iceland.

The sheer brutality of chasing until over-heated and then lancing our brethren, the whales, with harpooned-tipped grenades is horrific. Keep Reading

Celebrating Cherry Blossoms

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Cherry Blossoms

Hundreds of thousands of visitors come from around the world to witness the spring majesty of Washington D.C.’s flowering cherry trees. This breathtaking event reminds us that trees are remarkable.

There are over 80,000 tree species and their progenitors have inhabited our planet for over 350 million years. They provide watersheds, supply drinking water for billions of people, protect cities from stormwater runoff, and reduce cooling costs to our homes and buildings by as much as 40 percent. City trees also absorb mega-tons of air pollutants each year.

Trees and ancient forests are superlative carbon dioxide warehouses. In return, ancient forests provide more than one of every three breaths of oxygen. Ancient forests provide invaluable habitat for animals. They are also vanguards of some of the most potent cancer, coronary and pain medicines known to science.

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Chemical Chaos in the Ocean – the Death of Dolphins and Sea Turtles

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Ocean Pollution

Dolphins and sea turtles are in dire jeopardy. Necropsies, or autopsies performed on animals, show that as poisons are brimming in the oceans, animal deaths are piling up.

Over the previous several months, hundreds of scrawny, frightened and bloated gray dolphins have been stranded along Rio de Janeiro’s coast. Their autoimmune systems were completely compromised by a measles virus. These highly intelligent mammals were discombobulated, covered in grotesque rashes and gasping for oxygen – a terrifying way to die.

Dead dolphins and sea turtles
Photo credit: Instituto Boto Cinza.
The tragic death of dolphins and sea turtles is a wake-up call to stop polluting our planet, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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Aussie Glimpse at a 2.4C World

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Sydney Australia Skyline

There is a revived fossil fuel fever taking hold of the climate Down Under.

Burning fossil fuels releases CO2, which triggers the release of two other planetary, heat-trapping gases: methane and nitrous oxide. These three gases together are known as CO2 equivalent (CO2eq).

Currently, CO2eq is 495 parts per million and rising. According to the 2007 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report, Earth is committed to a temperature increase of at least 2.4C (4.3F), which translates into climate instability with more frequent and intense extreme weather e.g. heatwaves, droughts, firestorms, insect epidemics and flooding.

Dead mangroves in Queensland Australia
Photo credit: digitaljournal.com Tatiana Gerus. 200,000 people from 22 towns were affected from extreme weather, torrential rains and flooding, December 30, 2010.

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