(no subject)

[unbibium]

Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" last night focused on the Endangered Species Act, the act which allows the Federal government to render any plot of land unusable. It was passed years before the Supreme Court decision that has outraged so many Americans last month. Their position: it doesn't serve its stated goal of saving species, nor the popular left-wing agenda of curtailing corporate greed -- they interviewed a woman who isn't allowed to build a house on her land because of some endangered bird, even though Wal-Mart had no trouble getting permission to build a Supercenter nearby.

A recent story that's making the rounds make another important point on this issue -- that it's possible for a species to adapt to human encroachment. Poachers hunt elephants for their tusks. But some elephants are born without tusks, and poachers don't hunt them. Therefore, more tuskless elephants are being born, as they have the advantage when it comes to selection. The proportion of tuskless elephants is only up to about 5% now, but it used to be 2%. Evolution is slow, but not so slow that we can't watch it happen.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I admire Penn and Teller's work on the paranormal bullshit, but their passionate libertarianism causes their standards of evidence tend to loosen when applied to libertarian political positions, as when they cited fraud and sock-puppetteer John Lott in their show on gun control and antienvironmentalist propagandist Steven Milloy in the episode on secondhand smoke. I'd seek independent confirmation for arguments along these lines coming from them.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I wonder if they were equally sloppy in their episode about recycling.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Apparently they also rather overstated the uncertainties on global warming in the "Environmental Hysteria" episode, though they didn't jump outright into the "global warming is a conspiracy of fearmongering scientists" camp, preferring to pick on deep-ecology loons.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

They used the same former-Greenpeace-founder guy for the Endangered Species episode.

I'll also confess that my idea of climate change is somewhat biased by what I've heard about climate change during the Middle Ages. Apparently the Northern hemisphere was once much more temperate than it is now, and cooling of the region had such effects as requiring people to build homes with more elaborate fireplaces. But I learned that by watching James Burke's "Connections". And just today I learned that Greenland was quite fertile when the Vikings first colonized it, so it's not named deceptively as the urban legend has it. It became barren later. My source was a guy who just returned from a vacation in Iceland, where he was raised.

On the other hand, your journal, and other credible input I've been taking in, has confirmed that global warming, or at least polar warming, is something that has a high probability of existing, and changing the balance of the ecology. But there are so many variables in play, that we probably won't know the real effects until it's too late. I've heard on random websites that the Northwest Passage will open up, creating the Holy Grail of shipping routes. And some blowhard college student at a Mexican restaurant asserted that if the polar ice caps melted, the oceans would only rise by some insignificant amount, though I remarked that some cities like New Orleans, which lie below sea level, are on thin ice as it is. But even religions that are true can encounter the same pitfalls, so there will also be people who make up facts and exaggerate statistics when they don't have to.

The debate isn't as clear-cut as evolution. It's easier to visualize animals evolving than an entire planet changing. So the debate will probably continue until something comes along that's too obvious to ignore or dismiss. I hope it's not the extinction of plankton. That'd suck.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There's still a lot of uncertainty about the Medieval Warm Period, but the best and most recent information I've heard suggests that it wasn't warmer than today. It certainly wasn't warmer than it will become if, say, atmospheric carbon dioxide doubles.

The Medieval Warm Period was considerably warmer than the "Little Ice Age" that followed it (probably caused by a combination of reduced solar activity and increased volcanism), but the Little Ice Age ended sometime in the 19th century. Since the middle of the 20th, the dominant forcings are pretty definitely manmade, and human activity was a significant contribution for a while before that.

It's true that it's hard to say what the consequences of a significantly warmer earth would be. I wouldn't be sanguine about them being mostly positive. Rising sea levels are mostly a problem for very low-lying seacoast areas; the "Waterworld" scenario is not remotely possible. Still, lots of coastal cities are in that zone.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Well, I'll admit the bias of not caring about spotted owls in the first place. My friend miwasatoshi is a birdwatcher, and judging by the way he talks about the birds he's seen, biodiversity isn't in such grave danger. And I'll admit the additional bias of considering it axiomatic that human life is more important than animal life. So I was kind of an easy sell.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Most of the scientists who've actually studied this seem to think that species are disappearing at a tremendous rate more or less characteristic of the great mass extinctions. There are prominent academic dissenters; the thing is, most of them aren't biologists (Julian Simon, probably the most prominent, was an economist and professor of business administration; Bjorn Lomborg's background is in political science). I'm not really qualified to judge the evidence myself, but as with climatology, I'm somewhat more inclined to trust the people inside the discipline than out.

I also don't think it's clear that letting a mass extinction happen really constitutes choosing human life over nonhuman life, particularly with regard to plants and particularly in the less-developed world.

As for whether the US Endangered Species act really protects habitats adequately to save species, I will remain silent since I know jack squat about that. The environmental activist groups' concentration on "charismatic megafauna" (that is, fuzzy cute animals) does bother me, though I understand that that's what brings in the dough; ugly, obscure bugs and plants are probably more important to preserve in the grand scheme of things. But I do think there's more to this than an aesthetic affection for a few marginal species of animals.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

That's one thing I seldom hear addressed: the plight of species low on the food chain. I can buy the argument, often pushed in Penn & Teller's show, that logging isn't evil, and it is in their interests to replant the trees that they cut down. But, do they have the sense to rotate their crops, to plant a similar spread of species of tree as they did before? In college, I heard the story of how Dutch elm disease spread through the country like wildfire because there was such an overpopulation of elm trees that the disease not only affected a large percentage of domestic trees, but it spread more quickly than it would have if each elm had a few houses' worth of other trees between them.

Replanting efforts have been credited with the recovery of a single-digit number of endangered species, out of the double-digit number of delisted species both plant and animal, out of the four-digit cumulative list. Most of that delisted list was enumerated in the Bullshit episode, which I fear I may have since deleted. Check Showtime or your nearest P2P station for the rerun. A lot of people who consider themselves science-minded listen to those two, so if they're in error, you'll probably see that error spread like Dutch elm disease. Watching the show will allow you to brace yourself.

So, the trees should stay, but the spotted owl can fuck off. The Endangered Species Act can fuck all the way off, twelve different ways. And in conclusion, Carthage should be destroyed.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

And I wrote that response before following the one link which predicts the mass extinctions based on levels of deforestation.

I've heard that most permanent deforestation in the world is due to clearing land for agriculture, rather than the timber or paper industry. If that's the case, then we'd better hope that vertical farming takes off.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

LIAR THERE IS NO EVOLUTION GOD CREATED THESE TUSKLESS ELEPHANTS TO SPARE THEM FROM SINNNNN