Book review: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History // Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change
Up to half the world's species will be gone by 2050
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
Reviewed by Caspar Henderson
One day around 66m years ago – it was in June or July if the evidence from fossilised pollen traces has been interpreted correctly – an asteroid somewhat larger than Manhattan ploughed into the Earth near what is now Chicxulub in the Yucután Peninsula, Mexico at 45,000 mph. As it hit with a force equivalent to more than 100m megatons of TNT, or about1,500 times the total content of the world's present nuclear arsenals, the asteroid sent a vast cloud of scalding vapour thousands of miles in all directions, and blasted more than 50 times its own mass of pulverised rock high into the sky where, as tiny particles, it incandesced and heated the entire atmosphere to several hundred degrees centigrade, killing almost everything unprotected by soil, rock or deep water.
Many scientists believe that about three-quarters of animals, including the pterosaurs, the mosasaurs and, as every child now knows, the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out as a result. It took millions of years for life to recover and surpass its previous diversity, this time with a new ensemble of species that included our distant ancestors. This event, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (and formerly as the Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinction, is counted as one of five mass extinctions over the last 500m years or so, where a mass extinction is defined as an event in which a significant proportion of life is eliminated in a geologically insignificant amount of time.
At first glance, the footprint of industrialised humanity on the biosphere may look small compared with that of the Chicxulub asteroid. The additional input of heat into the world's oceans resulting from greenhouse gases put there by the combustion of fossil fuels, for example, is equivalent to only about four atomic bomb detonations, or well under a tenth of a megaton per second. But first glances are sometimes misleading. Humans are affecting the Earth system in many ways, and have been doing so every moment for decades and indeed centuries. It may seem like a diffuse, drawn-out affair to us as individuals but compared with many natural processes (for which animals and plants are, in Jacob Bronowski's phrase, equipped with "exact and beautiful adaptations"), it is virtually instantaneous. Perhaps the current transformation will turn out to be more like the end-Permian 252m years ago, the third of the "big five" extinctions, which is thought to have been kicked off by massive pulses of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, each of which lasted only a few decades, but which together resulted in the death of up to 95% of all life.
Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
Reviewed by Caspar Henderson
One day around 66m years ago – it was in June or July if the evidence from fossilised pollen traces has been interpreted correctly – an asteroid somewhat larger than Manhattan ploughed into the Earth near what is now Chicxulub in the Yucután Peninsula, Mexico at 45,000 mph. As it hit with a force equivalent to more than 100m megatons of TNT, or about1,500 times the total content of the world's present nuclear arsenals, the asteroid sent a vast cloud of scalding vapour thousands of miles in all directions, and blasted more than 50 times its own mass of pulverised rock high into the sky where, as tiny particles, it incandesced and heated the entire atmosphere to several hundred degrees centigrade, killing almost everything unprotected by soil, rock or deep water.
Many scientists believe that about three-quarters of animals, including the pterosaurs, the mosasaurs and, as every child now knows, the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out as a result. It took millions of years for life to recover and surpass its previous diversity, this time with a new ensemble of species that included our distant ancestors. This event, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (and formerly as the Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinction, is counted as one of five mass extinctions over the last 500m years or so, where a mass extinction is defined as an event in which a significant proportion of life is eliminated in a geologically insignificant amount of time.
At first glance, the footprint of industrialised humanity on the biosphere may look small compared with that of the Chicxulub asteroid. The additional input of heat into the world's oceans resulting from greenhouse gases put there by the combustion of fossil fuels, for example, is equivalent to only about four atomic bomb detonations, or well under a tenth of a megaton per second. But first glances are sometimes misleading. Humans are affecting the Earth system in many ways, and have been doing so every moment for decades and indeed centuries. It may seem like a diffuse, drawn-out affair to us as individuals but compared with many natural processes (for which animals and plants are, in Jacob Bronowski's phrase, equipped with "exact and beautiful adaptations"), it is virtually instantaneous. Perhaps the current transformation will turn out to be more like the end-Permian 252m years ago, the third of the "big five" extinctions, which is thought to have been kicked off by massive pulses of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, each of which lasted only a few decades, but which together resulted in the death of up to 95% of all life.
Or not. A lot is uncertain. What is beyond reasonable doubt is that something big is under way. The best estimates are that the Earth is losing species at many times the background rate (the natural churn in which a few species go extinct every year while new ones evolve), and that 30% to 50% will be functionally extinct by 2050.
The plight of the non-human world has inspired many works of popular science over the last 20 years or so. A 1995 book by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, presciently titled The Sixth Extinction, David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo, in 1996, and numerous essays by EO Wilson are among those that speak with clarity and urgency. Books about the death of single species, from Sam Turvey's Witness to Extinction (2008) about the Yangtze river dolphin to Joel Greenberg's A Feathered River Across the Sky (2014) about the passenger pigeon sometimes reach substantial audiences. John Platt's Extinction Countdown is one of many useful blogs on the web. The calamity has inspired artists too. Maya Lin continues to develop a remarkable project titled What is Missing?. Extinctathon, a computer game imagined by Margaret Atwood in her Oryx and Crake trilogy (2003-13), now exists in the real – virtual – world. In The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy disgorges a nightmare of a world that humans have killed.
But with extinctions and new discoveries piling up, there is a need for still more studies. And in The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for the New Yorker, offers well-composed snapshots of history, theory and observation that will fascinate, enlighten and appal many readers.
Kolbert begins with a visit to a research station in Costa Rica, where researchers are documenting the disappearance of the golden frog,Atelopus zeteki. Amphibians, the class that includes frogs, are the most endangered group of animals in the world, with an extinction rate as much as 45,000 times the background rate. In addition to factors such as habitat loss, a kind of chytrid fungus, inadvertently spread by humans and lethal to many amphibians, is thought to be to blame.
The book then turns to the development of extinction as an idea and how it has changed our view of life. In this account the phenomenon was discovered in the early 19th century by the anatomist Georges Cuvier, who recognised that enormous teeth and bones recovered from sites in what is now Ohio belonged not to elephants but to hitherto unknown beasts. The mastodons, and other strange giants whose remains came across his dissecting table, had lived in "a world previous to ours", which, Cuvier suggested, had perished in a great catastrophe. Charles Darwin accepted Cuvier's view that the deep past had been filled with extinctions, but rejected catastrophe as a principal cause in favour of a gradual, or uniformitarian view of extinction championed by the geologist Charles Lyell.
Only in the 1980s was the hypothesis, proposed by Luis and Walter Alvarez, that a massive asteroid had caused mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period generally accepted. Palaeontologists came to agree that life was characterised by long periods of stability occasionally interrupted by panic. Kolbert's history tour concludes with a look at the far future. Jan Zalasiewicz, a palaeobiologist at the University of Leicester, argues that although our age (for which he champions the term Anthropocene) will leave a record in the geological strata no thicker than a cigarette paper, its impact will nevertheless be great.
One of the strengths of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Kolbert's 2006 book on global warming, was vivid reportage from exotic locations.The Sixth Extinction shares this characteristic. There are useful, indeed exemplary, discussions of ocean acidification starting from readily observable natural effects off the Italian coast, of the fate of coral from the Great Barrier Reef, of the extent to which tropical forests in Peru can adapt to rapid change, of habitat fragmentation in the Amazon basin and beyond, and of the consequences of the mass global transference of species from one place to another. It is all pretty grim.
Towards the end, Kolbert writes: "We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways remain open and which don't." I don't know about you, but I don't recall being involved in that decision. Indeed, it seems that some of the most important decisions are being taken by those individuals who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep people in the dark about climate change and who are blocking moves to a green economy. We need to decide otherwise.
The extinction crisis is so vast and complex that it is almost repels thought. It is what the cultural critic Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject. We need a lot more imaginative thinking about the choices we can make and what comes next, whether it be the "Rambunctious Garden" of environment writer Emma Marris, the feral landscape of George Monbiot or a world utterly transformed by synthetic biology as envisaged by Craig Venter. We need new big stories. Is it too much to ask that we should alter Earth with compassion for the other creatures with whom we share it, and in celebration of their endless forms?
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/14/sixth-extinction-unnatural-history-kolbert-reviewConservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change
Conservative groups may have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change, according to the first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort. The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change. Such financial support has hardened conservative opposition to climate policy, ultimately dooming any chances of action from Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, the study found.
“I call it the climate-change counter movement,” said the author of the study, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle. “It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.” Brulle's study, published on Friday in the journal Climatic Change, offers the most definitive exposure to date of the political and financial forces blocking American action on climate change. Still, there are big gaps.
It was not always possible to separate funds designated strictly for climate-change work from overall budgets, Brulle said. “Since the majority of the organizations are multiple focus organizations, not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.”
Some of the think tanks on Brulle's list – such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – said they had no institutional position on climate change and did not control the output of their scholars. In addition, Brulle acknowledged that he was unable to uncover the full extent of funding sources to the effort to oppose action on climate change. About three-quarters of the funds were routed through trusts or other mechanisms that assure anonymity to donors – a trend Brulle described as disturbing and a threat to democracy.
“This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power,” he said. “They have their profits and they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hire people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. It ends up that people without economic power don't have the same size voice as the people who have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy.
“That is the bottom line here. These are unaccountable organisations deciding what our politics should be. They put their thumbs on the scale … It is more one dollar one vote than one person one vote.” The vast majority of the 91 groups on Brulle's list – 79% – were registered as charitable organisations and enjoyed considerable tax breaks. Those 91 groups included trade organisations, think tanks and campaign groups. The groups collectively received more than $7bn over the eight years of Brulle's study – or about $900m a year from 2003 to 2010. Conservative think tanks and advocacy groups occupied the core of that effort.
The funding was dispersed to top-tier conservative think tanks in Washington, such as the AEI and Heritage Foundation, which focus on a range of issues, as well as more obscure organisations such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the John Locke Foundation. Funding also went to groups that took on climate change denial as a core mission – such as the Heartland Institute, which held regular conclaves dedicated to undermining the United Nations climate panel's reports, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which tried and failed to prosecute a climate scientist, Michael Mann, for academic fraud... read more:
