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Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
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The Downward March of the Penguins
July 02, 2008 1:49 PM
Dee Boersma, the biologist at the University of Washington whose warning about penguins yesterday made headlines, seemed genuinely surprised at the attention when I reached her yesterday. Her paper, in the journal BioScience, is HERE, and it's different from most of the scholarly papers that come my way.
For one thing, it's written in plain English. And it's more of an alarm than a straight documenting -- something she says she's been working on for 25 years -- of the decline in the numbers of many penguin species.
So give her paper a read, mindful of the position she's taken as an advocate.
"The human population has exploded. In my lifetime it's more than doubled. What we're seeing for penguins is their populations are halving," Boersma told us.
She calls penguins "sentinels of the marine environment," and says their well-being is a signal of ours.
"What they are telling us is that there are fundamental changes going in the world's oceans, and it's not good, and we need to be paying attention to these species."
(Emperor Penguins. Image credit: Michael Van Woert, NOAA NESDIS, ORA)
July 2, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (7)
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One more piece of evidence for rapid change.
It appears that human activity is changing the climate faster than nature usually does.
How many more signals does nature have to send us before we become Earth Centered and not so much ego centered?
Posted by: Andy Clark | Jul 2, 2008 9:01:21 PM
I'm old enough to remember how the tobacco industry fought tooth and nail against the medical and scientific community over the causal effect between cigarette smoking and cancer. It's no secret that Big Oil, Big Coal, right wing-nuts like Rush Limbaugh, Libertarians, and others have used the tobacco industry's tactics to cast doubt on the validity of what the scientific community has concluded about the causal effect between climate change and the release of greenhouse gases by mankind. Many Americans died because of Big Tobacco's greed and selfishness. This time around, the stakes are much higher. For the sake of our children and future generations, we need to take action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate against the climate change consequences that have already been set in motion.
Posted by: Badgersouth | Jul 2, 2008 11:44:15 PM
Maintaining biodiversity is not an environmentally extreme view. It's about maintaining Earth's ability to support life as we know it. That includes mankind's ability to persist.
Posted by: Eric | Jul 3, 2008 7:30:21 AM
Even though we are changing the environment, there were still mass extinctions of one kind or another throughout the history of this planet. Yes, it's sad to see when contemporary creatures die off because of our predations, but it does happen, regardless. If not global warming, then, disease, disaster, etc.
Posted by: Andy | Jul 3, 2008 9:10:18 AM
Yes, it's true there have been mass extinctions in the past. However, that's not a reason for us to bring one about another one through reckless disregard of our own habitat.
Posted by: Eric | Jul 3, 2008 10:05:59 AM
I wish we'd just get hit by a massive asteroid and get all this speculation about the end of the world over with.
Posted by: Pedro | Jul 3, 2008 10:20:36 PM
This time around, if we are not careful the mass extinctions will be the human race.
Posted by: Edward Walker | Jul 4, 2008 12:26:13 AM
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