Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
June 9, 2012
In Australia, the University of Western Sydney (UWS) is erecting a 4 acre project, called Eucalyptus Free Air Carbon Enrichment (EucFACE). To assume a glimpse of the future, this “time-machine”, comprised of several 9 story tall frames with pipes will pump carbon dioxide into the air surrounding the forest area.
While carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have risen in the last century, scientists are not clear as to the cause. Plants use CO2 to live. They absorb the gas, and convert it into oxygen. Researchers at the UWS are asking if rising levels of CO2 are too much for plants to handle.
CO2 levels are about 390 ppm; pre-industrial levels of CO2 were about 280 parts per million.
Propaganda concerning CO2 claims that the earth’s climate may be more sensitive to CO2.
The UWS hopes to have a clearer understanding of the relationship to CO2 and the earth’s atmospheric temperatures.
While UWS is concerned about CO2, climate change alarmist Mark Urban, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, warns in his new study that the loss of the planet’s biodiversity is much higher than originally predicted.
The scientists at the University of Queensland and Australian CSIRO have conducted a global study that links climate change to global habitat loss. These two studies corroborate the claims of alarmists that man is destroying the planet and all other life forms on it.
The CSIRO is dedicated to environmentalism with regard to biological research, development and commercialization for the purposes of creating:
• Genome mapping
• Genetic and biochemical growth of plants and animals
• Water resource futures
• Acquisition of land for agricultural purposes
“We have really sophisticated meteorological models for predicting climate change,” says ecologist Mark Urban, the study’s lead author. “But in real life, animals move around, they compete, they parasitize each other, and they eat each other. The majority of our predictions don’t include these important interactions.”
CSIRO’s study measured climate change and habitat loss, decreasing rainfall and its effect on species.
“Human population growth has caused significant habitat degradation across the globe, typically in support of agriculture and urban development,” lead researcher Chrystal Mantyka-Pringle from UQ’s School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management said. “This alone has negatively impacted many species, but combined with rises in temperature and reduced rainfall as a result of a changing climate, there could be catastrophic results for some populations. Serious declines are already a reality for many species.”
Conservation of biodiversity is the focus of “conservation policy and management strategies that don’t take into account the combined effects of habitat loss and a changing climate may be inefficient and at worst ineffective,” said Mantyka-Pringle.
The study entitled, On a collision course:
competition and dispersal differences create no-analogue communities and cause extinctions during climate change was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
According to the study, “interspecific competition and dispersal variation, both alone and together, dramatically alter community responses to climate change by elevating extinction risks, altering diversity patterns and creating no-analogue communities.” Competition disturbs community reactions to climate change through 3 inter-related mechanisms:
• decreasing population abundances, which increase extinction risk and slow climate tracking
• preventing species from colonizing newly available environments
• causing the extinction of species that would otherwise persist owing to their broad thermal performance profiles
Urban claims species are responding to man-made global warming by going extinct. He cites that his projections display that as the earth’s temperature rises, animals and plants migrate to higher altitudes where temperatures are cooler. Yet, because not all species can relocate fast enough, they are going extinct.
Urban collaborated with Josh Tewksbury and Kimberly Sheldon of the University of Washington to create complex mathematical models that includes migration and competitive intensities in the eco-system. These computer models showed that climate change’s rapid alterations of the natural world are directly causing the destruction of the biodiversity across the globe.
“When a species has a small range, it’s more likely to be outcompeted by others,” Urban says. “It’s not about how fast you can move, but how fast you move relative to your competitors.”
The authors assert that current predictions of biodiversity loss under climate change – many of which are used by conservation organizations and governments – could be vastly underestimating species extinctions.
The study admonishes organizations to follow biodiversity assuming that climate change models have grossly underestimated climate impacts on plants and animals.
They retort that protecting species from climate changes include “species interact and differ in dispersal ability; we might be vastly underestimating climate change impacts on biodiversity. This means that current predictions underlying biodiversity threats used by governments and conservation organizations could be conservative. We challenge ecologists to incorporate species interactions and dispersal differences into future predictions of biodiversity under climate change, and we suggest that conservation biologists should consider concentrating protection efforts on those species that disperse poorly and interact strongly.”
The new efforts to save biodiversity are purveying propaganda from the UN Earth Summit Rio+20 that is currently begin held in Rio de Janeiro.
The latest scheme from the Sustainable Development conference is to blame the natural flow of extinction on man-made climate change which in turn endeavors to lay legitimacy to the climate change alarmist’s fear-mongering.
Studies like these are nothing more than computer models designed to “prove” their assertions without the use of empirical data and real world observations.
Related posts:
Views: 0