This year has brought plenty of concern to nature appreciators, those who realize that, as nature goes, so eventually goes humankind:
Devastating storms erupted last spring in the wake of a mild winter, drought and heat baked the land throughout the spring and summer, and an epic November blow assaulted population centers. Weather-related deaths reached 349 in the United States. The repair bill, the federal government reported, will be the second-highest since 1980, behind 2005, a year that spawned four mainland hurricanes, including Katrina.
The upper Great Lakes and the Mississippi River have had news-making low-water problems in the wake of widespread drought more intense than anything seen since the 1930s.
The year is expected to go down as the warmest or second-warmest since data has been recorded. The warmest occurred in 2008.
Graphs indicate that the number of extreme weather events has been on an upward slope since 1980. Several large property and casualty insurance companies let it be known that they expect the impact of climate change to force bigger claims payouts.
November marked the 333rd consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th-century average, the National Climatic Data Center reported.
Only in the United States, among industrial nations, is the reality of global warming or its causes questioned by large segments of the population. The reasons for this are many — simple and complex — but most likely are linked to the reality that Americans represent slightly less than 5 percent of the world’s population and use 25 percent of its energy.
What does any of this have to do with hunting and fishing? Probably nothing to anyone who thinks of deer, wild turkeys and salmon as a farmed product that can be replenished annually after being subjected to annual harvest. That kind of thinking, though, doesn’t stray far from the notions held by those content to find nature in their cross hairs behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
In significant ways, humans already have nature surrounded, so much so that the wild is nearly impossible for most people to locate, let alone visit. Some paleontologists and others who study the planet’s history have dubbed this the anthropocene age. Humans, they suggest, have become the largest influence in shaping the future of life.
Global warming and its discontents are but one manifestation of human influence. Others include the cutting of forests, the cultivation of arable land, the depletion of topsoil, the channeling and damming of rivers, the loading of waters with nutrients, the spreading of nonnative plants and animals, the poisoning of underground water, the exploitation of ocean life, the release of toxic chemicals and radiation, the obliteration of wetlands and the depletion of aquifers.
The largest and oldest trees reportedly are dying worldwide of factors that include a hotter, drier climate, the impact of logging and land clearing, and the spread of insects and disease. Half of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has vanished. A cyanobacterial pathogen is attacking coral reefs in Hawaii. The world’s oceans, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, are reportedly 30 percent more acidic than they were in the preindustrial era. Acidic oceans pose an immediate threat to shellfish and shore life.
The Arctic ice melt last summer was larger in area than the United States, and the ice sheet might have shrunk to the point at which a permanent impact will result because more sunlight around the pole is being absorbed as heat rather than reflected back into space. Melting permafrost could double carbon and nitrogen levels in the atmosphere, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.
About 20 percent of the world’s giant pandas, an endangered species, will lose their food source as global warming wipes out the bamboo on which they feed, Chinese scientists said. Researchers found that the fungus ravaging North American bat populations can survive in the soil for many years, meaning that even if all the bats in a cave are wiped out by white-nose syndrome, the site will remain deadly to any bats trying to recolonize.
A group of 8,000 conservation experts posted a paper asking for protection of 100 of the most endangered animals, which include the Javan rhino and Brazil’s wooly spider monkey.
Earth is facing its sixth great extinction, said a report published in the journal Science and written by paleobiologists at the University of California, Berkeley.