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Credit Christoph Niemann (This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2014. For the rest of the list, click.) Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.” Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century. Extinction is a relatively new idea in the scientific community. Well into the 18th century, people found it impossible to accept the idea that species had once lived on earth but had been subsequently lost. Scientists simply could not envision a planetary force powerful enough to wipe out forms of life that were common in prior ages.

In the same way, and for many of the same reasons, many today find it inconceivable that we could possibly be responsible for destroying the integrity of our planet’s ecology. There are psychological barriers to even imagining that what we love so much could be lost — could be destroyed forever. As a result, many of us refuse to contemplate it. Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality. For example, we continue to use the world’s atmosphere as an open sewer for the daily dumping of more than 90 million tons of gaseous waste. If trends continue, the global temperature will keep rising, triggering “world-altering events,” Kolbert writes.

According to a conservative and unchallenged calculation by the climatologist James Hansen, the man-made pollution already in the atmosphere traps as much extra heat energy every 24 hours as would be released by the explosion of 400,000 Hiroshima-class nuclear bombs. The resulting rapid warming of both the atmosphere and the ocean, which Kolbert notes has absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide we have produced, is wreaking havoc on earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems. It threatens both the web of living species with which we share the planet and the future viability of civilization. “By disrupting these systems,” Kolbert writes, “we’re putting our own survival in danger.” The earth’s water cycle is being dangerously disturbed, as warmer oceans evaporate more water vapor into the air. Warmer air holds more moisture (there has been an astonishing 4 percent increase in global humidity in just the last 30 years) and funnels it toward landmasses, where it is released in much larger downpours, causing larger and more frequent floods and mudslides. Advertisement The extra heat is also absorbed in the top layer of the seas, which makes ocean-­based storms more destructive.

Just before Hurricane Sandy, the area of the Atlantic immediately windward from New York City and New Jersey was up to nine degrees warmer than normal. And just before Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, the area of the Pacific from which it drew its energy was about 5.4 degrees above average. Our oceans, a crucial food source for billions, have become not only warmer but also more acidic than they have been in millions of years.

They struggle to absorb excess heat and carbon pollution — which is why, as Kolbert points out, coral reefs might be the first entire ecosystem to go extinct in the modern era. The same extra heat pulls moisture from soil in drought-prone regions, causing deeper and longer-lasting droughts. The drying of trees and other vegetation leads also to an increase in the frequency and average size of fires. Food crops are threatened not only by more pests and the disruption of long-­predictable rainy season-dry season patterns, but also by the growing impact of heat stress itself on corn, wheat, rice and other staples. Earth’s ice-covered regions are melting. The vanishing of the Arctic ice cap is changing the heat absorption at the top of the world, and may be affecting the location of the Northern Hemisphere jet stream and storm tracks and slowing down the movement of storm systems.

Meanwhile, the growing loss of ice in Antarctica and Greenland is accelerating sea level rise and threatening low-lying coastal cities and regions. Viruses, bacteria, disease-carrying species like mosquitoes and ticks, and pest species like bark beetles are now being pushed far beyond their native ranges. Everywhere the intricate interconnections crucial to sustaining life are increasingly being pulled apart. Credit Christoph Niemann This is the world we’ve made.

And in her timely, meticulously researched and well-written book, Kolbert combines scientific analysis and personal narratives to explain it to us. The result is a clear and comprehensive history of earth’s previous mass extinctions — and the species we’ve lost — and an engaging description of the extraordinarily complex nature of life.

Most important, Kolbert delivers a compelling call to action. “Right now,” she writes, “we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed.

No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.” Kolbert expertly traces the “twisting” intellectual history of how we’ve come to understand the concept of extinction, and more recently, how we’ve come to recognize our role in it. When mastodon bones were first studied, in 1739, many scientists reasoned that the large and unique bones belonged to an elephant or hippopotamus. But in 1796, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier presented evidence of an entirely new theory: The bones belonged to a lost species from “a world previous to ours.” Cuvier collected and studied as many fossils as he could, eventually identifying dozens of extinct species, and over the next several decades, with the contributions of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, extinction evolved as a scientific concept. Today, Kolbert writes, we are witnessing a similar mass extinction event happening in the geologic blink of an eye. According to E.

Wilson, the present extinction rate in the tropics is “on the order of 10,000 times greater than the naturally occurring background extinction rate” and will reduce biological diversity to its lowest level since the last great extinction. This time, however, a giant asteroid isn’t to blame — we are, by altering environmental conditions on our planet so swiftly and dramatically that a large proportion of other species cannot adapt. And we are risking our own future as well, by fundamentally altering the integrity of the climate balance that has persisted in more or less the same configuration since the end of the last ice age, and which has fostered the flourishing of human civilization. As early as the 1840s, scientists noticed large gaps in the fossil record — time periods in which earth’s biodiversity declined rapidly and could not be explained by a static system. Some scientists theorized that abrupt climate changes had caused past mass extinction events.

After milking the fate of the planet for maximum drama, Donald Trump announced today that the U.S. Would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. To reach this decision, the President had to dismiss decades’ worth of research by the country’s most prestigious scientific organizations. He needed to resist pleas from the U.S.’s staunchest allies; ignore appeals from many of its largest corporations, including ExxonMobil; and disregard the counsel of his Secretary of State. All this for, well, what? To shore up his base on the coal-hugging right?

“ ANALYSIS: TELLING LITERALLY EVERY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD TO FUCK OFF WILL PROBABLY CREATE PROBLEMS DOWN THE ROAD,” David Roberts, who blogs about climate policy for Vox, as the news of the move began to leak out. But, if Trump’s decision is evidently wrongheaded, it’s also possible that it won’t make all that much difference. This is in part because the U.S. Had already effectively exited the agreement. In part it’s because just about everybody outside the Trump Administration seems to understand that the U.S. Is making a world-historical mistake.

“” runs the headline of the cover story of next week’s Bloomberg Businessweek. Among the many reasons that Trump’s move makes no sense is that the Paris accord is a fundamentally weak agreement. Designed to avoid the need for approval by the U.S.

Senate, it’s not even an official treaty. Under the accord, each country was left to devise its own commitment—or, as it is officially known, “nationally determined contribution.” In March, the Administration made it clear that it had no intention of fulfilling the U.S.’s commitment, which was to reduce the country’s carbon-dioxide emissions by at least twenty-six per cent by 2025 (a figure that relies on a baseline from 2005). The White House did this by rescinding—or, more accurately, indicating its desire to rescind—the two sets of Obama-era regulations upon which the commitment was based: a set of stricter auto-efficiency standards and a series of rules governing emissions from power plants. Even under these rules, it would have been a stretch for the U.S. To meet its Paris “contribution”; without them, meeting the contribution has become, for all intents and purposes, impossible. (Instead of declining, the U.S.’s emissions are now through 2030.) But, since the country’s commitment was, essentially, voluntary, the U.S. Could have remained a party to the Paris accord while at the same time ignoring the agreement’s terms.

(In fact, technically, it will remain a party to the accord, as the process of formally withdrawing will take years.) Many in the climate-policy world argued that this course was preferable and that, despite the Trump Administration’s atrocious behavior, it would be best to keep the U.S. At the negotiating table. Others worried that Washington’s bad manners might be contagious. “A rogue US can cause more damage inside rather than outside the agreement” is how Luke Kemp, a climate-policy expert at Australian National University, put it recently, in the journal.

Trump’s decision has obviously rendered this debate moot. By withdrawing, the U.S. Will join a select group of non-participants. Only two other countries, Syria and Nicaragua, are not part of the Paris agreement—Nicaragua because it objected to the voluntary nature of the commitments.

One way to think about the Paris accord is as a diplomatic version of “Stone Soup.” In the folktale, reluctant villagers contribute tidbits to a collective pot, and in the end everyone gets a meal. The story turns on a trick that overcomes the villagers’ reflexive stinginess; by the logic of the scheme, the working-out of the illusion transforms it into reality. In the climate treaty, instead of soup, the objective is a radically transformed energy system. If everyone believes that the transformation is going to happen (“everyone,” in this case, meaning the world’s major energy producers and the banks that finance them), then it will, in fact, take place: the illusion has the power to become self-fulfilling. This is the promise of Paris—and, of course, the peril. The dynamic can run in either direction.

The U.S.’s withdrawal could prompt other countries to reconsider their contributions. Or it could have the opposite effect. The Trump Administration is leaving the energy technologies of the future to other countries to develop, and many nations see an economic opportunity. As the headline of a recent post on put it,“If Trump Dumps the Paris Accord, China Will Rule the Energy Future.” It is telling that several of the U.S.’s largest tech companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Intel, signed an open letter to Trump, urging him to “keep the United States in the Paris Agreement.” The letter states, “By expanding markets for innovative clean technologies, the agreement generates jobs and economic growth.” On Tuesday, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, reportedly, urging him to remain in the agreement.

In another open letter to the President, which ran as a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, the heads of thirty other mammoth companies, including 3M, Cargill, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley, wrote to express their “strong support for the United States remaining in the Paris Climate Agreement.” that they were concerned about the “strong potential for negative trade implications if the United States exits from the Paris Agreement.” Many commentators have suggested that the U.S., in withdrawing from Paris, is ceding its leadership role in the world. But the sad fact is that the U.S. Has never been a leader in addressing climate change; this is one of the main reasons that the Paris accord is so weak. Has only been a leader in producing climate change. (On an annual basis, America is now the world’s second-greatest carbon emitter, behind China, but on an aggregate basis it’s responsible for more of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere than any other country.) When Barack Obama helped forge the Paris accord, he was trying to make up for decades of American inaction.

Kolbert Realty Homes For Sale

Trump has now nullified that effort. The just result would be that it is the U.S. Economy that ends up suffering.