More joyful news from the real world.
World's wildlife population halved in just 40 yearsEnjoy them while you can. Only half the world's animals are left compared with 40 years ago, mainly because of habitat destruction either by locals for farming or by the multinational mineral and timber trades.
The biennial Living Planet Report, released this week by conservation charity WWF, tracked the fate of 10,000 vertebrate species around the world between 1970 and 2010. It found that the total population of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles has declined by 52 per cent in only two generations of humans.
Latin America saw the steepest decline, with animal populations falling by 83 per cent. Animals living in fresh water also fared badly, plummeting by 76 per cent.
This makes sense, given that human population roughly doubled over the same period. But hey, don't worry about it all.
Also:
Blame climate change for heatwaves that struck in 2013The verdict is in: climate change is guilty. Greenhouse gas emissions made five heatwaves in 2013 more likely.
That's the conclusion of the third annual assessment of the role of global warming in extreme weather events from the previous year. For 2013, the research included five separate heatwaves in Australia, China, Japan, Korea and western Europe. The report found that climate change played a part in all of them.
Australia's results were particularly damning. "The chances of observing such extreme temperatures in a world without climate change – it is almost impossible to imagine how that would have happened," says Peter Stott of the UK Met Office, an editor of the report, a special supplement in the
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society called
Explaining Extreme Events of 2013 from a Climate Perspective.
But hey, don't worry about that either.
ETA: Oh and this last one is funny in a dark kind of way. Our idiotic Prime Minister, who denies climate science due to having his brains located in his rectum, was getting quite upset last year when some people tried to link the massive bushfires and heatwave to climate change predictions. He accused them of trying to score political points by politicising a national disaster.
Well, it turns out those people were right. Yes, climate science does have real world ramifications, fuckwit.