No answer forthcoming from TRTL, kulu or the reincarnation of dickie to Tragedy's request. And the usual distractions and smears to hide the fact. An example please.

Keep on sending the message out about our oceans KAEP – we’re reading you.

Kulu has an excellent grip on the issue of threatened species. Currently there are several restoration and recovery programmes implemented to sustain specie numbers but long term results are not yet available - except from the extractive industries.

However the land clearing in Australia continues and in 2001, Australia's rate of land clearing was amongst the highest in the world and the highest in the developed world.

Figures for the year 2000 show it had the sixth highest clearing rate on earth (behind Brazil, Indonesia, Sudan, Zambia and Mexico), at approximately 565 000 ha per annum, a rise of seven per cent over the previous year.

Land clearing also had devastating effects on other vertebrates. Between 1983 and 1993, land clearing led to the deaths of at least a billion reptiles, or more than 100 million reptiles on average each year.

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rp/2001-02/02RP02.htm#major

Sept 7, 2008: “Australian koalas are dying by the thousands as a result of land clearing in the country's northeast, while millions of birds and reptiles are also perishing,” conservation group WWF said.

“The environmental body warned that unless urgent action was taken to stop trees being felled, some species would be pushed to the brink of extinction.

“In an annual statement, Queensland state revealed that 375,000 hectares of bush were cleared in 2005-06 -- a figure WWF said would have resulted in the deaths of two million mammals.

Spokesman Nick Heath said WWF's figures were based on earlier scientific assessments of animal density in each area of the state combined with the amount of land cleared over the 2005-2006 period.

16/04/2009: Australia is clearing native vegetation at a rate that amounts to a $2.4 billion annual loss of stored carbon, a Senate climate change inquiry heard yesterday:

http://qcl.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/land-clearing-still-in-climate-scientists-sights/1488025.aspx

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1383.0.55.001Main+Features192009

It occurred to me yesterday, reading that journal-of-record mX on the way home in the train, that this whole beat-up is just another version of the cuddly-animals syndrome. You know, the one where it is so much more evil to club baby seals to death than it is to poison a rat.

The article that prompted this thought was one about the introduction by "researchers" in Texas of phorid flies, to kill fire ants.

Apparently, the phorid fly lays eggs on the fire ants, the eggs hatch into maggots inside the ant and eat away at the ant's brain. The ant "wanders around for about two weeks while the maggot feeds [on its brain]. And about a month later, the ant's head falls off".

Would it upset the do-gooders of the world if fire ants became extinct? I suspect not. Because we don't like them, do we?

It would be nice to see some honesty here. It's not about global warming. It's not about the problem of species becoming extinct.

It's because hamsters are cute and wrinkle up their little nosies at us, isn't it?

Pericles

I've never met a hamster and I don’t own any “cuddly” animals – nor do I go to zoos to experience that warm and fuzzy feeling.

Rather I ponder the fate of let’s say the dung beetle who is a marvellous little creature for biological control. The flightless dung beetle occurs only in a wilderness area of Daintree National Park where there has been no logging, no road construction and only the occasional foot traverses by bushwalkers.

However, other Australian dung beetle species are not adapted to feeding on cattle dung because cattle are not native to Australia so we imported the African beetle and that has been a great success. Dung beetles also bury animal dung, thus reducing fly numbers and mitigating the risk of contagions.

There is even talk among scientists to use these beetles to clean up doggy doo. However, in Africa, of the 29 species of dung beetles recorded in the Ankasa forest, most have become absent in plantations where assemblages were numerically dominated by species previously recorded in African savannas but the plantation fauna showed significantly lower species richness and diversity.

Africans continue to hunt bushmeat on which the dung beetle depends and of course hunting bushmeat (and intensive farming) is a major cause for the release of lethal pathogens which afflict humans around the planet.

Forest ants are extremely important in the recycling of organic material back into the system and they usually live in forest canopies and hollowed out stems. The reviled cockroach are important scavengers too but one must wonder what happens to the biodiversity in forests after the forestry and agricultural industry dumps tonnes of chemicals – by air or land, to kill off “invasive” pests. And these chemicals land in precious water reserves on which humans and animals depend.

KAEP’s beloved coastlines are sick from human and agricultural wastes and humans (not least the Japanese) are plundering the oceans for the tiny krill on which many larger marine species depend for their survival and many nations depend on the larger marine species for *their* survival. Need I elaborate further?

Just the answers I expected - ad Hominen attacks on me and so-called industry insiders publishing their research. I am still waiting for the evidence that backs up TLTR's statement. I am not interested in the personal attacks, I just want evidence please.

Protagoras trusts I am "not all that dumb Tragedy for you appear to be challenging this statement" but doesn't provide the evidence when I am serious about challenging his/her statement. Instead he provides us with a diatribe about land clearing. I am not interested in species extinction attributable to land clearing I am interested in extinctions atttributable to logging in Australia. If you don't know the difference between land clearing and logging I (and other readers) are wasting our time engaging with you.

I want people to be accountable for the assertions they make. Otherwise I will simply treat their words as opinionated waffle exposing their lack of unbiased knowledge on the subject they are rambling about.

A very important issue:

What benchmarks are there to show the oceans are OR are not dying due to human SEWAGE,AGRI, MUNICIPAL & INDUSTRIAL micro effluents?

This paper shows that ocean ecologies are in fact being exterminated by human activity in a very specialised area of the biosphere & that CO2 is not the cause. In fact observations of increased ocean CO2 levels may indeed be the result of oxidation or decay of human effluent poisoned marine ecologies that depend on the air-sea microlayer (SIMC) for their reproduction:

"It is particularly appropriate to use larval stages to
determine microlayer toxicity since many species of
fish and invertebrates have surface dwelling larval
stages which may be exposed to the enriched concentrations of potentially toxic chemicals which occur in the microlayer at the air-sea interface (Kocan et al. 1987, von Westernhagen et al. 1987). Potential toxicants such as copper (Cu), lead (Pb) and tributyltin
(TBT) can be highly enriched in the surface microlayer (SIMC)by as much as "1000"!! times bulkwater values (Pattenden et al. 1981). Even greater enhancements can occur with organic compounds such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)
(Baier et al. 1974, Brockman et al. 1976, Cross et al.
1987, Hardy et al. 1987)."

http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps/103/m103p103.pdf

Referenced researchers continue to say that we know so little about our oceans .. yet .. we do know that:

* the SIMC microlayer 10-100microns is key to the reproductivity of most marine ecologies especially those at the bottom of the food web

* that SIMC microlayer is under attack from huge athropogenic fluxes of dangerous & persistent toxicants

Therefore the entire marine food web from the bottom, up to large mammals like whales are being poisoned or starved out of existence by human wastewater products fouling up the critical SIMC layer within equally critical estuarial breeding grounds for the majority of marine ecosystems.

The notion that CO2 is the major cause of climate change is pathetic when you do the sums of ENERGY NOT being absorbed, by exterminated marine ecosystems. Instead that heat is gyred into circumpolar currents(roaring 40's) causing global=warming&ice-melts.