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  • Are you a concerned scientist? Read this ASAP (deadline 9/26)


    Fern Davies
    • World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice

       

      If you are a scientist from any scientific discipline (e.g. ecology, medicine, economics, etc.), and are concerned about global environmental and climate trends, we invite you to become a co-signatory for our in-press Viewpoint article in the journal Bioscience entitled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: a second notice” by Ripple et. al. (2017). In doing so, you will be included in the full list of co-signatories in the article’s online supplemental material.

       

      Over 13,000 scientists have signed the letter. If you'd like to add your name, be sure to do by 9/26.

    http://scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu/

     

    Twenty-five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1500 independent scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences, penned the 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” (see supplemental materials). These concerned professionals called on humankind to curtail environmental destruction and cautioned that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.”

     

    In their manifesto, they showed that humans were on a collision course with the natural world. They expressed concern about current, impending, or potential damage on planet Earth involving ozone depletion, freshwater availability, marine fishery collapses, ocean dead zones, forest loss, biodiversity destruction, climate change, and continued human population growth. They proclaimed that fundamental changes were urgently needed to avoid the consequences our present course would bring. The authors of the 1992 declaration feared that humanity was pushing Earth’s ecosystems beyond their capacities to support the web of life. They described how we are fast approaching many of the limits of what the planet can tolerate without substantial and irreversible harm. The scientists pleaded that we stabilize the human population, describing how our large numbers— swelled by another 2 billion people since 1992, a 35 percent increase—exert stresses on Earth that can overwhelm other efforts to realize a sustainable future (Crist et al. 2017). They implored that we cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and phase out fossil fuels, reduce deforestation, and reverse the trend of collapsing biodiversity. On the 25th anniversary of their call, we look back at their warning and evaluate the human response by exploring available time-series data.

     

    Since 1992, with the exception of stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse (figure 1, supplemental table S1). Especially troubling is the current trajectory of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change due to rising GHGs from burning fossil fuels (Hansen et al. 2013), deforestation (Keenan et al. 2015), and agricultural production— particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption (Ripple et al. 2014). Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.

     

    Full text:

     

    http://scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu/sites/sw/files/Ripple_et_al_%209-14-17%20Scientists%20main%20text.pdf





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