Where did all the polar species now extant come from following the great warming, circa 900CE? Magic?

Peter,
Being a "man of science" doesn't preclude one from holding values that are not originated by science. The values belong to the man, not to science. Science doesn't care if the penguin becomes extinct, but people do. I'm sure that this guy shares his love of penguins with many other people who are not scientists.

I'm going to assume that you used the word "ordained" for a reason, and respond accordingly.

First, just because someone isn't religious doesn't mean that they don't feel that life has value. That would explain part of the phenomenon you are questioning. Second, however, most scientists are not atheists. That takes care of the rest.

Your attitude, however, indicates a continuing misunderstanding of a lot of biological science with some potentially dangerous policy consequences. For example, there is a big difference between the background rate of extinction and evolution, and that which occurs during a mass extinction event. And, we actually don't know how far normal climactic variations have to progress to turn one into the other.

Since mankind is probably the first species in the history of evolution to actually have the ability to affect the environment enough to affect the climate, we might want to take a little bit of care about how we proceed and set the marginal incentives in directions that minimize our environmental impact, one way or the other. I don't see that there's anything wrong with that.

Especially since, from a purely evolutionary perspective, primates have been a failure and are thus much more likely to be victims in the next mass extinction than they are to be survivors.

Robert/HT

That there are millions of decent, non-religious people who hold admirable values, including a reverance for nature and wildlife, is obvious and a reason to be grateful. And, whether religious or not, I agree there is a duty to husband resources, care for nature, etc. etc.

But this is Antarctica, where nothing at all is happening to pollute or waste or damage. If this guy was complaining because we were dumping mine tailings onto the krill beds or testing nuclear devices willy-nilly, I would listen. You know that isn't where he is going. He is headed straight from a love of penquins to a Kyoto mindset. It isn't his values that I'm cynical about, it's the image of a fragile edifice of inter-locking parts, none of which can be disturbed without bringing it all down.

HT, who is the "we" that you think should be taking care on behalf of us all and setting the marginal incentives that will save the penguins?

HT,

Historical climate change is hardly unknown in written history. You are perhaps aware that Greenland from 1000 to about 1300CE had a long enough growing season to sustain enough people to have its own diocese. Then, it cooled down and hasn't been habitable in any serious way since. Another example is that later Roman Empire which had a period of sustained drought for about 2 centuries. This drought was one of many forces which led to the German and Gothic migration into the Empire and its eventual downfall.

Maybe we are having a climate change in some parts of the planet, but maybe not. I do however think it is a dubious notion to blame it on the relatively small amount of hydrocarbons we dump into the atmosphere. Should we be profligate in our use of resources and pollute everywhere we go? Of course not. But I'm not going to shiver in the dark and eat boiled kelp for dinner every night just to please a few enviro-weirdos.

Primates have been an evolutionary failure? In case you haven't noticed, we run the place(although the domesticated dog might give us an argument). We are the first species which can change its environment or change themselves so that they can adjust to a different environment without dying in large numbers. If you chose to live at the North Pole, it would be a simple matter for you, given enough money, to have a double-wide dropped onto the permanent ice cap, with pontoons if necessary, along with sufficient heating fuel, groceries, entertainment, etc to keep you busy. You could probably get next day delivery of anything you want from anywhere on the globe. The same would certainly be true at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or probably at the top of Mt. Everest, although you'd have to add in the cost of oxygen.

What's bothersome is the idea that these people can't see that human activity as nothing more than another event in this planet's history, a history which includes mass extinction by asteroids, volcanic eruptions and astrophysical events. All those extinctions were important in forming life as we know it. Why does this guy, and people who think like him, suppose that extinction events are now a thing of the past, that in the next few billion years left, there won't be any more of them?

Because to his sort of mindset, we've reached an "End of Evolution", a world which is perfect, or would be if humanity would just leave it alone (or just leave). There's no evidence for that belief. The evidence says that a billion years from now, all present day species will be extinct, replace by others. So when the guy starts arguing that we must impoverish ourselves to protect some unstable status quo, he does so from beliefs that have nothing to do with science, but are focused on himself.

(I still maintain that a viable theory for dinosaur extinction is that one of them developed intellegence, and hunted the rest to oblivion. If we look long enough, we will eventually find evidence of their robot spacecraft on the moon and among the asteroids.)

HT:
"And, we actually don't know how far normal climactic variations have to progress to turn one [i.e., background extinction rate] into the other [i.e., mass extinction events]."

We do know we are still well below the temperatures of the Medieval Climate Optimum, mentioned by Genecis above, and not even close to the temperatures of pre 8,000 B.C.. We also know that CO2 levels have been several times the current levels in the past. We also know that the only objective, global temperature measurements via satellite observations show little or no warming over the last 30 years.

Raoul,

If you actually believe that dinosaurs are extinct, all you need do is walk into a NYC singles bar wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and a Gold Rolex and the direct descendants of the velociraptor will be all over you, painted claws included, as if you were a staked-out wildebeest.

PeterB: even if our activities are not directly affecting Antarctica, we are doing so indirectly. Pollution up here works its way into the total global weather system, with unintended effects elsewhere. As a result, I am suggesting that we take some steps to minimize our environmental footprint. And by "we", I mean, precisely, "us". I am not suggesting that "we" sign onto Kyoto, because that concept is fatally flawed, but there are steps as individuals we can be taking, and that as a global community we could encourage in one way or another, that would have a net positive effect. Some of which would even be in our long-term economic best interests, as well. But the process probably starts by not making fun of someone who cares about extinctions in Antarctica, and attempting to intellectually marginalize people who measure effects on a system by observing its most sensitive components.

Bart: to return to two of your earlier comments. First, I think it is a mistake to confusing the abundance of a single species with success from the standpoint of evolution. Primates are down to a handful of species, having been winnowed to near extinction over the last couple of million years by the processes of natural selection. Mostly before Homo sapiens even got going. Right now, they are, in effect, represented by only a single species, and with rapidly reducing genetic diversity at that. From an evolutionary perspective, things are precarious. Equines are in approximately the same situation, by the way. If (or when, if you prefer) there is another mass extinction event, primates are not likely to be the beneficiaries, so perhaps we should be careful about provoking one.

Second, I am in fact aware that climate varies naturally over time, based on cyclical factors such as the tilt of global axis of rotation relative to the sun, the positions of the various continents and the height of mountain ranges therein, the long-term waxing and waning of the intensity of solar output, and a host of other natural inputs. However, we are currently introducing additional factors at a rapidly multiplying rate, and have no idea how these, when layered on top of the natural (i.e. non manmade) cycles, will affect global climate momentum. For example, what if the depth of a particular ice age affects the peak temperatures of the next climactic cycle, and we effectively eliminate an ice age with our activities? I'm not saying that's what is happening, but we don't know enough to say it's not and that's an argument in favor of treading lightly.

HT,

'Treading lightly' makes sense. No animal fouls its own nest without good reason.

I was unaware that mankind was faced with 'decreasing genetic diversity.' Have you ever ridden a NYC subway? There's a reason why Men In Black is done in New York.

If a meteorite hits the earth, all bets are off but if a pathogen comes around or if the polar ice caps melt, mankind will adjust. We certainly survived ' The Year Without a Summer' in 1816 and we have a lot more resources today than we did then.

The uniqueness of man is his ability to adapt his environment to his needs or to change his condition to fit his environment. That puts us ahead of all previous species, with the possible exception of the saurian carnivores that can easily be identified by their subscriptions to Cosmo.

HT:

No, the simple fact that someone cares deeply about something, whether extinctions in Antarctica or war in Darfur or social security reform in no way entitles them to solemn deference in and of itself. Caring is a very cheap currency in our modern times and is used far too often to stifle intelligent discourse.

HT

I meant professional or political caring, not ordinary politeness and sensitivity to a person's feelings.

Possibly, apart from his scientific credentials, he is like most people in feeling most comfortable with the way things are now.

Just because people study natural history does not make them somehow less than human.

He exaggerates. The algae are not going to 'disappear,' though perhaps they will become less common.

A number of the posts refered to extinction. We are not (in all likelihood) talking about extinctions here. All the present inhabitants of Antarctica have coped with the range of climatic changes over the past couple million years and are probably going to cope with the next one.

PeterB: OK, so scratch the "cares about" in that sentence and substitute "who draws inferences about the ecosystem from" and then respond to the larger point. The word "cares" was just shorthand for the longer phrase, as I believe the second part of that sentence makes clear.

Bart: ho, ho, ho, those crazy New Yorkers. But yes, we are becoming less genetically diverse. Previously, there were geographically separated populations of humanity each with its own genetic makeup. Yes, they had a lot in common, but they were slowly diverging from their shared genetic heritage. My personal thought is that they might have been on a path that would have eventually led to one or more speciation events. But now, thanks to man's mobility, these populations are blending back together. This has widespread implications, both for our survival as a species and for our longer term evolutionary potential as well, at least it does if you believe that evolutionary change tends to occur in smaller, isolated populations which then become "new species" when some catastrophe wipes out the original population. All our eggs are now in one basket, so to speak.

Mr. Eagar: while the algae, krill, and penguins might survive in greatly reduced quantities, some of the larger mammals might not. Top predators are in a pretty vulnerable in any ecosystem. Also, I think the point here is that larger inferences may legitimately be drawn from drastic changes in sensitive groups (as from the death of a canary in a coalmine). I for one wouldn't want to ignore the problem on the off chance that everything will turn out all right in the end, because the consequences of that position being wrong are potentially much more disastrous, and certainly more irreversible than a modest error in the other direction.

HT:
Your last response to Bret and Harry makes no sense. Smaller, isolated, inbreeding populations become genetically homogeneous due to genetic drift, i.e., they have less diversity. Outbreeding spreads traits throughout the whole species, increasing diversity. It seems to me an optimal species survival strategy to have all available genotypes distributed across the entire planet (all your eggs everywhere in a very large basket).

It is precisely the "sensitive" species that one would expect might become extinct. To argue they should be preserved at any cost is to attempt to prevent **any** extinctions -- a hopeless task.

HT:

Fine, you want us all to do something. If so, I suggest there are two burdens on you here. The first is to be persuasive with your science. From what I--a non-scientist--can glean, there is a vague consensus (not without dissenters) that the earth is warming and absolutely no consensus on why, how fast, what it means or what potential we have to stop it. Caution is great, but one measures an appropriate degree of caution against many other exigencies. It desn't stand out there alone in splendid isolation from cost, effectiveness, probability, etc.

Secondly, the underlying values have to be put in some context that people share and understand. Yes, we hammer natural selection and scientism a lot here because of their ill-disguised political agendas but also because they are happy to cherry-pick disingenuously when it is in their individual or collective self-interest. Frankly, I don't know what to do with a guy who says: "Yes, I am a scientist who believes evolutionary change is constant, inevitable, natural and purposeless, but I love penguins and you should to, so close your factories." I respect his basic humanity, but I'm not ready to take a political/economic sharp turn because of it.

That there are millions of decent, non-religious people who hold admirable values, including a reverance for nature and wildlife, is obvious and a reason to be grateful.

Peter, why are you assuming this guy is non-religious? Also, why are you knocking this guy for pushing an agenda? I read the whole article, and didn't see a single place where he advocates any form of action. He seems to be playing it pretty straight as a scientist, reporting the facts. No mention of global CO2 levels, no mention of cause at all. I think that you read in a lot of your own agendas into the text.

Mr. Watson: I think that our difference on this point stems from the fact that you are talking about the current genome, and I am talking about the future. You are correct that smaller populations become more genetically homogenous within themselves as a result of genetic drift. However, when did I say anything about genetic drift? I was, rather, primarily speaking of the long-term effects of mutation and natural selection operating on geographically isolated populations (aided, admittedly, by genetic drift, but as the means of finalizing a change in the genome, not the mechanism for creating it). Long term, continued isolation would thus tend to increase diversity among the entire population of populations. If it is true that evolutionary change tends to occur within isolated groups, then the global reach of the human community is, in effect, going to stop the evolutionary process for mankind as a whole, leading to less diversity in the genome over time.

Regarding your observation that it is hopeless to attempt to protect all species at any cost, well, who was arguing for that? My own point is that "sensitive" species are our canaries in the coalmine, and that we should pay attention to what is happening to them and take simple steps to counteract or at least mitigate the root causes, because we may be suffering to a lesser extent from these problems even now, and down the road we may experience more severe consequences if these root causes persist.

PeterB: you continue to caricature my position in order to throw some huge burden of proof my way. But it is an already established fact that pollution is bad (hint: it's not just about global warming); the hypothesis that problems in Antarctica may be coming from the same source should be just the icing on the cake to give us the incentive to do more about it. Again, for about the third time in this thread alone, I will point out that I am not calling for radical change, and that a lot of the things we could do make more economic sense than our current policies, which allow a lot of pollution and resource consumption to go on without really having to pay for the true costs of the activity.

Finally, it seems to me that although everyone seems very comfortable in responding to things I have not said (e.g. "genetic drift", "save every species", "radical change" etc.), no one has responded to most of the questions/arguments I actually have posed. For example, the canary in the coalmine effect, or the idea that the costs of erring on the side of ignoring the problem would be both irreversible and an order of magnitude larger than the costs of taking some simple precautionary steps, or the idea that incremental changes in behavior could, over time, achieve the effects we are looking for without undue economic or social disruption.

HT:

But you are not saying what you think we should do. I assume that, whatever it is, it isn't Antarctica focussed, so what do you say we can or should do?

Robert:

Yes, I was possibly being unfair to the guy personally, but it is The Guardian and this is just like thousands of similar articles that are supposed to lead us to a certain way of thinking politically.

PeterB: I think that an effort to phase in taxation increases on activities that cause pollution, especially optional ones, would be a good place to start, as would credits for activities that tend to reduce it. For example, a steady penny-every-year increase in the federal gasoline tax would, over time, encourage the continued development of higher-mileage vehicles or alternative fuel technologies (which we are going to need eventually anyway). Increasing license fees on a vehicle on an annual basis after it reaches a certain age, because older vehicles produce most of the pollution, would also be a good idea. Encouraging cleaner-burning coal or natural gas powerplants through either taxes on obsolete technologies or tax credits for new ones would also be constructive.

In each of these cases, the undesirable activities cause social and/or environmental problems that cost money to fix. Particulate pollution causes lung problems, industrial emissions can impair immune systems, climate change causes droughts and floods that take billions to prevent or recover from even in the U.S., never mind Antarctica. The problem is that creating these problems doesn't directly cost the polluters anything, and thus they have no incentive to clean up their act.

Whether or not global warming is as serious a problem as some seem to think, it would not hurt to encourage the mitigation of some of the problems noted above.

I hesitate to challenge jd on genetics, because he seems to know more about it than I do, but I believe he is incorrect to say that greater interbreeding increases diversity.

We are possibly using diversity in two different meanings.

But, if I understand Cavalli-Sforza etc. aright, diversity builds up in isolated populations (due to accumulation of mutations and by drift) and tends to be conserved.

Of the kind of genetic differences that C-S used in his migration studies, there is said to be more in any village in black Africa than in the rest of the world combined.

The reason being that when Person A and his wife and a few friends left the village, they carried off only a tiny fraction of the genetic diversity that had built up over, say, hundreds of thousands of years.

They began adding new diversity, of course, but in the 50,000 to 100,000 years since they left Africa, they have accumulated only a relatively small amount of diversity. Meanwhile, presumably, in their original village (if it has survived), the indigenes have been adding diversity as well.

At some point, I expect, there could be crossover point. 6 billion people should be able to carry more diversity than 6,000.

But if we are talking about diversity of language, religion, mores, then obviously there is more diversity in one American state than in one African village.