The two extinctions of the Carolina Parakeet Conuropsis carolinensis

Author(s):  
KEVIN R. BURGIO ◽  
COLIN J. CARLSON ◽  
ALEXANDER L. BOND ◽  
MARGARET A. RUBEGA ◽  
MORGAN W. TINGLEY

Summary Due to climate change and habitat conversion, estimates of the resulting levels of species extinction over the next century are alarming. Devising conservation solutions will require many different approaches, including examining the extinction processes of recently extinct species. Given that parrots are one of the most threatened groups of birds, information regarding parrot extinction is pressing. While most recent parrot extinctions have been island endemics, the Carolina Parakeet Conuropsis carolinensis had an 18th-century range covering nearly half of the present-day United States, yet mostly disappeared by the end of the 19th century. Despite a great deal of speculation, the major cause of its extinction remains unknown. Establishing the date when a species went extinct is one of the first steps in determining what caused their extinction. While there have been estimates of their extinction date, these analyses used a limited dataset and did not include observational data. We used a recently published, extensive dataset of Carolina Parakeet specimens and observations combined with a Bayesian extinction estimating model to determine the most likely extinction dates. By considering each of the two subspecies independently, we found that they went extinct ˜30 years apart: the western subspecies C. c. ludovicianus going extinct around 1914 and the eastern subspecies C. c. carolinensis either in the late 1930s or mid-1940s. Had we only considered all observations together, this pattern would have been obscured, possibly missing a major clue in solving the mystery of the parakeet’s extinction. Since the Carolina Parakeet was a wide-ranging species that went extinct during a period of rapid agricultural and industrial expansion, conditions that mirror those occurring in many parts of the world where parrot diversity is highest, any progress we make in unraveling the mystery of their disappearance may be vital to modern conservation efforts.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin R. Burgio ◽  
Colin J. Carlson ◽  
Alexander L. Bond ◽  
Margaret A. Rubega ◽  
Morgan W. Tingley

ABSTRACTDue to climate change and habitat conversion, estimates of the number of species extinctions over the next century are alarming. Coming up with solutions for conservation will require many different approaches, including exploring the extinction processes of recently extinct species. Given that parrots are the most threatened group of birds, information regarding parrot extinction is especially pressing. While most recent parrot extinctions have been island endemics, the Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) had an 18th-century range covering nearly half of the present-day United States, despite which, they went extinct in the 20th century. The major cause of their extinction remains unknown. As a first step to determining what caused their extinction, we used a newly published, extensive dataset of Carolina parakeet observations combined with a Bayesian extinction estimating model to determine the most likely date of their extinction. By considering each of the two subspecies independently, we found that they went extinct ~30 years apart: the western subspecies (C. c. ludovicianus) around 1914 and the eastern subspecies (C. c. carolinensis) either in the late 1930s or mid-1940s. Had we only considered all observations together, this pattern would have been obscured, missing a major clue to the Carolina parakeet’s extinction. Since the Carolina parakeet was a wide-ranging species that went extinct during a period of rapid agricultural and industrial expansion, conditions that mirror those presently occurring in many parts of the world where parrot diversity is highest, any lessons we can glean from their disappearance may be vital to modern parrot conservation efforts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Haekal - Siraj

 The 2015 Paris Agreement requires all participating countries to reduce emisson level. Indonesia as Non-Annex I accepted the norms of the 2015 Paris Agreement by ratifying this agreement. Meanwhile, Indonesia's emissions level continues to increase due to the rate of deforestation and forest degradation in Indonesia which ranks highest in the world. This study aims to analyze Indonesian policy in ratifying the agreement by using the Constructivism Perspective in explaining the International Regime and the Concept of Norm Influence by Finnemore and Sikkink. The study uses qualitative methods with explanatory designs. Data collection techniques are sourced from secondary sources as well as data analysis techniques carried out by reduction, presentation, and drawing conclusions as well as verification. This study found that the United States as a hegemonic state acting as the norm entrepreneurs by granting climate change financial assistance of $500 million through the GCF for Indonesia as a developing country was a condition affecting Indonesia in ratifying the agreement. Keywords: Indonesia, ratify, 2015 Paris Agreement, norm, climate change.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4

Harris County, Texas, the site of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF’s) fourth annual Sharing Knowledge conference in 2019, has been tested. Hurricane Harvey, the catastrophic storm that struck just over 18 months earlier, was one of the worst weather-related events ever faced by the city of Houston and its surrounding area, and the continuing impact of climate change suggests it will not be the last. The city’s 2.3 million residents have also dealt with industrial accidents, borne the brunt of devastating floods, and provided refuge to people fleeing other disaster areas in the southern United States and to immigrants from around the world....


Author(s):  
Henry Shue

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted in Rio de Janeiro at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in June 1992 establishes no dates and no dollars. No dates are specified by which emissions are to be reduced by the wealthy states, and no dollars are specified with which the wealthy states will assist the poor states to avoid an environmentally dirty development like our own. The convention is toothless because throughout the negotiations in the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee during 1991 to 1992, the United States played the role of dentist: whenever virtually all the other states in the world (with the notable exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) agreed to convention language with teeth, the United States insisted that the teeth be pulled out. The Clinton administration now faces a strategic question: should the next step aim at a comprehensive treaty covering all greenhouse gases (GHGs) or at a narrower protocol covering only one, or a few, gases, for example, only fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO2)? Richard Stewart and Jonathan Wiener (1992) have argued for moving directly to a comprehensive treaty, while Thomas Drennen (1993) has argued for a more focused beginning. I will suggest that Drennen is essentially correct that we should not try to go straight to a comprehensive treaty, at least not of the kind advocated by Stewart and Wiener. First I would like to develop a framework into which to set issues of equity or justice of the kind introduced by Drennen. It would be easier if we faced only one question about justice, but several questions are not only unavoidable individually but are entangled with one another. In addition, each question can be given not simply alternative answers but answers of different kinds. In spite of this multiplicity of possible answers to the multiplicity of inevitable and interconnected questions, I think we can lay out the issues fairly clearly and establish that commonsense principles converge to a remarkable extent upon what ought to be done, at least for the next decade or so.


First Monday ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Latham

Planetary phenomena, such as global climate change and transborder disease transmission, are increasing subject to monitoring aided by advances in surveillance and data processing technologies. The most powerful governments of the world, especially the United States, are building monitoring systems they can control. Communities and activists around the world face a fundamental choice: become involved in shaping those systems so they better serve the needs and interests of the world’s population or build their own independent, unofficial monitoring systems.


Author(s):  
David W. Orr

For two centuries and longer, humankind has been on a collision course with the limits of the Earth. The inertial momentum—the scale and velocity of the human enterprise—has grown so rapidly since the mid-20th century that virtually every indicator of planetary health is in decline (McNeill, 2000). Even an otherwise self-characterized “optimistic” analysis concludes that: . . . The momentum toward an unsustainable future can be reversed, but only with great difficulty. [The reversal] assumes fundamental shifts in desired lifestyles, values and technology. Yet, even under these assumptions, it takes many decades to realign human activity with a healthy environment, make poverty obsolete, and ameliorate the deep fissures that divide people. Some climate change is irrevocable, water stress will persist in many places, extinct species will not return, and lives will be lost to deprivation. (Raskin et al., 2002, pp. 94–95) . . . Considerably less optimistic, Thomas Berry concludes that “It is already determined that our children and grandchildren will live amid the ruined infrastructures of the industrial world and amid the ruins of the natural world itself ” (2006, p. 95). James Lovelock’s view is even darker: “the acceleration of the climate change now under way will sweep away the comfortable environment to which we are adapted . . . . [There is evidence of ] an imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell” (2006, pp. 7, 147; The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 2009). Given such dire predictions, theologian Jack Miles, author of A History of God (2000), suggests that we begin to ponder the possibility that “the effort to produce a sustainable society has definitively failed . . . that we are irreversibly en route to extinction.” Alan Weisman, in a striking exercise of journalistic imagination, describes in The World Without Us how our infrastructure would then crumble, collapse, and finally disappear (2007). These are only a few of the recent musings about the human prospect.


Author(s):  
Nick Jelley

‘What are renewables?’ defines renewable energy and provides a brief history of its use. It focuses on energy generated by solar, wind, and hydropower. These energy sources are renewable, in the sense that they are naturally replenished within days to decades. Only a few years ago, giving up our reliance on fossil fuels to tackle global warming would have been very difficult, as they are so enmeshed in our society and any alternative was very expensive. Nearly all of the sources of energy up to the 18th century were from renewables, after which time the world increasingly used fossil fuels. They powered the industrial revolution around the globe, and now provide most of our energy. But this dependence is unsustainable, because their use causes global warming, climate change, and pollution. Other than hydropower, which grew steadily during the 20th century and now provides almost a sixth of the world’s electricity demand, renewable energy was a neglected resource for power production for most of this period, being economically uncompetitive. But now, renewables are competitive, particularly through the support of feed-in tariffs and mass production, and governments are starting to pay more attention to clean energy, as the threat of climate change draws closer. Moving away from fossil fuels to renewables to supply both heat and electricity sustainably has become essential.


Solar ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-3
Author(s):  
Juergen H. Werner

Climate change and the consequential environmental catastrophes are real, not only in less developed countries of the so-called “Global South” but also in so-called industrialized and “well-developed” areas of the world! Just within the last few months and years, we have seen high-temperature records in the United States, fire disasters in Canada, Australia, Greece, Italy, and Spain [...]


Eos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randy Showstack

One year ago today, President Trump vowed to exit the United States from the Paris climate pact. Eos discusses this with climatologist Michael Mann, author of the new book The Tantrum that Saved the World.


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