The raids were planned by a group called the Republican Welcoming Committee and include the St. Paul Police, the FBI and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department. According to Greenwald, the purpose of these raids was to intimidate protesters for whom there was no evidence of a threat to persons or property. The preemptive nature of the raids was simply an attempt to reduce the number of protesters and sanitize as much as possible the RNC convention environment. These illegal acts are carried out with “warrants” obtained from compliant judges based on laws of dubious legal stature, so that the Republican fat cats see fewer protests and the media sees and reports a more tranquil scene. For some people, like the young protesters meeting in St. Paul, we have indeed become a Poland. The growing homeland security environment mentality serves as the driving force to increasingly form a police state in America and if we don’t act quickly to shut down this new movement of illegality, based on over-hyped national security issues, we are going to see a Poland for the rest of us. We have already established the principal in this country that national security trumps our laws. That is how FDR could force U.S. citizens of Japanese descent, to be incarcerated during WW II and that is how the homeland security forces can generate seemingly arbitrary laws, as Poland did, to suppress our freedoms and gradually move us into a Polish-like state of intimidation and public submission. These illegal acts must stop and those that perpetrated them must be charged with acts of illegality themselves. I believe, and many others share this view, that we are only one or two terrorist attacks away from the formation of a police state and the actions we have seen in St. Paul give us an indication of what we can expect in the future, because these vague and seemingly arbitrary laws can be applied to any one of us. It is reminiscent of the “vagrancy” laws that were passed in the South after the civil war, and used to specifically round up blacks and force them into labor camps that continued to exist right up until WW II–it was simply another form of slavery to provide the much needed free labor that the South still tried to secure for its economic formula. How many of you could have your homes raided for “conspiracy to commit a riot.” Perhaps in the future just writing a blog like this one might quality. To stop this kind of festering growth in intimidation, those who perpetrated these events must face the threat of incarceration themselves–find themselves in jail next to those they had arrested a few hours before. But that won’t happen until we have judges in this country that protect us from further erosion of our citizen rights. The right to protest is now being challenged by law enforcement. We should not kid ourselves into believing that what has happened in St. Paul is anything other than a great danger to our entire society.

RFM

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Just yesterday, the St. Paul Police Chief, John Harrington was interviewed on C-Span, and extolled the virtues of his anticipated actions that would not include riot gear for his police officers; yet, the first time I got a glimpse of the demonstration it was chaos and police brutality in full riot gear. The police claim that some protesters used violent methods, but it remains to be seen whether they can make serious charges stick. Does anyone want to take bets on whether the mainstream media report on Amy Goodman’s arrest tomorrow? My guess is that they have to, but time will tell.

I didn’t see that the St. Paul police tried to emulate Mayor Daley’s police force actions of brutality at the 1968 Democratic Convention, which is now the stuff of legends, and unfortunately was the beginning of the war split in the Democratic Party. In 1968, the Democratic Party and Daley’s actions were taking place against liberals/radicals who represented one component of the party. In the St. Paul demonstrations, it is primarily an anti-war demonstration and is represented by a coalition, so both Obama and McCain signs were in evidence, though overwhelmingly tipped towards Obama. I don’t think the right wing does stuff like that: they would rather start wars than end them. According to a poll in the NYT yesterday, 79% of delegates approve of the way Bush is handling his Presidency, while 63% of Republican voters feel that way (all voters score at 29%, while Democratic voters are at 6% on this issues). For the all important war and invasion of Iraq, an astonishing 80% of Republican delegates think it was the right thing to do, while that figure for Republican voters nationally is 70%, 37% for all voters, 14% for Democratic voters and 2% for Democratic delegates at the Denver convention. Here is another outcome of that poll that is striking: when asked if it is better to have health care coverage for all Americans or hold down taxes, only 7% of Republican delegates favor health care coverage, while 40% of republican voters favor health care over budget. On this issue, all voters favor health care 67%, with Democratic voters at 90% and Democratic delegates at Denver were at 94%. If you look at the NYT/CBS poll (poll error figures were not given but are traditionally 3-5%) you can appreciate that the Democratic party is far healthier and “American” than the current state of the outmoded Republican Party, which is sliding into the trash bin of history. Yet, as Obama said on 60 Minutes this past Sunday, “Republicans don’t know how to govern, but they are good at getting elected.” Amen, now we need to get out the vote and put pressure on Obama to drive on the left side of the party because that is what got you here in the first place.

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We first heard about the “bridge to nowhere” and complained about it as pork excess. But, when the “bridge to everywhere” went down in the heart of our own city here in Minneapolis, hardly a flag of protest went up, with the exception of refreshing columns by Nick Coleman of the Star Tribune. We are too numbed by experiencing a country that no longer works and it is that fear that allows Republicanism to further advance it’s cause.

Today, we largely live in the world of Corporate Republicanism that we would have outlawed forty years ago and much of it exists, not just because of the gradualism that accompanied the slow conversion of our democracy to a free market corporatist state, but also because the real nature of Corporatist Republicanism has been hidden from our view, through the lack of activism in our press and a compliant public that shows little interest in the world outside of America or indeed in the details of our economic and social governance. Who has time for watching the erosion of our freedoms, the hijacking of our government or the subversion of our national economy when Paris Hilton is facing jail?

Republicans complain about the lack of personal freedom, all the while promoting its further erosion. Republicans complain about expensive domestic programs like health care, all the while promoting no-bid contracts to their business partners, or expensive drug plans for patients to promote huge profits for drug companies. Putting corporate profit up as the Holy Grail of their movement, they have achieved a level of success unimaginable just a few decades ago: astonishingly, the process itself was acutely rejectionable but chronically acceptable. The Republican Party views the principal role of our government as that of enhancing corporate profits, with unfettered access to the environment and an open market system giving biased access to the markets of every country on the planet: Nirvana in a nutshell.

It was not rationalism that gave us corporatist Republicanism, but instead it was created by full compliance with the organizational makeup of the human nervous system. Our brains best serve our survival needs, when disagreeable or threatening change is sudden. Acute threatening circumstances lead us, reflexly, to generate a quick response to either remove the threat or remove ourselves from it. But when changes are introduced gradually, in piecemeal fashion, particularly if they represent ideas projecting a future rather than an immediate outcome, each incremental change is more readily absorbed and our nervous system is far less likely to generate a survival alarm. Instantaneous Republicanism would have been odious to our instincts, but the same outcome, achieved through gradualism to our senses has worked. This intrinsic property of our brain, known as adaptation, is useful: it prevents us from over-reacting to situations that don’t merit a quick response. But our adaptive brain is what allowed us to accept Republicanism. It’s a little like the story of putting a frog into boiling water, in which case he immediately jumps for safety. But, put the same frog in a pot of cold water and gradually increase the temperature and the frog is more inclined to accept his deadly future because the slow incremental change in heat allows the nervous system to adapt (I have never seen this done, but I’ve heard the story enough times that I have looked upon it as true). That’s what Republicans did to us: they heated the water slowly to cook us and now that we are fully cooked and numbed from action by inaction, we don’t complain.

If we are going to remove ourselves from the current trajectory we are on as a society, with limited freedoms, constant fear from enemies we mostly created for ourselves and a certain pathway to world irrelevance and national bankruptcy, then rank and file Republicans and Independents are going to have to decide if their party is truly pursuing a set of worthy national goals, rather than merely practicing the numbing of our senses to create an ever greater mode of national compliance. We now have a large constituency who believes that Katrina disasters of the future will be just like the last one, as our brains are increasingly incapable of survival instincts and appropriate escape behavior. The next war can be sold just as easily as the invasion of Iraq. If Bush had been given his way and NATO agreed to Georgia as a member, we might be sending troops right now to fight against the Russians. The challenge before us is how to escape from Republicanism, this process of midget-sizing our brains and wiping away our cortex. The enemy of Republicanism is longitudinal thinking. Isn’t it about time we looked down the road a few years ahead and try to visualize where they are taking us? Isn’t is a brige to nowhere for just about anyone but a very few, overly wealthy Americans? I don’t even think the super wealthy talk about a trickle down economy anymore, as Ronald Reagan did, since they know that nothing trickled down and besides, in the field of international finance, you’re not building a country anymore, you’re finding profits in tearing one down. This election, more than any other in my lifetime, is about a lot more than getting a better person in the White House. It’s about reshaping a country to address problems that are both broad and deep. It is about the redistribution of wealth to rebuild a national society and inject a broader sense of fairness into the American culture and it is also about providing education and bulding opportunities for jobs. If we begin that process, we will inevitably run into the 900 lb gorilla in the room we have yet to talk about–our unmanageable military budget. In the early 1990s, a group of experts concluded that we could properly defend ourselves and provide protection for the country with a military budget of about $ 60 billion. Collectively, for all military related expendures we spend about $1.1 trillion, yet cannot provide safety to our country as 9/11 demonstrated. The only way out of this dilemma is to announce the future of the planet to be at grave risk and convert our military manufacturing centers, which are basically owned by the Federal Government anyway, to the manufacture and development of technology needed to save the planet, clean the air, reduce emissions, improve the water and educate our people. Through that process, we can begin to slowly cook the Republicans.

RFM

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Apparently, the region has now become popular to sport-fisherman who come, with sunblock and uv protective clothing (it seems you can get a sunburn through a t-shirt-not aided by radioactivity) and fly fish in the shallow reefs for bonefish. One of the tourists remarked, “The contrast of it is amazing. I mean, the hydrogen bomb is the most powerful and destructive thing there is, right? Yet out here, this place, and the reefs we saw yesterday — it’s just gorgeous.”
Much of the Pacific atoll region was left deserted after the bomb testing, although villagers have returned in some regions. But the absence of exploitive human behavior has allowed nature to take over and reconstitute the area to give the oddest juxtaposition between man’s most destructive weapon and nature’s ability to do repair work in his absence. If you’re planning a vacation there Christmas Island is only about 3 hours away from Honolulu. I guess the message is “take your flyrod.”

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Here are two examples of the failure of contemporary models. EXAMPLE 1: The ice of Antarctica is melting faster and by mechanisms that were not appreciated or included in models. This past February through March, the Wilkins Ice Shelf broke up and disappeared in a matter of a few weeks. This was not the first time that such a seismic event of ice breakup has occurred. Climatologists have incorporated into their models the assumption that the loss of ice would take place at the edges, where the ice meets the increasingly warmer ocean. But that is not what happens. Like the Wilkins Ice Shelf loss, the surface of the ice is melted during the day, with the water accumulating into pools and fissures that penetrate into the ice further back from the ice-ocean interface. At night, when this water freezes, it expands and puts pressure on the ice sheet to break up into smaller sections. So, instead of losing an ice shelf over hundreds if not thousands of years, as the edge model would have us believe, massive ice shelfs can be lost virtually overnight. No model ever had that mechanism included and it is one reason why we must question all the results of all the models.
Example 2: The acute focus of many climatologists has now been targeted to Greenland, which was once thought to be relatively free from short-term meltdown created by global climate change. But a group of researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, working in Greenland earlier this year, watched a 3 kilometer (about 1.8 miles) wide lake suddenly disappear into a 1 kilometer fissure in the lake within 90 minutes. The flow of water necessary to drain the lake so quickly would be greater than the flow of water over Niagara Falls. The point behind this observation is that climate change can occur quickly, as if there might be a tipping point and that kind of climate behavior does not emerge from the models. There aren’t enough chaotic variables in the models that can spin the simulation into predicting short-term, highly non-linear catastrophes. If Greenland loses its ice, then water levels could be elevated by as much as 6 meters (~18 ft) and many cities would be under water. This could occur so rapidly that there would not be enough time to move inland in an orderly way and many people could either drown or starve to death. It would be very hard for any model to predict either of the illustrated events.

All climatologists are in a state of panic, because governments are relying on their data to formulate global climate change treaties and policies. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a multinational organization that studies climate change patterns and provides governments with data that are used by them to formulate treaties, such as the Kyoto treaty (that the United States did not sign). Now European governments are going ahead with a new treaty and formulating it on models and data that we know are completely inaccurate. The models used so far underestimated the rising temperatures by at least a degree (2.5 vs 3.5 degree centigrade–a huge difference).

The treaty that is now under development will propose keeping the atmospheric carbon dioxide level below 450 ppm. This compares with pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm and the current level of 380 ppm. The assumption is that by allowing the carbon dioxide to get to 450 ppm, but no more, the earth will experience no more than a 2 degree C increase in temperature. But the modeling data that supports that conclusion is completely discredited and no one has a better model that is ready to give us better results or a more certain understanding of what we can expect.

A paper submitted to SCIENCE MAGAZINE by James Hansen of NASA has argued that if you look back 50 million years at a time when carbon dioxide levels were falling and reached a level of about 425 ppm, a level we are likely to see in a decade or two, that is about the time that Antarctica got its ice cap. This raises the possibility that the planet may have a tipping point near that level and by going above it, as future treaties are likely to allow and project, Antarctica might become ice free and if so, the projected rise in sea levels would be more like 60 meters or ~180 feet. While I wouldn’t start moving to the mountains just yet, we should all appreciate the high degree of uncertainty that we will live with for the rest of our lives about global climate change and recognize that we still know very little about the planet that we live on.

We started to devour the planet long before we ever tried to figure out how it works. Perhaps the planet is getting ready to devour us or many of us and do so faster than we think. It would of course be naive for anyone to assume near-term calamity threatening extinction of the human species. But progress on understanding the planet we live on is very likely to be so slow that we may not be able to keep up with the changing reality of the global climate change itself. In other words, we will continually be faced with studying a new planet every time one of the homeostatic mechanisms gets lost. The melting of the polar ice caps that we are witnessing before our eyes is roughly 10 to 50 years ahead of schedule. If a tipping point exists for polar ice caps and Greenland, then it seems almost certain that this planet cannot sustain the human population that it has now (6.5 billion). The exponential growth of the population ceased in the 20th century, so that we are expected to reach zero population growth sometime this century, at which time we may level off at 7-9 billion humans on our little planet. If some catastrophic future lies ahead of us, it is only too bad that nature can’t selectively pick out the Republican Party as a kind of trial balloon to see if their extrication can, all by itself, fix the lovely little blue planet we have gown fond of.

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In the midst of the post-convention euphoria, John Zogby writes (August 24) that, over the summer, Obama lost 12 points to McCain in going from a 47-40 lead to a five point deficit by his latest polling results (pre-convention). He also points out that Obama lost that lead because young voters began to see him waiver on things that are important to them. Just as I had predicted when I made the point earlier, the majority of Americans, in the range of 60-80%, support the views of progressive liberals on issues which include the war in Iraq, energy and health care. Obama’s move to the center cost him that lead and I worry that, while he reinforced his commitment to a more liberal position last night in his convention speech, his campaign managers have moved him to a more central position to steal votes from the undecided independents that are wavering on McCain. The trouble with that strategy is that the young voters that have been newly attracted to Obama will just stay home on election day, especially if they perceive he is no longer their kind of candidate. Young voters won’t go for McCain, they just won’t go to the polls. The polls that are taken after the two conventions are the ones that begin to reveal the public sentiments and tracking them then becomes more indicative of voter commitments. I have been personally disappointed by Obama for his centrist slide and, while I contributed to the Democratic Party, I have yet to contribute directly to Obama’s campaign. I certainly will do so in the coming days and, while I am disappointed in his lack of progressive vigor, letting McCain win this election would be tantamount to a public crime–one committed by the public!
I have not seen the ad, but the Swift Boat people who attacked Kerry, have put together an attack ad against Obama that links him to the terrorist past of William Ayers (former member of the Weatherman Underground and now a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago). The Republicans have a way of making these connections mean something (unlike Kerry who didn’t fight back against the Swift Boaters, Obama’s campaign is going after the legality of these kinds of ads, although one sees little hope of this strategy actually achieving anything).
In my opinion, what the Obama campaign should do is hit very hard on McCain with the evidence that he has early Alzheimer’s (published accounts reveal that he has 6 of the 10 behavioral features of early cognitive failure). and demand that he take a neurological exam with a test for his cognitive capacity to reassure Americans that he is competent to lead the country. If elected, McCain will be our oldest president at a time when the problems a new administration will face have never been greater or more demanding. Given his family history of early death (father age 70, grandfather age 61) and the apparent signs of cognitive dysfunction, a test should be demanded by the American public. By putting McCain on the defensive about his ability to lead because of cognitive impairment, it is one way to change the tone of the election. You can go to this site and contribute to ads demanding an examination of McCains cognitive state. Of course, as well all know, anyone voting or registering Republican already has a serious cognitive impairment. We have yet to learn whether this might be something in the water, the same water that Bush as been drinking. Perhaps an overdose of solvents used in processing the plastic bottles they favor as their source of water–that could be the root of all this strange Republicanism and the birth of Faux News. Perhaps McCain, learning the source of his cognitive disability in the solvents of plastic processing, will add a new campaign slogan “I will bring back quality public drinking water to Arizona–oops I mean to the American People.”

RFM

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According to Traister, there is anger over the Hillary issue and anger over the fact that Nancy Pelosi asked Hillary to step aside and encouraged super delegates to vote for Obama. But Traister is quick to emphasize that this is a sophisticated form of anger, a Socratic version if you will, not a brutal, destructive form of hostility. Some women are understandably angry over how Hillary was treated and they want to express that anger, while still speaking enthusiastically about Obama. And that kind of controversy is just the sort of thing that party conventions need. If conventions should ever lose their controversial, issue-debating motif, they would lose their value as a center of gravity for party unity. To me, it makes not difference if Hillary is nominated and we go through a round of voting. We have done that in the past, so it would hardly be a negative. Perhaps it would be a negative if it didn’t happen.

I have always felt that the Democrats do far less staging of their conventions than do the Republicans. We will see next week in St. Paul whether any errant Republican delegates go over a bridge that isn’t quite finished, reminding us of a certain Republican Minnesota Governor that took money out of bridge repair to aid in balancing his Republican budget. Republicans are the great destroyers of infrastructure!
Last night, I switched between C-Span and PBS coverage of the convention, as I can no longer stomach the kind of coverage we get from the major networks. There were PBS reporters such as Judy Woodruff, whose mission was to find card-carrying PUMA delegates, but, during my watch, every woman who was interviewed and confessed to disappointment about Hillary, conveyed enthusiasm for Obama and Hillary signs were hard to find, though when discovered, seemed to have an unusually large share of the broadcast time.

Conventions are supposed to be events where people express alternate opinions and make it into a house with some controversy. If you bring your gripes to the convention, they might get ironed out there–that’s one of its functions. Without controversy at the Democratic Conventions of the past, we would never have had civil rights and let’s remember that without the Democratic party and Lyndon Johnson, and the controversies of unseated delegations, civil rights would have been delayed and Martin Luther King’s dream might still be just that. There is but one rule for a convention: it is meant to inspire the supporters to go out and work their ass off to get their nominee elected. We can afford to let Chris Matthews create his fiction, but can MSNBC?
Matthews crystallizes the problem we face with contemporary “television reporting”–it doesn’t report anything of value or it pursues self-constructed delusions. About the only thing that I can think of where TV coverage is confined to the facts is their coverage of an airplane crash during the first few minutes after the event. TV reporting has been forced by the new economy of television and the profit motive of news, to straddle the fence between entertainment and news, to the point that it is neither.

If you are a visible personality on your own, as every modern TV “reporter” aspires to be, and many, such as Matthews have become, then you need a story line that will get you through the Convention. You must display a vision that is beyond what others can gleam from the events surrounding them. If your vision going into the convention was that the Hillary supporters would destroy Obama’s chances of an electoral victory this Fall, then you might have to create it if in fact you can’t find adequate evidence to support it once you arrived. If you can’t find PUMAs in force at the convention center, you seduce the few, hire them, dress them up or somehow amass a group that is well below critical mass for their assigned role as implosives, but surrounding you on the TV camera, the optical distortion makes it seem that they are about ready to declare imminent domain over the entire convention. Real numbers don’t bother you, statistics don’t matter. You have a story that you are going to stick to and if it doesn’t apply, you become a producer and make it happen. After all, it’s enterntainment. That’s why people watch Chris Matthews! Who would ever watch Matthews for news?
That’s modern life in “TV journalism.” And people seem to like it. Or at least some do. On TV, we watch people with silly histories of their own telling us, in the face of evidence against such an overwhelmingly negative PUMA campaign, that imminent destruction of the convention and the party is going on as evidenced by the masses surrounding the reporter whose image is made up as if our “reporter” was speaking from the convention floor. Is it live or is it Memorex? I suppose fictional dreaming is the real thing too.

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When we finally understood that the invasion of Iraq was more about oil than WMD, Americans began to think that, with $4 a gallon for gas looming as perhaps a permanent new state of our energy costs, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to have control of a country in the Middle East that had the second largest oil reserves in the region, especially one in which much of the oil remains untapped due to the sanctions against Saddam Hussein. All that fit neatly, since we were told that the surge had worked! Now with all that success, we are just waiting for the day when officials and reporters are willing to come out of the Green Zone in Baghdad. Despite that overwhelming success of the surge (the civilian death rates are at about 1000/month, approximately where they were in 2005, but civilian deaths are irrelevant, right?), the oil option that Americans thought they paid for seems to be having problems, as Iraq recently signed a $1.2 billion oil deal with China for oil development service contracts and American oil companies are pulling back from what they hoped would be low profit service contracts initially, with the option of getting in on more lucrative oil contracts in the long run. We are now witnessing Iraq’s version of hard ball. Thanks to the high cost of oil, Iraq now enjoys having $ billions in oil revenues sitting in the bank, while we continue to spend $ billions on conducting our war there. Go figure. Are we being played like a poor quality fiddle in Iraq?
Russia-Georgia Conflict: If you want to read more about the Russia-Georgia conflict, go to William Pfaff’s website to get a more balanced perspective on the nature of the conflict. Pfaff writes for the International Herald Tribune and is syndicated in many American newspapers. You can read about Pfaff, who has been called by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as the new Walter Lippmann and a review of one of his recent books “The Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia” in the New York Review of Books.

RFM

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Golden Toad

A beautiful little amphibian called the Golden Toad was first described in the Monteverde mountain region of Costa Rica in 1966, but has not been seen anywhere in the world since 1989 and is presumed to be extinct. This biological tragedy is made more alarming by the fact that this region of the Costa Rica mountains is protected as a national reserve and was presumed to be a site for species preservation, not extinction! Costa Rica has some of the most delicate and unusual ecological systems of the world. Placed at the isthmus of the junction between North and South America, Costa Rica has both a Pacific and a Caribbean coast, with a prominent North-South mountain range that serves as a continental divide, which, like that in North America, determines whether rivers flow to the Pacific or Caribbean oceans. Monteverde is near a unique regional preserve in the mountainous region North of San Jose, the main city of Costa Rica (To get there you have to drive up a 30 km road that is unpaved, very rocky and dangerous. We did it in a small four-wheel drive car, during an intense rain storm, but most others we met hired tour guides to take them up and bring them back: they looked at us like we were a little nuts).

On the Caribbean side of the mountain forest, the region is a rain forest, fed by moist warm air coming up into the mountains, driven by a warm, seasonal Caribbean current. But on the Pacific side of the same region, the forest is a cooler cloud forest, in which less rain falls, but continuous cloud formations in the canopy of the forest keeps the region damp and cool. The continuous moisture of the cloud forest is essential for the orchids and bromeliads that live as epiphytes in the tree canopy. Without a source of continuous high humidity, many of the special plant species could not survive and the unique ecology of the region would be significantly changed.

I know from experience about one aspect of this issue, as I once tried to grow Masdevallia and Dracula orchids of the type found in the tree canopies of the cloud forests in Costa Rica; I found it impossible to grow them in Minnesota unless you go to great lengths to keep the humidity at 70% or more and in the range of 60 degrees Fahrenheit at night. In Minnesota, that type of environment can only be achieved with something like the Orchidarium that is manufactured here in Minnesota, specifically to address that kind of problem. I don’t have an Orchidarium, although a primitive homemade version of one is sitting in my office, only lacking waterproofing and an internal fan. Someday I will get to it and try the same orchids once again under “cloud forest conditions.” These special orchids and bromeliads don’t just have a small regional area of distribution, but within the cloud forest they have a restricted vertical layering to their representation, where the cloudy tree top regions best meet their requirements. These orchids produce small delicate flowers which attract very specific pollinators. Pollination requirements in the forests around Monteverde are not just met by insects, but huge arrays of humming birds are in the area and serve as pollinators as well. Indeed many flower shapes are such that they fit the long bill of hummingbirds.  We must have seen at least 10-15 different humming bird species all in one area of the cloud forest. They are very aggressive, territorial birds–little bantam fighters, with a heart rate in flight of about 1200 beats/minute (only small hearts can achieve this rate, because they reduce the distance over which the Purkinje system has to conduct to coordinate the contractile sequences of the heart, atrium to ventricle).

Environmental changes in cloud forests from global climate change have already been documented in the cloud forests of Peru, where a drier climate change has been measured directly. The exaggerated seasonal changes in temperature and humidity have directly impacted on the positioning of plants within the cloud forest. Ecologists in Costa Rica are very worried that an excessive drying cycle may be taking place in the cloud forests of Monteverde and speculation is that such changes were responsible for the dissappearance of the Golden Toad, although this action might have been achieved through an indirect effect (see below).

Seasonal changes shape the ecology of the region and one of the most important cycles relates to fruit production from the many trees in the forest, the most important of which may be the Avocado tree, of which there are numerous species. To the casual eye, the differences between the two forests on either side of the continental divide seem trivial. But closer examination of the flora and fauna indicates that while there are many species common to both areas, unique species of plant and animal life can be found in one region but not the other. The difference in the moisture delivery system and temperature gradients have produced a truly remarkable gradient of plant and animal differences in ways that investigators are still trying to understand. Hundreds of different species of birds, mammals, amphibians, butterflies, snakes and hordes of invertebrates can be found living in the region. Other animals such as jaguars and wild pigs (peccaries) have all but disappeared in the Monteverde forests due to habitat degradation. The Monteverde region is a paradise for bird watchers (I showed a few guides and hiking companions the great advantages of image-stabilized binoculars for viewing long distance objects, which provides much greater image clarity through elimination of user vibration–don’t go home without one). You can’t make out the features of a monkey in the trees without an image stabilized viewing system.

Three-wattled Bellbird

An educational film we saw about the ecology of the Monteverde region, while visiting the area for several days, pointed out some of the essential characteristics of the rain and cloud forests across the divide and how the overall ecology of the cloud forest was heavily dependent on the migratory pattern of a single bird–the Three-wattled Bellbird. This bird feeds almost exclusively on Avocado fruit as it comes in season (not the big ones you see in stores, but much smaller fruit about the size of your thumb). The male Bellbird has a very loud, almost screeching sound that falls short of a songbird call, but it is one of the loudest sounds in the forest and very unmistakable. You can listen to it here. The Three-wattled Bellbird has a lowland-highland migratory pattern that is essential to the forest ecology because the Avocado seeds eaten by the bird are not digested, but are distributed  through the feces to serve as a continuous source of new growth for the forest. Apparently, without this single bird, the cloud forests would lack a widespread mechanism for regeneration. There is evidence that these birds are rapidly being depleted in many forests in Costa Rica. The trees in these forests get very large, with a mixture of giant Palm and Avocado. You cannot tell the age of the tree by looking at tree rings, as there are none. The continuous growth of trees in the tropical climate eliminates the more northern cycle of seasonal growth which produces tree rings that aid in dating of forests and trees.

The forests in Costa Rica support a truly remarkable variance in birds and other animals. It is one of the truly great centers for birding, though that is best done in December or January when new Avocado fruit sprouts in the mountains. In addition to the Three-wattled Bellbird, the fascinating Bare-necked Umbrellabird puts on quite a show and the Resplendant Quetzal is a major show stopper. The area is also rich in parrots, monkeys, tree sloths and serves as the migratory breeding center for hundreds of different butterflies and large numbers of small poisonous, but highly colorful frogs, about 1 inch in diameter. Some of these frogs live within the pedals of the tree bromeliads which capture and retain water. They seem completely protected, as their bright colors warn predators of their poisonous nature, so that they are eaten only at the peril of the predator. At night thousands of these frogs make the forest come alive with the chatter of this rich orchestra intent on trying to find good sex.

Yellow-Banded Dart Frog

Despite a strong commitment on the part of the government to maintain the region as a primitive forest ecosystem, land development, both private and public, continues at a rapid pace, so the long-term future of these forests remains a matter of speculation. It’s hard to know if the ecotourism that now supports a very expanded economy for the region is helping to preserve the forests or helping to accelerate their decline. On the one hand tourism leads to expansion of facilities, but on the other, it provides farmers with a more attractive alternative for preserving their land as part of the forest reserve rather than clearing it for farming. One of the best bird trips Rosemary and I experienced was when we went by ourselves in a private reserve area, where we had to pay a few Colognes to enter, but the birds were more numerous than those in the park reserve itself. But, if these special areas are lost, we are guaranteed to lose thousands of unique species who will join the plight of the Golden Toad.

It has been estimated that perhaps 1/3 of the global amphibian population is under ecological stress and that over 120 amphibians have become extinct since 1980. These numbers are alarming because in many cases, the extinction has taken place in areas that are protected, like the story of the Golden Toad in Costa Rica. The single most alarming study (Whitfield et al., PNAS 104, 8352, 2006) was reported a few years ago based on a thirty-five year observation within a biological field station in La Selva, Costa Rica, a protected, old-growth lowland forest. During that period, approximately 75% of the amphibian population has declined since 1970. The trend is similar for reptiles as well. The reasons cited in this study are not those of global climate change (seems to operate in some cloud forests and may be responsible for the loss of the Golden Toad), or the introduction of harmful microorganisms (which seems to operate in some areas), but instead appears to be the result of climate-driven loss of leaf litter, which serves as a critical microhabitat element for frog survival. When you consider that these areas are protected, imagine what must be happening in other regions, about which we know a lot less because we don’t have the appropriate longitudinal studies or the feet on the ground to make the relevant observations. Climate changes of course don’t do all lifeforms in,  but they do change the distribution and the numbers. Although it is much too early to say with certainty, it looks as though the awaiting winners of climate change are microorganisms, such as bacteria and fungi, which are ready to move in when some disturbance in the environment changes the dynamic balance and biodiversity of the region.

There are many scientists who believe we are living at the beginning, or perhaps even further along than that, in the sixth mass extinction period. The current one is every bit as dramatic or even more so than the one that eliminated the dinosaurs some 70 million years ago. That last mass extinction was probably caused by a massive asteroid that hit the earth near the Yucatan Peninsula. Everyone agrees that the current mass extinction is not the result of an asteroid, but is being caused by evolution’s supposedly greatest triumph–the human species. If so, how poetically ironic. Can the species that is causing the new mass extinction show its capacity to recognize and reverse its behavior or do we need another species in the future, perhaps evolving out of the current success to reverse the destructive environmental trends of the last few hundred years and learn how to better manage our small blue planet? Right now, the amphibians are showing signs of the first massive, known species decline and elimination. Because they reside in the tropic and temperate zones, the massive habitat destruction in these regions may well lead to elimination of amphibians, with animals such as the Golden Toad leading the way, like an early canary in the mine of habitat destruction. We have mislabeled what we are doing to the earth: it is not “Global Warming” but “Global Climate Change and Mass Species Extinction.“ The latter is a far more accurate description of what our actions are doing to this planet. Mother nature has started to talk back; more Katrina’s are on the way, simply because the water temperature elevations dictates that likelihood. Yet the very forces with which Nature speaks to us, such as more massive and extensive tropical storms, will also contribute further to species extinction. None of us alive today will know the answer to the riddle of whether evolution’s greatest success has been the planet’s greatest disaster.

With the current administration coming to an end, the one that was able to suppress science rather than help it flourish, we will see and hear more about these problems and since the forces that will produce climate change are already underway, we will go through a dramatic alteration in species preservation: that part is unavoidable and it has already happened on a massive scale. The question is how far are we willing to go and what can we do to stop it? Population control is obviously essential, but we are headed for a significant increase in population during this century which will only intensify habitat destruction. Yet, habitat destruction by itself is not the only problem. The main challenge is how adaptive we are in addressing these problems as they get identified. Have we as humans lost the Darwinian capacity to go through the process of natural selection to enhance our survival probability, responding to forces that germinate in our brains, by process that we don’t actually see, touch or feel in the ordinary sense? It is clearly a frontal lobe issue and hence, in part, a political issue as well. Who will be the survivors and what will they do to achieve success? Will it be economic? Will it be cleverness? So far, all we know from the global climate change models is that they underestimated the speed with which these changes would take place and that everything that we see happening that we don’t like, will get worse and do so more quickly. Deserts will grow, rainy areas will get more rain, hurricanes will be larger and more violent, ocean currents based on polar ice caps will decline or disappear and the polar ice caps themselves will melt. It should be easier to get a suntan, so perhaps the tanning salons will be stressed for their survival. So far, we don’t have much good news on this issue, except that Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, will be able to offer one hell of a lot of beach-front property.

RFM

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