You've probably heard or read this elsewhere but in case you haven't:
From the New York Times:
An "extinction crisis" is under way, with one in four mammals in danger of disappearing because of habitat loss, hunting and climate change, a leading global conservation body warned Monday.
“Within our lifetime, hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions,” said Julia Marton-Lefèvre, the director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or I.U.C.N., a network of campaign groups, governments, scientists and other experts.
Among 188 mammals in the group’s highest threat category — critically endangered — was the Iberian lynx, which has an estimated population of 84 adults and has continued to decline as its primary prey, the European rabbit, has fallen victim to disease and overhunting.
The report, presented at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, formed part of a Red List of Threatened Species issued annually by the group.
Jan Schipper, the director of the global mammal assessment for the I.U.C.N. and for Conservation International, an environmental group, said it was hard to draw a direct comparison with the last detailed survey on mammals, in 1996. New species have been identified, others discovered, and the criteria used to assess species have been made more broadly applicable across all animals and plants.
But he gave a mostly bleak assessment.
“Although 5 percent of mammals are recovering, what we observe are rates of habitat loss and hunting in Southeast Asia, Central Africa and Central and South America that are so serious that the overall rate of decline has steadily increased during the past decade,” Mr. Schipper said.
Amphibians, too, are facing an extinction crisis, with at least 33 percent either threatened or extinct, the I.U.C.N. reported.
This past Monday not only marked the autumnal equinox and the onset of fall but it also brought to light the knowledge that we’ve hit the tipping point feared by climatologists: global warming has heated the Arctic’s sub-sea layer of permafrost enough to melt it, allowing methane to vent out from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
Methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. There are millions of tons of it stored beneath the Arctic, an amount calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves.
This is just the beginning of the methane release. There is no way of turning it off. None.
(You can read the entire initial report here. An excerpt is included at the bottom of this post.)
When I first sent this news link to a friend asking him how it made him feel, he could only make a self-referential joke about flatulence and write “It’s interesting.”
“Interesting?”
It isn’t “interesting.” It’s devastating. Irrevocable. Damning.
There is no longer any turning back. We are now officially fucked. We’ve done too little, too late. Actually, we have accomplished one thing: we’ve doomed our children and most of the planet’s other species.
We all share the blame, especially those of us who’ve devoted our professional lives selling you shit you don’t need: we merchants and marketeers of meaningless brands, of plastics that poison our babies, of production that enslaves the Third World, of empty entertainments and mindless frivolities that have diverted us from the contemplation of our souls and the expansion of our minds, let alone the shepherding of life on this planet.
For my part, I apologize, even though doing so doesn’t mean or change anything. I’m sorry. I’ve always tried to offset the lighter aspects of my work by layering in environmental messages whenever I could: from my very first attempt at writing the TMNT back in issue 28 of the first Mirage comic book series (and before that in The Puma Blues), through my many years hiding behind the façade of Dean Clarrain and writing Archie’s TMNT Adventures and Mighty Mutanimals series, on up to some of my scripting of the 2K3 and FF cartoon show.
And much the same way that I’ve offset my car’s carbon footprint by purchasing a terrapass, my actions (recycling, reusing, minimizing personal consumption, living as green as possible given my current circumstances) have, and continue to be, woefully inadequate. Especially in light of the methane time bomb.
I don’t know what else to do.
I don’t even think that there’s anything else I can do.
Except watch.
Watch as the signs multiply, as paradise slips away, and to continue to wake up in the middle of the night to cry as I hold the sleeping form of my beautiful, innocent daughter. I am so deeply sorry, sweetie….
The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.
Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.
In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.
Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.
Several toy knock-offs recently confiscated at Israeli customs. My favorite thing about them is the character art group shot at the upper right of the front packaging -- the Raphael is so heavily shadowed (lifted from an early TMNT movie teaser image) that it reminds me of the period when the Archie TMNT Adventures version of Raphael wore his individualistic black costume. Makes me wonder... was the counterfeiter inspired by same?
This just in from Chris @ 4K:There's a 2-minute clip of the first episode of the new season onlinenow(turtles start about one minute in; opening titles not final).
As most of you know, the cw is about to begin airing a new TMNT cartoon. Below is the show's description as per the press release from 4Kids Entertainment (which can be viewed in full here).
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Back to the Sewer
When the Turtles come back from the future, the menacing Viral interferes with their return to the present, causing Master Splinter to get trapped in cyberspace and bits of his data code to scatter all throughout the digital domain. The Turtles venture into the vast virtual realm to find their beloved Master, but instead discover… The Cyber Shredder! If the Turtles are going to be triumphant they’ll need to work together in ways they never have before, otherwise Splinter will be lost and the devious Shredder will be back, causing all “shell” to break loose.
Bill Melendez, an Emmy-winning animator who brought Charlie Brown and the “Peanuts” gang to blithe, blockheaded life on television and in films — and who helped keep them alive after the death of their creator, Charles M. Schulz — died on Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 91 and lived in Los Angeles.
Mr. Melendez’s son Steven confirmed the death, saying his father had been in declining health after a fall last year.
One of the very few Hispanics in the business when he began his career in the 1930s, Mr. Melendez was the only animator Mr. Schulz allowed to shepherd his characters onto the screen. He did so in more than four dozen TV specials, four feature films, a slew of Saturday-morning cartoons and scores of commercials.
Mr. Melendez won six Emmy Awards, starting with “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965), the first “Peanuts” television special and still a holiday staple. From that program onward, Mr. Melendez also supplied the “voice,” such as it was, of Snoopy.
Joining Paste Pot Pete Laird will be Mirage old timers Eric Talbot, Michael Dooney, Jim Lawson, Dan Berger, Steve Lavigne, and he who thinks that none of this pop culture stuff means a hill of beans anymore because of this.
I admit it: I'm suffering serious "blog fatigue" when it comes to this TMNT site. The primary reason is due to the moronic comments by Armaggon and the replies that they in turn engender, as well as the rampant bitching that often takes place in the comments section. At this point I'm on the fence about shutting this down, or at the very least of killing the comments option all together. Time will tell. Be well.
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