The Daily Climate: Australia's White Possum - First Mammal Driven Extinct by Global Warming?

by Emily Gertz

Published December 02, 2008 @ 02:44PM PT

In Australia, the white lemuroid possum, a nocturnal mammal found only above 1,000 meters [3,280 feet] in the mountain forests of far north Queensland, has not been sighted in three years. Scientists believe that a temperature rise of up to 0.8 degrees C. in its high forest habitat has driven the white possum to extinction. If they're right, this small white furry would be the first mammal known to be made extinct by global warming. Peter Michael reports for the Courier Mail that "[s]cientists believe some frog, bug and insects species have also been killed off by climate change. But this would be the first known loss of a mammal and the most significant since the extinction of the Dodo and the Tasmanian Tiger. 'It is not looking good,' researcher Steve Williams said."

European Parliament has backed the establishment of "bee recovery zones" continent-wide to give bees biodiverse, nectar-rich, pesticide-free places to survive and prosper. Anna Momigliano reports for the Christian Science Monitor that proponents hope a full 1% of all cultivated land across the 27 member nations of the European Union will be set aside for bee havens. Across both North America and Europe, the causes of this "Colony Collapse Disorder" remains a mystery; researchers are investigating the role of climate change, pesticides, lack of nutritious food and other factors. Plummeting bee populations in Europe have halved honey production, and crops dependent on bees for pollination have begun to suffer, with about $1.25 billion worth already lost.

Power plants across the U.S. hoover up millons of gallons of water a day to cool the power-generating steam they create. In this process, countless fish and other aquatic organisms are killed, and the plants then eject that water back into the rivers, lakes and streams it came from. Last year, enviro-advocates and six states won a case in U.S. Circuit Court to try and stop this harm to the nation's waterways, with the court rejecting Bush-era EPA rules that factor cost-benefit analysis into whether plants must replace older water-cycling systems with modern technologies like newer closed loop systems that recycle water, or that cool the operations using air -- drastically reducing aquatic harms in the process. The Bush administration and power plant operators appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in the case today. Both the conservative and liberal wings of the court appeared to agree that some cost-benefit analysis was appropriate; the question will be, how much? Dow Jones newswire reports via CNN Money, Nina Totenberg reports for NPR.

"For all the talk about a unified response to global warming, what is emerging is a crazy quilt of often-competing local strategies," reports Jeffrey Ball in today's Wall Street Journal. And it's getting in the way of "bailing out Mother Nature [[who didn't get us into this, last I checked --it's humanity that needs the bailing out]] an unprecedented, global scale...After a decade of small and fitful experiments with curbing emissions in isolated industries and regions, it is now clear that a massive economic transformation would be necessary to achieve the scale of emissions cuts that many scientists and politicians are suggesting."

Image: White lemuroid possum, courtesy of Wet Tropics Management Authority of Australia.