Environmental Science 204

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Environmental Science 204

• Ecology and the Biosphere

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In the Past Hour (World)

• World Populationgrown by 8,500 (all 2004)
• 15,000 births
• 6,500 deaths
• 200 from air pollution
• 600 children from hunger
• 300 from AIDS

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In the Past Hour (World)

• Food Consumed
• Fish Shellfish -33 million pounds (2002)(10
  million pounds farmed)
• Meat - 59 million pounds (2004)
• Grain - 515 million pounds (2004)
• Coffee Beans - 340,000 lbs (2002)
• Ice Cream - 650,000 quarts
• Fertilizer Use35 million pounds

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In the Past Hour (World)

• Forests Cut 20,000 acres (1,000,000x size of
  this room!) (2000)
• Extinctions 1-3 species
• Paper/Wood Consumed250 million pounds

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In the Past Hour (World)

• 5,000 cars rolled off the assembly line (2004)
• 50 million spent on advertising (2002)
• Carbon Dioxide 1.8 billion pounds added to
  atmosphere (US - 25) (2004)

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In the Past Hour (U.S.)

• Energy Use570 million lbs oil equivalent
  (1999)(2.1 million barrels)(3/31 - 66/barrel
  138 billion!)(World 2 billion lbs equivalent)
• Water Use16 billion gallons (2000)

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In the Past Hour (U.S.)

• Threw Away
• 50 million pounds municiple trash (4.5 lbs person
  day) (2001)
• 3 billion lbs mining/industrial/agricultural
  waste
• 11 million pounds paper
• 2.5 million plastic bottles
• 2,300 computers
• 2 million pounds packing peanuts
• 21 million pieces of junk mail
• 170,000 pounds of edible food

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Before you get depressed
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Scientific Method

• Raise question
• Gather data

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Scientific Method

• Raise question
• Gather data
• Form hypothesis
• Test and modify hypothesis
• Scientific Theory
• Scientific Law

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Peer-Reviewed Journals
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Does Tropical Biodiversity Increase As Rainforest
Area Expands During Global Warming? Science
Daily Online, 31 March 2006
(1)"Plant diversity seems to increase when
tropical forests cover large areas. (2) Shrinking
ecosystems may experience biodiversity loss
lasting for millions of years." (3) Carlos
Jaramillo, at the Smithsonian Tropical Research
Institute (STRI), and colleagues seek
explanations for the longest Central and South
America pollen record, published in the March 31,
2006 issue of the journal Science. (4)
Jaramillo's intriguing findings provide an
evolutionary perspective on a modern crisis,"
William Laurance of STRI and the Biological
Dynamics of Forest Fragments project in Brazil
comments (5) "They suggest that the rapid
contemporary loss and fragmentation of
rainforests will lead to striking, long-term
biodiversity declines. (6) Jaramillo used cores
drilled through 5km of rock in eastern Colombia
and western Venezuela to get at the fossil pollen
record in a sequence of samples representing 10
to 82 million years before present. (7) Then they
correlated pollen diversity with global
temperature estimates for the middle part of that
sequence (20-65 mybp). (8) "We found that pollen
diversity tracks global temperature through time
over millions of years. (9) Diversity increases
as the planet warms and decreases as it cools.
(10) The mystery is that even when global
temperatures vary enormously, average
temperatures in the tropics don't change much, so
why do we see global temperature patterns
reflected in tropical plant diversity?" (11)
Jaramillo proposes that changes in area drive
speciation and extinction in the tropics. (12)
There is good correlation between area and number
of species more area implies more species. (13)
During global warming, tropical areas expand and
diversity goes up, the opposite happens during
global cooling. (14) If this is the case,
fragmentation of modern tropical forest could be
equated to a global cooling period, because
forested areas are shrinking dramatically,
resulting in plummeting diversity in the forests
that remain."