Hello Goodbye

A newly discovered "Eden" in New Guinea "could be disappearing faster than it can be explored," according to New Scientist magazine. That's because temperatures in the tropical highlands of the island are raising at a terrific rate -- about a half a degree Fahrenheit per decade, as compared to a one degree change, globally, across the entire 20th century.

The reason for the anomalous temperature increase is as yet unexplained, but the story calls to mind yesterday's postings (see below) about wildlife deaths in a Costa Rican national park as well as Michael Grunwald's new book about the Everglades and poses a troubling question for conservationists; namely, how do we protect wildlife in a world where the climate has come unhinged?

What, after all, does it mean to "restore" the Everglades, or Louisiana's wetlands for that matter, if rising sea levels doom much of South Florida and Southern Louisiana to inundation? What does it mean to establish parks and preserves if changing temperatures and weather patterns fundamentally alter ecosystems so as to render them unsustaining?

In The Weather Makers, author, explorer and scientist Tim Flannery confronts this very question, confessing that the impending loss of species diversity in his home country of Australia "outraged [him] sufficiently to undertake the task of writing" the book in the first place. Writing in the introduction, Flannery -- initially a climate-change skeptic -- bluntly asserts that, "in the years to come this issue [global warming] will dwarf all the others combined. It will become the only issue."