Alaska's prized wild salmon are suffering from a disease that scientists suspect of being boosted by -- you guessed it -- global warming. The emergence of Ichthyophonus as a threat to king salmon has coincided with a steady warming of Yukon River water over the past few decades, which scientists say has welcomed cold-averse parasites northward. "Climate change isn't going to increase infectious diseases but change the disease landscape," says federal marine ecologist Kevin D. Lafferty. "And some of these surprises are not going to be pretty." Literally: Fish infected with "ich" become covered in white, pimply spots, smell funky, and produce mealy, oily flesh. One independent researcher estimates that perhaps 20 percent of king salmon are dying of ich before reaching spawning grounds. If so, fisheries would do well to cut back commercial catches by an equal amount to maintain a healthy population; so far, Alaska's Fish and Game Department has largely chosen to ignore the problem.
source: Los Angeles Times
Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success
‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science
Comments
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MAD MAC Posted 2:39 pm
17 Jun 2008
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Tasermons Partner Posted 3:52 pm
17 Jun 2008
Yes, but it generally changed very slowly. Even in the most catastrphic times in Earth past (short of orbital bombardments and supervolcanoes) the changes generally took centuries to have an effect that we are seein' in a few years time.
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MAD MAC Posted 4:13 am
18 Jun 2008
the evidence indicates that climate change IS an issue and we need to deal with it. But man made causes are NOT, NOT the cause of every extreme weather event or every change we are seeing in the eco systems of the world and people should stop attributing everything to it. It's not intellectually honest.
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Wolverine Posted 9:48 am
18 Jun 2008
You people should take a few ecology and biology courses or just do some reading on the subjects before you complain that those who've properly identified what's going on are not intellectually honest. Your attitude that humans are not causing immense ecological harm has no basis in reality.
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MAD MAC Posted 4:12 pm
18 Jun 2008
Let's talk about DDT for a minute. In Sri Lanka, at the height of DDT spraying, Malaria cases dropped to 19 for one year. NINTEEN. When the spraying was terminated, the numbers skyrocketed incredibly up into the 50,000 range. Ever had malaria Wolverine? It sucks. Take my word for it. It also killed MILLIONS of people a year. Of course, since you don't like people, you don't care when they die. So if mayb eight or nine hundred thousand children die annually from malaria, so much the better. They can't grow up to have a big carbon footprint right?
Like I said before. You have ZERO credibility.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 2:29 pm
19 Jun 2008
Incidentally, the number of cancer, neural disorders, and stillborn rates skyrocketed.
Tit-for-tat.
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MAD MAC Posted 3:00 pm
19 Jun 2008
No, they didn't. Where did you get that from. Pull it out of your fourth point of contact? Prior to DDT in Sri Lanka there were an average of 55,000 cases of malaria annually. Do you know how many people that was killing? There is no question that in places where malaria or dengue are prevalent, mosquitoes have to be controlled or they will kill a LOT of people. I live in a dengue zone, and they have been using DDT derivatives here in limited quantities. So I did a little research into it. Turns out the half life in water (they primarily spray the breeding areas in the sewers) is 15 days. The link to cancer in humans is tenuous AND the tests always are given in gross quantities. It is much less clear whether small amounts of exposure are harmful at all.
Dengue and Malaria are killing hundreds of thousands of people every year, and immobilizing millions more.
Nature is trying to kill you all the time. Remember that.
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Nucbuddy Posted 3:14 pm
19 Jun 2008
Cite? Quantification? There is little association between DDT and cancer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
In 1987 the EPA classified DDT as a class B2 probable human carcinogen [...] Regarding the human carcinogenicity data, they stated "The existing epidemiological data are inadequate. Autopsy studies relating tissue levels of DDT to cancer incidence have yielded conflicting results."
A study of malaria workers who handled DDT occupationally found an elevated risk of cancers of the liver and biliary tract. Another study has found a correlation between DDE and liver cancer in white men, but not for women or black men. An association between DDT exposure and pancreatic cancer has been demonstrated in a few studies, but other studies have found no association. Several studies have looked for associations between DDT and multiple myeloma, and testicular, prostate, endometrial, and colorectal cancers, but none conclusively demonstrated any association.
Elevated cancer-risk typically takes many years to decades to express.
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MAD MAC Posted 9:25 pm
19 Jun 2008
FACT: Malaria cases dropped from 50,000 in Sri Lanka to 19. There's a fact for you. We haven't even started talking about Dengue, which a good friend of mine contracted in Haiti and which totally sucked.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 1:34 pm
20 Jun 2008
...'specially considerin' several studies that sugest that some mosquito populations have already built up an immunity to DDT?
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MAD MAC Posted 1:48 pm
20 Jun 2008
Come on man, there is NO DENYING that spraying insecticides that kill mosquitos drops dengue and malaria cases dramatically. And right now there is VERY LITTLE evidence that would suggest that the benefits of that spraying is outweighed by the positives.
Where I live, the government sprays twice a year, and I'm glad they do.
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