Daintree white possum – another wrongly blamed extinction?
A tiny white possum found high up in the tropical Daintree forest in Australia hasn’t been spotted in 3 years.
“Probably extinct due to man made global warming…” expounds Professor Stephen Williams of James Cook Unversity in Queensland according to a recent news item on ABC Online.
The article then went onto mention tempertures in the rain forest (and indeed, globally) have risen by 0.5C (but the period of concern in which the temperatures had risen were not mentioned).
Here at the Dappled Planet, we are concerned about the ongoing extinction rates of megafauna on the planet but on the issue of which is killing off the animals faster – man induced global warming or man induced competition at the ground level (habitat destruction, hunting etc), we do tend to err on the side of man induced ground level competition.
And surely, a possum living in an already hot area with average temperatures probably in the 30C range, which has probably been on this planet for well over 60,000 years (when it is postulated man first landed on Australia during the last ice age), which has survived the dramatic (in excess of 5C) rise in temperatures associated with the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago is unlikely to suddenly perish just because the temperature may have crept up half a degree over the last 150 years?
Meterologist William Kininmonth, former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation certainly seemed to think blaming the extinction on a slight increase in temperature was a bit unlikely – and hence earned himself the moniker of “Climate Change skeptic.’ As he dryly points out, the climate of the Daintree has not varied significantly in the last 100 years…
At the Dappled Planet, if it could be proven that this marsupial was extinct (which was also not known – it just hadn’t been seen in 3 years) exclusively due to climate change, then we’d be supportive of intiatives to try and prevent that.
But, if a possum can survive an ice age meltdown, and can survive hidden amongst the forest for 10s of 1000s of years and ONLY become a (possibly) extinct species AFTER man penetrates and starts destroying and/or changing its habitat – the Daintree Forest, is not at all conceivable that man induced habitat change is more likely killing off the possum than a small change in temperature which barely reflects the temperature change between winter and summer in the jungle?
We point this out because it is wrong to keep arguing man-made global warming is causing these animals to become extinct. In some (rare) instances, that may be the case, but more commonly, it appears that man is causing this animals to become exctinct due to habitat desctruction/change or hunting. if that is the case, then these factors should be shouted from the roof tops – because those are things which we absolutely do have control over and immediate, fast-acting measures can (very successfully) be taken to prevent further degradation of the environment that these animals live in.
But to point out that animal species are dieing out because of man-induced global warming?? That doesn’t help preserve the species! That blames something which has taken 150 years to manifest as a potential problem, seems to give most people the right to procrastinate by debating whether or not global warming caused it or not, and then do nothing.
Sure… We could cut out CO2 emissions but lets be real here – all the targets being proposed by the governments around the world aren’t going to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere significantly – and certainly none are forecasting they will reduce the global temperature by more than 0.1C by the end of the century – end of the century!!! But if habitat destruction or change is really the cause of the demise of this possum then we can’t afford to wait a century or two to go “yep, yep… guess it wasn’t global warming that was causing the possum to die off. Might have been the eco-toursim scaring the critters deeper into the forest and downslopes to warmer climes…” or something similar.
So lets call a spade a spade here – if the possum is indeed suddenly and dramatically becoming extinct, it is far more likely to be doing it as a result of man modifying its land-based environment than fiddling with the global thermostat -and if thas the case, lets find out what that cause is and take immediate, preventative measures that will preserve the habitat of the possum. Not blame it on something which will take decades to rectify!
