If the world in chaotic 2024 became too much with us, it’s in part because not yet universally recognized is that humankind has become too much with it. Earth is flush in organisms that thrive on a planet peopled in good portion by a self-aggrandizing segment of the primate family pretty much oblivious to anything except that which brings the next fast buck. Pleasure, comfort, prestige, convenience and distraction can be bought. Ignorance and indifference are offered free of charge with the lifestyle. Doing well and not necessarily ranked by menacing potential are rats, mosquitoes, microscopic pathogens, invasive species, pen-raised livestock and poultry, oligarchs, dispensers and consumers of technological bunkum. Doing not so well are wild birds, fish, insects, mammals, amphibians, forests, jungle, soil, air, fresh water, oceans and organisms whose lives are at risk from floods, fires, storms and heat. Plankton might not survive warming seas, Oceanographic Magazine reported. Driven largely by global habitat loss, wildlife populations have fallen by 73% during the past 50 years, the World Wide Fund for Nature asserted. Solar-reflecting cloud cover is diminishing. The Arctic tundra for the first time on record is emitting more carbon than it absorbs, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported. An ocean current pumping the heat that keeps much of Europe inhabitable during winter is slowing down because of melting ice in the Arctic. Open water surrounding the poles comes earlier and lasts longer than climate scientists predicted a few years ago. Populations of salmon, trout and other migratory fish have fallen on average by 81% since 1970, a coalition of conservation groups reported. During the first half of 2024, the number of national heat records broken worldwide was “beyond anything ever seen or even thought possible before,” declared one archivist of extreme events. Temperatures in […]