All the Topics in the World

The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists.
In a new report, they warn that ocean life is “at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history”.
They conclude that issues such as over-fishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in ways that have not previously been recognised.
The impacts, they say, are already affecting humanity.
The panel was convened by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), and brought together experts from different disciplines, including coral reef ecologists, toxicologists, and fisheries scientists.
Its report will be formally released later this week.
“The findings are shocking,” said Alex Rogers, IPSO’s scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.
“As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.
“We’ve sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we’re seeing, and we’ve ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we’re seeing changes that are happening faster than we’d thought, or in ways that we didn’t expect to see for hundreds of years.”
These “accelerated” changes include melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea level rise, and release of methane trapped in the sea bed.
Fast changes”The rate of change is vastly exceeding what we were expecting even a couple of years ago,” said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a coral specialist from the University of Queensland in Australia.

Some species are already fished way beyond their limits – and may also be affected by other threats”So if you look at almost everything, whether it’s fisheries in temperate zones or coral reefs or Arctic sea ice, all of this is undergoing changes, but at a much faster rate than we had thought.”
But more worrying than this, the team noted, are the ways in which different issues act synergistically to increase threats to marine life.
Some pollutants, for example, stick to the surfaces of tiny plastic particles that are now found in the ocean bed.
This increases the amounts of these pollutants that are consumed by bottom-feeding fish.
Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms – which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land.
In a wider sense, ocean acidification, warming, local pollution and overfishing are acting together to increase the threat to coral reefs – so much so that three-quarters of the world’s reefs are at risk of severe decline.
Carbon depositsContinue reading the main story“Start Quote
The challenges are vast; but unlike previous generations, we know what now needs to happen”
Dan LaffoleyIUCNLife on Earth has gone through five “mass extinction events” caused by events such as asteroid impacts; and it is often said that humanity’s combined impact is causing a sixth such event.
The IPSO report concludes that it is too early to say definitively.
But the trends are such that it is likely to happen, they say – and far faster than any of the previous five.
“What we’re seeing at the moment is unprecedented in the fossil record – the environmental changes are much more rapid,” Professor Rogers told BBC News.
“We’ve still got most of the world’s biodiversity, but the actual rate of extinction is much higher [than in past events] – and what we face is certainly a globally significant extinction event.”
The report also notes that previous mass extinction events have been associated with trends being observed now – disturbances of the carbon cycle, and acidification and hypoxia (depletion of oxygen) of seawater.
Levels of CO2 being absorbed by the oceans are already far greater than during the great extinction of marine species 55 million years ago (during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum), it concludes.
Blue planetThe report’s conclusions will be presented at UN headquarters in New York this week, when government delegates begin discussions on reforming governance of the oceans.

In the long run, greenhouse gas emissions must be cut to conserve ocean life, the report concludesIPSO’s immediate recommendations include:
stopping exploitative fishing now, with special emphasis on the high seas where currently there is little effective regulationmapping and then reducing the input of pollutants including plastics, agricultural fertilisers and human wastemaking sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.Carbon dioxide levels are now so high, it says, that ways of pulling the gas out of the atmosphere need to be researched urgently – but not using techniques, such as iron fertilisation, that lead to more CO2 entering the oceans.
“We have to bring down CO2 emissions to zero within about 20 years,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg told BBC News.
“If we don’t do that, we’re going to see steady acidification of the seas, heat events that are wiping out things like kelp forests and coral reefs, and we’ll see a very different ocean.”
Another of the report’s authors, Dan Laffoley, marine chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas and an adviser to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), admitted the challenges were vast.
“But unlike previous generations, we know what now needs to happen,” he said.
“The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now.”

Climate change disasters, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, dieback of the Amazon rainforest or collapse of the Atlantic overturning circulation, could be predicted according to University of Exeter research. Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Professor Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter shows that the ‘tipping points’ that trigger these disasters could be anticipated by looking for changes in climate behaviour.
Climate ‘tipping points’ are small changes that trigger a massive shift in climate systems, with potentially devastating consequences. It is already known that climate change caused by human activity could push several potential hazards past their ‘tipping point’. However, it is often assumed that these ‘tipping points’ are entirely unpredictable.
Professor Lenton argues that a system of forecasting could be developed to enable some forewarning of high-risk tipping points. The approach he outlines involves analysing observational data to look for signs that a climate system is slowing down in its response to short-term natural variability (which we experience as the weather). This characteristic behaviour indicates the climate is becoming unstable, and is a common feature of systems approaching critical thresholds known as ‘bifurcation points’.
Professor Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter said: “Many people assume that tipping points which could be passed as a result of human-induced climate change are essentially unpredictable. Recent research shows that the situation is not as hopeless as it may seem: we have the tools to anticipate thresholds, which means we could give societies valuable time to adapt.
“Although these findings give us hope, we are still a long way from developing rigorous early warning systems for these climate hazards.”

Royalty Managment Software and Solid Systems AmalgamationIn any upcoming software sector, there are an ample variety of offerings and few “agreed-upon” standards; some royalty management software is powerful and heavy, while some is unobtrusive but inadequate.

Dedicated royalty management solutions are now approved as a fact of trade by extraordinary players in the publishing business. The book trade is too cryptic, the commercial environment is too uncertain, and governing requirements are too iron-fisted, to not have a systems software system in place to manage royalty processing. The explicit perks of royalty software – and there are a lot – are important.

But how useful are any of those benefits, if implementing the necessary framework upsets your workflow? Shutting down for a complete overhaul would give you all the allotment in the world to put together improvements. Most of us, however, don’t have that luxury – imperative improvements have to be observed, and put to work, on the fly. Here’s a quick look at how we’ve taken the best royalty management solution, and given it the rapid utilization mastery that an opposing business needs.
In 1999, when MetaComet Systems began creating and supplying software-based royalty and rights solutions to the publishing trade, we were in the company of the exiguous providers of custom-built royalty management solutions. Big publishers emptied hundreds of thousands of dollars, hiring programmers to build in-house systems for royalty management, and everyone else made do with spreadsheets.
As time went on – and specifically in recent years – two things happened as one: first, the publishing industry became far more complex, and next in order, cutting edge information technology became far more unrestricted. Changes in publishing meant that publishers right away needed to get more accomplished, more prompt, and more combative in royalty management, and changes in technology purposed that there was a steadily multiplying number of people who furnished software marked at meeting the emerging needs of publishers.
In any emerging software sector, there are a wide mixture of offerings and few “agreed-upon” standards; some royalty management software is energetic and bulky, while some is unobtrusive but found wanting. Some royalty software is user-friendly but feature-limited, while some has too many features for anyone but the builder who concocted it to use. And over-arching most of the offerings is that they either cannot integrate with present-day systems (accounting, sales, etc.), or that integrating requires a dear reconstruct.
Working with a wide variety of publishers, of varying sizes and exigencies, has directed us how to to balance plentiful features with the need for ease-of-use. For example, some of our clients have hundreds of thousands of products in dozens of markets, with markedly composite rights and licensing agreements spanning many verticals, while others administer with a hundred products strictly in the print commerce. Obviously there are differences in the solutions we postulate each type of client, but the experience of putting Royalty Tracker to work across an amplitude of challenges, has honed our expertise to accommodate it into any trade, with minimal disruption.

The result of our experience and work is the most streamlined integration practice in the business; MetaComet’s royalty management solutions are so easy to use that companies can often execute the solution themselves, without the help of MetaComet’s application team. (Of course, we are always available for supplemental support, if needed).
In any emerging systems software sector, there are a broad array of offerings and few “agreed-upon” standards; some royalty management computer program is energetic and bulky, while some is unobtrusive but imperfect.The goal is to save time, and get more efficient, and that is the driving motivation behind every step we take.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!