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Whales, schistosomes, wind power and Antarctica all generated interesting points on recent posts and I'll try to deal with some of them. Apologies for being dilatory in responding to some of the questions raised.

To the white continent first, and the many comments relating to on last week's Nature paper indicating that Antarctica has warmed, overall, over the last halfcentury. (I've had lots of emails on the subject as well, so this is a good forum in which to frame a reply).

toughNeilHyde, you asked if I "could explain how the scientists have reached their findings based on 50 years of satellite records, when the sats have only been up there 30 years".

I'll give it a go. Clearly it's impossible physically to get data from satellites that didn't exist, but there is data from weather stations going back further than that.

So, if you can correlate the satellite and weather station record over the period for which both existed - how they vary together and how closely tied they are - and if you assume that the relationship between the two was roughly the same in previous decades, then you can compute what the satellites probably would have shown across the continent if they'd been operating, with appropriate error bars.

Whether you find this convincing or not is up to you. Clearly , although others mounted on these more sceptical observers.

I don't find this surprising at all. Even in uncontroversial areas of science, a single study can often generate widely varying reactions - and this is anything but uncontroversial.

The important thing, it seems to me, is to keep the nature of science in perspective. Single studies rarely "prove" anything; and ultimately only posterity, rather than peer review or polemic, can judge whether researchers were right or wrong.

So when you write, PAWB46, that I and lots of other journalists decided to report on this because we "fell for the media hype", to me that's missing the point.

We - or at least I - report such studies because they add to the pile of stuff that we already have on a very important issue. It's up to you to decide whether the pile consists of something marvellous or malodorous.

You also suggest, PAWB46, that somehow the Antarctica paper was kept "top secret". There's no secret - you just have to subscribe to Nature, it's a commercial publication.

One other climate-related comment to clarify: manysummits, you say that melting of the Greenland ice cap would add about 20 metres to sea levels - in fact it's more like (six to seven metres).

Now, in the thread on renewable energy I did make an error, peroxisome, as you suggested - but it was linguistic rather than mathematical.

Referring to a study from the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), I wrote: "to keep the supply as reliable as it is now (and no electrical system is 100% reliable) the backup would need to have about one-fifth the capacity of the wind turbine fleet - ie if wind supplied 20% of the electricity, the backup would have to be able to supply about 4%".

What I should have written was "the backup would need to have about one-fifth the output of the wind turbine fleet" - because, as you correctly point out, the turbines don't spin all the time.

Basically, UKERC has taken the load factor into account already - it was my conflation of "capacity" and "output" that muddied the waters. Rob Gross of UKERC has sent me a more detailed explanation which I'm pasting in at the end of this entry.

A couple of quick ones on whaling. MadTom1999, you say that "blue whales and other endangered species turn up on Japanese plates".

To my knowledge, there have been no recent scientifically validated reports of blue whale meat on sale (although Japan and some other countries do take species listed as endangered, such as fin and sei whales). The Australian government [Word file] last year. If you have new evidence, could you post details?

Rustigjongens, I wrote about the of how upbringing and culture might inform food choices (frogs, dogs, whales) a couple of years ago while in Japan, and I'd be interested to see what you make of it.

Finally, the post on whether conserving biodiversity could be a useful way of curbing the impact of disease brought some really interesting comments, and particular thanks to DavidCrosweller for insights into the problems involved in tackling issues such as schistosomiasis and sanitation in the field.

I completely agree, ClaphamBusman, that conserving biodiversity is never going to be the whole solution. After all, the parasites have presumably evolved in a diverse ecology, so simply restoring or preserving that ecology isn't going to wipe them out.

But it seems to me that you need a diverse toolbox for this kind of issue, and if looking after your land, preventing run-off and keeping the snail population together is going to reduce the disease burden, then why not? - especially as it's likely to have other benefits in the long run.

With that, a belated Happy Lunar New Year - I'm sure the climate-sceptical among you will be able to make some play on the fact that we're now in the Year of the Bull - and here's Rob Gross's explanation of the maths of renewables back-up.

"Reliability is a capacity issue. The capacity credit of wind is about 20%, which means that it can displace about 20% of its own installed capacity in terms of the conventional capacity that can be retired (NB: at high penetrations the capacity credit for wind might fall as low as 10%). The low load factor of wind is already reflected in this (low) capacity credit. It is also reflected in the 'comparator plant' that it makes sense to compare a wind farm to.

"100MW of wind would replace the energy from a 30MW conventional plant (roughly). In order to keep peak supplies secure it could only displace a conventional capacity of 20 MW. To the extent that 'back up' is needed you need 30-20 = 10MW. 'Back up' on this basis represents the additional thermal capacity needed on the system when 100MW wind replaces the energy output of 30MW of thermal.

"To use your example: If wind supplies 20% of electricity (say 80TWh) at a load factor of 30% you require around 25GW of wind installed. The capacity credit of wind is 20%. So you can retire 5GW of thermal plant without reducing reliability. However instead of 25GW of wind you could have got the same energy (80 TWh) from 8GW of fossil stations (very roughly). Hence the 'back up' needed in this scenario is 8 - 5 = 3GW. 25GW Wind contributes energy equivalent to 8GW of thermal power. But it only contributes reliability equivalent to 5GW.

"Suppose capacity credit is only 10%. The energy contribution of wind is unchanged. The energy equivalent comparator is also unchanged. In this instance you can only retire 2.5GW. So for 25GW wind you needed 5.5GW back up. If capacity credit is zero you need 8GW. In all cases you need a larger system than you would if you had all thermal generation. But in no case do you need to cover anything like two-thirds of the wind capacity.

"Your reader gets it wrong because he suggests that we need to treat wind power capacity as if it were a conventional generator. Equivalent here to 25GW - 5GW, or 80% back up of the wind capacity.

"Instead we must consider how much conventional capacity we can retire when wind comes on the system without making the system less reliable. This will be lower than the amount of capacity we could retire if we only need to keep average energy output the same. The difference gives a crude estimation of 'back up' (though this is a misleading term). Of course all these numbers are smaller than the nameplate installed capacity of wind power required to provide a given amount of energy."

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• - What's this?

After about a possible "compromise package " between pro- and anti-whaling nations, the first signs of what such a compromise might look like have just surfaced.

The has been riven into two factions for decades, but there is a view, shared by some on each side, that chucking verbal harpoons at each other once a year is achieving nothing.

The current IWC chairman, Bill Hogarth, has been driving a process aimed at finding a compromise. And , the possible parameters of that compromise are now being put into writing.

On my desk, I now have the text that went into a small meeting of delegates from six IWC member countries, plus a few other key players, held at the weekend in Hawaii.

The issues it concentrates on aren't surprising. The major component of deals proposed in previous years, and the major component of this one, is that Japan stops or reduces in a big way - currently conducted under - in exchange for which it gains the right to catch more whales near its coastline.

But there are many, many details to be worked out.

What reduction in Antarctic catch? How will it be monitored? How big and how commercial would the expansion in coastal whaling be?

What would ensure that the coastal catches did not become unsustainably large? What would prevent other countries - South Korea for now, possibly others later - duplicating the Japanese operation?

In terms of how it's answering those questions, the discussion paper doesn't generally make happy reading for people opposed to whaling.

There are two draft "compromise packages" proposed for scientific hunting. One envisages a progressive downscaling of the Antarctic minke whale catch over five years and an end to hunting fins and humpbacks; the other would set maximum catch limits for the five year period.

Nowhere is there mention of the anti-whalers' main goal - a complete end to scientific whaling, or at least its placement under international jurisdiction.

Japan currently aims to catch about 1,000 whales in the Antarctic each year. But the paper says that a decrease in the Antarctic haul would be "linked" to the coastal whaling quotas; that's not quantified, but implies that the more Japan cedes ground in the Southern Ocean, the more it will gain around its coasts - although the coastal catch would have to remain within limits set by the .

There are more details in the document, on sanctuaries, bycatch and monitoring; but the scientific/coastal hunting trade is the most important.

The US could, presumably, live with all this - although there's been no word yet on whether the Obama regime would endorse this potentially unpopular initiative, stemming as it does from Mr Bush's time in office.

Some other governments are going to find it difficult, particularly those such as Australia and the UK that usually take a hard-nosed anti-whaling stance.

And what about the environment groups which campaign so eloquently on the issue?

I called up Patrick Ramage, who heads the - one of the most vocal anti-whaling organisations - to see what he made of it.

"It's a bit of a surprise to understand that it's not 'if you exit scientific whaling then we'll give you something on your coast'," he said.

"The endgame appears to contemplate a legitimisation of scientific whaling and gives them coastal whaling.

"For any government serious about whale conservation, it's going to be difficult to sign up to a package that means the end of the moratorium - with whatever weasel words - and a legitimisation of both coastal and scientific hunting."

If what's included is causing such groups concern, what's not included may turn out to be even more problematical for them.

, though restricting itself to a single species, the minke. The document makes but one brief mention of this annual haul, and no mention at all of Iceland's.

These two countries are , which is one reason why anti-whaling groups have chased a trade ban for so long. But trade, it appears, is not on the table.

A technical point - but a highly important one for the future - concerns what category of whaling the new proposed Japanese programme would fall into.

Currently, the IWC recognises three categories - commercial, and scientific.

The new coastal whaling can't be commercial, because the 1982 commercial moratorium will stay in place, according to the document.

It doesn't appear to fit into the subsistence or scientific categories either - yet the text also says it "would not be considered to constitute a new form of whaling" - so what is it, what are the parameters, and what's to prevent any other country deciding they would like a slice of it too?

A source close to the negotiations tells me there would be restrictions on how the meat can be distributed but it wouldn't be considered to be something new. So what should we call it - commercial-lite? Subsistence-commercial?

The same source tells me that other countries would be prevented from following suit by simple politics. Voting the package through will require a three-quarters majority of IWC members - although Dr Hogarth will be doing everything he can to have consensus - and the same three-quarters majority could easily block bids by other countries to follow in Japan's shoes.

In a nutshell, then, what we have is a political package. It aims to deliver certain things that each camp might demand; but as it now stands, it would not enshrine these ingredients in the international whaling convention in a way that fundamentally changes the way the industry is regulated.

In terms of what's on paper, it appears to give more to Japan (and, by omission, the other whaling nations) than it does to the anti-whaling bloc.

So far, it only works for the anti-whalers if they believe Japan will follow through on the spirit of the compromise as well as the letter, and will agree to further restrictions in the years to come.

My sense is that some of the anti-whaling delegates involved in the talks do believe that. But it will come harder to many outside.

Some who oppose whaling in principle that from these beginnings a final text can be wrought that satisfies them more than the current situation.

But you can get a foretaste of the opprobrium that anti-whaling countries will get if they follow this process through from the angles that some of their news organisations are now putting on the story - (ABC); (The Age); (Radio New Zealand).

The very least they will need to appease their electorates, newspapers and activists is a deal that reduces Japan's total whale kill markedly on a long-term basis - and a signed piece of paper demonstrating that.

So far, they don't have it.

My bet is that anti-whaling countries are going to demand a lot more details, safeguards and concessions than they have at present when commissioners of IWC countries next meet in Rome in March.

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• - What's this?

Does loss of biodiversity affect human health?

The United Nations Environment Programme believes it does - the notion was one of the top lines in the last edition of its massive five-yearly , which came out in 2007.

The nuts and bolts of the link, though, can come across as a bit tenuous - loss of species may affect the discovery of new drugs; biodiversity can impact water quality; and so on. They're not necessarily the most convincing arguments to those who pride themselves on having hard heads.

This week, I came across something a bit more concrete - and what makes it more interesting is that it relates to one of the really poor cousins of the medical research field, .

Also known as bilharzia, this is a disease which receives so little attention and money that malaria is a rich prince by comparison. Yet it affects about 200m people and is said to be the second most devastating parasitic disease in the world - malaria being the first.

The parasites - flatworms of the genus Schistosoma - spend part of their lives in water-borne snails, and people - usually children - contract the infection from the water when the parasites swim free.

There's no vaccine, and there are really only two modes of attack - either giving regular doses of drugs such as praziquantel, or trying to eradicate the snails that carry the parasite, with chemicals such as copper sulphate.

Some people have looked at introducing crayfish to eat the snails - I hope something of an alarm bell rang there given the problems that invasive species have caused in some places around the world - or by introducing certain plants.

So , a researcher at the University of Colorado, asked a simple question; could the diversity of the snail population affect the number of parasites?

His team rigged up a series of experimental chambers in their lab. All had the same number of Planorbidae snails that carry the parasites, but he put in different numbers of other snail families that can't carry it.

As he reported in the Royal Society's journal this week, there was a definite impact. The number of Planorbidae infected fell by between a quarter and half when other types of snail were around.

The reason is probably what parasitologists call the "decoy effect". Some parasites will attempt to enter the wrong kinds of host - they can't, they die, and so there are fewer parasites around to infect the real hosts.

Now, this is a laboratory experiment - but if the results do hold true in the wild, here would be both a striking demonstration of the principle that biodiversity can beat disease, and something practical that the millions of people affected by schistosomiasis could use to protect themselves to some extent.

Simply keeping their ponds and streams in a state that preserves the range of native snails might reduce the number of people infected.

Implementing that remedy, however, might not be so straightforward given other environmental trends.

Agriculture is changing in many of the countries affected by schistosomiasis, even in its African heartlands.

Excess fertiliser running off farmland into water stimulates the growth of algae; and this appears to be an advantage to the disease-bearing snails, who can thrive on the green stuff, whereas other types die off.

(It's the same thing in microcosm that's happening to ; too much nutrition for algae brings the death of important native species - in this case, the coral polyps.)

You could argue, of course, that simply wiping out the wrong kind of snail would be more effective. But it's been tried, it has side effects, and it's a procedure that needs doing time and time again.

And wiping out the hosts wouldn't be an option for another condition where the link from biodiversity to human health has been demonstrated - .

and his collaborators have shown that a diverse ecology reduces the number of white-footed mice, an important carrier of the ticks that transmit the disease.

Lyme disease is frequently in the news in North America, and I'm not surprised, having met a conservationist in Canada a few years ago who was still suffering the effects more than a decade after infection.

Schistosomiasis is rarely in the news anywhere. But it should be; it is one of the factors holding back the health and education of children in the poorest countries, and if simply keeping the right mix of snails alive would indeed help keep the parasite down, why not?

In the meantime, it's not my job to do the UN's publicity; but if they're looking for concrete evidence to show why biodiversity matters to the human race, perhaps the snail-ridden waters of Africa and Asia are places worth looking.

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• - What's this?

Before the inauguration speech, .

In the event, he didn't - nor the C-word, although the W-word did crop up once in , as a pledge to "roll back the spectre of a warming planet".

In a chill Washington DC, Barack Obama also vowed to "harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories".

Now that we are done with the ceremonials, what environmental moves can we expect as the new president's senior officials assemble their teams and grapple with the practicailties of turning campaign promises into political realities?

According to the often well-informed , we're going to see dramatic action on energy in little more than the time it takes to flick on a light, with Mr Obama launching his presidency "with a daring idea: to anchor the American economy with energy sources not derived from fossil fuels".

Fifty billion dollars will go into the "green economy", it suggests.

Campaign pledges also referred to creating five million jobs in that green economy - a vast hike from [pdf link], according to the US Conference of Mayors.

Another pledge mentioned setting up a greenhouse gas "cap-and-trade" scheme, a concept pioneered in the US .

He has spoken, too, of , which enter a critical phase later this year.

US-based observers are better placed than I to comment on what all this will mean for American citizens and how they're likely to react to the various components.

But from an international perspective, it's clear that Mr Obama's actions over the next 11 months on energy and climate - both the domestic policies and the approach to international treaties - will be absolutely vital in deciding whether the UN climate negotiations in December in Copenhagen can achieve a deal delivering major carbon cuts.

If his administration flinches in the face of its economic woes, other governments will then have an easy reason for curbing their own ambitions.

There's another aspect to the financial issue, in that developing countries are likely to ask the industrialised world for sums in the ballpark of $50bn per year to fund protection against potential climate impacts.

That is the likely price-tag of a Copenhagen deal - and they'd be expecting the US to stump up a significant proportion of that cash.

It's a point that I'm not sure is properly appreciated in western capitals, but a taste of it from a climate conference in Ethiopia, with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi insisting that "those who contributed more to causing the problem, who are also better positioned to assist, will contribute more to the costs of adapting and implementing climate-friendly development paths".

When the warm inauguration glow fades, spending billions on railway lines and home insulation and solar panels, built by Americans for Americans, may still make political sense for hard-pressed Congressional representatives.

But spending billions to build sea walls in the Seychelles and put schools on stilts in Nicaragua? I wonder.

Climate may be the most pressing environmental item for the new president, but there are others.

Chunks of the country . Infrastructure investments, effiiciency measures and international deals to buy water are among the possible policy options.

Conservation groups have made the something of a political football in recent years, seeing protection for and as one of the few tools they had for putting pressure on the Bush administration on climate change.

But it remains a powerful piece of legislation that could be deployed as a way of tackling the that's affecting the US along with just about every other nation on Earth.

Internationally, Mr Obama might be considering whether to make the US a party to the UN's , the global treaty charged with stopping the loss of species. Despite playing a leading role in drafting the convention back in the early 1990s, the US now shares "non-party" status with Andorra, Iraq and Somalia.

US ratification and renewed leadership on biodiversity would be applauded by conservationists and by many other governments - as would a decision to put the US inside the scope of other international treaties with an environmental dimension such as the UN Law of the Sea Convention.

The US has enabling it to put trade sanctions on countries violating fisheries rules.

In the late days of Mr Bush's term that his officials were contemplating deploying these measures more vigorously, and it will be interesting to see whether Mr Obama's appointees follow through.

All that, one suspects, will be put below the climate change tasksheet in Mr Obama's in-tray.

I'd be interested to see what you make of it all, and what you would be urging his team to do, either on the C-issue or the much broader E-issue.

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• - What's this?

Just a quick post today to clarify three issues highlighted on recent threads - fisheries decline, renewable energy and the use of DDT in malaria prevention.

On my post on regime shifts in the natural world, you mentioned, hrp1000, the transformation that appears to be preventing the once mighty cod stocks of the Grand Banks from rebuilding themselves.

was good enough to send me a reference for exploring the idea that other fish which cod used to eat - in this paper, herring and mackerel, although capelin have also been proposed - are now able to thrive, eating cod larvae and so becoming the new bosses of the situation.

You need a subscription to access the full article, but anyway the full reference is there. Essentially the authors found that cod fell during years when herring and mackerel (which have a taste for cod larvae) were abundant, and vice versa.

As they admit, it's a correlational study but may nevertheless have pinpointed the reason the cod are failing to recover.

In several threads, not least "Predict and survive" - or not, we've got into discussion of renewable energy and in particular the issue of how much back-up is needed.

CuckooToo, you posited the idea that wind turbines need 100% backup because the wind doesn't blow all the time.

It's intuitively logical - but not backed by a number of studies, including , at least when the proportion of wind-generated electricity remains below 20%.

There are a number of reasons:

• if turbines are disbursed around the country, their output won't vary in step
• supply and demand can be balanced by ramping up power stations running at less than full capacity, firing up standby generators or temporarily cutting supply to industrial clients which can cope with it - all things
• by trading internationally - in the UK's case, via the interconnector with France
• using storage systems, such as the pumped water facility at or some other technology

In the UK's case, the report concludes that to keep the supply as reliable as it is now (and no electrical system is 100% reliable) the backup would need to have about one-fifth the capacity of the wind turbine fleet - ie if wind supplied 20% of the electricity, the backup would have to be able to supply about 4%.

This shouldn't really be a surprise because the current system has to cope with large variations in demand between different seasons and between night and day, and with sudden unexpected events such as the emergency shutdown of a large power station - a different kind of intermittency.

The intermittency of the wind supply could be decreased by putting turbines where the wind blows more reliably, and the move to more offshore wind farms should in principle help here.

Generating a higher proportion of electricity from wind would require more backup (or storage or flexibility), but predicting how much isn't easy - largely because there isn't any experience of it. .

A wider mix of renewables would of course be more predictable and could generate more flexibly. Tides can be forecast as far in advance as you like; geothermal, hydro-electric and biomass stations can be operated on demand just like gas turbines.

As to cost... well, that's a different issue. Some aspects, such as the long-term cost of tidal power, are, I would suggest, un-forecastable at the moment.

Thirdly, and finally; my post on Heathrow's third runway took us into discussion about the role of DDT in malaria prevention and the question, ClaphamBusman, of where it's being used now.

The pointed me to last year's , which lists 53 countries deploying insecticides, 13 of which use DDT.

The report's summary notes that "a revival of support for indoor residual spraying of insecticide (IRS) presents a new opportunity for large-scale malaria control".

Some years ago, - a fascinating experience, and a striking demonstration of the fact that in the real world, the decisions that have to be taken are often about balancing risks rather than eliminating them.

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• - What's this?

Not that this blog is about to morph into , but here's a trivia question anyway; what's the most expensive stamp in the world, and why?

If you go by prices paid at auction, the answer is the Swedish . In 1996, someone paid $2.3m to own one; because it is, almost certainly, the Treskilling Yellow - the only one in existence.

Humans love rarity. Shop-keepers trying to shift a sale bargain never put notices in their windows advertising "only 375 left - hurry while stocks are plentiful", and I've not seen a holiday company yet that promises "the kind of experience you can get pretty much anywhere at any time, if we're honest".

A few years ago, French biologist suggested that it might be human nature to see animals and all wild things in the same light; and that this might spell bad news for those animals and other wild things.

As something beautiful or tasty or especially useful becomes rare, the value we put on it will rise. That will make harvesting said creature even more profitable, hastening its exploitation and probably its extinction.

Dr Courchamp's dropped onto my metaphorical mat this week, and it contains more evidence that rare species do have, in his words, a "fatal attraction" - fatal for them, that is, not for us.

So picture the scene. You're in Paris in the spring, and with everything bursting into bloom you decide to indulge your taste for natural things by paying a visit to .

The zoo has a research arm, and most of its time is devoted to studying other animals; but this time, you are the subject.

Here, Dr Courchamp's team has laid before you two tanks containing chipmunks, one labelled "rare" and the other "common"; they are in fact the same species.

There, you spot a door with a notice saying you'll have to pay extra to see the animal inside, which is said either to be rare or common.

And on the table are two jars containing identical seeds, but one jar is labelled as a rare species and the other is common; which are you going, surreptitiously, to put in your pocket and walk off with?

In all of these situations, it's your behaviour that's being monitored. And it turns out that at every turn, visitors valued the rare over the common.

They would spend more time looking at or looking for an animal if they were told it was rare; they would walk up more flights of stairs, spend more money, or get wetter and colder to reach its cage, and run a greater risk of being caught stealing a seed - all because of that four-letter word.

So what Franck Courchamp has dubbed the does seem to hold true. But visiting a zoo isn't generally an activity that's going to bring animals closer to extinction, notwithstanding the concerns there are over the welfare implications of keeping some species in some zoos.

I called him up for a chat. It turned out I'd missed his previous paper in which his collaborators had posed as waiters at a (presumably quite plush) party, offering people canapes of caviar said to be either from rare or common species.

Guess which one people said tasted better?

Now we have the beginnings of a route to extinction. If people think they prefer the taste of the rare species (the "two varieties" in the experiment were actually the same, so it's clearly our psychology that's making the difference), then that caviar will command a higher price than the other, and fishermen will seek the sturgeon that makes it.

In the pet trade, it's already happening. I had a chat to Robin Moore, an amphibian specialist with , who confirmed what you might have guessed - the rarer the frog (or newt or salamander), the more money it'll fetch.

Stepping outside the amphibian realm, he told me of a case where the sum of around $100,000 had been offered for a blue form of the (usually green) snake, just because the blue ones are rare.

The world's biggest amphibian, the , is a particularly interesting case, though for the most part people aren't looking to keep it but to eat it.

Hunting this critically endangered species is now banned; but there seems to be a way of getting some on your plate if you can pay enough. A recent study found the price per kilo had risen about by a factor of 20 in as many years.

(In a neat tie-in with a previous post, the specimens caught are apparently getting smaller too.)

You might think that hunters and traders would have an interest in keeping a sustainable population of these creatures alive so they have something to hunt for years to come.

But the economics don't work like that.

In the first place, they can always hunt other things if they run out of salamanders, so their living won't disappear. Secondly, they're competing with each other in a declining, unregulated market; and thirdly, as Colin Clark demonstrated decades ago with whaling, you may make more money long-term by hunting something lucrative to extinction and banking the proceeds at a healthy interest rate than you can by preserving your prey for future seasons.

To what extent the whale trade existed because of demand was, and continues to be, a contentious subject; but there's no doubt that in the world of collecting, desire is everything.

In Japan, keeping stag beetles is a growing hobby, and rare species from other parts of Asia [pdf link] in this specialist market.

In fact, so much do we (or some of us, at any rate) desire these scarce things that some organisations are starting to be more careful about publicising the rarity of anything that could be collected. The paradox is that only by publicising it can they raise a wider awareness that could prevent the coup de grace.

Are we loving some species to death, turning them first into the conservation equivalent of the Treskilling Yellow, and then sending them down the path of the golden toad?

If Franck Courchamp is right, one road to extinction has been clearly signposted in the pretty boulevards of La Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes.

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• - What's this?

They're not yet calling it "the new DDT", "the new Brent Spar" or "the new Narmada Dam"; but is shaping up nicely for the lead role in the global storyline of environmental protest.

It has all the right ingredients. It's a single issue at a single site, with (ironically) good transport links to a major population centre guaranteeing easy access for activists and television crews.

The anti-runway campaign such as actress Emma Thompson.

Campaigners cast as the villain of the piece the government that is adept at talking the talk on climate change but not so clever at turning its pledges and targets and ambitions into something as solid as the Heathrow tarmac - and on whether the runway is a good thing.

Most importantly, it has in the director's chair , the acknowledged master of turning an issue that could have died a quiet death into an "event", boosting the public profile and assumed importance by orders of magnitude - sometimes, beyond its true environmental significance.

Aviation is the .

So it is an important player on the climate field; but , which contributes a bigger greenhouse gas burden as well as having other major impacts, nor power generation.

But, for right or wrong, it is the runway that appears cast in this storyline as the touchstone issue whose resolution symbolises the UK government's lack of fibre on climate change ("the first big test of the Government's environmental credibility since the Climate Change Act became law last year. It has failed spectacularly," in ) - and, by extension, the lack of will among richer nations generally to diverge too far from the path of business as usual.

History tells us, though, that there is often something of a disconnect between the icon and the reality.

American farmers were using far worse pesticides than DDT when directed attention to the issue - aldrin, dieldrin, endrin - but it was DDT that people talked about, it was DDT that , and so it became the iconic chemical, the one that's now embedded in the public consciousness whenever the spectre of "chemicals" is raised.

From the beginnings of modern environmentalism, activists concluded that the public would become interested only if messages were simple.

In the run-up to the 1972 , the organisers produced a large book - Only One Earth - that distilled the ideas of prominent thinkers in a challenging but rather wordy way.

The UN media people dealing with the summit decided they needed something simpler and sexier to grab public attention. Negotiations led to Friends of the Earth writing another book - slimmer, with far fewer and far simpler words - and far more pictures, many of emotive subjects.

Greenpeace honed the strategy to perfection. The organisation realised a simple video of its activists bravely blocking a Soviet harpooner would ramp up public awareness of whaling - and of itself - far faster than all the words in the world.

Issues grow to be iconic, too when celebrities are involved. To be frank, news editors like a bit of glamour with their environmental peril - and with most editors being male, an attractive female figurehead (such as the Booker Prize-winning author who campaigned vigorously against India's ) will always help move the story up the TV bulletin running order or nearer to the front page.

The tendency to draw public attention to simple icons obviously works - in part. It brought the commercial whaling moratorium, it has led to bans and taxes on plastic bags and, lately, .

Despite Greenpeace making (and later admitting) factual errors during its campaign over the oil facility, the campaign did result in reforms to the way such structures are to be disposed of in future.

But there is a counter-argument: that concentrating on the simple, easy, iconic target obscures the bigger picture.

So commercial whaling was banned, but the wider health of our oceans continues to decline. Plastic bag bans or charges may reduce their usage, but as (in the UK at least) they make up less than 1% of just the household waste sent to landfill sites, does focussing on them allow us to forget about the rest of the waste we generate?

You can, of course, argue it the other way round; that without a whaling ban we would not now be - the next marine icon - or that banning incandescent bulbs shines a light on the greater issue of domestic energy consumption, and opens up a path to legislation on other wasteful appliances () that will cumulatively have a major impact.

It's interesting, too, to look at some of the issues floating around that don't acquire that particular melange of activist protest, media interest, celebrity endorsement and political squirming that marks out an issue as iconic.

Here's an example. For several years, campaigners have been trying to raise the profile of .

It's a contender for the title of Africa's largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, and the gas wasted could help provide millions of local people with the energy they badly need.

Campaigners describe high-profile western oil companies such as Shell as the villains of the piece. But still, for some reason, the issue refuses to take off in the same way that Heathrow's new runway appears to be doing.

So how can we expect things to evolve? The government has said the runway can go ahead; but Greenpeace and the other campaign groups involved appear equally determined that it will not.

The issue offers plenty of scope for direct action - the familiar "bulldozer vs man tied to a tree" scenario that we saw regularly during the era of a decade and a half ago.

It also offers scope for legal battles, as the airport's owner (presumably) tries to buy the land it needs, some of it now owned by campaigners, through compulsory purchase orders.

Perhaps the battle-lines will spread out to some of the same capitals where Heathrow's jets currently touch down; this is, by definition, a global issue.

We shall see. In 20 years' time, perhaps we will look back on this day as the birth of an iconic battle symbolising humanity's response to the warnings of climate scientists; or perhaps hindsight will show us an iconic distraction from the wider imperatives of curbing consumption and the growth in the human footprint.

Whatever history's judgement, I suspect the dispute over Heathrow's third runway really is going to be one that we'll remember.

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The 1957 sci-fi movie suggests that humans can have a pretty startling impact on the world.

As a result of exposure to a cloud of pesticide and something else probably involving "radiation", our hero Scott Carey begins to shrink until he's just a few inches high and is seriously threatened by the family cat (OK, the film's title didn't win any awards for lateral thinking but the special effects were pretty good for the 1950s).

Sci-fi directors usually , and as with many other films in the genre the precise causes of the incredible shrinking aren't detailed too carefully, nor whether all the factors are entirely of human origin.

Out in the natural world, the picture is clearer. Some animals and plants are shrinking. Human activities are responsible, and we know the reason why.

The first time I came across the phenomenon of the incredible shrinking fish was in Australia a few years ago, when I met researchers who'd noted that the world's biggest fish, the whale shark, - and at a startling rate, with the average length falling from 7m to 5m in a decade.

The most likely explanation is that fishermen are pulling the biggest whale sharks they can find out of the ocean, either because they're the easiest to spot or because they're the most lucrative catches.

Individuals that are naturally smaller are more likely to survive and reproduce - and so over time sets of genes producing fish of smaller size become more common in the population.

Over time, the fish shrink.

Different groups of researchers have studied the shrinking phenomenon - cod, flounder, salmon, pilchard - and, to a lesser extent, in land animals and even plants. Now a group of US and Canadian researchers has pulled all of this data together for a paper in this week's .

and his colleagues assembled a list of studies tracking changes in 29 different species which are hunted or fished or plucked for human consumption.

Some studies had looked at the overall size of the animals (or plants), while others followed changes in the size of various body parts.

The height at flowering of the Himalayan snow lotus (used in traditional medicine) has fallen, the weight of Norwegian caribou has reduced, the horns of bighorn sheep are not as long as they used to be, the volcano keyhole limpet is shrinking.

And commercial fish species after commercial fish species is also getting smaller.

Some researchers had also found that the average age at which species reproduce has changed. On the eastern coast of Canada, for example, cod now reproduce a year earlier than they did two decades ago. Fishing has removed so many of the bigger, later-reproducing fish that the genetic mix has again changed; and this has implications for the long-term health of the stock, as bigger female fish carry more eggs.

The overall picture is startling - across these 29 species traits such as body length are changing about three times faster than in species unnaffected by human hunting.

I called up Chris Darimont (who, holding posts at the Universities of Victoria and California, must be a busy chap) for a chat about what this might mean.

Does it give us a comprehensive view of how human hunting is changing animals and plants? No, because by no means all the species involved have been studied.

Would the organisms grow longer again if hunting stopped? We don't know.

What can we do about it? Is it just a question of reducing the amount of hunting we do?

Here, things get intriguing. Chris pointed out that human hunting generally targets the biggest, whereas in nature predators generally target the young, the old and the sick. The "genetic winnowing" is very different.

So in fisheries, for example, regulators (and sometimes fishermen) often set mesh sizes delberately designed to let the younger and smaller fish escape.

Could this be entirely the wrong thing to do from an evolutionary perspective? Here I thought back to a radio feature my ex-colleague Tim Hirsch made years ago on .

An old-timer who'd lived through the collapse told Tim in his distinctive Newfoundland brogue that fishermen had targeted the old fish, "the mother fish which had been out there spawning over the years", knowing that it was the wrong thing to do. They'd done it anyway because it was the most profitable approach (and also probably because it was what convention dictated).

Economics would almost always push hunters, fishers and gatherers to take the largest of a kind, Chris suggested. It would be challenging too to think of technology that could target the sick, the old and the young as nature does.

The obvious technological shift would be to go back to pre-industrial catching methods, which do not appear to have had the same shrinking impact, as Chris Darimont's colleague found a few years ago when analysing the bones of fish caught in prehistoric hunts and preserved in middens.

Old-fashioned hunters could not target the biggest and strongest in the way we can today. The technology didn't allow it, and presumably getting close-up and personal with a vigorous rampaging caribou in the prime of health could have led to the demise of the hunter rather than the hunted.

Turning the technological clock back is unlikely to be an attractive option. So unless fine minds can come up with another way of doing it, which also adds up economically, it looks as though we will have to live with the fact that our hunting is re-shaping species at an unnatural rate.

It turns out that we don't need clouds of pesticides or mysterious "radiation" experiences to make living things shrink. The modern way of consuming nature is quite powerful enough.

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A previous thread here has generated highly divergent views about data on sea ice cover from the University of Illinois, and what it might mean.

I wondered whether the scientists involved could help clear up any confusion on how their data should be interpreted; so I emailed to ask them.

Here's the response from William Chapman of the programme.

"On January 1, 2009, an article by Michael Asher entitled appeared on the . We have received many requests for confirmation and clarification on this article from media outlets and interested individuals regarding the current state of the cryosphere as it relates to climate change and/or global warming.

"One important detail about the article in the Daily Tech is that the author is comparing the global sea ice area from December 31, 2008 to same variable for December 31, 1979. In the context of climate change, global sea ice area may not be the most relevant indicator. Almost all global climate models project a decrease in the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area over the next several decades under increasing greenhouse gas scenarios. But, the same model responses of the Southern Hemisphere sea ice are less certain. In fact, there have been some suggesting the amount of sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere may initially increase as a response to atmospheric warming through increased evaporation and subsequent snowfall onto the sea ice.

"Observed global sea ice area, defined here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979, as noted in the Daily Tech article. However, observed N. Hemisphere sea ice area is almost one million sq. km below values seen in late 1979 and S. Hemisphere sea ice area is about 0.5 million sq. km above that seen in late 1979, partly offsetting the N. Hemisphere reduction.

"Global climate model projections suggest that the most significant response of the cryosphere to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will be seen in Northern Hemisphere summer sea ice extent. Recent decreases of N. Hemisphere summer sea ice extent (green line) are consistent with such projections.

"Arctic summer sea ice is only one potential indicator of climate change, however, and we urge interested parties to consider the many variables and resources available when considering observed and model-projected climate change. For example, the ice that is presently in the Arctic Ocean is than the ice of the 1980s and 1990s. So Arctic ice volume is now below its long-term average by an even greater amount than is ice extent or area."

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There's an intriguing question asked in the pages of the US journal this week.

In a nutshell, it is this: can we forecast sudden, possibly catastrophic environmental changes by monitoring long-term trends?

As and her co-researchers point out, what can happen is that a trend gradually worsens for a while, but manageably, until there is a quick, catastrophic flip over into another state - the starkest example being from a species in existence to a species in extinction.

The term de jour for these changes is "tipping points". And although it's been bandied around in the arena of global warming for the last four or five years, the example this group uses in the PNAS paper involves fisheries, in particular the off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 1990s.

The collapse appears to have produced a "regime change". Once, adult cod kept numbers of smaller fish such as capelin down by the simple expedient of eating them. The depletion of adult cod has enabled capelin to thrive - and now, they are taking their revenge by eating juvenile cod so fast that few make it to adulthood.

The predator has become prey; the ecosystem has flipped over into another "regime", and may never return.

Scientists and fishermen - and Canadian politicians - knew in advance that the cod population was declining. But if there had been something to tell them it would result in a probably irreversible collapse, and by when, would they have done something about it?

Reading this bit of research took my mind back to the in October, and a conversation I had there with from the .

Part of Jonathan's job is to devise new ways of monitoring declines in biodiversity. He pointed out to me that for all the talk of global changes, human society only has one continuous long-term record of a key global environmental trend - for more than half a century.

When I first thought about it, I decided Jonathan must have erred. The dates back to 1659, and measurements of sea level using tide gauges began in Amsterdam not long afterwards. Britain's "first phenologist" began recording the arrival of spring in 1736, while historical documents recording go back even further.

But after a bit more deliberation I realised that he had a point. Interesting and valuable as they are, all of these longer historical records are registering consequences of some environmental change; they are telling us nothing about the causes, and nothing about whether sudden change lies ahead and whether it will be reversible.

So what Reinette Biggs and her colleagues set out to ask in their simple model of an ecosystem very like the Grand Banks cod and capelin conumdrum was this: is there anything in the record, any signals that in retrospect could have shown that a huge change was coming, and indicated whether anything could be done to stop it?

If so, what would that tell us about using a similar prediction technique in the future?

Their conclusion basically was "no", for the Grand Banks fishery, or for anything else: "Indicators cannot at present be relied upon as a general means for detecting and avoiding ecological regime shifts."

The situation regarding projections of climate change impacts would appear to back up their view.

For all the talk of tipping points analogous to the cod collapse - irreversible melting of the Greenland icecap or drying out of the Amazon rainforest - uncertainty surrounds the precise temperature rises that could make them happen, and the precise greenhouse gas concentrations that would lead to these temperature rises, and whether reductions in emissions could reverse them.

The situation becomes even more complex when you look at the multiple pressures that crowd in on ecosystems and species. The most acute issue for the Wyoming Toad is the fungal disease that is threatening amphibians worldwide; but salinity changes (possibly linked to climate), invasive species, "predation, pesticide use, irrigation practices, and lack of genetic diversity".

Sort out an early warning system for that lot if you can.

Environmental monitoring is increasing. Satellites now watch over a plethora of parameters including forest cover, clouds, ice extent, and gases in the atmosphere.

Countries such as the UK have set up such as the numbers of key species, water quality, the extent of sustainably managed woodland, and even the amount of time that people spend volunteering for nature conservation tasks.

But for all that, we are a long way from knowing what to look for in the streams of data these projects produce; a long way from being able to tell what will survive without our help, what are the most important interventions to make, and when the deadlines for making those interventions will arrive.

So where does that leave us? In the words of Reinette Biggs: "While this research develops, management for unwanted regime shifts will depend on existing approaches that hedge, avoid risk, maintain ecological resilience, or build social resilience to cope with unexpected change."

In other words, "predict and survive" is for now an unfeasible doctrine for environmental protection; deploying a bit of prudence and a bit of planning is, she suggests, probably the best we can do.

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It's a question I was going to ask in a week or so as the man prepares to leave office.

But following the announcement of a , it seems right to ask it now: what is the second President Bush's environmental legacy?

Reaction to this week's announcement ranged from the Pew Environment Group's to the Center for Biological Diversity's contention that in the end it meant nothing without cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

In recent weeks, the president's administration has been under fire for (an echo of ), over plans that would and - and for the "one-minute-to-midnight" nature of this rule making.

For some observers such as , the administration's record on greenhouse gas emissions means that President Bush will be remembered for "a studied, and malignant, neglect of major issues such as climate change".

But for some others, including the , the Pacific marine measures are enough to "recast his environmental record".

A few other issues that bear on the legacy question might, depending on your point of view, include:

• the impact of US overseas aid policies regarding condom use on population growth
• apparent contradictions between the US accepting scientific accounts of man-made climate change while withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol; yet, for all that, [pdf link] during Mr Bush's time in office
• US leadership of , possibly involving a partial lifting of the global hunting moratorium, but possibly also reducing the number of whales killed each year
• fisheries policies that are among the world's most progressive
• support for genetically modified foods
• support for nuclear power

So what do you think?

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• - What's this?

As the butterfly of 2009 emerges from the pupa of 2008, I thought it might be worth flagging up a few environmental themes and events to look out for during the year that lies ahead.

So here is my somewhat arbitrary and definitely non-exhaustive list of five to watch in 2009. I'd be glad of your input into what else is worth a look.

1. Apologies for being predictable; but politicking over climate change is going to figure high on the news agenda for much of the year.

By early June, negotiators will have compiled the first draft of a - a comprehensive global package including targets on greenhouse gas emissions, funding to help poor countries adapt to climate impacts, the transfer of "clean" technologies, money for forest protection, and much more.

The package is supposed to be finalised and signed off at the UN climate conference in December in Copenhagen.

Key things to look out for in the lead-in include what targets the US and Japan set themselves for reducing emissions by 2020, what kinds of targets developing nations indicate they'll be willing to adopt, the reaction of organisations lobbying for indigenous peoples and for wildlife to draft wording on reducing emissions by slowing deforestation, and whether the sums of money raised for adaptation look like getting anywhere near the ballpark that several reports have concluded is necessary.

The complexity is staggering. If it comes off, it will be by far the most complex environmental agreement ever concluded; if I were a negotiator, I would be getting all the sleep I could now.

2. While the UN process is firmly under the control of politicians, scientific bodies continue to look for new and better ways of gathering data about the important parameters of climate change; and 2009 will see the launch of satellites designed to answer some of the big outstanding questions.

The US Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) and Japan's Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) () will both plot production and absorption of carbon dioxide across the Earth's surface in unprecedented detail.

The absorption side is particularly fascinating, as the information we have on the behaviour of carbon "sinks" - and how that behaviour may change in the future - is still annoyingly sketchy.

Comprehensive data on how forests take up carbon dioxide would also be politically important, enabling more accurate targeting of funds for the protection of trees.

Meanwhile the European Space Agency is planning to launch its ice-measuring satellite during 2009 - four years after the first Cryosat was destroyed by a fault during launch.

Among other things, this craft should provide better indications of whether warmer seas and air are accelerating the melting of ice from the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets - a factor that could generate significant changes in sea level over the coming century, but which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledges is a major unknown.

3. Back on Earth, wildlife groups are denoting 2009 as . The idea is to raise awareness about the factors causing most populations of this close human relative to decline - chief among them being the expansion of the human footprint.

Do these "years of the..." really work as awareness-raising tools? 2008 was variously declared as the , , and - there may have been a few others - but I'm not sure that the outlook for any of these really improved during the 12 months.

There are some hopeful signs for gorillas. The 10 range states recently concluded pledging, among other things, to prosecute poachers, establish reserves and minimise conflict between gorillas and humans.

Cameroon has just in a key area for the Cross River gorilla, one of the most threatened populations. But from Democratic Republic of Congo, we receive of how fragile protection measures are rendered by the very human problem of civil conflict.

4. Early in the year, institutions connected to the life of Charles Darwin will be of the great man's birth, in a year that also marks 150 years since the publication of his seminal .

Parts of the book could have been subtitled On the Demise of Species; and I suspect Darwin would have understood the gorilla's problems rather well.

He certainly recognised that humans were taking species to and beyond the edge of extinction; but hinted that by concentrating on extinctions, we were missing the overall picture of natural decline:

"To admit that species generally become rare before they become extinct - to feel no surprise at the rarity of a species, and yet to marvel greatly when it ceases to exist, is much the same as to admit that sickness in the individual is the forerunner of death - to feel no surprise at sickness, but when the sick man dies, to wonder and to suspect that he died by some unknown deed of violence."

In other words, we should be noting the slide of common species into rarity as much as the final plunge into extinction; a thesis that the Year of the Gorilla patrons would no doubt heartily endorse.

5. The final of my five picks for 2009 takes us to the whaling grounds of the polar seas - and to the conference halls of Portugal, where this year's (IWC) meeting takes place in June.

If this is a seminal year for climate change, it is no less important for whales and whalers.

For about a year and a half, various countries have been can be agreed between the various factions; and for a number of reasons, it appears that this initiative must reach a conclusion at this year's IWC meeting or be consigned to the graveyard where many previous attempts at reform lie interred.

The political obstacles are formidable and it is unclear whether all parties actually want an agreement.

If it does emerge, it will overturn in some way the moratorium on commercial whaling that has stood for more than two decades and which some cite as one of the biggest achievements of the conservation movement.

So that's five from me.

But what have I missed? What else do you think is shaping up as a key environmental issue for 2009?

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