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You'd think that conserving the world's biodiversity would be a pretty uncontroversial aim - wouldn't you?

Who wouldn't think it a good idea that the giant panda survives for our children's children to marvel at, that the intricate dependencies of remain un-ruptured by dynamite and fertilisers, that savannahs and forests and mangroves be allowed to continue providing humanity with game and oxygen and coastal protection?

According to York University's - you need to think again.

Co-chairing a wrap-up session at the recent , the biologist suggested that biodiversity may not remain climate change's cosy cousin for much longer.

The fundamental reason why from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit was, he said, because climate change had reached such a fever pitch of political heat, and if it becomes evident that conserving biodiversity means changing lifestyles, those working in the field must expect debate to reach similar temperatures.

With this year being declared the International Year of Biodiversity, and with of coming up this October, you'd expect such heated conflict to materialise this year, if at all.

History suggests that Professor Fitter may be correct.

Just two countries in the world are not parties to the CBD: Andorra and the US.

I'm a little shaky on Andorra's reasons. But the aetiology of the US position speaks absolutely to the argument that the "mom and apple pie" view of biodiversity can quickly turn into "mom and a lacing of strychnine".

After President Bill Clinton signed the convention in 1993, it went swiftly into Congress for ratification, and the first indications were that it might well pass.

But a number of interested parties began to argue against - organisations concerned with land ownership and land rights, such as the Montana Farm Bureau Federation and Grassroots for Multiple Use, allied with groups opposed in principle to extensions of government and regulation.

Concerns were expressed about possible restrictions on the unfettered access that US pharmaceutical companies had to the developing world's biological riches, and on the nascent technology of genetic engineering.

With , using phrases such as "I am especially concerned about the effect of the treaty on private property rights in my state and throughout America" and "a rather common view among so-called developing nations that this treaty is some sort of an international cash cow to be milked", it went un-ratified - and remains so to this day.

In the domain of public opinion, the parallels are striking.

On the website of , you'll find a video clip of Lord Monckton speaking against carbon curbs through the UN climate convention, and a video clip of US lobbyist Henry Lamb speaking against moves to protect wild lands through the UN biodiversity convention.

A related consultancy, , links the issues by talking of "false environmental catastrophes like global warming and ecosystem destruction" - both promoted by people who want to establish global governance.

The rhetoric on news media is also familiar: "Your instincts tell you there is something wrong, or incomplete about what the media is telling you... We provide information the media leaves out - the other side of the story!"

Now, this post isn't a history lesson, isn't an examination exclusively of US lobby groups, and doesn't assume that UN conventions are the only way to protect biodiversity.

But it does demonstrate the wider point that when panda push comes to financial shove, biodiversity can become every bit as heated as climate change.

Here's a hypothetical example raised at the InterAcademy panel meeting.

Let's say you want to protect the Amazon rainforest and the rich biodiversity it contains.

One way you might look to do that is by reducing deforestation; and .

So you might choose to campaign among Western consumers, or to lobby Western governments, to reduce the amount of beef consumed on Western plates; less beef equals more trees.

Does the issue look uncontroversial now?

So with something of a nod to the industry of our regular commenter davblo2, and without a hint of judgement on their merits, here are just five arguments that I expect to see deployed at some point during the year:

• Biological diversity around the world isn't really declining

• Where it is, it's a product of natural cycles such as the normal run of predator-prey dynamics; species have always gone extinct and always will

• Much of the evidence for declining biological diversity comes from eco-extremist groups, so cannot be trusted, as these organisations have a financial stake in portraying a crisis

• Moves to protect biodiversity are just an excuse to raise taxes

• Developing countries should concentrate on economic growth first, then use their wealth to repair any damage caused; they have more to gain by ripping down their forests and selling the timber than by protecting them

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It's hard to overstate how much the events of the last two months have altered the global picture of climate politics.

Picture the scene you'd have found on any day towards the end of last year: more prime ministers and presidents talking publicly about climate change than ever before; the vast majority of the world's governments apparently committed to making some kind of agreement that would restrain the growth in greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to avoid "dangerous" climate change; the world's two biggest emitters - China and the US - announcing targets to take into the maelstrom of Copenhagen; rafts of mayors and business leaders and activists straining every sinew to encourage everyone across the finishing line.

How different things look now.

Out of Copenhagen agreeing that limiting the global temperature rise to 2C was indicated by the science, but not agreeing to set 2C or any other temperature figure as a firm target, and not containing anything that would commit governments to policy measures that could achieve such a target.

Meanwhile, the prospective US climate legislation encounters new hurdles, the latest being to succeed Democrat Edward Kennedy as Massachusetts Senator.

That pushes the Democrats below the majority they need to prevent long discussions on the healthcare bill that, it's generally assumed, must go through before the climate wrangles begin in earnest.

It also could be interpreted as indicating that Mr Obama's raft of policies is proving less palatable to the electorate - and with campaigning for mid-term elections due to begin in just half a year's time, one possible consequence would be to push Democrats and Republicans alike away from the camp supporting climate legislation.

Other interpretations and other projections of the US scene are possible, of course. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that passage of the American legislation looks less likely than it did two months ago.

Internationally, this is hugely significant. If the big developing countries do not see action from the US, they will be even more reluctant to curb their own emissions - that's abundantly clear.

Perhaps because the Copenhagen summit ended at a time when much of the world was preparing for Christmas and New Year revelries, I'm not sure that news organisations - including ourselves - have adequately reflected how momentous a shift it signalled.

Before Copenhagen, most of the building blocks appeared to be in place for some kind of global, negotiated, and possibly even effective deal - if not in Copenhagen itself, then within a further year.

Would anyone now make that assessment?

, too, may be affecting politicians' views - it's impossible to make a broad judgement on that, despite the protestations of many players in Copenhagen that the basics of the IPCC's scientific argument remained sound.

Anyway, we discussed at the tail end of last year some of the reasons why the summit did not produce a solid deal, and the point of this post isn't to re-tread that ground.

It's simply to reflect, with the benefit of a bit of distance, just how far the world of climate politics has shifted.

Without US legislation, without a willing China and India, it is hard to see how anything more significant than the Copenhagen Accord can come later this year or in the next few years - despite continued European protestations of support, despite the demands of small island states, and despite the judgement of many of the accord's architects (from Barack Obama to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh) that it falls short.

Depending on your views on man-made global warming, you might find the mood-shift encouraging or disappointing. But it's hard to argue, I think, that it isn't significant - perhaps the most significant change in international environmental governance since the Rio Earth Summit.

And the question that not even the most clued-up observers know how to answer at the moment is: "what happens next?"

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About two decades ago, the world's frog experts realised they were characters in the opening chapter of a detective novel.

It wasn't so much a whodunnit as a wotisdoinit - killing, that is, frogs and salamanders in different parts of the world .

The pages were littered with suspects: pesticides, the ozone hole, global warming, disease, invasive species, farming... the list went on and on. And with it a question; was any one suspect working alone, or in a gang?

Now we know that there are two prime movers in the ongoing amphibian massacre. One is the fungal disease ; the other is... everything.

"Everything?" Surely not?

Well... yes, .

While the chytrid fungus has blown whole populations away single-handedly in a season's shooting spree, many species undergo a slow, inexorable decline more akin to starvation or an ancient torture; squeezed into corners by the expanding human habitat, poisoned by farmland chemicals, eaten by bigger invasive neighbours, hunted for meat, stressed by temperature rise and stalked by viruses - or any combination of the above.

As the plot of that detective story becomes clear, it seems that scientists are beginning to write another with a very similar narrative, but this time with bees cast as the victims.

Bee populations - wild and cultivated - have always had their ups and downs, their years of plenty and years of absence. But about five years ago, on a scale not documented before, leading to the term .

Since then, the phenomenon has been noted across much of Europe, with indications that it's gone further afield - to Brazil, to Taiwan.

or whether it's just an extreme form of a hive decline that's usually more gradual. Whatever the realities of that, it's clear that wild bee populations are also declining at serious rates, both Apis mellifera and .

The search for a cause - an aetiology, in medical parlance - has once again focused on individual suspects: disease, pesticides, climatic change, loss of genetic diversity, urbanisation, etc etc etc - even the use of mobile phones.

Once again, as the pages turn, a more complex picture emerges of a syndrome that might well have multiple causes - indeed, that might have a different mix of causes in different locations.

The latest twist in the plot comes from , where scientists working in the lab have found a link between the health of hives and the diversity of plants on which bees forage for food.

Although the finding needs to be confirmed in field trials - which the team is hoping to instigate - the indication is that a diet of diverse pollen gives the bees the amino acids they need to synthesise their full panoply of chemical defences against pathogens.

A reasonable hypothesis, then, would be that if you put your bees to work and feed them on one particular food all winter, such as corn syrup - - they're going to fall like insects out of the sky when an unpleasant disease comes along.

Along with that goes the notion that if you lose a diversity of wild plants, you'll begin to impact wild bees. (The reverse may also apply, a little more intuitively.)

suggests that the diversity of bees and flowers have been declining at similar rates for more than a century - a conclusion that could suggest the causes are intertwined.

If a monoculture diet was the only issue, perhaps it wouldn't matter; perhaps the insects would survive.

But add in a lack of genetic diversity among commercial stocks, , changes to the availability of water brought about by everything from man-made climate change to dams, the greater mix of pathogens that commercial bees must encounter as the hives travel from one workplace to the next, the declining extent of "natural" habitat for wild bees, and so on and so on and so on - and once again, "everything" becomes a reasonable suspect.

If this is right - and other branches of the natural world such as coral reef ecosystems are also under multi-frontal attack - it raises a pretty obvious problem: how do you combat "everything"?

A small but growing number of amphibian species now exist only in reserves or captive breeding programmes - special places set aside for them. The only way to defend them against the multiple attacks of the real world is to take them out of the real world.

That option does not exist for bees - especially for colonies and populations and species that we do not domesticate, that live in the wild and pollinate many of the plants on which they forage.

You might defend them against disease with a treatment, or against harmful pesticides by finding a more sympathetic substitute, just as you can find a medical treatment for the clear aetiology of a broken leg or a defective heart valve.

But just as there is no medical treatment for old age, there is no defence against everything - nor is there ever likely to be.

Which leaves us with what conclusion to the story?

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I'm spending part of this week at biodiversity school.

Not any ordinary school, mind, but Britain's .

This week it hosts a conference with the somewhat arcane title - which doubles as the triennial conference of the , the umbrella organisation encompassing 103 science academies (like the Royal Society) from around the world.

As at any science conference, the jargon flies around thick and fast; but what's interesting about this one is that beneath the jargon lie some of the simplest and most important questions pertaining to the environment and how humankind should manage it in the future.

The questions include: why does biodiversity matter? And how can we do the best for nature in a world that will soon need to feed, clothe and maintain nine billion people?

On one level, of course, biodiversity matters if we decide it matters - if all humanity, or groups of it, decide it's important to preserve tigers or tunas or turtles and do something about it.

But as the Royal Society's former chairman reminded us, biodiversity conservation is absolutely not just about a handful of iconic species and an emotional response to fin and fur.

Non-charismatic organisms (insects, fungi, bacteria, worms, etc) vastly outnumber those you'd find on a conservation charity's posters; so why do they matter? What is, in fact, the scientific case for preserving them?

Long-running research projects such as the run by and the have given us some answers.

In a nutshell, explained from McGill University in Canada as he distilled the results of such projects for his audience, they show that diversity leads to ecosystems that are highly and robust.

So when two plots of grassland, for example, are grown next to each other and one is allowed to contain more species than the other, it will be more productive; and the productivity rises, apparently, because a greater variety of species brings a greater number of ways in which they can complement each other in terms of what they consume and produce.

The complementarities and the richness apply not only to plants, but to insects and other animals; diversity supports diversity.

Plots endowed with high diversity retain their high productivity if something should affect one of the species they contain; low diversity ones decline. So high diversity is a kind of insurance policy against disease or other impacts.

But there's a problem. Humanity may benefit from intact and therefore productive ecosystems; but we also need to create and maintain quite large areas of low diversity in the form of farms.

And the world's food production is going to have to increase as the human population rises. .

So how do we compromise our need for these low diversity zones with the need that both we and nature have for high diversity?

's group at Cambridge University is developing a strategy that involves plotting the sensitivity of a given species to a given ecological change.

A hypothetical example would be something like this. If you needed to drain an area of wetland to grow crops, the local frogs might be extremely sensitive to that, whereas birds might be fine with a bit of drying so long as some moisture remained.

So as far as the frogs are concerned, the best solution would be patches of intense farming with patches of intact wetland in between. One's good for assuaging human hunger, the other's good for frogs.

But the best strategy for the birds would be to farm moderately over the whole area, because that would allow them to remain at pretty much optimum levels.

If you have both birds and frogs, you have to find some kind of compromise.

This isn't just an abstract concept. Professor Balmford's team is trying it in Ghana and India, and is starting to be able to make firm recommendations to policymakers.

Land providing food is one example of an "" - a way in which the natural world enables human society to exist.

The , the four-year project that aimed (what's wrong with ambition?) for nothing less that to measure the ecological health of the planet's surface and what it means for humanity, categorises ecosystem services into four groups:

"...provisioning services such as food, water, timber, and fiber; regulating services that affect climate, floods, disease, wastes, and water quality; cultural services that provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and supporting services such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling."

In principle, Professor Balmford explained, you could devise the optimum strategy for any given combination of species and services.

This week's conference is necessarily distilling biodiversity science for an audience that contains people in the field but also scientists in completely unrelated disciplines; and in the space of a blog post, I have to distil it down much further, but at some stage all the presentations should be on if you want to explore them further.

Interesting stuff, I hope you'll agree. And we're due to hear more about the economic case for conserving biodiversity - how prices can be put on those ecosystem services, and what it costs to replace them when nature becomes too degraded.

Not everyone thinks likes that approach... but that's a post for another day.

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Among those who work on and care about the preservation of nature's plants and animals, the word "endangered" is an absolute touchstone.

Endangered species will in general have more conservation resources devoted to them. There may be political or community or scientific action aimed at saving them, the most extreme examples being captive breeding programmes or .

This approach hasn't been drawn up as some master plan - it's just evolved, a natural tendency to devote resources in situations where some kind of danger is clearly evident.

But is it sensible? Why wait until species become endangered? Why not intervene at an earlier stage, devoting resources to keeping ecosystems intact and keeping common species common rather than allowing them to become rare - to give a medical analogy, favouring prevention rather than cure?

It's a particularly pertinent time to ask the question given that we've just entered the UN-designated , when various groups of people are going to be thinking more than usual about nature preservation; and it's cropped up , in an article by .

(Science is a subscription publication so you may not be able to see the article from the link above - apologies, but not much I can do about it.)

One of his main arguments is that common species, by dint of being common, contribute most to the ecosystem that contains them - providing the majority of services such as photosynthesis and nutrient flow.

Given that human societies depend to a greater or lesser extent on these same services, it's not just an altruistic point.

The main driver of nature loss through human history (and the main thing pushing species currently on towards extinction) has been removal or degradation of habitat.

National parks and protected areas are aimed, of course, at combating this, at preserving some areas where habitat is more or less unchanged.

About 13% of the world's land surface is now under some kind of protection. And while that's a figure and an achievement that many conservationists are proud of, it does mean that 87% of the land is without protection.

And here's the catch in Professor Gaston's argument. As he puts it: "To a first approximation, common species are habitat loss" - in other words, when you change the habitat, you change or remove the common species.

It's sometimes assumed that you can reduce pieces of forest or coral reef or whatever it is down and down in size, and whatever lives there will continue to live there, albeit in proportionately smaller numbers.

Ecologists know this isn't true; and Kevin Gaston gives two cases where modification of habitat during modern settlement of North America had catastrophic impacts on very abundant species, the rocky mountain locust (or grasshopper) and the passenger pigeon.

reads:

"Over the 19th Century, the species crashed from being one of the most abundant birds in the world to extinction... It was a nomadic species, breeding and foraging in vast flocks millions of birds strong... The precise cause of its extinction is difficult to determine, but the widespread clearance of the hardwood trees which provided its mast food, and the proliferation of the rail network and telegraph system which enabled efficient location of nesting colonies and the transport of young birds to market are probably the two single most important factors."

; a fascinating piece of social as well as ecological history.

Both abundant species; both sliding through rarity to extinction in less than a century - and neither, it appears, capable of enduring in lower numbers in small protected pockets.

Preserve the habitat, preserve the species.

And there are other reasons why focusing on common as well as rare species might be a good idea.

One fairly obvious point is that as Darwin noted, common species become less common before entering the threatened list; so even if preventing extinctions is your only aim, you can achieve that by intervening earlier.

Another is a point made by Jean-Christophe Vie from in : what do we want to preserve species for?

"Do we want nature to be confined in zoos and botanic gardens or isolated pockets where rich tourists could go and watch what once covered most of our planet?"

Do we want species to exist in such small numbers that they cannot play a significant role in the ecosystem they inhabit?

An example: two years ago, that resulted in increasing volumes of sometimes toxic algal blooms. The cod are still there, but in numbers too small to play their former role in the ecosystem.

To highlight the International Year of Biodiversity, IUCN has launched allowing you a "daily download" of something rather beautiful from around the natural world. They've also provided (I've scattered a couple of them around this post).

Not all of them are rare; not all of them are endangered. I guess their recommendation and Kevin Gaston's might be: let's keep it that way.

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It's , and brass monkeys in Bryn Mawr... a winter spell with weather that's unusually - well - wintry.

But not everywhere; in fact, other places in the Northern Hemisphere are seeing weather that's unseasonably warm.

In Goose Bay in Newfoundland, - bikini weather, relatively speaking, given that the average minimum for January is -23C.

The cause of what is an extreme of .

Essentially, air pressure is measured at various places across the Arctic and at the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere - about 45 degrees north, roughly the latitude of Milan, Montreal or Vladivostok.

The difference between the average readings for the two latitudes gives the state of the Arctic Oscillation index.

A "positive" state is defined as relatively high pressure in mid-latitudes and relatively low pressure over the polar region. "Negative" conditions are the reverse.

And what we have at the moment is an unusually extreme negative state.

The graph below comes from the and shows the variability of the index from 1950 to 2009.

The text on the graph is a little unclear as I've had to shrink it a bit, but you can see at the bottom right the current negative conditions developing during December - and .

that shows how extreme these few weeks are turning out to be - unmatched since the early 1960s, a period that saw several winters in the UK featuring extended spells of cold, snowy weather.

What the negative AO conditions mean is that cold air spills out of the Arctic down to mid-latitudes, which this time round includes much of Europe, tracts of the US .

For the UK, this implies a higher chance of cold northerly or easterly winds.

But if you live in places that are usually cold at this time of year - such as Goose Bay - you'll see a concomitant rise in temperatures compared with what happens during "positive" AO conditions, when the cold air is confined to more northerly latitudes.

A little more than a decade ago, I visited Yakutsk in Siberia which lies close to one of the candidates for the title of "coldest place on the planet" - , which has seen the mercury plummet as low as -71C.

I don't know how balmy it is in Oymyakon right now but - that's 10C warmer than the January average.

Despite the name "Arctic Oscillation", there's little discernible pattern to how the pressure difference varies, or what causes it - perhaps "Arctic Random Fluctuation" would be a better name.

Some researchers have linked an apparent increase in the average state of the index from the 1960s to the 1990s to man-made global warming, but you would have to say the jury is definitely still out.

(The AO is linked to another naturally varying phenomenon, by the way - the (NAO), the variability in the pressure difference between Iceland and the Azores - in fact, some hold that the NAO is just a sub-set of the AO.)

So the question of how long the unusually wintry UK conditions will last is really a question of how long the Arctic Oscillation will remain in its extreme negative state - and a week to 10 days seems to be the favoured timescale.

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