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Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG update.

Adopted people in Ireland to gain right to information on their birth parents

The Minister for Children James Reilly says planned legislation is ‘A major breakthrough’

 

The Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Dr James Reilly and Michelle Shannon the director of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs pictured at Government Buildings.

Planned legislation that would offer up to 50,000 adopted people a legal right to information about their birth parents for the first time has been described as a “major breakthrough” by Minister for Children Dr James Reilly.
The Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill will operate retrospectively and will also apply to all future adoptions.
The publication of the general scheme and heads of the Bill took place today.
People who were the subject of “informal” or illegal adoptions, or who were wrongfully registered, will also be able to avail of the information and tracing services planned under the legislation.
Many adoptees have faced difficulties accessing their birth cert, due in part to a constitutional right to privacy on the part of the birth parent.
Dr Reilly said officials had sought to strike a balance in the draft bill between the desire of adopted people to know more about their identity and the right to privacy of birth parents through a new statutory scheme.
In order to access records, adopted people would be required to sign a statutory declaration obliging them to respect the wishes of birth parents in cases where they do not wish to be contacted.
There will be no criminal sanction in the bill for failing to comply with this declaration.
The release of birth certs will, however, be subject to some conditions.
While there will be a presumption in favour of the disclosure of a birth cert, this will not apply if there are “compelling reasons” for the refusal, such as a person’s life being placed in danger.
In these cases, an adopted person could appeal the decision in court.
In addition, any additional identifying information – such as medical records – may only be disclosed with the consent of the birth parent.
‘A Major breakthrough’
Overall, Dr Reilly said the bill marked a “a major breakthrough in dealing with the complex challenge of providing a statutory entitlement to identity information for adopted persons”.
Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection Joan Burtonsaid the denial of birth certs and identifying information in the past was associated with an era when adoption in the State happened “very much in the shadows, with little or no regulation and great secrecy”.
She said: “As an adopted person myself who discovered the true identity of my parents only after an exhaustive and deeply emotional search in the late 1990s, by which time they were dead, I always thought that this was grievously wrong.
“This is why I welcome the publication of legislation today.”
A mixed response.
The 200-page bill drew a mixed response from adoption groups.
Paul Redmond, chair of the Coalition of Mother And Baby Home Survivors, said it was a “very good day” for the adopted community in the State.
“Finally after years, decades and generations of secrecy, we’re finally coming out and joining the rest of the international community,” he said.
“We’ve been assured that substantial information from our files including our medical information is going to be released in the future pro-actively.”
But the Adoption Rights Alliance said the legislative proposals would impose “statutory discrimination” against adopted people.
Susan Lohan, the alliance’s co-founder, said adopted people should have unconditional access to their birth certificates and files as a basic right, rather than having to sign a statutory declaration.
“We cannot possibly endorse what we have seen of the proposals as outlined by the Minister and his officials, as in some circumstances adopted people will be forced to sign away their rights in a way that further marginalises them on a statutory basis,” she said.
Claire McGettrick, also of the Adoption Rights Alliance, said it was important to separate the issues of information and tracing.
She said that adopted people are seeking a statutory right to information, as opposed to a statutory right to a relationship with their natural mothers.
“Adopted people can already navigate the civil records in the General Registrar Office to obtain their birth certificates, and additional barriers, such as an information veto and a statutory declaration that one will respect one’s natural mother’s privacy, are wholly unnecessary and offensive to adopted people,” she said.
But the alliance said it intended to “fully engage” with the upcoming committee hearings on the legislation.
“We are happy to work with Dr [James] Reilly and we wish to stress that the only statutory provisions we are in a position to endorse is where adopted people are given unconditional access to their birth certificates and files,” she said.
Mr Redmond said his group’s only issue of contention was a one-year lead-in to enacting the legislation.
Mr Redmond said a key breakthrough was the fact that “illegally and informally adopted people” would be given equal status with legally adopted people in terms of tracing and searching, as this was a very important matter for the community.

Court finds Eircom and Vodafone guilty of overcharging Irish customers

  

Eircom and Vodafone have today been convicted and fined for continuously sending customers over-charged bills.

Following an investigation by industry watchdog Comreg, the telecom giants along with Three Ireland pleaded guilty at Dublin District Court today to charges under Section 45 of the Communications Act.
Vodafone was fined €10,000 and eircom received fines totalling €21,000 after they each pleaded guilty to seven charges.
Three, which pleaded guilty to three charges, will be spared a conviction and will get the Probation Act if they donate €15,000 to charity by September 28 next.
Judge John O’Neill singled out Eircom for criticism branding their code of practice a joke and he said that when customers complained they were “pushed from Billy to Jack and they were ignored”.
He said customers would have been upset, petrified and “worried sick” when they received letters from debt collectors chasing them for money on behalf of eircom. In one case, they used debt collectors to pursue an elderly man living in a nursing home after he had already cancelled his account, the court was told.
Vodafone over-charged another man who had suffered a serious injury in a fall and had cancelled his account, the court heard.
The customers were only refunded after Comreg got involved, the judge was told. Prosecution counsel Christian Keeling said the aggravating factors were the phone companies’ failures to deal with customer complaints a timely and courteous manner.
Comreg compliance analyst Miriam Kilraine told the court there were seven customer complaints in relation to Eircom. One reported that they asked to cancel their account in January 2014 but they continued to be billed in the following months and a debt collection company pursued them.
In another instance, an elderly man living in a nursing home had also cancelled his account in 2013 but continued to get bills and a debt collection company engaged by eircom.
Eircom had also failed to deliver a service to another consumer who had money debited from their account. Another Eircom customer was over-charged for broadband after his debit details were got mixed up.
Judge O’Neill was told that another customer signed up for a €35 a month package but was instead billed at €50 a month for several months. The court was also told another customer signed up for an Eircom loyalty bundle but never received the €25 a month deal.
Ms Kilraine said that in November 2014, a man emailed Vodafone to cancel the account of his son who had suffered a serious injury in a fall. Despite numerous calls to the company he still ended up paying for two extra months.
The court heard the company failed to cancel broadband accounts of two customers and one of them was pursed by a debt collection company. One of their customers upgraded to “e-fibre” high-speed broadband but it never worked and another was put on the incorrect plan.
Judge O’Neill was told that a Vodafone customer opted for an unlimited calls and texts plan but it was never applied to her account. Another Vodafone user ended up overpaying by €705 after she was erroneously double billed.
The Comreg analyst told the court that Three Ireland which took over O2 accounts last year kept billing and getting paid by two customers who had cancelled accounts.
Another customer got a phone upgrade and was offered a package by shop with a Three franchise. She accepted a deal where she would get 300 minutes of free calls to the UK if she paid an extra €2.99 on top of her €55 a month package.
However, she ended up getting billed for €300. She repeatedly went back to the shop and got no explanation and the sales assistant hid from her, the court was told.
The court heard the phone company’s customer service team had worked out of Mumbai in India but they have set up a new call centre in Limerick to deal with complaints.
Lawyers for all the companies said the cases related to human and system error and the court was to note that they have all set up new remediation plans to ensure these problems won’t happen again.
Counsel for Vodafone and eircom also asked the court to note they had 2.3 million and two million customers respectively.
The court was also told they have agreed to contribute to prosecution costs.

Enda Kenny’s first director of elections now joins Lucinda Creighton’s Renua party as candidate

  

ENDA Kenny’s first director of elections has joined the Lucinda Creighton’s Renua Ireland party.

Frank Durcan was Mr Kenny’s director of elections for the 1975 by-election which saw the Taoiseach successfully contest his late father Henry’s Dail seat.
Mr Durcan also worked closely with Mr Kenny on other election campaigns until 1984 when he fell out the Taoiseach and quit the party.
Since then Mr Durcan has served as an Independent councillor on Mayo County Council.
Speaking to Independent.ie, Mr Durcan said he joined Renua because he believes it is the only “credible political party”.
He also paid tribute to his new party leader, Ms Creighton, who he described as “another Mary Robinson in the making”.
“She has something that the rest of them don’t. She has common morality and civic morality, and she is an able debater. She is educated and has proven herself in both Europe and Ireland,” he said.
Mr Durcan said he was impressed by Ms Creighton’s “very courageous” decision to step down as a minister and leave Fine Gael over the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act.
“She walked away from a very substantial amount of money. It is not everyone that would have that type of courage. We don’t have got enough people like Lucinda in Irish politics,” he added.
Mr Durcan does not intend to run in the next general election but will serve as a Renua councillor on Mayo County Council.
He will also assist the party in finding a candidate to run against the Taoiseach.

Meanwhile back in Sligo?

Finbarr Filan of Shafin Developments fame confirmed to run for Renua Ireland

 

The brother of Westlife singer Shane Filan will run for election in Sligo-Leitrim as a Renua candidate.

Finbarr Filan, brother of former Westlife singer Shane Filan, is to run for Renua Ireland
Mr Filan has confirmed he will be the general election candidate for the party headed by Lucinda Creighton. He will run in the Sligo-Leitrim constituency.
Mr Filan was a property developer and set up Shafin Developments with his brother Shane during the boom.
The firm took out a series of loans to construct a 90-home estate in Dromahair, Co Leitrim. The company went into receivership in 2012 and the pair were left with debt of €23 million.
Mr Filan said he welcomed the opportunity to be part of a political change.
“From my work in town and city centre management, I have experienced firsthand the frustration of the real time environment of retail business dealing with a monolith of a local authority.
“We need change and I would welcome the opportunity to be part of and help lead this change,” he said.
“I believe I have the character, personality, ability and life experience to win a seat for Renua in Sligo Leitrim.”

Ryanair reports a 25% rise in profits, and raises traffic forecasts

 

Passenger numbers up 16% to 28m in the first quarter of this year.

Ryanair said it is to raise its full-year traffic target by 3 million to 103 million.
Ryanair has reported a profit after tax of €245 million for its first quarter, up 15% on the €197 million recorded for the same period a year earlier.
Passenger numbers were up 16% to 28 million from 24.3 million and the airline said it was raising its full-year traffic target by 3 million to 103 million.
The airline said its full-year profit would be at the higher ends of its earlier guidance of between €940 million and €970 million due to strong bookings.
“This guidance, which is 12% ahead of last year’s profit, is heavily reliant on the final outturn of second-half fares over which we currently have almost zero visibility,” said chief executive Michael O’Leary.
Revenues were up 10% for the quarter from €1.49 billion to €1.65 billion while earnings per share increased from 14.22% to 17.90%.
Unit costs excluding fuel fell 7% in the three months under review.
The airline said it is now 70% hedged as far ahead as fiscal 2017 at an average price of $66 a barrel. It said it is 90% hedged at $91 a barrel for the 2016 financial year.
Ryanair said it intends to cut fares by between 4% and 8% over the winter months. It also plans to ground 40 planes between October to March as against 50 last year.
The airline said that fares for the first half of the financial year will be broadly flat.
“Our faster capacity growth and lower oil prices may lead to an aggressive pricing response from competitors who will try to defend their market shares,” said Mr O’Leary.
Having unanimously voted to accept IAG’s offer for its 29.8% stake in Aer Lingus earlier this month, Ryanair said that if the deal proceeds it would expect to receive the proceeds from the sale in September.

The Vatican hosts world leaders to fight climate change

  
More than half of the world’s population resides in cities, where 80% of all greenhouse gases are emitted. Citizens of large cities are directly affected by local decisions regarding ‘going green.
Cities across the world are developing policies and sustainable practices in efforts to provide healthier local environments and contribute to the global ‘green’ effort.
65 mayors recently visited the Vatican to discuss climate change with Pope Francis, giving cities a role in debates that previously only took place on the global and national level, where it is just not possible to deal with urban issues. National legislatures, whose debates are shaped more by financial interests than the everyday needs of local citizens, often get stuck in a state of paralysis regarding such policies.
Cities are in the perfect position to tackle issues such as air quality, energy efficiency, and conservation.
Depending on their geological location, cities are experiencing different effects of the same global pollution problem. Coastal cities, especially those in the developing world, are more vulnerable to natural disasters but do not have the massive sums of money needed to upgrade their infrastructure to better withstand flooding. Drier regions are experiencing intense summer heat waves and droughts that can cause health problems and strain water supplies for agriculture.
Residents who feel the effects most are the urban poor, infants, and the elderly.
As the effects of pollution are publicized and felt by individuals, communities, and nations, the world’s cities are setting into motion a bottom-up movement to push for a better quality of urban life.
Curitiba, Brazil has passed many successful policies, including integration of urban green spaces, reduction of waste, and a widely used public transportation system. Chicago has developed policies anticipating a hotter and wetter climate by repaving its roads with permeable materials, planting more trees, and offering tax incentives to encourage green office roofs.
Many cities have initiated environmental legislation that exceeds US Environmental Protection Agency standards.
An important organization in the movement, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership is a group of the world’s largest cities committed to reducing carbon emissions and increasing energy efficiency. In 2006, 40 cities were signed up–now there are more than 75 cities committed to the project with a combined population of over half a billion.
As grassroots, bottom-up movements spread, so does the inspiration and aspiration to care for the planet–for the Earth’s sake, the community’s sake, and the sake of the future generations.       

Monday, July 27, 2015

Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG update

David Drumm to give evidence by video link to Banking Inquiry team

    

Ciaran Lynch said a decision would be made on Tuesday

The Chairman of the Oireachtas banking inquiry Ciaran Lynch said it will decide on Tuesday if it will accept an offer from the former Anglo Irish Bank Chief Executive, David Drumm, to give evidence to the inquiry via video link from the United States.
Mr Lynch said by then the inquiry team will have access to the full legal advice on the matter and will make a decision on that basis.
However, he would not be drawn on the implications for the future of the inquiry if some members withdraw from the session if the inquiry does agree to hear Mr Drumm’s evidence in this way.
Mr Lynch said he was sure the work of the inquiry could be kept “out of the courts” when the full membership meet and discuss the matter with their support team and legal advisers on Tuesday.
He said it was important that the inquiry finish its work and that it has managed to complete two thirds of its work and interview 70 witnesses without encountering any major legal obstacles.
Mr Lynch said at the start of the inquiry he had asked members to leave their club jerseys at the door and he was sure they would do that when the group meets again on Tuesday.
He also said it is critical that the banking inquiry survives the recent controversies about how it is operating.
Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week programme, Mr Lynch said a Senior Counsel has been appointed to look at the internal procedures of the inquiry and it would be inappropriate for him to comment.
He said he would not speculate on what would happen if an inquiry member refused to take part in a particular hearing.
The inquiry has faced a number of challenges to date but it has operated on a collegial basis so far and he expected next weeks meeting to discuss Mr Drumm’s offer of video evidence will be in the same context, he added.
Mr Lynch said the value of the committees work will be reflected in its final report which is due to be published by the end of the year.
Earlier, a number of politicians who are members of the Banking Inquiry said that they will not participate in a proposed session where David Drumm may give evidence by video link.
Fine Gael TD Eoghan Murphy and Fianna Fáil finance spokesman McGrath said if the Banking Inquiry agrees to accept evidence via video link from the former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm they will not participate in that session.
Mr Murphy said he had made the decision to protect the integrity of the inquiry and said it would be undignified of the Oireachtas to offer Mr Drumm the privilege of giving evidence when he refuses to return to Ireland to co-operate with garda investigations.
He said agreeing to Mr Drumm’s request would be a fundamental mistake.
Mr McGrath said he believed that facilitating someone who had refused to cooperate with Justice authorities would be an affront to democracy and should not be considered.
The Socialist Party TD, Joe Higgins said he would make his final decision on the matter on Tuesday after the committee hears legal advice on the matter.
He said some people were saying that it would be interesting to hear from Mr Drumm but many others felt strongly that allowing him to give evidence in this way might treat ordinary people who had suffered as a result of the banking collapse with great contempt.

New poll shows Ireland wants Leo Varadkar as leader

  

The Fine Gael Minister for Health Leo Varadkar.

Health Minister Leo Varadkar is the overwhelming favorite among the public and Fine Gael supporters to be the next leader of the party.
A poll for The Sunday Times shows 34% of people would like to see Varadkar, who came out as a gay in January, take over from Taoiseach Enda Kenny.
“It’s always nice to get positive feedback from the public, but there is no vacancy. Enda is the leader and I have my hands full in health and a lot of work to do,” Varadkar said.
The poll shows independents are up five points to 31%, a record high. Fine Gael were unchanged in the poll with 24%. Fianna Fail were down three points to 18%, Sinn Fein were down two to 17%. Labor was down one point to eight and the Greens were down a point to one %.
Recently-formed political alignments were too new to be included as separate groups in the poll and were counted with the independents.
They included the Social Democrats launched last week with three Independent TDs (members of Parliament) as joint leaders. One of them is Roisin Shortall, a former junior minister who resigned from government in 2012 when she also resigned from the Labor Party.
The other new party is Renua Ireland, whose leader is Lucinda Creighton, who also resigned as a junior minister and from Fine Gael when she voted against the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill.
Both the Social Democrats and Renua have said they will run candidates in every constituency in the next general election which will be held within a year.

HSE pays €4.4m every year for mental health treatments in the UK?

   

The HSE is paying €4.4 million a year for mental health treatments in the UK.

The Sunday Times reports that 13 patients have been transferred to the UK for specialist psychiatric treatment.
The patients were moved abroad for periods of between two months and almost 14 years.
Fianna Fail’s spokesperson on Mental Health Colm Keaveney said these cases highlight the lack of investment in specialist care available in Ireland.
“We’ve seen a breach in the Programme for Government – a commitment to ring-fence specialist recruitment and expenditure in community mental health teams,” he said.
“It’s resulted in a staffing crisis on the ground … the HSE are left with no option but to export many of our complex, acute mental health needs.”

Irish study to find best way to quit smoking for ever

   

The Quit.ie programme was launched by the HSE in 2011, resulting in 600,000 “quit attempts” since then.

One is a global empire with testimonials from Anjelica Houston, Anthony Hopkins and Richard Branson. These stars claim to be among the millions of smokers around the world who have kicked the habit thanks to the advice of a former 100-a-day smoker who ultimately died of lung cancer.
The other is a programme run by the HSE that uses hard-hitting media ads and an online and telephone support system to encourage smokers to quit for good.
And now, the Tobacco Free Research Institute (TFRI) at the Dublin Institute of Technology is using a controlled sample of 300 smokers as guinea pigs to test the success rates of Allen Carr’s Easyway smoking cessation programme versus the HSE’s Quit.ie initiative.
The 12-month Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT), which is free for participants and funded through the Department of Health’s Lottery Fund, is intended to show which programme – if not both – is the most likely to help smokers quit for good.
The Allen Carr method was founded by the British accountant-turned-anti-smoking crusader who devised his ‘Easyway’ method of smoking cessation after trying unsuccessfully for years to quit his 100-a-day habit.
When he finally did quit after 33 years of smoking at the age of 48, he established his now world-wide chain of clinics and self-help books promoting his concept, which kept him smoke-free until his death from lung cancer at the age 72 in 2006.
The Quit.ie programme was launched by the HSE in 2011, resulting in 600,000 “quit attempts” since then.
Along with online and telephone support – including the National Smoker’s Quit Line manned six days a week – it has run a number of hard-hitting media campaigns, including the stark message that “one in every two smokers will die of a tobacco-related disease.”
The campaigns also include a series of TV ads using the late Gerry Collins, the father-of-three from Greystones, Co Wicklow, who candidly spoke of how his addiction to cigarettes was literally killing him before he died of lung cancer due to smoking in January, 2014.
“Unusually, we have recruited publicly because we want to compare these two treatment modalities,” said TFRI founder and consultant respiratory physician Professor Luke Clancy. “The Allen Carr method is well known all over the world but the efficacy has never been established,” he told the Sunday Independent.
While the number of smokers in Ireland is at its lowest ever level, at approximately 20pc of the adult population, Prof Clancy, who was instrumental in bringing in the 2004 smoking ban, said Ireland still has a way to go if we are to achieve the health department’s goal of being virtually smoke-free, with just 5pc of the population smoking by 2025. “We worried that no matter what we do, we won’t reach this target,” he said. “So we’re looking to see can we improve things.”
Already hundreds of smokers have signed up to the free controlled trial that will take place over the next 12 months in Dublin. After completing an online survey, participants are selected based on various criteria, such as age and number of cigarettes smoked a day.
Those selected can bail out any time after being randomly selected to take part in either the Allen Carr group or Quit.ie group. They will be monitored at one, three, six and 12-month intervals after signing a consent form and being assessed by a nurse who monitors weight and carbon monoxide levels in exhaled breath.
Those who stick it out for the whole year will be rewarded with the chance to enter a draw for a trips to Paris and the Caribbean.

How Lycos almost won the search engine war

 
In 1998, a young developer named Jim Gilliam was hired at Lycos after he impressed management by finding bugs in their site. He took on the task of improving their search results to find a way to beat their biggest competitor, Yahoo.
It was exhilarating to be back in the game again, a 20-year-old college dropout with stock options, working at the center of the internet revolution. But I was overwhelmed. I’d only ever worked on a team with a half-dozen people, and Lycos was a huge company with hundreds of employees. All the developers seemed much smarter and more experienced than I was, and I was struggling to understand all the different proprietary technologies Lycos had created.
As I dug in, I realised that the scope of the problems was immense. I was paralysed. I didn’t know where to start. At the end of my first week I passed Lycos’s VP of development Dave Andre’s office on my way out for the night. No one else was around and he waved me in. He asked how everything was going, so I was honest and told him what I was feeling. With no hesitation, he dropped the most influential piece of advice I’ve ever received. He said, “Jim, you can code. You have all the power. Just go do it.” So I did.
Lycos was a search engine, and like all search engines at the time, it was trying to figure out how to make money. The key was to make our search engine into something that would appeal to advertisers. Like Excite and Yahoo, Lycos paid the browser, Netscape, to send traffic our way, and we were all trying to keep people on our sites longer, because the longer people were on our sites, the more ads they saw. Lycos’s CEO, Bob Davis, was a sales guy, and his strategy was to cut deals with new, venture-funded dot-coms and split the revenue on all the ads that we sold. We would increase our ad inventory, help the startups, and the Lycos logo would be all over the web.
I didn’t really care about all that. I cared about our search results, which seemed to be the one thing that no one was paying attention to. We were a search engine, but our results sucked, mainly because it took between six and nine months to refresh the search catalogue. This meant that even our partner sites didn’t show up in our search results, making the entire sales strategy pointless. If I could fix this, our search would be better and we’d actually sell more ads.

Climate change drove woolly mammoths to extinction, say scientists

Dramatic climate shifts made it difficult for large animals such as the woolly mammoth to survive, new research confirms.

    
The mighty megafauna of the last ice age, including the wooly mammoths, short-faced bears and cave lions, largely went extinct because of rapid climate-warming events, a new study finds.
During the unstable climate of the Late Pleistocene, about 60,000 to 12,000 years ago, abrupt climate spikes, called interstadials, increased temperatures between 7 and 29 degrees Fahrenheit (4 and 16 degrees Celsius) in a matter of decades. Large animals likely found it difficult to survive in these hot conditions, possibly because of the effects it had on their habitats and prey, the researchers said.
Interstadials “are known to have caused dramatic shifts in global rainfall and vegetation patterns,” the study’s first author Alan Cooper, director for the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide in Australia, said in a statement emailed to Live Science.
Temperature drops during the Late Pleistocene showed no association with animal extinctions, Cooper said. Instead, only the hot interstadial periods were associated with the large die-offs that hit populations (local events) and entire species of animals (global events), he said.
Ancient humans also played a role in the megafaunal extinction, albeit a smaller one, he said. By disrupting the animals’ environments, human societies and hunting parties likely made it harder for megafauna to migrate to new areas and to refill areas once populated by animals that had gone extinct, he said.
Extinction analysis
The study is the latest in a long string of research examining what caused megafauna, or animals weighing more than 99 pounds (45 kilograms), to die off during the Late Pleistocene.
George Cuvier, the French paleontologist who first recognized the mammoth and the giant ground sloth, started the speculation in 1796 when he suggested that giant biblical floods were to blame for the animals’ demise. The extinctions also baffled Charles Darwin after he encountered megafaunal remains in South America.
Since then, various studies have placed the bulk of responsibility on ice age humans, temperature swings and aperfect storm of events.
However, advances in examining ancient DNA and ancient climate allowed Cooper and his colleagues to get to the bottom of the issue.
They examined DNA from dozens of megafaunal species that lived during the Late Pleistocene, combing through more than 50,000 years of DNA records for extinction events. The ancient DNA not only told them about global extinction events, but also local population turnovers, which occur when a group of animals dies and another population of animals moves in to replace them. [Wipe Out: History’s Most Mysterious Extinctions]
They then compared the data on mega-fauna extinction with detailed records of severe climate events, which they gathered from Greenland ice cores and the sedimentary record of the Cariaco Basin off Venezuela.
“By combining these two records, we can place the climate and radiocarbon dating data on the same timescale, thereby allowing us to precisely align the dated fossils against climate,” Cooper said. “The high-resolution view we gained through this approach clearly showed a strong relationship between warming events and megafaunal extinctions.”
The findings also show that extinction events were staggered over time and space, likely because the interstadial warming events had different effects on different regions, Cooper said.
Modern connections
Earth’s climate is much more stable today than it was during the Late Pleistocene, making the world’s current warming trends a “major concern,” the researchers said.
“In many ways, the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and resulting warming effects are expected to have a similar rate of change to the onset of past interstadials, heralding another major phase of large mammal extinctions,” Cooper said.
In addition, humans have disrupted the habitats and surrounding areas of many wild animals, making it challenging for species to migrate or shift ranges to places where they would be better adapted to deal with climate change, he said.
Other researchers called the new study an important one.
It shows “that the extinction and population turnover of many megafauna was associated with rapid warming periods, rather than the last glacial maximum [when the ice sheets reached their maximum during the last glacial period] or Younger Dryas [a sudden, cold spell that happened when the Earth was starting to warm] as has previously been suggested,” said Eline Lorenzen, an assistant professor of paleogenetics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
In fact, understanding how the past climate change affected extinction rates may help people be better prepared for future rapid global warming events, she said.
“This study is a bit of a wake-up call,” Lorenzen said. “Here we have empirical evidence — based on data from a lot of species — that rapid climate warming has profoundly impacted megafauna communities, negatively, during the past 50,000 years.
“It doesn’t bode well for the future survival of the world’s megafauna populations,” she said.