ul, appears the critters vanished! Hurray!
The Fall seasons just beginning - springlike weather - hot days, and warm gentle breezes during afternoon hours. Soon, vibrant colors of green, red, orange, gold, and purple gracing the landscape.
Yep - Paradise.
aktbird57 - You and your 300 friends have supported 2,801,673.6 square feet!
~~~
ahhhhh, cool nights for sleeping, gotta love those
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1 64.316 acres
Cool nights? Where, when?
sumac, here in Texas - go figure!!!
You guy's are having a hot time of it -
Clicked - for all of us.
20% daily chance of something happening, somewhere near all week long. Those are at least odds. We haven't even had that recently. Clicked.
clicked!
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aktbird57 - You and your 300 friends have supported 2,802,001.4 square feet!
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1 64.324 acres
I've clicked - - -
One - or, two more Rain Forest Trees saved.....
Happy Hunting Gang.... :wink:
dagmaraka wrote:clicked. twice.
Dagmaraka, We want a daily commitment from you or at least a halfassed one. Don't you know this is the coolest thread on A2K!!!!
WERE MAKING CHANGES HERE LADY!
were saving trees. You belong here with us.
What'll it take? You name it.
come up with some interesting offers. i'll consider them.
i'll try, cross my heart and hope to die (or as we slovaks use to say in the old days: honest pioneer pledge)
Morning all. And Amigo, do you think that posting "clicked" is good enough? We want more from you too.
Will go click now.
I have clicked - and, MA has clicked.......
Whatta day!
Dang the new seasons just beginning - and the weathers awsome!
Gonna click then to the porch.
clicked around the block
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aktbird57 - You and your 300 friends have supported 2,802,516.5 square feet!
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Saw my first red tree of the season today. Gotta get the camera out over the weekend.
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1 64.334 acres
Gotta get a camera that works here. At about 7 am yesterday morning, while watering outside (shh, don't tell anyone), flock of geese flew over in V-formation. Touch of fall in the air here too, and gasp, weaterman "guaranteed" rain for tomorrow. Somewhere around here.
Clicked.
"
September 13, 2007
Hopes Dim for Measures to Conserve Energy
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 ?- The prospect of a comprehensive energy package's emerging from Congress this fall is rapidly receding, held up by technical hurdles and policy disputes between the House and the Senate and within the parties.
This summer, both houses passed major bills meant to promote energy efficiency and wean industry from fossil fuels. The bills have gaping differences that are supposed to be resolved in a conference committee.
Democratic leaders in both chambers have signaled that conference committee members are unlikely to be named until late October, at the earliest. Others suggested that leaders may try to resolve the differences in the bills without convening a conference, which would create other problems, including the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
Although Democratic leaders proclaimed energy a top legislative priority last January, the issue competes with Iraq, appropriations, financial market turmoil and product safety for room on Congress's fall calendar.
The Senate passed its energy bill on June 21; the House passed its on Aug. 4. The most significant provisions include increasing automobile fuel-efficiency standards to a fleet average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, compared to 27.5 m.p.g. today.
The standard for light trucks is 20.7 m.p.g.
Another section would require utilities to generate 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
The mileage standard appears just in the Senate bill, having been squelched in the House by the opposition of Representative John D. Dingell, the powerful Democrat from Michigan. The mandate for renewable power is just in the House bill, having failed in the Senate.
Ordinarily, House and Senate leaders appoint conferees to reconcile bills. But because the Senate and House passed entirely different bills, not simply different versions, one or both chambers will have to pass the other's bill before it can be "conferenced."
An aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi said staff members were working to fashion a Senate bill to match the House version.
Senator Richard J. Durban of Illinois, the chamber's No. 2 Democrat, said Republicans were threatening to block the appointment of conferees or to amend the bill to eliminate provisions they did not like, including billions of dollars in new taxes on the oil industry.
President Bush has threatened to veto the House bill, which he says does not have enough incentives for domestic energy production, and the Senate bill because it has penalties for price gouging by the oil industry.
"It's not a pretty picture," said Frank Maisano, an energy lobbyist. "That's not to say that in time they won't be able to craft a compromise. But they're clearly not in any hurry."
As Congress moves at its own pace, at least 300 bills have been filed in 40 states this year on energy efficiency, emissions of heat-trapping gases or climate change, the National Conference of State Legislatures says.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia have adopted renewable energy requirements for utilities. California is leading 12 states trying to impose tailpipe emissions standards that will force manufacturers to produce more fuel-efficient cars.
On Wednesday, the National Governors Association announced a clean-energy initiative to speed passage of state measures to increase conservation and biofuel production and to reduce heat-trapping gases.
"This is the defining issue of our time," said Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, a Republican, "and there is great interest and momentum percolating in the states. While we have our problems and our conflicts, we're relatively less polarized than Congress and thus can be more nimble."
188 More Species Listed as Near Extinction
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 13, 2007; A10
Habitat loss, climate change and infectious diseases are pushing a growing number of species toward extinction, according to a report yesterday by the World Conservation Union.
The organization's 2007 "Red List," the most sweeping annual scientific assessment of the world's animals and plants, now lists 16,306 species as threatened with extinction, up from 16,118 last year. The addition of nearly 200 imperiled species to the list reflects the reality that the more scientists learn about the status of the world's millions of species, the more they find that appear to be in trouble, experts said.
"We expect the situation across taxonomic groups to be, quite honest, quite bleak. One needs to know how bleak," Jane Smart, who heads the group's species program, said in an interview. "If we received a lot more money, we would have a lot more species on the Red List."
The organization, which is based in Switzerland and is formally known as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), enlists several thousand scientists to evaluate the state of animals and plants as varied as the imperiled Yangtze River dolphin and Central Asia's wild apricot. After subjecting the assessments to a peer-review process, the group decides whether a species deserves to be listed as vulnerable to extinction, endangered, critically endangered -- or extinct.
Conservation advocates said the new report had a few bright spots, such as North American reptiles doing relatively well. But in a news conference in Washington yesterday, they painted a largely grim picture of how factors such as armed conflict and warming seas are shrinking the planet's natural heritage.
"Let's not kid ourselves, when it comes to biodiversity worldwide, the news generally is not good," said Michael Hoffman, a program officer in IUCN's biodiversity assessment unit.
Great apes are under increasing pressure from both hunting and disease, the report said, their numbers decimated by the bush-meat trade and by the Ebola virus. The Western gorilla population has declined more than 60 percent over the past 25 years and is now considered critically endangered; during the past 15 years, roughly one-third of gorillas that died in protected areas fell prey to the lethal virus.
Between 2003 and 2005, 55 percent of the Western gorillas in the Congo Republic's Odzala National Park died of the virus.
Russell Mittermeier, who chairs IUCN's primate specialist group, noted that protected areas are not always effective -- rebels have slaughtered gorillas in a preserve that straddles the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda -- but he defended wildlife preserves as essential.
"The world's endangered species are simply not going to survive without protected areas," said Mittermeier, who is also president of Conservation International.
Even in remote places, plants and animals are suffering from the onslaught of broader environmental forces such as climate change. Having completed its first comprehensive survey of Galapagos corals since the Red List started in the 1960s, IUCN experts identified a third of the native species as at risk of extinction. This year is the first time corals have been listed.
The group is surveying another 750 reef-building coral species in the Caribbean, the Indo-Pacific, the eastern tropical Pacific and southern Brazil, said Suzanne Livingstone, IUCN's global marine species assessment officer, who added that roughly a third of them might make it onto next year's list.
"There's probably going to be a similar trend over all corals, and that's largely because of climate change," she said.
Warming May Be Hurting Gray Whales' Recovery
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 11, 2007; A12
As many as 118,000 gray whales roamed the Pacific before humans decimated the population through hunting, and human-induced climate change may now be depriving those that remain of the food they need, according to a study released yesterday.
The research, based on a detailed analysis of DNA taken from gray whales living in the eastern Pacific, highlights how human behavior has transformed the oceans, the scientists said.
Today there are only about 22,000 Pacific gray whales, including about 100 in the western Pacific. By examining the genetic variability of the current population, scientists at Stanford University and the University of Washington at Seattle calculated that there were between 76,000 and 118,000 gray whales in the Pacific before commercial whaling in the 1800s shrank their numbers.
Federal officials took eastern Pacific gray whales off the endangered species list in the mid-1990s, but a rise in sea temperatures appears to have limited the whales' available food. A recent spike in deaths among gray whales may suggest "this decline was due to shifting climatic conditions on Arctic feeding grounds," the researchers wrote in the paper, being published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"There definitely are large-scale ecosystem effects going on," said Stanford doctoral student S. Elizabeth Alter, the lead author, in an interview yesterday.
"One of the most exciting things" about DNA analysis, she said, is that it gives us "the opportunity to look back in time and see what the ocean looked like before human impact."
The decline in gray whales has affected the ocean in a variety of ways, according to the researchers. Because the animals feed on the ocean bottom by sucking in and expelling sediment that contains shrimplike creatures called amphipods, the scientists wrote, historic populations may have redistributed enough sediment to feed a million seabirds.
Aboriginal tribes are currently allowed to kill as many as 125 eastern Pacific gray whales a year under International Whaling Commission rules, though this practice has sparked controversy. In light of the new data suggesting that the whales' numbers were more depleted than was previously known, international officials need to reconsider the amount of gray whale hunting they currently allow, the researchers said.
On Saturday, five members of Washington's Makah tribe shot and killed a gray whale without the required permit. Coast Guard officials caught the men and turned them over to tribal police. On Sunday, tribal council leaders issued a statement denouncing the men's actions and vowed to prosecute them.
Stephen R. Palumbi, a professor of marine sciences at Stanford and a co-author of the study, said the research suggests that given the right conditions, the number of gray whales could increase in the years to come. But a warmer Bering Sea could impede this recovery, he said, because it is killing off some of the food the whales consume.
When emaciated gray whales washed ashore between 1999 and 2001, scientists initially speculated that the animals were exhausting the ocean's "carrying capacity," Palumbi added, but it could be instead that global warming is to blame.
"It's not a conclusion we can come to. It's a hint," he said in an interview. But if humans are affecting the ocean's "capacity to support life, it's got to make you worry, it's got to make your wonder."
