Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering

Good earthturn Wildclickers

Busy spring - great weather - nitrate for lawns, trees, and today, a trip to the paint store.

Have a great day all ~


http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

so how do i sign up as an a2k member ?
do i simply register myself on this website ?
there doesn't seem to be a ready link to a2k here .
hbg

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

The link to the Wildclickers is hidden inside the link Stradee has posted.

Alternatively, I can send you an invitation through my account which is a subsidiary of the A2K/WildClickers account (or I can set up the account for you tonight, and send you your team name and password). Danon's another one who is good at setting up extra accounts.

would appreciate it !
hbg

hbg, you are a real american -- I always think of Canada as an American Nation - I sometimes even refer to you guys as - CANADA? That's an American place...!!!! It almost seems to be a foreign nation!!!!!!!!!

Or, something to that effect...... Big Grin.....!!!!!!!!

Way to click guys - and - gals.

Home and clicking on a Friday night.

hbg an american? oh my

The Wildclickers have supported 2,931,341.0 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 222,362.8 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 300 friends have supported: (222,362.8)

American Prairie habitat supported: 68,868.9 square feet.
You have supported: (17,979.8)
Your 300 friends have supported: (50,889.1)

Rainforest habitat supported: 2,640,109.3 square feet.
You have supported: (189,321.9)
Your 300 friends have supported: (2,450,787.4)

(testing the invitation system by sending myself an invite)

Well, ehBeth, we are all North Americans.....!!!!!!

All the same to me.

Your's truely, just another North American.

Still creaking for trees all over the Earth.

Clicked.

Couple of interesting articles. The first is a first-person account of how climate change is changing the boundaries for diseases and pests.

There is a link between climate change and the global health crisis. In Africa and Asia, global warming is driving pathogens into new habitats and facilitating the outbreak of exotic and often deadly diseases.

LAGOS, Nigeria " I caught malaria twice here.

I cured it early both times, before it had time to gather strength. Nonetheless, it knocked me down.

Walking to the clinic for a blood sample during the second attack, I vomited on the road. That night, on a friend’s couch, my bones ran cold, my skin shivered, my shirt changed color with sweat. It was two days before I was ready to work again.

As temperatures increase, regions that once were free of disease-carrying mosquitoes will become suitable for the insects.

“We’re seeing changes in the range of mosquitoes and the diseases they carry,” said Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

“That’s going to be an issue increasingly in terms of latitude and on the margins, both in terms of extensions of the range and in terms of seasonality,” he said.

Mosquito larvae mature more rapidly when the water in which they grow is warm. Female mosquitoes digest blood faster and bite more frequently as the mercury rises.

The cycle begins when mosquitoes ingest malaria parasites " the parasites split into males and females, reproduce in the mosquito’s gut, and release snake-shaped sporozoites that migrate to its salivary gland, ready to be injected when the insect bites a new human. Malaria transmission begins when a mosquito feeds on an infected person.

A malaria mosquito will only live a few weeks.

The parasite’s survival depends on it reaching maturity while its host is still alive to bite.

The strain of malaria I caught is called Plasmodium falciparum. In temperatures of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, the parasite takes 26 days to complete its reproductive cycle. At 77 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s ready to reinfect after just 13 days.

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Climate change is also accelerating the spread of dengue, a primarily urban, tropical disease that causes fevers and aching. The disease has reemerged in Brazil and climbed up the American coast. In Mexico, the number of cases has risen 600 percent since 2001. Outbreaks have reached the formerly dengue-free state of Chihuahua, on the border with Texas.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that by 2080 an extra 2 billion people will live in areas that are hospitable for the virus.

Scientists studying the Ebola virus in Gabon say that outbreaks erupt after wet weather breaks a long, dry spell. In North America, the spread of the West Nile virus accelerated when warm temperatures and drought in 1999 favored the carrier mosquito and the disease within it.

That same year, a new virus emerged in Malaysia. Deforestation and drought-driven forest fires drove jungle bats to feed in orchards near where farmers kept their pigs. The animals fed on the bat droppings, picked up the Nipah virus, and passed it on to their keepers. One hundred and one people died, and nearly a million pigs were culled, but the virus still escaped to Indonesia, Australia, the Philippines and Bangladesh.

In August 2007, an epidemic swept through Castiglione di Cervia, a small village in northern Italy. More than 100 of the town’s 2,000 residents came down with high fever, rashes and crushing pain in their bones and joints. An unusually mild winter had allowed Asian tiger mosquitoes to start breeding early, and their population had soared.

When an Italian tourist returned from India with chikungunya, a relative of dengue, the insects provided the perfect vector. It was the first time the disease had broken out in Europe. “By the time we got back the name and surname of the virus, our outbreak was over,” Rafaella Angelini, director of the regional public health department in Ravenna, told The New York Times.

“When they told us it was chikungunya, it was not a problem for Ravenna anymore. But I thought: This is a big problem for Europe.” According to officials at the World Health Organization, the epidemic was the first European outbreak of a tropical disease caused by climate change.

“This is all part of a pattern of emergence of new diseases and of the resurgence and redistribution of old diseases,” Epstein said. “It’s occurring globally for many reasons: deforestation, changing habitats, chemical use that affects predators, our own use of antibiotics, and then climate.”

Disruptions in normal weather patterns favor opportunistic pests and parasites. Climate change has the potential to unsettle ecosystems and bring humans, animals, and pathogens together in new and unexpected ways. Since 1976, the World Health Organization has identified 39 previously unknown diseases, including Ebola, the New Mexican hantavirus, and Lyme disease" an eruption of pathogens on par with those that occurred during the invention of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution.

“As the climate becomes more unstable, it will have an increasing impact,” Epstein said.
“We’re going to see things shift.”

A proposal for using t he Arctic Circle in a different way. Worth thinking about.

March 28, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
An Arctic Circle of Friends
By SCOTT BORGERSON and CAITLYN ANTRIM

THE North Pole is under siege by global warming. The sea ice there has lost half its thickness in the past six years, and all signs point to further rapid melting. By 2013, the entire Arctic could be devoid of ice in summer, and the region is likely to experience an influx of shipping, fishing and tourism. Russia planted its flag in the North Pole’s ocean floor two years ago, and other northern nations find themselves under mounting pressure to lay claim to huge swaths of the seabed. Before the land grab goes too far, the nations most involved should turn the northernmost part of the Arctic into a great park " a marine preserve that protects the polar environment and serves as a center for peaceful, international scientific research.

The Arctic’s pristine waters are a leading indicator, and an important regulator, of global climate health. They are the beginning and the end of the so-called great ocean conveyor, the mighty current that connects all the world’s oceans. And they are home to a vibrant ecosystem that supports whales, polar bears and terns.

Driving much of the new interest in the Arctic, however, are the stores of oil and gas that lie beneath the water " amounting to an estimated 22 percent of the earth’s remaining supplies. The largest deposits, however, are likely to be found in the shallower parts of the continental shelf, within the surrounding countries’ existing economic zones. Any fields found at greater depths, within the boundaries of the proposed park, would be prohibitively expensive to exploit for at least decades to come. For sovereignty claims, North Pole oil is a red herring.

The Convention on the Law of the Sea, the international treaty that sets the rules for ownership of ocean resources, recognizes that Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia, the four countries neighboring the Arctic Ocean, may be entitled to extend their seabed boundaries " and even sets a deadline for doing so. (Because the United States has not joined the Convention, it cannot make a claim to the extended continental shelf.) But it leaves it to those countries to resolve overlapping claims among themselves. Disputes over jurisdiction stand to slow the process of setting up a system for protecting the Arctic and could also poison international relations elsewhere. The creation of an international park would head off both problems.

One approach would be for the states and international organizations most involved in the Arctic to designate everything above 88 degrees latitude north " a circle with a 120-nautical-mile radius " as a marine park. This would be consistent with an idea presented in 1987 by Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union to create an Arctic “zone of peace.” And it has precedent in the 1959 treaty that created an international zone for scientific research in Antarctica, and that has governed that continent so well ever since.

Like Antarctica, the park could be managed by an international cooperative, including not only Canada, Denmark and Russia but also the United States, China, Finland, Germany, Japan, Norway, Sweden and any other countries that engage in Arctic research.

Canada, Denmark and Russia would benefit from such an initiative because each would avoid the kind of legal conflict and jurisdictional uncertainty that could discourage private investment in the surrounding areas. And the sovereignty extensions that have already been approved by the Continental Shelf Commission, a body established by parties to the Convention on the Law of the Sea, could be put into effect without delay. All three countries could also use the new scientific research to help them better manage their Arctic resources. And the park would not interfere with any nation’s freedom of navigation.

It might seem presumptuous for Americans to suggest that our northern neighbors forgo ownership of even a small part of the Arctic seabed. Admiral Robert Peary may have planted the American flag at the North Pole 100 years ago, but we have no territorial stake in the Lomonosov Ridge, the submarine link between Eurasia and North America that is the source of the competing claims. We do, however, have a vested interest in the peaceful development of the Arctic as a region. As citizens of a shared earth, we also have a stake in the greater good that can come from exploring the depths of the fastest warming part of the planet. American leadership on a polar park would send a clear message that we are attuned to the climate crisis.

Scott Borgerson is the visiting fellow for ocean governance at the Council on Foreign Relations. Caitlyn Antrim is the executive director of the Rule of Law Committee for the Oceans.

Interesting, sue. Thanks



http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

March 29, 2009

Taking Logging Into 21st Century

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

LOWELL, Ore. " Booming timber towns with three-shift lumber mills are a distant memory in the densely forested Northwest. Now, with the housing market and the economy in crisis, some rural areas have never been more raw. Mills keep closing. People keep leaving. Unemployment in some counties is near 20 percent.

Yet in parts of the region, the decline is being met by an unlikely optimism. Some people who have long fought to clear-cut the region’s verdant slopes are trying to reposition themselves for a more environmentally friendly economy, motivated by changing political interests, the federal stimulus package and sheer desperation.

Some mills that once sought the oldest, tallest evergreens are now producing alternative energy from wood byproducts like bark or brush. Unemployed loggers are looking for work thinning federal forests, a task for which the stimulus package devotes $500 million; the goal is to make forests more resistant to wildfires and disease. Some local officials are betting there is revenue in a forest resource that few appreciated before: the ability of trees to absorb carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that can contribute to global warming.

Pragmatism drives the shifting thinking, but a critical question remains: can people really make a long-term living off the forest without cutting it down?

“I run into people all the time who think we’re lying and trying to go back to old logging ways,” said Jim Walls, director of the Lake County Resources Initiative in southeastern Oregon, a nonprofit agency that is trying to create jobs for rural residents in fields like biomass energy production and wildfire prevention. “It’s just not true.”

One new believer is Harold Jones. Hear him repent and reposition in the new economy.

“The only money I’ve ever made is cutting down trees,” Mr. Jones, 75, said just after coming in from thinning the stand of Douglas firs he has planted on 125 acres he owns here in Lowell. “So what I’ve tried to do in my retirement is to try to bring back and repay the Earth for a lot of the devastation I’ve caused it.”

Mr. Jones started logging in 1948 and has long rolled his eyes at “countercultural types” who protest timber sales. Yet in front of his property now are signs saying “Certified Family Forest.”

The certification process, supervised by the American Tree Farm System, requires Mr. Jones to manage and replant his land under the supervision of a professional forester. It is intended in part to give small tree farmers some credibility within the sustainable forestry movement, which promotes forest health, and to help them market their product as “green lumber.”

“It’s quite a process,” he said.

Restrictions on logging have prompted entrepreneurial thinking about the forest for years, but efforts have increased as states like Oregon and Washington have emphasized renewable energy and jobs that support it. In turn, the plummeting housing market has forced some timber companies to try to diversify " and even collaborate with environmentalists to protect forests from wildfires, disease and development.

“There’s been recognition in the last several years that we need the industry to carry out the restoration work we want accomplished,” said Jonathan Oppenheimer, a senior conservation associate for the Idaho Conservation League, which is negotiating with loggers and others with the goal of getting Congress to preserve parts of the Clearwater National Forest as wilderness.

For loggers and other rural workers, survival in the future might mean abandoning fights to cut older trees in exchange for being able to salvage smaller timber from burned forests. It might mean removing or rebuilding roads and structures on federal land, whether to reduce erosion or to improve recreational access. For the Forest Service, the stimulus money for thinning reflects an increasing emphasis on preventing wildfires, rather than simply fighting them, by removing smaller trees and brush from overgrown forests.

The work may be less profitable for big timber companies than clear-cutting a hillside, but it can create jobs in places accustomed to losing them.

In Lane County, Ore., on the wet west side of the Cascade Range, the county commission is looking for revenue to replace dwindling federal payments set up a decade ago to help governments in timber regions. Lane County received about $47 million this year, but the subsidies are declining and are scheduled to expire in 2012.

Now Lane County commissioners are asking the Legislature to draft a resolution urging Congress to pay counties that have large amounts of federal forest land for the carbon that their forests trap. Such a plan would depend on Congress’s developing a system for buying and selling so-called carbon offsets.

Not everyone likes the idea. Some loggers say it would be the final blow to their efforts to restore more logging on federal land. Jobs that have disappeared, they say, will never return.

“It puts us at risk,” said Robbie Robinson, president of Starfire Lumber in Cottage Grove, about 20 miles south of Eugene. Pyramids of Douglas fir rested outside his office window, no buyers to be found. “What I sense is another whole business being built, and the real problem is being able to harvest old trees.”

Forest economists say government spending, beginning with the stimulus package but also extending to any program to buy and sell carbon offsets, will be necessary to build a new economy in the rural Northwest.

Some supporters of sustainable forestry are concerned that, despite assurances by the Forest Service, the stimulus package will create only short-term jobs in the woods and miss the chance to invest in a complete “waste chain,” in which small timber and brush from thinning projects are put to use for lumber, biomass fuel and other purposes, potentially strengthening rural economies on many levels.

“We’re doing a lot of things here that nationally we say we want to do " biomass, fuels reduction, forest health, green jobs " we’re doing all of it now,” said Josh Anderson, the timber resource manager for Vaagen Brothers Lumber in Colville, Wash., which has worked with environmental groups to preserve wilderness land but has had to lay off about half of its 200 employees in recent months.

“We want to be here to be able to do that when things improve,” Mr. Anderson said. “We need to see something that moves a long-term trend toward work on these projects. It’s got to be pretty integrated.”

Mr. Walls, of the Lake County Resources Initiative, said a planned biomass energy plant in Lakeview, near the Nevada-California border, would generate 150 construction jobs, 50 to 75 permanent jobs in the forest and 15 at the plant. The plant would generate 13 megawatts of electricity, enough to power every home in the town of 2,300 and to contribute to the broader power grid.

But for the plant to operate, Mr. Walls said, it would need a steady flow of fuel, in the form of wood byproducts, from federal forest thinning and wildfire prevention, a pipeline that may or may not become permanent. The plant is seeking about $5 million in grant money under the stimulus package.

Mr. Walls said he was told by the Forest Service’s regional office in Portland that the project was a top prospect and that a decision was expected any day. He said its chances might have improved this month when Oregon’s governor, Theodore R. Kulongoski, appointed him to a committee to help oversee stimulus spending.

Even if the Lakeview project and others like it do fall into place, Mr. Walls said, many other struggling timber towns still will need the demand for lumber to rebound. “In the end,” he said, “the housing market does have to turn back.”

Big Blobs Change View of Evolution

Sarah Hoffman
Natural History Magazine


On a submersible dive off the Bahamas, Mikhail V. Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and several colleagues were seeking big-eyed, glowing animals adapted to darkness.

Yet as they cruised above the seafloor, the team was distracted by hundreds of bizarre, sediment-coated balls the size of grapes. Each sat at the end of a sinuous track in the seafloor ooze. Indeed, the balls appeared to have made the tracks; some even seemed to have rolled upslope.

The team collected specimens and identified the creatures as giant protozoans, Gromia sphaerica, each one a single large cell with an organic shell, or "test." When cleaned of sediment, the test feels like grape skin, but squishier, Matz says.

Surprisingly, the tracks on the Bahamian seafloor resemble grooves found in sedimentary rocks formed as long as 1.8 billion years ago. The ancient grooves, bisected by a low ridge, had constituted the only evidence that multicellular, bilaterally symmetrical animals, such as worms, might have evolved so early in Earth's history.

Matz's discovery [of modern tracks apparently left by G. sphaerica] suggests that protozoans could have made those fossil traces rather than more advanced animals, which probably appeared much later. The next earliest evidence of multicellularity and bilateralism in animals occurs in fossils 580 million and 542 million years old, respectively.

G. sphaerica are rhizopods, an ancient protozoan group. Matz is planning further studies of the species, about which little is known.

The findings were detailed in the journal Current Biology in November.

New approach for US in global climate change talks

By DINA CAPPIELLO, Associated Press Writer
Dina Cappiello, Associated Press Writer 1 hr 7 mins ago

WASHINGTON " At its first negotiations on climate change, the Obama administration is trying to convince other countries that the U.S. does care about global warming and wants to shape an international accord.

After eight years on the sidelines, the U.S. says it is ready for a central role in developing a new agreement to slash greenhouse gases. But whether the U.S, which is the second largest source of heat-trapping pollution, is ready to sign onto a deal by year's end could depend on Congress.

In a rare move, State Department climate envoy Todd Stern joined the rest of the U.S. delegation in Bonn, Germany, for the first of a series of largely technical meetings that begin Sunday. The talks are hoped to lay the groundwork for an agreement to be signed in December in Denmark.

Stern, in a telephone interview Thursday with The Associated Press from London, said it was important for him to attend and "make the first statement on behalf of the United States and say we're back, we're serious, we're here, we're committed and we're going to try to get this thing done."

He added, "We want to convey that we mean it."

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is hosting the Bonn talks, said participants "will be very excited" to hear Stern outline the basic principles that will guide the U.S.

Other countries are expecting a new tone after eight years during which the Bush administration made clear its disdain for any climate discussions aimed at securing a commitment to mandatory greenhouse gas reductions.

This time the U.S. delegation represents the views of a White House committed to mandatory action on climate change. And unlike 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was drafted, there is now a Democratic-controlled Congress moving to embrace mandatory limits on greenhouse gases.

Back then, the United States lacked support for mandatory actions to achieve the reductions the U.S. had signed on to. Congress never ratified that accord and the Bush administration later rejected it outright, citing the lack of participation from developing countries.

That lack of involvement and the cost of emission cuts, in form of higher energy bills, have dominated the U.S. debate over Kyoto for years. Those issues have not have not disappeared.

But President Barack Obama has acted to reduce U.S. greenhouse gases and wants Congress to pass a cap-and-trade program that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by mid-century.

"The president has embarked on a strong domestic program already and there is much more coming," Stern said at a briefing Friday in Berlin.

On Saturday, the White House announced it was convening a Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate in Washington in late April to help achieve a successful outcome in Copenhagen and develop joint ventures to increase the global supply of clean energy. With only six weeks of U.N. talks scheduled before the Denmark meeting, the forum will give leaders of the 16 major economies and the U.S. more time to negotiate a deal.

The final meeting of the forum will be held in La Maddalena, Italy, in July 2009.

Stern said the U.S. position on an international agreement will be framed by what happens in Congress. The reductions expected to be required by Congress will be the basis for what the U.S. can commit to reducing, he said.

But Congress already is trying to address the recession, health care and other priorities. "This will be a big, big fight to get the domestic piece done," Stern conceded.

Many European countries want the U.S. to adopt stronger short-term targets, equal to a 25 percent to 40 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2020. Obama has called for reaching 1990 levels by then, a roughly 15 percent cut.

Stern has warned European leaders that their demands will lead to stalemate.

In Germany, the U.S. team is expected to spend most of its time listening and forming relationships rather than discussing concrete proposals.

That "is unfortunate given the intense timetable between now and Copenhagen, but understandable," said Jennifer Havercamp, who leads Environmental Defense Fund's international climate negotiations team. "It will not achieve a lot of substantive progress in the negotiations because the Obama team is so new."

___

Interesting stuff, sumac.

~~~

Getting ready to turn the lights off for EarthHour.

~~~

The WildClickers have supported 2,931,378.0 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 222,392.4 square feet.

American Prairie habitat supported: 68,868.9 square feet.

Rainforest habitat supported: 2,640,116.7 square feet.

~~~

http://www.google.com/intl/en/earthhour/2009/

Yep, it's lights off time.

sumac, interesting stuff.....

Good job, WildClickers!

Luv Spring, do not love allergies. ahchooo

Have a sniffle free day all ~



http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

officialy signed up now ! (being sponsored by the gators in huntington beach state park , s.c. )
hbg

The WildClickers have supported 2,931,466.9 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 222,422.0 square feet.

American Prairie habitat supported: 68,868.9 square feet.

Rainforest habitat supported: 2,640,176.0 square feet.

hbg, good pic. I've seen gators in Florida - in fact there is a most popular and interesting swamp there next to Georgia and a tourist trap where they wrestle gators to please the payers. It's all really close to St. Augustine, FL. The first town occupied by Europeans in the USA.

Of course, there were Native Americans here thousands of years prior to that. In fact, as you probably know - when the so called pilgrams landed on Plymouth Rock - it was not only to make more beer - but, the first Native American they met spoke the English language better than the pilgrams did.

Same thing happened in Florida - when the Spanish landed they were greeted by the Native Americans in Spanish.

So much for the history books we had when we were young and in school.

Very interesting.