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

Clocks? What's that? Ooooh, it's the thing that tells me when it's time to watch a certain program on TV.................. Aaaaaaah, the retired life.

sumac, that pipeline your article mentioned came across the LA/TX state line and within a quarter mile of our home here in NE TX. Wow, what an expensive way to do business. That is quite a project. Oh, by the way, also, the land above the oilfields in W TX is filling daily with earthquakes localized where the oil is being pumped out of the ground. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out if you make a large hole underground it will cave in some day. And, it's happening as I type this.

All clicked for all - my group and ehBeth.

Not any more are you retired...

Just hired you at Cafe World

Wow! That sounds like a cure! Had a great Halloween, served almost 200 kids, all cute and goofy looking! Love it and I'm all clicked today, too!

That was a great link into why I get up so many times during the night. Will have to speak to my doctor now. Thanks!

Evening All

rain rain rain rain rain... then it stopped for an hour.... now it's bucketing again!!!! BUCKETING!

all clicked....

hugs y'all x

Happpy late Halloween Teeny and all the Wildclickers!

Very quiet evening here so I watched "Sleepy Hollow" with the herd.

Glad you all had a safe and fun evening.

The article makes sense. Seasonal changes affect all of wildlife and natural habitat. Allergies are here again after the wind storm last week - tossing dust.
(ahchoo)

Now, weathers warm and Springlike, and no wind. hurrah!

Next week though - who knows.

Hi ya iz! Well geeze. Recoup plus rain. Hang in there!

Dan, please tell Beth we miss her smiling face.

Thanks for the clicks danon.

I can take over for the week - hopefully my puter will be home again by next weekend. Very weird without regular access to check up on people, places and things.

Big hugs to all of the Hallowe'ening WildClickers!

Click clock.
Hello meanderings.

Just did 10 clicks for Kids through Global Warming. The Rain Forest is always my 1st click, though. I get a butterfly every day for doing it and so happy to resume clicking on a daily basis.

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

Matalin claims the Earth is cooling


Skeptics of climate change often say the world has been cooling in the past decade.

Conservative pundit Mary Matalin made that claim on CNN's Situation Room on Oct. 22, 2009. Matalin warned that the Obama administration is pushing too many big legislative initiatives such as a cap-and-trade plan to slow global warming when the administration should be focusing on the deficit.

"If they care about reducing the deficit, which should be their No. 1 priority ... they're not going to be able to do this " all this other nonsense, cap and trade and all the rest of it. Too much, too fast," Matalin said. "Climate change is a fake issue anyway. ... There is not consensus science on what is causing global climate change. There is climate change, but for the last decade the climate has been cooling. There is the science. There is the data on that. They want to do this because they like to have all these programs being controlled by the government."

So, Matalin acknowledges that the Earth's temperature is changing, but she's not so sure that those changes are man-made. We'll save the debate over whether climate change is caused by human activity for another day. For now, we're going to check Matalin's claim that the Earth has been cooling in recent years.

Last spring, we checked a similar claim made by the Cato Institute, a free-market think tank. The group claimed that there has been no net global warming for over a decade; we found that False because the climate scientists we spoke with said that, while temperatures have remained relatively static over the last decade, very little can be learned about climate change in a 10-year window.

Matalin's office sent us a few articles pertaining to the issue, two about a new book by Christopher Booker, a British author and climate change skeptic, who wrote in the Oct. 25 issue of the British newspaper the Telegraph that, "as the world has already been through two of its coldest winters for decades, with all the signs that we may now be entering a third, the scientific case for (carbon dioxide) threatening the world with warming has been crumbling away on an astonishing scale."

Another study, published by Bob Carter, a professor of geology at Australia's James Cook University, in the Jan. 20 issue of the Australian newspaper argued that "global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002."

Carter is correct that global temperatures hit a high point in 1998. Several entities " including NASA, the Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States " track temperature changes. Generally speaking, their records show that 1998, a year when a warming pattern called El Nino ruled the weather, is the hottest we've had since scientists started collecting temperature information in the mid 1800s. NASA, on the other hand, pins 2005 as the hottest year on record.

But no matter how you slice the data, temperatures have indisputably fluctuated in the last decade, contrary to Matalin's suggestion that they have cooled. This graph from NASA shows that the temperature increased slightly between 2000 and 2001, dropped in 2002, and rose once again the following year. In this case, the annual mean temperature goes up and down, and the five-year mean is on a steady rise. This graph from NOAA shows a similar trend, with temperatures dipping slightly at the beginning of the decade and peaking once again in 2005.

We asked Richard Heim, a meteorologist at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center Climate Monitoring Branch, what to make of all these ups and downs.

At the most, it shows a plateau, he said. But certainly not a cooling trend.

"With climate change, not every year is going to be warmer," Heim said. "It's two steps up, two steps down " that's not a indication we're on a massive cooling trend."

NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt recently told the Associated Press the same thing:

"The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record," he said. "Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming."

If 1998 is the starting point, a year many climate skeptics tend to cite, everything looks cooler in comparison, said Raymond Bradley, a climate scientist at the University of Massachusetts. He also pointed out that, when evaluating the impact of climate change on temperature, it's misleading to look at only the last 10 years.

A decade is such a small period of time that "it's like saying, 'It was cold here last week. What happened to climate change?'" Bradley said.

It's a point we heard repeatedly from the climate experts we interviewed. They all agreed that, while climate temperatures may dip from year to year, it's shortsighted to say changes within a decade mean that climate change is going away.

"If you just take a one-year comparison " say that it's cooler in 2008 than it was in 2007 " that's an improper use of statistics" to make judgments about climate change, said John Reilly, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It still remains much warmer than it was in the 1960s. To the extent that there has been some slight cooling, we still remain half-a-degree above what it was then."

Indeed, climate records show that temperatures have been on the rise since the middle of the century, and that fluctuations between recent years are relatively small compared to overall increase. NASA estimates that global temperatures have risen a total of 2.3 degrees since 1895, and that 13 of the warmest years since 1850 have occurred in the last 14 years.

Jim Hurrell, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., says these natural temperature variations are expected.

"In the same way that El Nino made 1998 warm, in 2007 and 2008, La Nina made global temperatures a bit cooler than they have been running, but still much warmer than the long-term average," Hurrell said referring to El Nino's cooler counterpart.

Citing just the last 10 years "is a classic case of taking the data and letting it tell a very misleading story," he said.

Matalin said, "for the last decade the climate has been cooling." That suggests there has been a distinct reversal of the steady warming that scientists have documented for many years. But a review of the data shows that's not the case. The numbers show that in the past 10 years, global temperatures have not continued their sharp increase. But they have not cooled either. In fact, some years in the last decade have been hotter than the previous years. At most, they could be described as hitting a plateau. But they haven't cooled as Matalin said. We find her claim False.

All clicked.

Climate bill faces hurdles in Senate
DEMOCRATS DEEPLY SPLIT
Deal on nuclear plants offered to court Republicans

By Juliet Eilperin
Monday, November 2, 2009

The climate-change bill that has been moving slowly through the Senate will face a stark political reality when it emerges for committee debate on Tuesday: With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.

Like the measure adopted by the House, the legislation favors a cap-and-trade system that would issue permits for greenhouse gas emissions, gradually lower the amount of emissions allowed, and let companies buy and sell permits to meet their needs -- all without adding to the federal deficit, according to projections. But key Republicans are making their opposition clear, even as Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) has enlisted Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) as his most visible GOP ally in gathering support for the bill.

Sen. George V. Voinovich (Ohio), a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee who was initially seen as one of the few Republicans who might consider backing the majority, is helping lead the opposition.

"Why are we trying to jam down this legislation now?" he asked during a hearing last week. "Wouldn't it be smarter to take our time and do it right?"

He wrote Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson twice this summer to ask for a more detailed economic analysis of the House-passed climate legislation, and he has joined the other six Republicans on the committee in boycotting the climate bill's markup, scheduled for Tuesday.

The measure has deeply divided Democrats. With states in the Midwest, South and Rocky Mountain West dependent on fossil fuels for energy, many senators are worried about the legislation's impact on industry and consumers.

"I think at the end of the day, the people who turn the switch on at home will be disadvantaged," Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) told CNBC on Friday, explaining why he did not think the bill Kerry had sponsored along with Environment and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) could pass.

So Democratic leaders, with the support of the Obama administration, are trying to sway at least half a dozen Republicans by offering amendments to speed along their top priority: building nuclear power plants.

Graham has suggested provisions on nuclear power and offshore oil drilling that could win his support for a cap-and-trade climate bill. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) has established a bipartisan working group of 17 Senate offices that is close to producing a detailed amendment aimed at hurrying the construction of U.S. nuclear reactors.

But it remains unclear whether that approach will hold currency in the current era of political polarization. One of the top Republicans whom Democrats hope to recruit in this effort -- Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), whom Graham and Kerry recently buttonholed on the Senate floor -- has voiced skepticism about the legislation.

"A tepid nuclear title isn't enough to get her to support a bad climate bill," said Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Murkowski.

Graham and Kerry are set to meet Wednesday with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, as well as with Obama's top climate adviser, Carol M. Browner, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to discuss a possible compromise. They are also setting up meetings with colleagues on the issue.

"There is nowhere near 60 votes for a nuclear power bill on its own. There's not 60 votes for a cap-and-trade bill as it's currently constructed," Graham said in an interview. He said combining the two measures is "the only way you'll get to 60 votes."

It is what Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope calls "the old formula for bipartisanship."

"They would agree on a goal, they would not agree exactly on the means to a goal, and they'd come up with a legislative solution that takes elements from both sides," he said.

And Graham, for his part, has become a lightning rod for controversy back home. On Oct. 22, the American Energy Alliance, an advocacy group funded in part by energy companies, launched a radio, TV and online advertising campaign in South Carolina that has cost "close to $300,000" so far, according to the group's spokesman, Patrick Creighton.

Featuring a Halloween theme, the TV commercial warns of "some scary stories coming out of Washington" and says, "The latest is Senator Lindsey Graham's support for a national energy tax called cap-and-trade."

Creighton said the group questions why Graham says a deal will help offshore drilling, which Congress has already allowed.

Groups backing the climate bill came to Graham's defense last week. They aired radio and television ads that featured state Sen. John Courson, a conservative Republican who became concerned about global warming after witnessing the decline of polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba.

"Out-of-state interests are attacking our Senator Lindsey Graham," Courson says in an ad underwritten by Republicans for Environmental Protection, "because he's backing an energy plan that produces more power in America."

Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said he is optimistic that the parties can reach an accord because Americans are not divided along party lines on global warming. "Is there bipartisanship in the country? I think clearly there is," he said.

State lawmakers who came to advise the White House last week on climate saw a different picture. "We looked for any Republican, in any state legislature in the country, who supported a bill," recalled Minnesota state Rep. Jeremy Kalin. "We found not a one."

In dead Vineyard oaks, a warming warning

By Beth Daley, Globe Staff | November 2, 2009

WEST TISBURY - Ever since a vast tract of Martha’s Vineyard forest died two years ago, visitors who stumbled upon the graveyard of gray stalks have called it eerie, bizarre, and sad.

Now scientists are calling it something else: a possible climate change lesson.

The 500 acres of dead oak trees were the epicenter of an islandwide infestation of caterpillars that munched their way through millions of leaves for three consecutive springs ending in 2007. Then a severe summer drought hit the island, finishing off tens of thousands of the weakened trees.

“I have never seen anything like what has happened on Martha’s Vineyard in New England,’’ said David Foster, a Harvard University ecologist. “Usually you walk through forests and see some dead trees, but here, it’s hundreds of acres and almost all of the trees in it are dead.’’

Ordinarily, such catastrophic damage would be chalked up to bad luck. But Foster, who is also director of Harvard Forest, the university’s experimental forest in Petersham, and other researchers recently discovered a vast die-off of Cape Cod coastal oak trees 5,000 years ago during an abrupt warming period. They found evidence of the forest’s demise in sediment samples from under lakes and ponds, and they speculate that the ancient - and far smaller contemporary - episodes may have roots in the same type of one-two climate punch: more-active bugs coupled with an intense drought.

Scientists predict that in a warming world, insects will thrive, and droughts and other extreme weather will become commonplace. With the prospect of more numerous bugs feasting on weakened trees, Foster wonders whether the recent die-off is a harbinger of more catastrophic ones in the future. While the dead trees will certainly be replaced by new ones, what species repopulate forests has ramifications for everything from lichen to leaf-peepers.

“These trees control the foundation of an ecosystem,’’ said Foster, whose group has just been awarded $100,000 from the National Science Foundation to study the Vineyard forest. “What happens when they collapse? We are trying to understand how everything in that forest copes.’’

Nobody foresaw the death of the oaks. In the spring of 2004, an intense caterpillar infestation gripped the trees for two weeks, raining thousands of inch-long green-and-gray caterpillars on the heads of islanders and visitors.

Many thought the bugs were the despised European winter moth that shows up in horror-movie-like numbers off the island, but scientists were able to confirm that most of the bugs were a native fall cankerworm. Not that the news was much better: Cankerworm moth numbers were legendary that winter when they emerged as adults, splattering car windshields so thoroughly that drivers could hardly see.

“The first year, it was a shock’’ that the leaves were disappearing so quickly, said Tim Boland, executive director of the Polly Hill Arboretum in West Tisbury, as he picked his way last week over lichen-covered dead oak branches that littered a narrow Arboretum path.

“Then it was, ‘They came. They went. Let’s hope they don’t come again.’ But they did . . . twice. And so did the drought,’’ he said, pointing to the lifeless trees around him that are part of the epicenter of the destruction. About 17 acres of the Arboretum’s trees were killed off.

The 2007 dry period began in July, with less than 2 inches of rain that month, according to the National Weather Service. Thousands of trees began dying across the island but for some reason, virtually all the trees in the 500-acre swath did. Boland suggests the forest’s location may be partly to blame - elevated and sandy, the ground may not have been able to hold enough water for the weakened trees. Foster isn’t sure that is the answer.

Across the island, communities are struggling to deal with dead trees that pose a safety hazard if they fall on roads or walking paths. In West Tisbury, executive secretary Jennifer Rand said, officials are going after only the “deadest of the dead’’ trees because there is not enough money to remove them all.

Polly Hill and private landowners in the dead-oak epicenter are not cutting the trees, a situation that is allowing Foster to understand how the forest recovers on its own.

The researchers have tantalizing clues to their climate theory. First, by examining long, cylindrical cores of sediment extracted from Cape Cod lakes and Vineyard ponds, they discovered that oak pollen dramatically declined about 5,000 years ago - at the same time as other sediment and vegetation records indicated warmer temperatures and drought conditions.

Second, scientists have known for years that New England’s vast hemlock populations also crashed 5,000 years ago, a situation initially attributed to insects because hemlock pests were found in a peat bog sample from that time.

But it would be unusual to have two enormous populations of trees crash at the same time, suggesting there was an underlying reason at play, such as climate. While just a pest outbreak or a drought may not have killed the trees, the combination - whether it was a drought followed by pests or vice-versa - could have wiped them out.

“Insects are always around with patchy disturbances, but you don’t see them wipe out entire species,’’ said Wyatt Oswald, assistant professor of science at Emerson College and a Harvard Forest research fellow who is studying the phenomenon.

There is another link to today. Just like 5,000 years ago, a pest is wiping out New England’s majestic hemlock trees. The nonnative woolly adelgid is mostly contained in southern New England because scientists believe it’s too cold for the insects to advance northward. But New England winters have warmed around 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 40 years, and researchers believe the pest will make inroads into more northern regions as temperatures warm.

“It’s what makes the story interesting,’’ Oswald said. “The same two types of trees are dying at the same time’’ today, just as they did 5,000 years ago.

Today, the researchers are carefully watching what grows on the forest floor now that the sun is no longer blocked by oak leaves. Thorny catbriar and sassafras are filling in the gaps between the dead oak trunks. And beech trees are gaining a stronger foothold. Scientists say the pollen record shows the same thing happened 5,000 years ago, when the coastal oaks gave way to beech.

“Climate change will drive changes in the forest,’’ said Harvard’s Foster. “But they will be more rapid if the forest is also impacted by bugs.’

So good having you here at the Rainforest thread, plus clicking each day!

sue, interesting articles, thanks.

Beautiful weather again today. Late last evening was sitting on the porch when i heard rustling from where the shed lives, and there was one of the herd babies from two years ago visiting, with a family of his own.
We conversed.

Have a good day all ~

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

Dear Shirley,


I’ve got some very exciting news to share with you! Just this morning, we received word that Clorox will be switching production methods at all of its factories to eliminate the use of dangerous chlorine gas. This victory is so important, because it will eliminate the risk of injury or death to 13 million Americans in the case of an accident or attack on one of these factories.

In just two days, the House will vote on legislation that would require the highest risk chemical plants to use the safest chemical processes available to them.

This announcement by Clorox should show Congress that the regulation of potentially lethal chemicals like chlorine is possible and necessary.

That's a good thing, Stradee...............

Hello all, and welcome back ehBeth....... If you need more help, let me know.

Scientists are now trying to make gasoline in the lab. I would ask why they didn't do this years ago - but, I think the answer is obvious.

All cricked.

ckickdeeeeeeeeeeeed


tired, eyes closing........... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

hugs and love you y'all xxxxxxx

Wake up wake up,...click click......

T T T Tuesday. No stuttering here,....

Clicked and on the hunt....

clicked

hoping the puter will be home soon

miss it - miss everyone!