Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Wonderful, HS --- I lived in Korea for a year and visited Japan two times. Fantastic land and I just love the people I met there. In Japan.
Now, in Korea, I met and became friends with many people - they took me to places that visitors from other countries don't have a clue about as far as the culture of the country is concerned. I was always surprised about all the new things I saw and experienced. WOW, what a tour of duty.

Another Tuesday and another tree asmiling....... It's a good thing.

You're welcome, T, and have a safe and productive trip! Godspeed

Good earthturn, wildclickers ~

Beautiful a.m for the Sierras...

Landscaping watered, trees singin', cats munchin'...

...plus preparing for a busy day with daughter.

Have a good one all ~

Thanks again, Stradee - your book will be on its way tomorrow. I can get e-mail from anywhere, pls let me know if you liked it

Hi West Coast Gal - good clicking weather out there....... But, where you are is always good clicking weather. Great place to live.

Hi HS, I'm with Stradee - have a wonderful trip and enjoy.

Thanks T! Will send e mail and let you know when i receive the package.

You're welcome again....and have a good trip!

Beautiful day with daughter...shopping, lunch, chat...she's such a blessing.

Have a good evening all ~

Don't know what is the matter with me but I lost this thread for a coupleof days. Could not find it.

Now that I have everyone's attention, a couple of fascinating posts.

July 14, 2010
Animal Autopsies in Gulf Reveal Only a Mystery

By SHAILA DEWAN
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The Kemp’s ridley sea turtle lay belly-up on the metal autopsy table, as pallid as split-pea soup but for the bright orange X spray-painted on its shell, proof that it had been counted as part of the Gulf of Mexico’s ongoing “unusual mortality event.”

Under the practiced knife of Dr. Brian Stacy, a veterinary pathologist who estimates that he has dissected close to 1,000 turtles over the course of his career, the specimen began to reveal its secrets: First, as the breastplate was lifted away, a mass of shriveled organs in the puddle of stinky red liquid that is produced as decomposition advances. Next, the fat reserves indicating good health. Then, as Dr. Stacy sliced open the esophagus, the most revealing clue: a morsel of shrimp, the last thing the turtle ate.

“You don’t see shrimp consumed as part of the normal diet” of Kemp’s ridleys, Dr. Stacy said.

This turtle, found floating in the Mississippi Sound on June 18, is one of hundreds of dead creatures collected along the Gulf Coast since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded. Swabbed for oil, tagged and wrapped in plastic “body bags” sealed with evidence tape, the carcasses — many times the number normally found at this time of year — are piling up in freezer trucks stationed along the coast, waiting for scientists like Dr. Stacy, who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to begin the process of determining what killed them.

Despite an obvious suspect, oil, the answer is far from clear. The vast majority of the dead animals that have been found — 1,387 birds, 444 turtles, 53 dolphins and one sperm whale — show no visible signs of oil contamination. Much of the evidence in the turtle cases points, in fact, to shrimping or other commercial fishing, but other suspects include oil fumes, oiled food, the dispersants used to break up the oil or even disease.

The efforts to finger a culprit — or culprits — amount to a vast investigation the likes of which “CSI” has never seen. The trail of evidence leads from marine patrols in Mississippi, where more than half the dead turtles have been found, to a toxicology lab in Lubbock, Tex., to this animal autopsy room at the University of Florida in Gainesville. And instead of the fingerprint analysis and security camera footage used in human homicides, the veterinary detectives are relying on shrimp boat data recorders and chromatographic spectrum analysis that can tell if the oil residue found in an animal has the same “chemical signature” as BP crude.

The outcome will help determine how many millions BP will pay in civil and criminal penalties — which are far higher for endangered animals like sea turtles — and provide a wealth of information about the little-known effects of oil on protected species in the Gulf.

“It is terribly important to know, in the big scheme of things, why something died,” said Moby Solangi, the director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Miss., where the initial turtle necropsies and some dolphin necropsies were performed.

“We might be doing what we can to address the issues of today and manage the risk,” he said. “But for tomorrow, we need to know what actually happened.”

Searching for a Smoking Gun

In a laboratory at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Jennifer Cole, a graduate student, was slicing a precious chunk of living dolphin tissue into .3-millimeter sections.

Supervised by Céline Godard-Codding, an endangered species toxicologist, Ms. Cole was studying cytochrome P450 1A1, an enzyme that breaks down hydrocarbons.

Tissue samples are one of the only ways to learn more about toxins in marine mammals and sea turtles, whose protected status limits the type of studies that can be done — researchers cannot do experiments to determine how much oil exposure the animals can withstand.

Oil — inhaled or ingested — can cause brain lesions, pneumonia, kidney damage, stress and death. Scientists working on the BP spill have seen oil-mired animals that are suffering from extreme exhaustion and hyperthermia, with the floating crude reaching temperatures above 130 degrees, Dr. Stacy said.

Far less is known about the effects of dispersants, either by themselves or mixed with oil, though almost 2 million gallons of the chemicals have been used in the BP spill.

Studies show that dispersants, which break down oil into tiny droplets and can also break down cell membranes, make oil more toxic for some animals, like baby birds. And the solvents they contain can break down red blood cells, causing hemorrhaging. At least one fresh dolphin carcass found in the Gulf was bleeding from the mouth and blowhole, according to Lori Deangelis, a dolphin tour operator in Perdido Bay.

Investigators plan to take skin and mouth swabs, slices of organ tissue and vials of bile from animals that have died and test them for disease and hydrocarbons, as well as for dispersants, before a final report on the cause of death is written. But no samples have yet been sent to labs, because NOAA scientists are still debating what types of results will prove most useful.

Jacqueline Savitz, a marine biologist with Oceana, an environmental group, said there was no excuse for any delay in testing.

“It’s absolutely urgent that it should be done immediately,” she said, because the findings could influence response measures like BP’s experimental use of dispersants underwater.

In the meantime, at places like the Tech institute, the oil spill has set off a mad scramble to fill in the gaps in knowledge. In one laboratory, jars of BP crude in various stages of weathering await analysis to determine their relative toxicity. In another lab, graduate students paint precise amounts of oil on incubating duck eggs. Tanks of fiddler crabs awaited a shipment of Corexit 9500, the dispersant being used by BP in the Gulf.

In the end, Dr. Godard-Codding said, scientists will not find a single smoking gun. The evidence — results of laboratory tests, population counts, assessments of how well oil-drenched animals survive after rehabilitation — will all be circumstantial.

Suspicions Fall on Shrimpers

When Lt. Donald Armes of the Mississippi Marine Patrol heard about the rash of dead sea turtles littering the state’s shores, his first thought was not of oil but of shrimp boats.

“Right off the bat, you figure somebody’s gear was wrong,” he said recently, after patrolling for shrimpers in the Mississippi Sound, a few days before floating islands of oil forced officials to close it. By gear, Lieutenant Armes meant turtles excluder devices, which shrimp trawlers are supposed to have. Without them, trawls can be one of the biggest dangers for turtles, which can get trapped in the nets and drown. The devices provide an escape hatch. Another kind of shrimp net, called a skimmer, is not required to have an excluder device — instead, the length of time the skimmers can be dragged is limited to give trapped turtles a chance to come up for air.

When shrimp season began in Mississippi on June 3, the marine patrol inspected all the boats and found no violations involving the excluders, Lieutenant Armes said. But on June 6, 12 dead turtles were found in Mississippi in a single day. Similar spikes have occurred when parts of Louisiana waters were opened to shrimpers, and since most of the waters in the spill area have closed, the turtle deaths have subsided.

Shrimpers emerged as a prime suspect in the NOAA investigation when, after a round of turtle necropsies in early May, Dr. Stacy announced that more than half the carcasses had sediment in the airways or lungs — evidence of drowning. The only plausible explanation for such a high number of drowning deaths, he said, was, as he put it, “fisheries interaction.”

Environmentalists saw the findings as confirmation of their suspicions that shrimpers, taking advantage of the fact that the Coast Guard and other inspectors were busy with the oil spill, had disabled their turtle excluder devices.

The devices are so contentious that Louisiana law has long forbidden its wildlife and fisheries agents to enforce federal regulations on the devices. Last month, Gov. Bobby Jindal vetoed legislation that would have finally lifted the ban, citing the “challenges and issues currently facing our fishermen.” By contrast, Mississippi officials strengthened turtle protections by decreasing the allowable tow time for skimmers, posting observers on boats, and sending out pamphlets on turtle resuscitation.

Officials in both states say that turtles die in shrimp season even when shrimpers follow the law, from boat strikes and other accidents. They also say there have been far fewer shrimpers working since the spill, in part because many have hired out their boats to BP. That should mean fewer, not more, turtle deaths.

But there has also been illegal activity. In Louisiana, agents have seized more than 20,000 pounds of shrimp and issued more than 350 citations to commercial fishermen working in waters closed because of the oil spill. In Mississippi in June, three skimmer boats were caught exceeding legal tow times -- one just hours after the shrimper had been given a handout explaining that the maximum time had been reduced, Lieutenant Armes said.

As for the piece of shrimp that Dr. Stacy found lodged in the turtle’s throat during the necropsy, it, too, pointed to shrimpers. A turtle is normally not quick enough to catch shrimp, Dr. Stacy said. Unless, of course, it is caught in a net with them.

Diagnosing Difficulties

In the necropsy lab in Gainesville, Dr. Stacy was slitting open the turtle’s delicate windpipe, looking for traces of sediment, a tell-tale sign of drowning. He finds none there, so he examines a crinkled papery membrane barely recognizable as lungs. Nothing.

“Drowning can be a difficult diagnosis,” he said. He has requested data that will show the level of commercial fishing in the area. But, he cautioned, “A lot of times our evidence is fairly indirect.”

In a sense, the necropsies so far have posed more questions than answers, demonstrating how oil has become just another variable in an already complex ecosystem. Late in June, a dolphin examined at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Miss. showed signs of emaciation, but its belly was full of fish, suggesting that it may have gorged itself after a period of difficulty finding food.

Another dolphin, its ribs broken, was hit by a boat, a catastrophe that dolphins are normally nimble enough to avoid. The veterinarian, Dr. Connie Chevis, found a tar-like substance in the dolphin’s throat. The substance will be analyzed to see if it is oil, but one theory is that the animal could have been disoriented by oil exposure, which can have a narcotic effect, rendering it incapable of avoiding a boat strike. Ms. Deangelis said the dolphins on her recent tours have been “acting like they’ve had three martinis.”

The results raise questions about oil’s indirect effects. Is crude, for example, responsible for what anecdotal reports say is a steep increase in turtles in Mississippi and Louisiana waters? The population of Kemp’s ridleys has been rebounding thanks to years of protective measures. But some scientists have speculated the spill is driving wildlife toward the coast, crowding areas where there is more boat traffic and setting the stage for fatal accidents.

In a normal year, one or two turtles might get snagged on the hooks of recreational fishermen at the piers. Now, the institute in Gulfport is caring for 30 such turtles, a possible indication that they are desperate for food. In recent weeks, Dr. Chevis said, she has begun to see elevated white blood cell counts and signs of pneumonia in rescued turtles, both of which are symptoms of oil exposure, but could easily have other explanations.

In Gainesville, Dr. Stacy returned the jumbled remains of the turtle that ate the shrimp to its plastic wrapper and sent it back to the freezer. There, it will be stored indefinitely, just one piece of evidence among thousands.

July 12, 2010
Insects as Model Animals

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Jeremy Niven spends his days at Cambridge University running locusts across ladders and through mazes, trying to figure out how bugs think. Dr. Niven, 34, studies the evolution of brains and neurons in insects and other animals, like humans. We spoke during a break in last month's World Science Festival in New York, where he was a guest presenter, and then again later via telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows:

Q. YOUR RESEARCH SUBJECTS ARE LOCUSTS. SOME PEOPLE MIGHT SAY, “LOCUSTS, YUCK!” WHY STUDY THEM?

A. I think locusts are sweet. When you get used to them, they are actually quite nice.

Actually, I find that working with invertebrates opens your mind. Insects don’t perceive the world the way we do. Trying to understand them makes you think more about why we see the world as we do. Many animals have different sensors and receive different energies. Birds have ultraviolet vision. So do bees. They can see things we don’t. One learns respect for their capacities.

But the other thing is that insects in general and locusts in particular are admirable because they permit us to gain new information about nervous systems. With insects, we can actually study neural circuits and see how what happens in the neurons relates to behavior.

Q. SO INSECTS ARE YOUR MODEL ANIMAL?

A. Yes. You see, with mammals, their nervous systems are very complex and everything you look at is more difficult to connect to behaviors. There are so many neurons in their brains — where do you even begin? How do you associate what’s going on in the neuron with what’s going on in the animal? Now, in insects, there are fewer neurons and so they can be identified more easily.

Of course, insect brains don’t work in the exactly same way a human brain does. But there is more overlap than many realize. It’s a consequence of evolution that animals have used the same biological tricks to get what they need from the environment. They mix and match different molecular components to build the system they need. So you can find the same components in a locust’s nervous system as in human. We just have more of it.

Q. YOU’VE DONE AN EXPERIMENT WHERE YOU PLACED LOCUSTS ON A LADDER THAT HAD JIGGLING RUNGS. YOU THEN WATCHED HOW THEY WORKED THEIR WAY ACROSS THIS TRICK LADDER. WHAT WAS THE POINT?

A. I wanted to know how locusts used their vision to coordinate their limbs in a changing situation. This research involved learning how insects combine visual information with decision making and motor patterns.

With locusts, we’ve long thought they used their limbs to feel things gradually or that they used their antennae to sense the environment, much like a blind person with a cane. But with our experiment, we showed they use their vision to make a kind of guesstimate of distance. Then they jump.

Many insects use an approximate approach. So they teach us that many behaviors that a psychologist might describe as very complicated, an insect can do with very few neurons, and by making a few rough guesses.

Q. WHY SPEND TIME LEARNING THIS?

A. We have not discovered yet the neural circuits in humans that are involved in reaching for objects. However, we might be able to work that out in locusts. We already know that it doesn’t take a huge brain to accurately control the limbs. These insects do it. There are all kinds of possibilities for robotics and for rehabilitative medicine in these studies.

Q. OVER YOUR CAREER, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY HAS BEEN YOUR MOST SIGNIFICANT FINDING?

A. In 2007, we were able to study how much energy neurons used and we quantified it. We studied different types of insect eyes — from tiny fruit fly eyes to huge blowfly eyes. In each creature, we worked out how much energy it takes for neurons in the brain to process information. What we learned was that the more information a fly’s eye needed to process, the more energy each unit of information consumed. That means that it’s bad, in the evolutionary sense, for an animal to have a bigger brain than it needs for survival. It’s like having a gas-eating Ferrari, when what you really need is Honda Civic.

Q. SO BIG BRAINS ARE NOT ALWAYS AN ADVANTAGE?

A. Bigger is better if you want to produce enormously complicated behavior. But in evolution, brains evolve by selection. There always is pressure on animals to produce behaviors for as little energy as possible. And that means for many animals, smaller brains are better because they won’t waste energy.

You know, there’s this pervasive idea in biology that I think is wrong. It goes: we humans are at the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree, and as you get up that tree, brain size must get bigger. But a fly is just as evolved as a human. It’s just evolved to a different niche.

In fact, in evolution there’s no drive towards bigger brains. It’s perfectly possible that under the right circumstances, you could get animals evolving small brains. Indeed, on some islands, where there’s reduced flora and fauna, you’ll see smaller versions of mainland species. I would argue that their brain size has been reduced because it saves energy, which permits them to survive in situations of scarcity. They also might not need big brains because they don’t have natural predators on the islands—and don’t have to be as smart because there’s nothing to avoid.

Q. SPEAKING OF ISLANDS, WHEN AN APELIKE FOSSIL WAS DISCOVERED ON THE INDONESIAN ISLAND OF FLORES IN 2003, A GREAT CONTROVERSY BROKE OUT AMONG ANTHROPOLOGISTS. SOME SAID THIS THREE-FOOT TALL SMALL- BRAINED CREATURE WAS A NEW SPECIES OF HOMINID — A HUMANLIKE PRIMATE. OTHERS CLAIMED IT WAS AN EARLY HUMAN WITH A BRAIN DEFORMITY. WHY DID YOU JUMP INTO THE FRAY?

A. Because I thought it was a hominid. This thing about its being a human ancestor with a diseased brain never made much sense. The people who insisted it was a deformed early human couldn’t believe that it was possible to have such a huge reduction in brain size in any hominid. Yet, it’s possible to get a reduction in brain size of island animals as long as the selection pressure is there. There’s nothing to stop this from happening, even among hominids.

Q. SO WHY WERE OTHER SCIENTISTS INSISTING THAT FLORES MAN WAS A DEFORMED HUMAN?

A. Because there’s this idea that nature moves inexorably towards bigger brains and some people find it very difficult to imagine why if you evolved a big brain — as ancient hominids had — why you would ever go back to a smaller one. But evolution doesn’t really care. This smaller brain could have helped this species survive better than an energy-consuming bigger one. The insects have shown us this.

Q. GETTING BACK TO INSECTS. DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE DISLIKE THEM SO?

A. I think probably because in the near past, we associated insects with disease. That’s a big part of it. On the other hand, Darwin loved insects. There’s a wonderful quote from him, where he’s talking about the marvelous brains of ants, and he says that they may be more marvelous than the brains of humans or monkeys because they are tiny and to be able to do so much behavior with such tiny brains, I can’t help but agree.

Amazon Storm Killed Half a Billion Trees
OurAmazingPlanet Staff

LiveScience.com Ouramazingplanet Staff

livescience.com
2 hrs 7 mins ago

.A violent storm ripped through the Amazon forest in 2005 and single-handedly killed half a billion trees, a new study reveals.

The study is the first to produce an actual tree body count after an Amazon storm.

An estimated 441 million to 663 million trees were destroyed across the whole Amazon basin during the 2005 storm, a much greater number than previously suspected.

In some areas of the forest, up to 80 percent of the trees were killed by the storm. A severe drought was previously blamed for the region's tree loss in 2005.

"We can't attribute [the increased] mortality to just drought in certain parts of the basin - we have solid evidence that there was a strong storm that killed a lot of trees over a large part of the Amazon," said forest ecologist and study researcher Jeffrey Chambers of Tulane University in New Orleans, La.

From Jan. 16 to Jan. 18, 2005, a squall line - a long line of severe thunderstorms - 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) long and 124 miles (200 km) wide crossed the whole Amazon basin. The storm's strong winds, with speeds of up to 90 mph (145 kph), uprooted or snapped trees in half.

When trees die, they release their stored carbon into the atmosphere, which contributes to climate change. In a vicious cycle, these storms could become more frequent in the future due to climate change.

To calculate the number of trees killed by the storm, the researchers used satellite images, field studies and computer models. They looked for patches of wind-toppled trees, which allowed them to distinguish from trees killed by the drought.

"If a tree dies from a drought, it generally dies standing. It looks very different from trees that die snapped by a storm," Chambers said.

The storm wiped out between 300,000 and 500,000 trees in the area of Manaus, Brazil, alone. The number of trees killed by the 2005 storm was equal to 30 percent of the total human-caused deforestation in that same year for the Manaus region. The researchers used the tree loss in Manaus to estimate the tree loss across the entire Amazon basin.

"It's very important that when we collect data in the field we do forensics on tree mortality," Chambers said. "Under a changing climate, some forecasts say that storms will increase in intensity. If we start seeing increases in tree mortality, we need to be able to say what's killing the trees."

The study, funded by NASA and Tulane University, will be detailed in a future edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

July 14, 2010

After High Line’s Success, Other Cities Look Up\

By KATE TAYLOR
Phone calls and visitors and, yes, dreams from around the world are pouring into the small offices of the Friends of the High Line on West 20th Street in Manhattan these days.

Detroit is thinking big about an abandoned train station. Jersey City and Philadelphia have defunct railroad beds, and Chicago has old train tracks that don’t look like much now, but maybe they too...

The High Line’s success as an elevated park, its improbable evolution from old trestle into glittering urban amenity, has motivated a whole host of public officials and city planners to consider or revisit efforts to convert relics from their own industrial pasts into potential economic engines.

In many of these places there had already been some talk and visions of what might be, but now New York’s accomplishment is providing ammunition for boosters while giving skeptics much-needed evidence of the potential for success. The High Line has become, like bagels and CompStat, another kind of New York export.

“There’s a nice healthy competition between big American cities,” said Ben Helphand, who is pushing to create a park on a defunct rail line in Chicago. “That this has been done in New York puts the onus on us to do it ourselves and to give it a Chicago stamp.”

The High Line, an elevated freight spur that runs along the West Side of Manhattan and overlooks the Hudson River, was also nothing more than a crumbling eyesore 10 years ago. But since it opened as a park last year, its plantings and vistas, tasteful design and intricate weave through the redbrick bastions of New York’s meatpacking past and contemporary buildings by Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel have been a hit. Though the High Line is not fully completed — plans have it potentially extending as far north as West 34th Street — more than two million people have already visited.

Developers from Rotterdam and Hong Kong have come looking for ideas. Officials from Jerusalem are hoping to visit. Recently a team from Singapore (Is there really anything old and rusty in Singapore?) spent time on the landscaped walkways that stretch from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street.

“We could have a full-time job if we wanted to just do tours,” said Lisa Tziona Switkin of James Corner Field Operations, the lead designer on the project. She has walked the park with people from Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago and elsewhere. Many of these visitors are interested in the potential for using outmoded infrastructure to add green space and transportation options as well as to promote cultural and commercial revitalization. Part of the fascination with the High Line, which is operated by the city and the nonprofit Friends group, is that it is more than just a pretty place. The neighborhoods it runs through — the meatpacking district and Chelsea — were already glamorous with many restaurants, bars and art galleries. But the opening of the High Line has made those areas even more of a destination and encouraged the Whitney Museum of American Art to build a museum there.

In the early days the founders of the Friends of the High Line, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, drew their own inspiration from the development of the Promenade Plantée in Paris, an elevated park built beginning in 1988 on an abandoned railroad viaduct.

Now their success is encouraging others. In Philadelphia the idea is to turn the Reading Viaduct, which is 60 feet wide, into an elevated park and bike path.

“Our viaduct is much wider, which gives us more opportunity in some way,” said Paul R. Levy, the president of a business improvement group that is exploring the plan there.

The proposal is the brainchild of John Struble, a furniture maker, and Sarah McEneaney, an artist, who live near the viaduct and who met Mr. David in 2003 when he walked the span with them.

“He totally inspired us,” Ms. McEneaney said. “We got a lot of advice early on.” Still, she said, the project had little momentum until the High Line opened. “That sparked a lot more interest from the city administration,” she said.

Now the business-improvement quarter, known as the Center City District, is conducting a feasibility study focused in part on whether building the park would bring new development to the neighborhood, where many buildings are vacant.

“I was a nonbeliever until I actually walked on the High Line,” Mr. Levy said. “It was a complete turnaround for me.”

Alan Greenberger, the deputy mayor for economic development in Philadelphia, expressed caution about whether what was done in New York could be reproduced elsewhere. “People do look at the economic success and say that’s inspiring,” he said. “Can you replicate it? That’s another story.”

In Chicago, Mr. Helphand is president of Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail, a group modeled after the organization that Mr. Hammond and Mr. David direct. He acknowledged that Chicago does not have the army of private philanthropists that New York does, but said there was still lots of enthusiasm.

“We don’t have Diane von Furstenberg,” he said, referring to a prominent supporter of the High Line, “though we do have a celebrity chef.” (The first two sections of the High Line cost $152 million, $44 million of which was raised by Friends of the High Line.)

Recently, Chicago commissioned a design master plan from a team that includes a firm that was a runner-up in the competition to design the High Line.

Not everyone in Chicago, or other cities for that matter, embraces the notion that all good ideas start in New York. Janet Attarian, a project director for the Chicago Transportation Department, said that the plan for the Bloomingdale Trail has been around since the late 1990s. “It is something that we have been cogitating for a while,” she said.

The Bloomingdale Trail is almost three miles long, twice the length of the High Line, and is wide enough to accommodate bike traffic, which will give it a certain functionality that the High Line lacks.

“In the mornings there will be a rush hour of bicycles,” Mr. Helphand predicted. “It’s the east-west nonmotorized transportation route that we don’t have.”

Jersey City officials, who can practically see the High Line across the Hudson River, want to turn a downtown railroad embankment into an elevated park and transportation corridor. The effort is complicated by a legal battle with a developer that is now in mediation. The City Council on Wednesday voted to raise funds to acquire the embankment should the city win the fight.

Maureen Crowley, a coordinator for the Embankment Preservation Coalition, said that Mr. David and Mr. Hammond have advised the group, and that Mr. Hammond recently joined its advisory board.

The coalition organized a tour of the High Line last year for Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy and several other Jersey City officials, who were impressed, Ms. Crowley said.

Other recent participants in a High Line tour were from Paris, a group of officials from La Défense, that city’s business district. They sought ideas for shaping development in their own neighborhood. The group’s leader, Philippe Chaix, had been involved in developing the Promenade Plantée, the High Line’s muse a decade ago.

“When we were beginning to take the High Line around,” Mr. David recalled, “being able to point to the Promenade Plantée was huge to us. It’s exciting that the High Line can act in the same way — be something that other projects can point to and say, ‘This may sound unusual, but look, they’ve done it here, and look how successful it is.’ ”

Was it a gorgeous birthday day?

<smooches>

Yep, it was

Napped on the porch today after a very busy bday with daughter...and friends during late afternoon...a very tired Shirl.

((((((((((beth)))))))))) n' smooches

Hot, hot and unbearable. So few hours to be outside before the heat drives me in.

Dang...103* Sacramento...100* plus for the Foothills

Done watering...paint can wait...in for the duration

Stay cool all ~

World simmers in hottest year so far
By Alina Selyukh Alina Selyukh
29 mins ago

.WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The world is enduring the hottest year on record, according to a U.S. national weather analysis, causing droughts worldwide and a concern for U.S. farmers counting on another bumper year.

For the first six months of the year, 2010 has been warmer than the first half of 1998, the previous record holder, by 0.03 degree Fahrenheit, said Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at the federal National Climatic Data Center.

Period of a El Nino weather pattern is being blamed for the hot temperatures globally.

"We had an El Nino episode in the early part of the year that's now faded but that has contributed to the warmth not only in equatorial Pacific but also contributed to anomalously warm global temperatures as well," Lawrimore said.

Abnormally warm temperatures have been registered in large parts of Canada, Africa, tropical oceans and parts of the Middle East.

Northern Thailand is struggling through the worst drought in 20 years, while Israel is in the middle of the longest and most severe drought since 1920s. In Britain, this year has been the driest since 1929.

Also, Arctic sea ice has melted to its thinnest state in June.

However, as cooler temperatures may set in later this year, it remains to be seen whether 2010 will overtake 2005 as the hottest year overall.

"This year the fact that the El Nino episode has ended and is likely to transition into La Nina, which has a cooling influence on the global average temperature, it's possible that we will not end up with the warmest year as a whole."

EFFECTS ON THE U.S. STATES, FARMERS

The record-warm weather globally hasn't translated into the same in the United States, where June was only eighth hottest to date.

"For the U.S., January to June, this is only slightly warmer than average," Lawrimore said.

What may tip the scale is the development of La Nina, possibly coming in July and August, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Although La Nina means cooling globally, the transition commonly brings hotter and drier weather to the farming belt of the U.S. Midwest region.

"It's going to be pretty warm across eastern Nebraska, Iowa, western portions of Missouri, mid to upper 90s (F)," said Donald Keeney, senior agriculture meteorologist with CROPCAST Ag Services.

The hot temperatures may especially hurt corn pollination, while dry weather could affect soy bean crops, Keeney said.

But meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Eric Luebehusen said the impact of La Nina is usually delayed for the United States, meaning good news for corn farmers.

"Most crops are already reproductive," he said, "so if you can last through the next few weeks, you will pass the really dangerous point where you may sustain yield losses due to heat."

Drought is developing in some parts of the Mid-Atlantic states, Lawrimore said, but for now it's moderate and contained in 8 percent of the country. For comparison, 15 percent of the contiguous United States was in drought last year at this time, 27 percent in 2008 and almost half in 2007

Yes sumac, I heard on the Nat'l news this morning that this year has set a world record for high temps. That was forecast by scientists over twenty years ago as a sign that the world is in trouble. If we begin to see mini Ice-age type weather lasting approx two to three years in small areas we will know we are in trouble.

Anyway, in the mean time - another tree is asmiling !!

Winter was above normal for rain (thank God)

This is the first week we've had more than two days of over 100 degree temps. Relief by Monday the news says.

Keeping everything crossed that our earth recovers for future generations.