Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

DECEMBER 7, 2010, 5:47 PM

The Ice Man Warneth

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
.
CANCÚN, Mexico –- As the main plenary session at climate talks here was getting under way on Tuesday, I received word that Lonnie Thompson, a longtime student of ice and climate at Ohio State University, has a paper coming out in a behavior journal, The Behavior Analyst, concluding with unusual bluntness that humanity is in deep trouble. Thompson is an extraordinary scientist focused for decades (along with his equally remarkable wife, Ellen Mosley-Thompson) on direct observations of climate as well as evidence derived from ice cores extracted from glaciers around the world. He appears to have spent more time on ice fields above 18,000 feet than any human being in history. (The connection between glaciology and behavior will become clear below.)

He echoes the conclusion of John P. Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, that human can choose a mix of mitigation, adaptation and suffering. The paper summarizes Thompson’s decades of work retrieving and analyzing ice cores from mountaintop ice in the Andes, Himalayas, Africa and elsewhere and relates those findings to the broader body of research on a growing human-amplified greenhouse effect. Here’s the opening section and a link to the rest:

Glaciers serve as early indicators of climate change. Over the last 35 years, our research team has recovered ice-core records of climatic and environmental variations from the polar regions and from low-latitude high-elevation ice fields from 16 countries. The ongoing widespread melting of high-elevation glaciers and ice caps, particularly in low to middle latitudes, provides some of the strongest evidence to date that a large-scale, pervasive, and, in some cases, rapid change in Earth’s climate system is underway. This paper highlights observations of 20th and 21st century glacier shrinkage in the Andes, the Himalayas, and on Mount Kilimanjaro. Ice cores retrieved from shrinking glaciers around the world confirm their continuous existence for periods ranging from hundreds of years to multiple millennia, suggesting that climatological conditions that dominate those regions today are different from those under which these ice fields originally accumulated and have been sustained.

The current warming is therefore unusual when viewed from the millennial perspective provided by multiple lines of proxy evidence and the 160-year record of direct temperature measurements. Despite all this evidence, plus the well-documented continual increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, societies have taken little action to address this global-scale problem. Hence, the rate of global carbon dioxide emissions continues to accelerate. As a result of our inaction, we have three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.

Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization (‘‘Climate Change,’’ 2010).

That bold statement may seem like hyperbole, but there is now a very clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the earth is warming, that warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes in climate, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are very possible. This pattern emerges not, as is so often suggested, simply from computer simulations, but from the weight and balance of the empirical evidence as well. [Read the rest.]

The paper is most noteworthy as a capstone, and personal, statement of science and risk from another in a long line of veteran climate scientists foreseeing calamity in “business as usual.”

I’d love to hear from members of the Asociation for Behavioral Analysis International, which invited Thompson to give the lecture that’s the basis for the paper, on why they see such a disconnect between information and response. There’s plenty more on that puzzle in the archives here, of course.

Good pick for article sumac. I agree totally. Humans are destroying the earth and as a result - us.

May be something to the 2012 prediction after all. Although I think the end will be long after that date.

Weeks almost over and there's ice and snow everywhere...... Except here. It freezes at night but is nice and sunny during the day.

All clicked and saved another tree today.

Great clicking all good clickers for Rain Forest.

RETREAT

E.P.A. Delays Tougher Rules on Emissions

By JOHN M. BRODER and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The Obama administration is retreating on long-delayed environmental regulations — new rules governing smog and toxic emissions from industrial boilers — as it adjusts to a changed political dynamic in Washington with a more muscular Republican opposition.

The move to delay the rules, announced this week by the Environmental Protection Agency, will leave in place policies set by President George W. Bush. President Obama ran for office promising tougher standards, and the new rules were set to take effect over the next several weeks.

Now, the agency says, it needs until July 2011 to further analyze scientific and health studies of the smog rules and until April 2012 on the boiler regulation. Mr. Obama, having just cut a painful deal with Republicans intended to stimulate the economy, can ill afford to be seen as simultaneously throttling the fragile recovery by imposing a sheaf of expensive new environmental regulations that critics say will cost jobs.

The delays represent a marked departure from the first two years of the Obama presidency, when the E.P.A. moved quickly to reverse one Bush environmental policy after another. Administration officials now face the question of whether in their zeal to undo the Bush agenda they reached too far and provoked an unmanageable political backlash.

Environmental advocates are furious. They fear a similar delay on the approaching start of one of the most far-reaching regulatory programs in American environmental history, the effort to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Narrow Niches and Nowhere to Go

Andrew M. Sugden

Studies of the changing distributions of plant species under contemporary climate change tend to not take into account the often quite specialized requirements of plants for soil composition, pollinators, and regeneration conditions. A good example is plant species found on serpentine soils, which are generally restricted geographically. Damschen et al. revisited the rich but narrowly restricted floras on serpentine in the Siskiyou Mountains in the northwest United States, first studied 60 years ago by the ecologist Robert Whittaker. They found striking changes in the species composition of herbaceous communities, with the strongest declines in the more-specialist serpentine species, which have no suitable neighboring habitat to migrate to. The plant communities are becoming more characteristic of drier, warmer habitats, and with fewer, more widely tolerant species. Besides showing how climate change may pose special risks to the floras of hot spots of endemic species, this work illustrates the increasing power of long-term ecological records in illuminating the effects of climate change on biota.


CREDIT: ELLEN DAMSCHEN
Ecology 91, 3609 (2010).

Good articles sumac......... thanks.

All cleeked down S.

Good clicking all.............

SAN ALBERTO, Colombia — Colombian architect Simon Velez is changing notions about what bamboo can do.

Velez has used bamboo to build massive domes, cathedrals and long-span bridges that soar across highways.

His stunning designs and his pioneering use of bamboo make him a one-of-a-kind architect who has won awards around the world. But his constructions are also drawing attention because they’re providing a more environmentally sustainable way of building.

Bamboo absorbs four times as much carbon dioxide as trees do, and can be harvested every year because of its rapid growth rate. It is stronger than concrete and steel and resists well during earthquakes. And in countries like Colombia, where it is abundant and cheap, it’s one of the most affordable building materials out there.

In a world of growing populations and shrinking resources, Velez’s bamboo designs make a lot of environmental sense. They also happen to be beautiful and soundly constructed — all convincing arguments, he hopes, for the design world to go bamboo.

UN climate meeting OKs Green Fund in new accord

By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press
36 mins ago

CANCUN, Mexico – A U.N. conference on Saturday adopted a modest climate deal creating a fund to help the developing world go green, though it deferred for another year the tough work of carving out deeper reductions in carbon emissions causing Earth to steadily warm.
Though the accords were limited, it was the first time in three years the 193-nation conference adopted any climate action, restoring faith in the unwieldy U.N. process after the letdown a year ago at a much-anticipated summit in Copenhagen.
The Cancun Agreements created institutions for delivering technology and funding to poorer countries, though they did not say where the funding would come from.
In urging industrial countries to move faster on emissions cuts, it noted that scientists recommended reducing greenhouse gas emissions from industrial countries by 25 to 40 per cent from 1990 levels within the next 10 years. Current pledges amount to about 16 percent.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon, in a 4 a.m. speech, declared the conference "a thoroughgoing success," after two separate agreements were passed. The agreements shattered "the inertia of mistrust" that had settled over the frustrated efforts for a broad climate treaty, he said.
One of the agreements renewed a framework for cutting greenhouse gas emissions but set no new targets for industrial countries. The second created a financial and technical support system for developing countries facing grave threats from global warming.
Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa, the conference president, gaveled the deal through early Saturday over the objections of Bolivia's delegate, who said it was so weak it would endanger the planet.
Decisions at the U.N. climate talks are typically made by consensus, but Espinosa said consensus doesn't "mean that one country has the right to veto" decisions supported by everyone else.
The accord establishes a multibillion dollar annual Green Climate Fund to help developing countries cope with climate change, though it doesn't say how the fund's money is to be raised. Last year in Copenhagen governments agreed to mobilize $100 billion a year for developing countries, starting in 2020, much of which will be handled by the fund.
The agreements also set rules for internationally funded forest conservation, and provides for climate-friendly technology to expanding economies.
Espinosa won repeated standing ovations from a packed conference hall for her deft handling of bickering countries and for drafting an acceptable deal, though it fully satisfied no one.
"It's been a challenging, tiring and intensive week" said U.S. special climate envoy Todd Stern, clearly content with the results.
The European Union's top climate official, Connie Hedegaard, said Saturday's decisions would help keep international climate talks on track.
"But the two weeks in Cancun have shown once again how slow and difficult the process is," Hedegaard said. "Everyone needs to be aware that we still have a long and challenging journey ahead of us to reach the goal of a legally binding global climate framework."
Christiana Figueres, the U.N.'s senior climate official, said the agreements would put all governments on cleaner trajectory. "Cancun has done its job," she said.
Environmentalists cautiously welcomed the deal.
It "wasn't enough to save the climate," said Alden Meyer of the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists. "But it did restore the credibility of the United Nations as a forum where progress can be made."
The Cancun deal finessed disputes between industrial and developing countries on future emissions cuts and incorporates voluntary reduction pledges attached to the Copenhagen Accord that emerged from last year's climate summit in the Danish capital.
It struck a skillful compromise between the U.S. and China, which had been at loggerheads throughout the two week conclave on methods for monitoring and verifying actions to curtail greenhouse gases.
"What we have now is a text that, while not perfect, is certainly a good basis for moving forward," Stern said during the decisive conference meeting. His Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, sounded a similar note and added, "The negotiations in the future will continue to be difficult."
The accord "goes beyond what we expected when we came here," said Wendel Trio of the Greenpeace environmental group.
Underscoring what's at stake in the long-running climate talks, NASA reported that the January-November 2010 global temperatures were the warmest in the 131-year record. Its data indicated the year would likely end as the warmest on record, or tied with 2005 as the warmest.
The U.N.'s top climate science body has said swift and deep reductions are required to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 F) above preindustrial levels, which could trigger catastrophic climate impacts.
Bolivian delegate Pablo Solon protested that the weak pledges of the Copenhagen Accord condemned the Earth to temperature increases of up to 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 F), saying that is tantamount to "ecocide" that could cost millions of lives.
He also complained that the text was being railroaded over his protests in violation of the U.N.'s consensus rules.
In the 1992 U.N. climate treaty, the world's nations promised to do their best to rein in carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases emitted by industry, transportation and agriculture. In the two decades since, the annual conferences' only big advance came in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, when parties agreed on modest mandatory reductions by richer nations.
But the U.S., alone in the industrial world, rejected the Kyoto Protocol, complaining it would hurt its economy and that such emerging economies as China and India should have taken on emissions obligations.
Since then China has replaced the U.S. as the world's biggest emitter, but it has resisted calls that it assume legally binding commitments — not to lower its emissions, but to restrain their growth.
Here at Cancun such issues came to a head, as Japan and Russia fought pressure to acknowledge in a final decision that they will commit to a second period of emissions reductions under Kyoto, whose current targets expire in 2012.
The Japanese complained that with the rise of China, India, Brazil and others, the 37 Kyoto industrial nations now account for only 27 percent of global greenhouse emissions. They want a new, legally binding pact obligating the U.S., China and other major emitters.

Lost Civilization May Have Existed Beneath the Persian Gulf

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Managing Editor
LiveScience.com
Fri Dec 10, 7:25 am ET

Veiled beneath the Persian Gulf, a once-fertile landmass may have supported some of the earliest humans outside Africa some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, a new review of research suggests.
At its peak, the floodplain now below the Gulf would have been about the size of Great Britain, and then shrank as water began to flood the area. Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said.
The study, which is detailed in the December issue of the journal Current Anthropology, has broad implications for aspects of human history. For instance, scientists have debated over when early modern humans exited Africa, with dates as early as 125,000 years ago and as recent as 60,000 years ago (the more recent date is the currently accepted paradigm), according to study researcher Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K.
"I think Jeff's theory is bold and imaginative, and hopefully will shake things up," Robert Carter of Oxford Brookes University in the U.K. told LiveScience. "It would completely rewrite our understanding of the out-of-Africa migration. It is far from proven, but Jeff and others will be developing research programs to test the theory."
Viktor Cerny of the Archaeogenetics Laboratory, the Institute of Archaeology, in Prague, called Rose's finding an "excellent theory," in an e-mail to LiveScience, though he also points out the need for more research to confirm it.
The findings have sparked discussion among researchers, including Carter and Cerny, who were allowed to provide comments within the research paper, about who exactly the humans were who occupied the Gulf basin.
"Given the presence of Neanderthal communities in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates River, as well as in the eastern Mediterranean region, this may very well have been the contact zone between moderns and Neanderthals," Rose told LiveScience. In fact, recent evidence from the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome suggests interbreeding, meaning we are part caveman.
[Rewind: Ancient Egyptian artifacts recovered from bank vault]
Watery refuge
The Gulf Oasis would have been a shallow inland basin exposed from about 75,000 years ago until 8,000 years ago, forming the southern tip of the Fertile Crescent, according to historical sea-level records.
And it would have been an ideal refuge from the harsh deserts surrounding it, with fresh water supplied by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun and Wadi Baton Rivers, as well as by upwelling springs, Rose said. And during the last ice age when conditions were at their driest, this basin would've been at its largest.
In fact, in recent years, archaeologists have turned up evidence of a wave of human settlements along the shores of the Gulf dating to about 7,500 years ago.
[Discovery: 100-million-year-old ancient crocodile]
"Where before there had been but a handful of scattered hunting camps, suddenly, over 60 new archaeological sites appear virtually overnight," Rose said. "These settlements boast well-built, permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world."
[Video: Hieroglyphic funeral spells discovered in Egypt]
Rather than quickly evolving settlements, Rose thinks precursor populations did exist but have remained hidden beneath the Gulf. [History's Most Overlooked Mysteries]
"Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago," Rose said. "These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean."
Ironclad case?
The most definitive evidence of these human camps in the Gulf comes from a new archaeological site called Jebel Faya 1 within the Gulf basin that was discovered four years ago. There, Hans-Peter Uerpmann of the University of Tubingen in Germany found three different Paleolithic settlements occurring from about 125,000 to 25,000 years ago. That and other archaeological sites, Rose said, indicate "that early human groups were living around the Gulf basin throughout the Late Pleistocene."
To make an ironclad case for such human occupation during the Paleolithic, or early Stone Age, of the now-submerged landmass, Rose said scientists would need to find any evidence of stone tools scattered under the Gulf. "As for the Neolithic, it would be wonderful to find some evidence for human-built structures," dated to that time period in the Gulf, Rose said.
Carter said in order to make for a solid case, "we would need to find a submerged site, and excavate it underwater. This would likely only happen as the culmination of years of survey in carefully selected areas."
Cerny said a sealed-tight case could be made with "some fossils of the anatomically modern humans some 100,000 years old found in South Arabia."
And there's a hint of mythology here, too, Rose pointed out. "Nearly every civilization living in southern Mesopotamia has told some form of the flood myth. While the names might change, the content and structure are consistent from 2,500 B.C. to the Genesis account to the Qur'anic version," Rose said.
Perhaps evidence beneath the Gulf? "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands," said Rose, quoting Douglas Adams.

Very interesting sumac. Mesopotamia (now Iraq) is where the biblical Abraham came from - the one who began our Old Testament. He came from Ur. On the way west is when he had the dreams about God talking to him. At that time also the people of Mesopotamia's religion had not only old tales of a world flood but the story of two people and man and a woman created by God in a garden. In fact most of Genesis was their religion. Records still show these things because they were the first people to develop writing at approx 4300 BC - the Egyptians were close behind. Also, when the Jews fled Egypt with Moses they took with them many writings and storys from the Egyptian royalty. You can look it up by Googling Amenamop an Egyptian. Most of Psalms was plagerized from him. And there are others.

December 11, 2010

Climate Talks End With Modest Deal on Emissions

By JOHN M. BRODER
CANCÚN, Mexico — The United Nations climate change conference began with modest aims and ended early Saturday with modest achievements. But while the measures adopted here may have scant near-term impact on the warming of the planet, the international process for dealing with the issue got a significant vote of confidence.

The agreement fell well short of the broad changes scientists say are needed to avoid dangerous climate change in coming decades. But it lays the groundwork for stronger measures in the future, if nations are able to overcome the emotional arguments that have crippled climate change negotiations in recent years.

The package known as the Cancún Agreements gives the more than 190 countries participating in the conference another year to decide whether to extend the frayed Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that requires most wealthy nations to trim their emissions while providing assistance to developing countries to pursue a cleaner energy future.

The agreement is not a legally binding treaty, but the success of these talks allows the process to seek a more robust accord at next year’s climate conference in Durban, South Africa.

“This is not the end, but it is a new beginning,” said Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who serves as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It is not what is ultimately required, but it is the essential foundation on which to build greater, collective ambition.”

The agreement sets up a new fund to help poor countries adapt to climate changes, creates new mechanisms for transfer of clean energy technology, provides compensation for the preservation of tropical forests and strengthens the emissions reductions pledges that came out of the last United Nations climate change meeting in Copenhagen last year.

The conference approved the package over the objections of Bolivia, which condemned the pact as too weak. Bolivia’s chief climate negotiator, Pablo Solón, said that the emissions reductions laid out in the plan would allow global temperatures to rise as much as 4 degrees Celsius over the next half century, twice the stated goal of the agreement and a level that would doom millions in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.

But his protests did not block acceptance of the package. Delegates from island states and the least-developed countries warmly welcomed the pact because it would start the flow of billions of dollars to assist them to adopt cleaner energy systems and adapt to inevitable changes in the climate, like sea rise and drought.

But it left unresolved where the $100 billion in annual climate-related aid that the wealthy nations have promised to provide would come from.

Todd Stern, the American climate envoy, said the package achieved much of what he had hoped, including a more solid commitment by all nations to take steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and a more formalized international program of reporting and verification of reductions. It adds needed specifics to the fuzzy promises of last year’s Copenhagen Accord, he said.

“This is a significant step forward that builds on the progress made in Copenhagen,” he said in a news conference after the package was adopted. “It successfully anchors mitigation pledges of the Copenhagen Accord and builds on the transparency element of the accord with substantial detail and content.”

Mr. Stern had been particularly insistent that the agreement include a consistent formula for countries to disclose their emissions, report on the measures they are taking to reduce them and provide detailed statements of economic assumptions and methodology. Although a number of large developing nations like China, Brazil and South Africa balked at the intrusiveness of the system, Mr. Stern helped devise a compromise they could live with.

Yvo de Boer, who stepped down this year after four years as executive secretary of the United Nations climate office, said that the success of this year’s conference was in large measure attributable to the modesty of its goals.

“This process has never been characterized by leaps and bounds,” he said in an interview. “It has been characterized by small steps. And I’d rather see this small step here in Cancún than the international community tripping over itself in an effort to make a large leap.”

In all, the success of the Cancún talks was a shot in the arm for a process that some had likened to a zombie, stumbling aimlessly but refusing to die.

“None of this, of course, is world changing,” said Michael A. Levi, who follows climate issues at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “The Cancún agreement should be applauded not because it solves everything, but because it chooses not to: it focuses on those areas where the U.N. process has the most potential to be useful, and avoids other areas where the U.N. process is a dead end. The outcome does not change the fact that most of the important work of cutting emissions will be driven outside the U.N. process.”

John Collins Rudolf contributed reporting from New York.

Straw bale house interior...



More photos and 'how to' here:
http://www.google.com/images?rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS303US303&q=Straw+bale+house&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=fdEETafBGYj4sAOF3_m8DQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=2&ved=0CCwQsAQwAQ&biw=1259&bih=758

or


http://www.balewatch.com/

Good day all ~

Nice idea and useful --- but ageless....... Been around for thousands of years. And they are climate friendly....... Good insulation. Almost as good as living in a cave where the temps are constant.

Thanks for the snowman - haven't made one of those for decades.

December 13, 2010

Musk Oxen Live to Tell a Survivors’ Tale

By NATALIE ANGIER
Among the various large, charismatic and visibly winterized mammals that one might choose as a mascot for life in the Arctic belt, polar bears are, let’s face it, too hackneyed, reindeer too Rudolph, caribou too Sarah Palin’s target practice, and woolly mammoths too extinct.

There’s a better choice, though few may have heard of it. According to Arctic biologists, the quintessential example of megafaunal fortitude in the face of really bad weather is the musk ox, or Ovibos moschatus, a blocky, short-legged, highly social ungulate with distinctively curved horns and long hair that looks like shag carpeting circa 1975.

Ovibos’s common name is only partly justified. The males do emit a musky cologne during mating season, but the animal is not an ox. Nor, despite its back-of-the-nickel silhouette, is it a type of buffalo either. Its closest living relations are thought to be goats and sheep, but taxonomically and metaphorically, the musk ox is in an icy cubicle of its own. Once abundant throughout the northern latitudes worldwide, today they are found only in Arctic North America, Greenland and pockets of Siberia and Scandinavia. The musk ox is a holdover from the Pleistocene, the age of the giant mammals memorialized in natural history murals everywhere — the mammoths and mastodons, the saber-toothed cats, the giant ground sloths, the 400-pound beavers. Yet while a vast majority of the frost-fitted bigfoots disappeared at the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, Ovibos hung on, as stubbornly as the ox it is not.

Scientists are now seeking to understand how, exactly, the animal has managed to persist through repeated climate shifts and habitat upheavals. Researchers see in the musk ox’s story clues to help guide efforts to conserve other large land mammals now at risk of extinction. They also hope to raise the profile of a species they consider magnificent, at once stalwart and supple, a page of living prehistory whose social and behavioral complexities they have just begun to decode.

“There’s evidence that they have an elephantlike social structure, and even some form of culture,” said Joel Berger, a researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society and a professor at the University of Montana. So why is everybody flying to Africa to see elephants when we’ve got this marvelous species living in our own backyard?

In a presentation last week at the Bronx Zoo, where the wildlife society is based, Dr. Berger described preliminary results from field studies of the musk ox that he has performed with Layne Adams of the U.S. Geological Survey and other collaborators. He talked about the challenges of catching animals to weigh and measure them, check their teeth, take their blood and furnish them with G.P.S. collars. One group of musk ox in Cape Krusenstern National Monument in Alaska had such bad, broken teeth you’d think they were subsisting on a diet of Pepsi and Snickers bars, said Dr. Berger, and the researchers worried that the population was unhealthy and on its way out.

Yet after suffering several seasons of declining numbers, the brown-toothers rebounded this year to match in fecundity and offspring survival a group living in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve that had exemplary teeth. The cause of their rotten dentition remains a mystery, but the Krusenstern clan clearly was not biting the dust.

For all their storied past as co-prancers with mastodons, musk oxen are not huge animals. Adult males stand about four feet high and weigh around 600 to 700 pounds, less than half the weight of the average draft horse. Yet they look hulky as a result of their spectacular double-layered fur coat. The long, shaggy outer layer they keep year round, not only to help shield them against the brutal cold of an Arctic winter, when temperatures can plunge 40 degrees or more below zero, but also to deter the insect pests of an Arctic summer.

“You’ll see caribou in summertime trotting across the countryside trying to get away from all the mosquitoes and biting flies,” said Jim Lawler, a biologist with the National Park Service’s Arctic Network in Fairbanks. “But the musk ox just stand there with clouds of mosquitoes hovering above them. It’s hard to penetrate that fur.” For added insulation, musk oxen grow a second fur layer each winter, an undercoat called qiviut that is said to be many times warmer than wool and softer than cashmere — and how obliging of the animals to shed that qiviut in spring for use in scarves.

With their stubby legs, musk oxen are not migratory like caribou or great dashers like reindeer. Their basic approach to winter management is: Don’t just do something — stand there. “You’ll see them in a big storm, drifted over, covered with snow,” said Dr. Lawler. “They’re almost part of the scenery.” They lapse into a state of what might be called hibernation al fresco, as their oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production drop and their metabolic rate slows by about a third. “They’re basically shutting down some of their machinery so they can survive on less food,” said Dr. Lawler, who has studied musk ox energetics.

Whatever their occasional resemblance to the scenery, musk oxen are by no means as dumb as a post. “They live in loosely knit family-bonded societies,” said Dr. Berger, and they keep track of who’s who. The group is, after all, essential to their survival. When confronted with predators like wolves, a herd of musk oxen will famously circle the wagons, the adults forming a wall of horns facing outward, the vulnerable young safely shielded behind them. They also seem to have a keen memory for where the best foraging grounds may be found in the spring, the optimal mix of grasses and willow twigs to maximize the performance of the microbes at work in their ruminant gut. Musk oxen turn out to be very efficient at extracting calories to put on the fat they need to survive the long winter fast.

Historical records and genetic evidence alike suggest that the musk ox is a Rasputin, “the comeback kid of the Quaternary,” said Ross MacPhee, curator of vertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. “They undergo periods where they really bolster their numbers for a few years, then they go down to an almost complete collapse, then later they come back like gangbusters.”

As a result of passing through repeated population bottlenecks, in which only a handful of individuals survived to spawn subsequent generations, today’s 100,000 musk oxen are thought to be notably homogenous, lacking in the sort of genetic diversity once thought critical to a species’ long-term prospects. “It would be hard to argue that musk ox are on their way out the door,” said Dr. MacPhee. “They are not weak sisters.”

Just ask that saber-toothed cat fossilized under the floor.

Multiple clicks done. We are COLD here. Didn't get up to 32 today. More expected.

Adobe's been around forever also, and the new bale homes can be totally enviro friendly also. Weather gets any colder, we'll all be living in igloos!

Sending a decorated home next.

Dang, been busy and trying to do everything plus fighting off a flu bug. yuk Tummy feels a tad wonky.

Well, have a good evening dan and sue.

sumac, Musk Oxen make the finest and softest sweaters and knited stuff in the world. But it's expensive..........wow
Stay warm.........

Stradee --- I saw on the Nat'l news a segment on health with a doctor saying that a sliced onion in a room will keep a person from getting the flu..... The onions are very good at attracting bacteria and evidently do so at a fantastic rate. I now have slices of onion in the rooms we live in here at our home. Keep adding fresh ones when the old ones dry.

Good clicking everyone.............

A brush with snow and then wintry mix.

Hi all..........
Great clicking for trees asmiling............

December 16, 2010

Small Steps on Global Warming

Given the chaos at last year’s global warming meeting in Copenhagen, delegates to this year’s sequel in Cancún, Mexico, hoped mainly to stop the bleeding. In fact, they did more than keep the battered United Nations process alive. Delegates were freed of the expectations of the conference in Copenhagen — which failed to achieve its main objective: a legally binding treaty limiting emissions. And they found common ground in a few achievable steps that will increase trust among nations and could form the basis for stronger measures down the road.

Rich countries, for instance, agreed to help poorer ones preserve their tropical forests and adopt cleaner energy systems through a new “green fund” that will initially be administered by the World Bank. For their part, developing countries agreed to greater transparency in reporting their emissions and their progress in reducing them. Transparency had been a huge sticking point with the Chinese, who do not like anyone looking over their shoulders. Tough bargaining by the Americans and timely pressure from other big developing nations like India brought China on board.

Saving the United Nations process, however, is not the same as saving the planet; the hard work of actually cutting emissions will fall to individual nations, especially the big emitters. It will thus be important to continue exploring parallel negotiating on tracks like the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, originally convened by President George W. Bush and consisting of 17 big nations that account for nearly four-fifths of all emissions; and the Group of 20 industrial nations, which has put climate change high on its agenda.

The principal players, now and in the future, will be the two biggest emitters, the Chinese and Americans. They have talked about joint investments in clean energy technologies, and they obviously must keep climate change on their bilateral agenda. But, first and foremost, they must tackle their own emissions.

The Chinese have pledged to cut their carbon intensity — the rate at which they allow emissions to grow — but what the world will eventually need is net reductions. The United States, embarrassingly enough, has no national strategy. Congress’s failure to pass a comprehensive climate bill has left President Obama with little to work with. Until it gets one, the world has a slim chance of bringing emissions under control.