Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Stradee, thanks for the info - I'm glad the town is straightening things up a bit. The old way. That's a good thing. Also, my good friends live in Folsom. I'd like to visit - but, that's the way it goes.

sumac, sounds simple enough to me re the freedom of choices thingy....... The Ivy League kids who don't work while in school and with less or no worry about future income (making a living), are less predictable about the field they will settle into because regardless they will have it easier that those without advantages. The kids with no substantial financial backing who usually are accepting student loans to enter college and have to work each day to make room and board have an enormously larger selection of possible fields in which they would accept jobs.

Also, nobody is really free - even the President of the USA and other countries aren't free to do as they please. Even dictators have to walk a line in order to survive. I think the only really free people are the ones you told us about in an article many posts ago - the S Am tribe emerging from the forest and when asked if they would stay forever said, "What's forever?"

I'm happy to know that our President has reinstituted the EPA standards that Bush removed during the first few months in office.

Agreed Stradee............ This is certainly a good thing.

January 21, 2011

For Many Species, No Escape as Temperature Rises

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
KINANGOP, Kenya — Simon Joakim Kiiru remembers a time not long ago when familiar birdsongs filled the air here and life was correlated with bird sightings. His lush, well-tended homestead is in the highlands next to the Aberdare National Park, one of the premier birding destinations in the world.

When the hornbill arrived, Mr. Kiiru recalled, the rains were near, meaning that it was time to plant. When a buzzard showed a man his chest, it meant a visitor was imminent. When an owl called at night, it foretold a death.

“There used to be myths because these are our giants,” said Mr. Kiiru, 58. “But so many today are gone.”

Over the past two decades, an increasing number of settlers who have moved here to farm have impinged on bird habitats and reduced bird populations by cutting down forests and turning grasslands into fields. Now the early effects of global warming and other climate changes have helped send the populations of many local mountain species into a steep downward spiral, from which many experts say they will never recover.

Over the next 100 years, many scientists predict, 20 percent to 30 percent of species could be lost if the temperature rises 3.6 degrees to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. If the most extreme warming predictions are realized, the loss could be over 50 percent, according to the United Nations climate change panel.

Polar bears have become the icons of this climate threat. But scientists say that tens of thousands of smaller species that live in the tropics or on or near mountaintops are equally, if not more, vulnerable. These species, in habitats from the high plateaus of Africa to the jungles of Australia to the Sierra Nevada in the United States, are already experiencing climate pressures, and will be the bulk of the animals that disappear.

In response to warming, animals classically move to cooler ground, relocating either higher up in altitude or farther toward the poles. But in the tropics, animals have to move hundreds of miles north or south to find a different niche. Mountain species face even starker limitations: As they climb upward they find themselves competing for less and less space on the conical peaks, where they run into uninhabitable rocks or a lack of their usual foods — or have nowhere farther to go.

“It’s a really simple story that at some point you can’t go further north or higher up, so there’s no doubt that species will go extinct,” said Walter Jetz, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, whose research last year predicted that a third of the 1,000 mountain birds he studied, or 300 species, would be threatened because warming temperatures would decimate their habitats.

Birds are good barometers of biodiversity because amateur birdwatchers keep such extensive records of their sightings. But other animals are similarly affected.

Two years ago, scientists blamed a warming climate for the disappearance of the white lemuroid possum, a niche mountain dweller in Australia that prefers cool weather, and that was cute enough to be the object of nature tours. Many scientists, suspecting that the furry animal had died off during a period of unusually extreme heat, labeled the disappearance the first climate-related animal extinction.

Since then, biologists have found a few surviving animals, but the species remains “intensely vulnerable,” said William F. Laurance, distinguished research professor at James Cook University in Australia, who said that in the future heat waves would probably be the “death knell” for a number of cold-adapted species.

For countries and communities, the issue means more than just the loss of pleasing variety. Mr. Kiiru regrets the vastly diminished populations of the mythic birds of Kikuyu tribal culture, like buzzards, owls and hawks. But also, the loss of bird species means that some plants have no way to pollinate and die off, too. And that means it is hard for Mr. Kiiru to tend bees, his major source of income.

Current methods for identifying and protecting threatened species — like the so-called red list criteria of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a conservation gold standard — do not yet adequately factor in the impact of probable climate shifts, and the science is still evolving, many scientists say.

Some species that scientists say are at most risk in a warming climate are already considered threatened or endangered, like the Sharpe’s longclaw and the Aberdare cisticola in Kenya. The cisticola, which lives only at altitudes above 7,500 feet, is considered endangered by the international union, and research predicts that climate change will reduce its already depleted habitat by a further 80 percent by 2100.

Other Kenyan birds that are at risk from climate warming, like the tufted, brightly colored Hartlaub’s turaco, are not yet on watch lists, even though their numbers are severely reduced here. A rapid change of climate can quickly eliminate species that inhabit a narrow niche.

On a recent afternoon, Dominic Kimani, a research ornithologist at the National Museums of Kenya, combed a pasture on the Kinangop Plateau for 20 minutes before finding a single longclaw. “These used to be everywhere when I was growing up,” he said.

He added: “But it’s hard to get anyone to pay attention; they are just little brown birds. I know they’re important for grazing animals because they keep the grasses short. But it’s not dramatic, like you’re losing an elephant.”

As the climate shifts, mountain animals on all continents will face similar problems. Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley recently documented that in Yosemite National Park, where there is a century-old animal survey for comparison, half the mountain species had moved their habitats up by an average of 550 yards to find cooler ground.

Elsewhere in the United States, the pika, the alpine chipmunk and the San Bernardino flying squirrel have all been moving upslope in a pattern tightly linked to rising temperatures. They are now considered at serious risk of disappearing, said Shaye Wolf, climate science director of the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco, which in 2010 applied to protect a number of American mountain species under the United States’ Endangered Species Act.

Last year, new research in the journal Ecological Applications and elsewhere showed that the pika, a thick-furred, rabbitlike animal that takes refuge from the sun in piles of stones, was moving upslope at about 160 yards a decade and that in the past decade it had experienced a fivefold rise in local extinctions, the term used when a local population forever disappears.

On the Kinangop Plateau in Kenya, Mr. Kimani exults when he finds a Hartlaub’s turaco, once a common sight, near Njabini town, in a stand of remaining of old growth forest, after engaging local teenagers to help locate the bird. The turaco could lose more than 60 percent of its already limited habitat if current predictions about global warming are accurate, Dr. Jetz said.

“Even substantial movement wouldn’t help them out,” he said. “They would have to move to the Alps or Asian mountains to find their mountain climate niche in the future.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 21, 2011


An earlier version of a photo caption with this article misidentified a bird that was pictured. It is a Tacazze sunbird, not a sandbird.

Good morning clickers........
sumac, unfortunately extinction is a norm throughout the earth - and the entire universe as well. The upside of it is that new species are born as well as new stars and other stuff.

Brings to mind my old signature line = "The only unchangable thing in existence is change itself."

A really unfortunate thing for future life forms is that - as we all know when matter burns it turns to ash - then eventually all the matter in the universe will have burned and there will be nothing but darkness - and probably a few verrrry large black holes pulling all the leftover ash into what I suppose will eventually be one huge black hole that will more than likely implode into itself and form a new universe in another dimension. Sounds like a good explanation anyway............

This article from NPR may sound far-fetched, but it is interesting.

Rome may have fallen hundreds of years ago, but much of the civilization the Romans built still dots the landscape today. One team of scientists recently unearthed a different kind of Roman artifact that may hold a strange clue to the empire's downfall.

A study of tree rings recently published in the journal Science provides evidence of climate shifts that, perhaps not coincidentally, occurred from A.D. 250 to 550, a period better known as the fall of the Roman Empire.

Ulf Buentgen and his team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research collected tree-ring data from ancient wood found in medieval castles and Roman ruins. They created a detailed history of climate change over the past 2.5 millennia and found the data point to the end of the Roman Empire as a period of exceptional climate change.

Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Penn State, was not a member of the research team, but explains how the information found in tree rings changes what we know of the last centuries of Roman imperialism.

"They were able to tease out two pieces of information from these trees," Mann explains. "They can get some idea of how warm the summers were, and how wet the sort of late-spring/early summer was."

That's because trees create a new ring each year. A big ring occurs in times of good climate, and a small ring occurs in years of drought or extreme temperatures. Wood samples from this time period show a climate flip-flopping unpredictably, which would have been bad for the Roman Empire.

"Like any large civilization — including the civilization we have today — it was highly dependent on predictability of natural resources," Mann says. "It was very heavily adapted to the climate conditions that had persisted for centuries."

But while the tree rings show variability, there is no data for why these climate changes occurred. Global warming contributes to modern climate change, but Rome fell from power long before industrialization.

"Presumably it was some combination of these external natural factors like solar variability and volcanic eruptions, and just the pure sort of chaotic variability of the climate system," Mann speculates.

This new research may not establish cause-and-effect, but it does contribute another factor to explain Rome's fall. It also creates another clue for scientists sleuthing their way into an uncertain climate future.

Thanks sumac, interesting stuff.......... There are many thoughts on the downfall of the Roman Empire. The one that attracted me was that they had conquered the reachable world and there wasn't enough left with any real wealth to take over. Common taxes didn't cover expenses anymore. And, the fact that they became lazy and were outnumbered by their slaves and had to take in 'barbarians' to fill the army......... Oh, well.

Great clicking all.

JANUARY 23, 2011, 5:10 PM

Heroic Naturalists or Imperialist Dogs?

By RICHARD CONNIFF
Specimens looks at how species discovery has transformed our lives.

Tags:

history of science, Natural History, species

What does it mean to discover a species? Who should get the credit for it? Why did early naturalists think it worth risking their lives, and often losing them, to ship home the first specimens of a previously unknown butterfly or bat? These turn out to be tangled questions, and it is easy to get stuck on the thorns.

Not long ago, for instance, I wrote that a 19th-century French missionary and naturalist in China, Pére Armand David, had “discovered” the snub-nosed golden monkey. A reader sent me this somewhat testy comment: “The answer to the question ‘who discovered it’ is actually the Chinese.” Père David had merely “observed it and introduced it (and many other animals) to the West and into the Western zoological system.”
George Wong/European Pressphoto Agency A male snub-nosed golden monkey.
My irritated reader had a point, of a misguided sort. It’s common these days to dismiss the scientific classification and naming of “new” species as just one more Western appropriation of other peoples’ natural resources, and the golden monkey can seem like a particularly egregious instance. Europeans first saw the species in the form of images in Chinese paintings and porcelains. But it looked so odd, with a fringe of flame red hair around its bluish-white face, that they mistook it for a figment of the Chinese imagination.

David himself may never actually have seen these mountain-dwelling monkeys in the wild. Instead, his Chinese hunters brought him six specimens in the course of a long and productive expedition into western Sichuan province. David shipped the specimens back to Paris, along with more than 100 other mammal species. There, in an act of blithe cultural hodgepodgery, a French naturalist described the golden monkey in a scientific journal and gave it the species name roxellana to commemorate the Ukrainian wife of an Ottoman Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, because monkey and wife both had distinctive up-turned noses. You can see how this might leave people in China feeling a little left out.

Courtesy of Richard ConniffLocal hunters often did the work of collecting.
Nor were they alone. The truth is that many of the species discovered by early naturalists had already been known to local people, sometimes in great detail, long before outsiders arrived to describe them scientifically. Moreover, the naturalists often depended on knowledgeable locals to show them what was there, and seldom gave proper credit for the help. But to call this local knowledge “discovery” is like saying Newton didn’t discover gravity, because people already knew that things have a way of falling down.

The key to scientific discovery is making knowledge available to people everywhere, usually by publishing a detailed description in a scientific journal. It means saying exactly how the proposed species resembles other related species, and how it’s different, thereby assigning it to a place in a universal system of classification. (Even highly-trained scientists can sometimes gawp at a species for a century or two before they notice the differences. Thus scientists have only lately confirmed that the African elephant is actually two distinct species, the savanna elephant and the forest elephant. Technically speaking, the latter species was only discovered in 2010.)

Discovery also means giving your find a name, by genus and species. The Latinate construction of these names can sometimes sound as if they are meant to exclude rather than inform. (The soldier fly Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides comes stumbling to mind). But before this system of species names came into existence, people could hardly communicate about the plants and animals in their own backyards — one town’s “dandelion” was another’s “pissabed” — much less from one country to another. After, they could start to see and talk about connections among species at opposite ends of the Earth.

The Chinese meanwhile had abundant local knowledge of their plants and animals, and Western explorers gladly took advantage of it, according to Fa-Ti Fan, a historian at Binghamton University and author of “British Naturalists in Qing China.” But, Fan writes, the Chinese “did not have a discipline, a system of knowledge, or even a coherent scholarly tradition equivalent to Western notions of ‘natural history,’ ‘botany,’ or ‘zoology.’ ”

Clare ConniffThe French missionary and naturalist Pére Armand David, as himself, and in disguise, right.
And in that context, Pére Armand David’s discoveries — unencumbered by asterisks or quotation marks — were crucial. He certainly displayed plenty of colonial arrogance, flouting local lords and their rules. (He had come to China “pursued with the thought of dying while working at the saving of infidels,” and there was a certain unholy insouciance about the way he drew his gun on would-be bandits.) But long before the Chinese themselves noticed, he warned that the plundering of their forests would wipe out “hundreds of thousands of animals and plants given to us by God,” leaving behind a landscape of horses, pigs, wheat and potatoes. If David had not brought them to the attention of the outside world, many of his new species — among them the giant panda — would in fact now be lost.

One of his least heroic discoveries, now known as Père David’s deer, or Elaphurus davidianus, was described on the basis of skins he probably obtained illegally, from the imperial hunting grounds south of Beijing. That find led European diplomats to press for live specimens to be shipped back to Europe for breeding. When Chinese soldiers bivouacking on the imperial hunting grounds later shot and ate the last remaining deer there, the species was extinct in China. But because of reintroductions from Europe — and the work of Pére David — these deer in fact now number about a thousand in their native habitat.

Discoveries by another early naturalist in China, Patrick “Mosquito” Manson, later enabled the government there to wipe out the hideously debilitating disease called elephantiasis. His work also led to the eradication or control of malaria in countries around the world. Likewise, work by early discoverers recently enabled researchers in China to pin down the source of SARS to four species of horseshoe bat in the genus Rhinolophus.

A simple-minded story line about imperialists appropriating natural resources — with great white hunters playing out their heroic exploits at the expense of local cultures — may have its revisionist appeal. But it’s at least equally important to recognize that the work of early naturalists continues to save lives and protect resources today. The best evidence of its value is that every country from China to Gabon to Colombia now employs this scientific system of discovery and classification as a better way to understand not just our world, but theirs.

anuary 23, 2011

Design Picked for Wildlife Crossing

By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON — At a picturesque spot in the mountains near the ski resorts of Vail and Breckenridge, Colo., two streams of traffic converge: people driving east and west on Interstate 70, and animals — black bears, cougars, bobcats, elk and deer — headed north and south to feed and mate. When they collide, the animal is almost always killed and the vehicle badly damaged, even if the driver is lucky enough to escape injury.

The obvious solution is a bridge or a tunnel for the animals, but how do you build one they will use?

On Sunday, a nonprofit group announced the winner of a competition to design such a crossing: Michael Van Valkenburgh & Associates, a landscape architecture firm with offices in New York City and Cambridge, Mass. The design team, associated with the national construction firm HNTB, submitted a proposal for a bridge made of lightweight precast concrete panels that are snapped into place and covered with foliage.

The bridge is broad enough to allow for strips — lanes, actually — that resemble forests, shrubs and meadows, with the aim of satisfying the tastes of any of the animals in the area. Miles of fences on either side of the highway would funnel animals to the bridge.

The state has not committed to build such a structure at that spot. The percentage of crashes caused by animals is far higher in other areas, said Stacey Stegman, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Transportation. But state officials are eager to learn what they can from the contest entries as they address the problem of animal-vehicle collisions.

Finalists in the competition, which concluded on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, took a wide variety of approaches.

One environmentally minded entry, from Balmori Associates of New York, called for building a crossing out of wood from trees killed by beetles. That would prevent the timber from rotting and giving off carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, and would avoid using concrete, which releases carbon dioxide when it is made, the designers said.

Experts who helped set up the design competition say the deadly collisions around Vail sometimes involve the Canada lynx, which is listed as a threatened species, one step short of endangered.

More broadly, the highway forms a threatening barrier between nature preserves on either side, increasing the likelihood that the populations will become genetically isolated.

“As you fragment the habitat, the long-term prognosis for wildlife is bad,” said Rob Ament, the project manager for the group sponsoring the competition, which bestows a $40,000 award and was initiated by the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University and the Woodcock Foundation in New York.

Danon,
I am sure glad that you also enjoy reading this articles because mostly it is you and me who are reading them.

We are going from a period of cold cold to something a wee bit milder as rain attempts to enter the area from the southwest. I really enjoy the few days of near 50 weather when they occur. My heating bill is going to be higher this year.

Danon, How is Patti doing?

One more.

New Language Discovered: Prairiedogese

JAD ABUMRAD and ROBERT KRULWICH

Listen To Prairie Dogs Talk
Morning Edition [7 min 19 sec]
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text size A A A January 20, 2011
If you learn a second language, there's usually a moment where things click — you overhear some snippet of conversation and suddenly, you just get it, effortlessly.

Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University has spent the past 30 years studying a foreign tongue. But there are no instructional podcasts or evening classes to help him: Slobodchikoff is trying to learn prairie dog.


Credit: NPR/1 Trick Pony
Prairie dogs, a species of rodent native to North America, live together in little villages of underground burrows. They are very social creatures, and when a predator enters their village — most often a dog or a coyote or a hawk — they call out to warn their neighbors. "It sounds kind of like 'chee chee chee chee,' " says Slobodchikoff, kind of like a dog's squeak toy.

When Slobodchikoff first started studying the prairie dogs, he couldn't really tell the difference between the calls for, say, a coyote or a hawk. But the prairie dogs responded to the different calls with specific behaviors, like dropping into their burrows or standing up to get a better view. Slobodchikoff started to think there might be something in those "chees" that he wasn't hearing. So he decided to investigate.


iStockphoto.com
Sound Analysis

Slobodchikoff and his students went out into the prairie dog villages, hid behind bushes, and stuck out their microphones whenever a human, or a dog, or a coyote, or a hawk passed through. They recorded calls that the prairie dogs made in response to different predators. Then he took his recordings to a lab and used a computer program to analyze the sounds. Any given sound is actually made up of different frequencies and overtone layers on top of one another. Slobodchikoff's computer measured those frequencies and separated out all the component tones and overtones.

What Slobodchikoff discovered was that the calls clustered into different groups, and each cluster had its own signature set of frequencies and tones. Prairie dogs, in other words, don't just have a call for "danger" — they have one call for "human," another for "hawk" and a third for "coyote." They can even differentiate between coyotes and domesticated dogs.

Slobodchikoff can now tell the difference between these different calls using just his ears, no computer needed. But the sophistication of prairie dog "chees" goes even deeper than he initially suspected.

Green Shirt, Blue Shirt

During his analysis, Slobodchikoff noticed something: Even though the human call was consistently different from the other calls, there was still significant variation between the individual human calls. He began to wonder whether the little rodents could possibly be describing their predators — not just differentiating hawk from human, but actually saying something about the particular human or coyote or hawk that was approaching.

So he devised a test. He had four (human) volunteers walk through a prairie dog village, and he dressed all the humans exactly the same — except for their shirts. Each volunteer walked through the community four times: once in a blue shirt, once in a yellow, once in green and once in gray.

He found, to his delight, that the calls broke down into groups based on the color of the volunteer's shirt. "I was astounded," says Slobodchikoff. But what astounded him even more, was that further analysis revealed that the calls also clustered based on other characteristics, like the height of the human. "Essentially they were saying, 'Here comes the tall human in the blue,' versus, 'Here comes the short human in the yellow,' " says Slobodchikoff.

Amazingly, it doesn't stop there. Slobodchikoff's next move was to see if prairie dogs could differentiate between abstract shapes. So he and his students built two wooden towers on each side of a prairie dog village. They then made cardboard cutouts of circles, squares and triangles and ran them out along a wire strung between the two towers, so the shapes sort of floated through the village about three feet from the ground. And the prairie dogs, Slobodchikoff found, were able to tell the difference between the triangle and the circle, but, alas, they made no mention of the difference between the square and the circle.

Putting It In Context

While Slobodchikoff's experiments have been repeated with other groups of prairie dogs, some researchers question whether the prairie dogs are really "describing" the predators they see. But Slobodchikoff continues to believe that communication among prairie dogs and other highly social animals is much more sophisticated than we think.

In fact, he says, the big problem is finding reliable ways to study animal communication. Prairie dogs chatter at each other all day long, just in the course of normal social interaction. "But what does it mean?" Slobodchikoff wonders. "We have no way of getting at it." Until there's an instructional podcast for prairie dog prater, we'll just have to wonder.

Produced by Radiolab's Soren Wheeler and NPR's Jessica Goldstein and Maggie Starbard

There are many thoughts, indeed, dan and sue, but the one that makes the most sense to me was the advent of the industrial age. Rome produced few exportable goods, and there was no emporer willing to reinvent the economy.

There were also plagues affecting most of the world at the time...guess nature decided most of the change. Amazing how the world works.

Winter Cold Remedies



Winter colds can really drag you down. It's cold outside but your sweating. Or your raspy throat is rough and scratchy. Your nose is stopped up or it won't stop dripping. Sound familiar? Whatever your symptoms, winter colds are no fun. Use these winter cold remedies to help you get over your cold faster.
A Winter Rub Down

Apply vapor rub liberally to the bottom of your feet to relieve cough and help you sweat out the cold in your body. Use vapor rub to ease aching muscles including sore back muscles that often accompany cold and flu. Vapor rub is of course great to use on your chest and under your nose for immediate cough relief.

Well, It Works on Vampires

Garlic is more than just a flavorful herb. Chop 2 garlic cloves and swallow them. Or you can add them to some applesauce or honey and swallow them. Garlic fights the cold virus so have plenty.

Have a Eucalyptus Steam

Bring a pot of water to boil. Add a few drops of eucalyptus oil to the water. Turn off the water. Carefully lean over the steaming pot drape a towel over your head and breath in the steam. Do this twice a day to help break up your cold and heal faster.

Vitamin C Therapy

At the onset of your cold make sure you take plenty of vitamin C. Chewable vitamin C tablets can be taken several times a day. Drinks lots of orange juice too.

Keep the Hydration Coming

Water, water, water. Drink lots of water, juice and clear fluids. Hydration isn't actually a cure but it has been proven to shorten the length of time you have a cold. Staying hydrated also keeps your pain level down.

Grandma Was Right!

Chicken soup has been proven to be an anti-inflammatory. Chicken soup loosens mucus and therefore shortening the time the cold stays in your system. Researchers at the University of Nebraska say canned soups work as well as homemade.

Add Some Humidity

Cold viruses live and thrive in dry conditions. This is why colds love the winter. By adding some humidity to your space you can kill those viruses in mid air. Make sure you keep your humidity free of mold. You could be doing more harm then good by spreading viruses around.

www.mayoclinic.com

Original article by Mimi Bullock

Here's a fabulous bath mixture to boost emmunity (From my Natural Healing Books)

Mix 5 drops eucalyptus essential oil (Eucalyptus globulus)
5 drops thyme essential oil
2 drops tea essential oil
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp vodka or gin

Massage your skin with gentle and circular motions while bathing to bring blood to the surface. In addition, a massage tones muscles and energizes the body.

Essential oil baths are great for colds, flu, and sinus infections.

Hi Stradee, some good stuff there to fight colds. Thanks a million.......
I love garlic anyway it comes. I sliver it and have it with a small piece of meat or something like that. It's pretty hot raw so be careful. You can heat it in the microwave for about 20 secs to take the spice out of it - it's just as effective either way.

Hi sumac, There are more clickers who visit but don't post - that's a good thing. My Patti is about the same. Some good days mixed in with a lot of bad days. There isn't anything anyone can do to help. No cure.

The prairie dog article is interesting. I always believed animals do communicate with some level of intelligence.

January 24, 2011

Cold Jumps Arctic ‘Fence,’ Stoking Winter’s Fury

By JUSTIN GILLIS
Judging by the weather, the world seems to have flipped upside down.

For two winters running, an Arctic chill has descended on Europe, burying that continent in snow and ice. Last year in the United States, historic blizzards afflicted the mid-Atlantic region. This winter the Deep South has endured unusual snowstorms and severe cold, and a frigid Northeast is bracing for what could shape into another major snowstorm this week.

Yet while people in Atlanta learn to shovel snow, the weather 2,000 miles to the north has been freakishly warm the past two winters. Throughout northeastern Canada and Greenland, temperatures in December ran as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Bays and lakes have been slow to freeze; ice fishing, hunting and trade routes have been disrupted.

Iqaluit, the capital of the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut, had to cancel its New Year’s snowmobile parade. David Ell, the deputy mayor, said that people in the region had been looking with envy at snowbound American and European cities. “People are saying, ‘That’s where all our snow is going!’ ” he said.

The immediate cause of the topsy-turvy weather is clear enough. A pattern of atmospheric circulation that tends to keep frigid air penned in the Arctic has weakened during the last two winters, allowing big tongues of cold air to descend far to the south, while masses of warmer air have moved north.

The deeper issue is whether this pattern is linked to the rapid changes that global warming is causing in the Arctic, particularly the drastic loss of sea ice. At least two prominent climate scientists have offered theories suggesting that it is. But others are doubtful, saying the recent events are unexceptional, or that more evidence over a longer period would be needed to establish a link.

Since satellites began tracking it in 1979, the ice on the Arctic Ocean’s surface in the bellwether month of September has declined by more than 30 percent. It is the most striking change in the terrain of the planet in recent decades, and a major question is whether it is starting to have an effect on broad weather patterns.

Ice reflects sunlight, and scientists say the loss of ice is causing the Arctic Ocean to absorb more heat in the summer. A handful of scientists point to that extra heat as a possible culprit in the recent harsh winters in Europe and the United States.

Their theories involve a fast-moving river of air called the jet stream that circles the Northern Hemisphere. Many winters, a strong pressure difference between the polar region and the middle latitudes channels the jet stream into a tight circle, or vortex, around the North Pole, effectively containing the frigid air at the top of the world.

“It’s like a fence,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a researcher in Camp Springs, Md., with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

When that pressure difference diminishes, however, the jet stream weakens and meanders southward, bringing warm air into the Arctic and cold air into the midlatitudes — exactly what has happened the last couple of winters. The effect is sometimes compared to leaving a refrigerator door open, with cold air flooding the kitchen even as warm air enters the refrigerator.

This has happened intermittently for many decades. Still, it is unusual for the polar vortex to weaken as much as it has lately. Last winter, one index related to the vortex hit its lowest wintertime value since record-keeping began in 1865, and it was quite low again in December.

James E. Overland, a climate scientist with NOAA in Seattle, has proposed that the extra warmth in the Arctic Ocean could be heating the atmosphere enough to make it less dense, causing the air pressure over the Arctic to be closer to that of the middle latitudes. “The added heat works against having a strong polar vortex,” he said.

But Dr. Overland acknowledges that his idea is tentative and needs further research. Many other climate scientists are not convinced, saying that a two-year span, however unusual, is not much on which to base a new theory. “We haven’t got sufficient insight to make definitive claims,” said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at a company called Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Mass., has spotted what he believes is a link between increasing snow in Siberia and the weakening of the polar vortex. In his theory, the extra snow is creating a dense, cold air mass over northern Asia in the late autumn, setting off a complex chain of cause and effect that ultimately perturbs the vortex.

Dr. Cohen said in an interview that the rising Siberian snow might, in turn, be linked to the decline of Arctic sea ice, with the open water providing extra moisture to the atmosphere — much as the Great Lakes produce heavy snows in cities like Buffalo and Syracuse. He is publishing seasonal forecasts based on his work, supported by the National Science Foundation. Those forecasts correctly predicted the recent harsh winters in the midlatitudes. But Dr. Cohen acknowledges, as does Dr. Overland, that some of his ideas are tentative and need further research.

The uncertainty about what is causing the strange winters highlights a core difficulty of climate science. While mainstream researchers are sure that greenhouse gases released by humans are warming the Earth, they acknowledge being on shakier ground in trying to predict the regional effects of that change. It is entirely possible, they say, that some regions will cool temporarily, because of disruption of the atmospheric and oceanic circulation, even as the Earth warms over all.

Bloggers who specialize in raising doubts about climate science have gleefully pointed to the recent winters in the United States and Europe as evidence that climatologists must be mistaken about a warming trend. These commentators have not been as eager to write about the strange warmth in parts of the Arctic, a region that scientists have long predicted will warm more rapidly than the planet as a whole.

Without doubt, the winter weather that began and ended 2010 was remarkable. Two of the 10 largest snowstorms in New York City history occurred last year, including the one that disrupted travel right after Christmas. The two snowstorms that fell on Washington and surrounding areas within a week in February had no known precedent in their overall impact on the region, with total accumulations of 40 inches in some places.

But the winters were not the whole story. Even without them, 2010 would have gone down as one of the strangest years in the annals of climatology, thanks in part to a weather condition known as El Niño, which dumped heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere early in the year. Later, the ocean surface cooled, a condition known as La Niña, contributing to heavy rainfall in many places.

Despite cooling from La Niña, newly compiled figures show that 2010 was among the two warmest years in the historical record. It featured a heat wave in Russia, all-time high temperatures in at least 17 countries, the hottest summer in New York City history, and devastating floods in Pakistan, China, Australia, the United States and other countries.

“It was a wild year,” said Christopher C. Burt, a weather historian for Weather Underground, an Internet site.

Still, however erratic the weather may have become, it is not obvious to most people how global warming could lead to frigid winters. Many scientists are hesitant to back such assertions, at least until they gain a better understanding of what is going on in the Arctic.

In interviews, several scientists recalled that in the decade ending in the mid-1990s, the polar vortex seemed to be strengthening, not weakening, producing mild winters in the eastern United States and western Europe.

At the time, some climate scientists wrote papers attributing that change to global warming. Newspapers, including this one, printed laments for winter lost. But soon after, the apparent trend went away, an experience that has made many researchers more cautious.

John M. Wallace, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, wrote some of the earlier papers. This time around, he said, it will take a lot of evidence to convince him that a few harsh winters in London or Washington have anything to do with global warming.

“Just when you publish something and it looks like you’re seeing a connection,” Dr. Wallace said, “nature has a way of humbling us.”

January 24, 2011

Director of Policy on Climate Will Leave, Her Goal Unmet

By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON — Carol M. Browner, the White House coordinator for energy and climate change policy, will leave the administration shortly, officials confirmed Monday night. Her departure signals at least a temporary slowing of the ambitious environmental goals of President Obama’s first two years in the face of new Republican strength in Congress.

Ms. Browner, a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was charged with directing the administration’s effort to enact comprehensive legislation to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases and moving the country away from a dependence on dirty-burning fossil fuels. That effort foundered in Congress last year, and Mr. Obama has acknowledged that no major climate change legislation is likely to pass in the next two years.

No decision has been made on whether she would be replaced or if the position would simply disappear, a White House official said.

“She will stay on as long as necessary to ensure an orderly transition,” a White House official said. “Carol is confident that the mission of her office will remain critical to the president.”

News of her departure was first reported by Politico.

An aide to Ms. Browner said she was proud of her White House accomplishments, including helping to coordinate response to the BP oil spill and fashioning a deal under which automobile fuel efficiency will increase by nearly 25 percent over the next five years. The aide said Ms. Browner was also pleased that Mr. Obama’s State of the Union message would include a strong endorsement of the clean-energy policies she championed.

But she is leaving with her major goals unmet and the E.P.A. — where she served for eight years under President Bill Clinton — under siege by Republicans who believe it is strangling job creation by imposing costly new pollution rules.

In recent weeks there has been speculation that Ms. Browner would be moved to another senior position at the White House, perhaps deputy chief of staff, with a broader portfolio. But those rumors did not pan out and instead Ms. Browner decided to return to the private sector.

Ms. Browner is known as a savvy navigator of the bureaucracy and a strong voice for environmental protection in a White House that was focused more on health care and the economy. Her departure leaves the administration’s other major environmental and energy policy makers without a strong advocate at the White House.

But in the face of Republican skepticism about climate change and strong opposition to environmental regulation, the administration will be spending more time defending the modest policy gains of the past two years than advancing new proposals.

Scott Segal, an energy expert at Bracewell & Giuliani, a law and lobbying firm in Washington, said Ms. Browner’s leaving might be a sign that the administration would be more sensitive to the concerns of business.

Garlic is the best! Roasted, mashed for taters, salads, every dish on the planet...(well, maybe not oatmeal) plus, a good disease fighter...love garlic!

Sorry hearing Pattie isn't doing well healthwise. Maybe a trip somewhere will pick up her spirits...Italy! Tuscany!

Speaking of...my good friend Joy and I, over lunch, talked about her trip to Southern Italy, then Greece. Northern Italy early Spring...I'm packing! My friend said "Shirl, when you visit Italy, you won't leave"!
The Villa calls.



sue and dan, I really like the Waterkeeper Alliance...Waterkeeper Alliance is among the world’s fastest growing environmental organizations, with nearly 200 local Waterkeepers patrolling rivers, lakes and coastal waterways on six continents.

Riverkeeper voices skepticism over Alcoa data

By David Bodenheimer
The Dispatch

Published: Monday, January 24, 2011 at 5:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, January 21, 2011 at 4:26 p.m.
The rift between Alcoa Power Generating Inc. and Yadkin Riverkeeper Dean Naujoks increased last week after Naujoks accused a recent report on dissolved oxygen levels from Alcoa of being misleading.

The state revoked Alcoa’s 401 water quality certification last month after officials with the Division of Water Quality said Alcoa intentionally withheld information on the Yadkin Hydroelectric Project’s ability to meet the state’s standards for dissolved oxygen levels.

Alcoa has since claimed that DO levels met the state standard 99.9 percent of the time in 2010 for water discharged from the project. Alcoa’s report does state water flowing into High Rock Lake has relatively low DO levels but says those levels improve at Narrows Dam, where Alcoa installed new technology in 2008 and 2009, and that improvement maintains until water exits the project at Falls Dam. Alcoa says tailwaters at Narrows met DO standards 93.4 percent of the time in 2010, and tailwaters from Falls met the standard 99.9 percent of the time in that same year.

But tailwaters from High Rock and Tuckertown met DO standards less frequently last year. High Rock met DO levels 65 percent of the time and Tuckertown waters only 56 percent of the time. Alcoa says this could be due to annual variability in hydrologic and meteorological conditions or changes in the quality of the water entering High Rock Lake.

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http://www.the-dispatch.com/article/20110124/NEWS/101244001/1005?Title=Riverkeeper-voices-skepticism-over-Alcoa-data

JANUARY 24, 2011, 2:43 PM

NASA’s Hansen Presses Obama for a Carbon Cost and Nuclear Push

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
A host of thinkers and doers focused on energy and climate have contributed statements they’d give if President Obama used his State of the Union message to announce a listening tour on how to shape a sustained American energy quest.

They include Nate Lewis, the head of one of the “innovation hubs” created by the Department of Energy, the author and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Gal Luft, an expert on energy security.

Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times James Hansen in 2008.
Here’s another, from James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist, author and anti-coal campaigner. (There are more coming later today.)

In 2001, Hansen was among a variety of climate scientists who were brought in to brief the full Bush cabinet, including Vice President Cheney.

I’ve asked Hansen periodically if he’s been consulted by the Obama White House in its first two years. Not yet, is the answer.

Presumably this is because, even though Hansen is a leading, if sometimes controversial, climate researcher, his personal views on energy policy clash with those the administration first focused on.

If there’s another reason, I can’t think of it.

Whether you agree or completely differ with Hansen, not having him as part of a national energy and climate conversation seems pretty ill considered. Here’s what he wrote:

It would have made good sense to give energy/climate a high priority right at the start. Solving our fossil fuel addiction and altering the course of global warming can be handled with a good overall strategy, but that strategy would not be based on a compromise that has special interests defining the details.

That’s why I wrote a letter to Michelle and Barack Obama [in 2008], starting it while stuck in London, where Anniek [Hansen's wife] had a heart attack. John Holdren agreed to deliver the letter, but not until after he was confirmed, so I made it a public letter. I understand that John told the media that he was not free to discuss what he communicated to the President and what reaction he received. In any case, I never heard back anything from the White House.

Another reason for concern: the President’s comment on global warming in his 2009 State of the Union message, which began with something to the effect: I know some of you don’t believe in global warming…

It is not a matter of belief. Galileo had to accept the reality that whether the Earth orbited the sun or vice versa was a matter of belief (if he did not want to go to an early grave), so he recanted his statements (probably with his fingers crossed).

But we are not living in a time when beliefs should trump science. The President should use his ascendancy to the most powerful position on the planet to help set a new sensible course for the planet and humanity. It would have required being blunt and honest about the situation and what was needed to break our addiction and avoid the tremendous inter-generational injustice that the present path will bring to pass. The path to a clean energy future would not be painful for the public, but it requires standing up to special interests who benefit from business-as-usual.

It is both a moral issue and a question of where the United States will stand in the future. Our economic standing is going to become second class this century if we do not move smartly toward a clean energy future.

No where is the lame middle-of-the-road go-slow compromise approach clearer than in the case of nuclear power. The Administration has been reluctant to admit that the Carter and Clinton/Gore administrations made a huge mistake in pulling the U.S. back from development of advanced nuclear technology.

That is the way to make nuclear power safer (nuclear power already has the best safety record of any major industry in the United States) and resistant to weapons proliferation. The approach to nuclear power is to take a few baby steps with current technology. People such as Bill Gates are despairing at the lack of leadership in Washington — investing his own money in development of advanced reactor designs.

But even Bill Gates does not have enough money to make up for the lack of dynamic leadership in Washington. If we took advantage of our brainpower (which is rapidly aging!), we could still be the leader in developing safer clean energy for the future and producing a better future for our children, rather than going after the last drop of oil in pristine environments, off-shore, in the tar sands. It is such a purblind foolish approach. We need someone with the courage to stand up to the special interests who have hamstrung U.S. policy, including the minority of anti-nukes who have controlled the energy policy of the Democratic party.

We are still waiting for an Abraham Lincoln, a leader who will stand tall. It is a moral matter. Lincoln would not have released half of the slaves….

The other thing not mentioned above is that the most fundamental problem, which I keep repeating, is this: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, somebody will keep burning them — implication, we must put a rising price on carbon. (Not cap-and-trade! A simple, honest approach — collect a fee from fossil fuel companies at first sale, distribute that money, 100 percent, to the public.)

Nevertheless, the easiest thing that he could do, and perhaps the best that we can hope for, is for him to give a strong boost to nuclear power.

Unfortunately, he seems to fall prey to Democratic politics on this, rather than being a responsible leader.

Hi Stradee and sumac --- good articles - I'll have to come back to finish reading everything.

I spent a lot of money and time going through business courses to get my BS and I could have done it a lot cheaper and faster if I had gone the "Father Sarduchi" (sp) way.........."Buy low, Sell high". That unfortunately is the methodology of business. And the energy companies will use it till the earth ends or the natural elements are all gone.

Thanks for the clicks - I see a tree asmiling.............

Stradee, if you get a chance go to Italy. The only thing to look out for is other drivers - unless you are a race track pro, it would be better for you to take a bus everywhere you go over there. Wow. We can't go anywhere anymore - unless it's wheelchair accessable. That's rough with bags.