Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Clicketly, click, click.

Good Saturday sue and dan

Yep, storms lasted three weeks...snow, rain, sleet...name it, it was dropped. Three days of beautiful spring weather giving way to Saturday showers today.

sue, glad you all are finally getting rain! Spring plantings...yaaaaaaaay

Tahoe had a rough winter...Higway 80 was closed two...slides, vehicle wrecks, and five feet of snow covering the second driving lane. Amazing. The drought is officially over says Jerry Brown. Must be true.

Got a few days outside work done...lawns are happy green...transplanted yesterday...some of the potted plants are winter tweekin'...lots to do.

Not finding much in the way of employment...keeping the search going...maybe something will become available soon. Need a diversion from the house! Peeling wallpaper as we speak. yuk

Not much more news dearhearts. Stradee is either working, or F.B ing or looking for a job...plus still trying to save the planet (an exercise in futility) however, we've made huge strides in animal welfare/care. DNA's the newest tool for putting animal abusers in jail. The NIH is also doing something finally to get rid of most class B dealers. Good news.

Now if we can convince the gov that animal testing is both cruel and useless, we'll have made monumental progress.

Moving right along....take good care. ♥

April 2, 2011

Mother Nature’s Melting Pot

By HUGH RAFFLES
THE anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping the country, from draconian laws in Arizona to armed militias along the Mexican border, has taken many Americans by surprise. It shouldn’t — nativism runs deep in the United States. Just ask our non-native animals and plants: they too are commonly labeled as aliens, even though they also provide significant benefits to their new home.

While the vanguard of the anti-immigrant crusade is found among the likes of the Minutemen and the Tea Party, the native species movement is led by environmentalists, conservationists and gardeners. Despite cultural and political differences, both are motivated — in Margaret Thatcher’s infamous phrase — by the fear of being swamped by aliens.

But just as America is a nation built by waves of immigrants, our natural landscape is a shifting mosaic of plant and animal life. Like humans, plants and animals travel, often in ways beyond our knowledge and control. They arrive unannounced, encounter unfamiliar conditions and proceed to remake each other and their surroundings.

Designating some as native and others as alien denies this ecological and genetic dynamism. It draws an arbitrary historical line based as much on aesthetics, morality and politics as on science, a line that creates a mythic time of purity before places were polluted by interlopers.

What’s more, many of the species we now think of as natives may not be especially well suited to being here. They might be, in an ecological sense, temporary residents, no matter how permanent they seem to us.

These “native” species can have serious effects on their environment. Take the mountain pine beetle: thanks to climate change, its population is exploding in the West, devastating hundreds of thousands of square miles of forest.

It’s true that some non-native species have brought with them expensive and well-publicized problems; zebra mussels, nutria and kudz

Hi Stradee and sumac -------- Grreat clicking all.

sue, the stuff that is brought into the US with all the good intentions is amazing. Tumbleweeds for example - seen forever in western movies - all imported.

Hey, sumac --- big rain storm heading your way.

Good saving trees all good rain forest clickers.

April 4, 2011

Multitude of Species Face Climate Threat

By CARL ZIMMER
Over the past 540 million years, life on Earth has passed through five great mass extinctions. In each of those catastrophes, an estimated 75 percent or more of all species disappeared in a few million years or less.

For decades, scientists have warned that humans may be ushering in a sixth mass extinction, and recently a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, tested the hypothesis. They applied new statistical methods to a new generation of fossil databases. As they reported last month in the journal Nature, the current rate of extinctions is far above normal. If endangered species continue to disappear, we will indeed experience a sixth extinction, over just the next few centuries or millennia.

The Berkeley scientists warn that their new study may actually grossly underestimate how many species could disappear. So far, humans have pushed species toward extinctions through means like hunting, overfishing and deforestation. Global warming, on the other hand, is only starting to make itself felt in the natural world. Many scientists expect that as the planet’s temperature rises, global warming could add even more devastation. “The current rate and magnitude of climate change are faster and more severe than many species have experienced in their evolutionary history,” said Anthony Barnosky, the lead author of the Nature study.

But equally as strong as the conclusion that global warming can push extinctions is the difficulty in linking the fate of any single species to climate. Policy makers would like to get a better idea of exactly what to expect — how many species will risk extinction, and which ones are most likely to wink out of existence. But scientists who study the impact of global warming on biodiversity are pushing back against the pressure for detailed forecasts. While it’s clear that global warming’s impact could potentially be huge, scientists are warning that it’s still impossible to provide fine-grained predictions.

“We need to stand firm about the real complexity of biological systems and not let policy makers push us into simplistic answers,” said Camille Parmesan, a biologist at the University of Texas. She an

I can't copy any more than that. Something is the matter with my computer. You'll have to track it down in Tuesday's NYT.

April 4, 2011
The Dollars and Cents of Bats and Farming
Putting a dollar value on nature and the services it provides isn’t easy. Such numbers can show how much our human economy depends on nature’s indiscernible economy. Take bats. A study in Science magazine reveals just how important they are to American agriculture.

Every day, a bat eats much of its body weight in insects, many of them harmful to crops. A group of scientists led by Thomas Kunz at Boston University calculated how much more money cotton farmers in one region of Texas would spend on pesticides if bats weren’t present. Extrapolating from those numbers, they estimated that bats save American farmers somewhere between $3.7 billion and $54 billion a year, most likely about $22.9 billion.

This is a huge savings no one notices as long as bats flourish. But bat populations are severely threatened, especially the commonest species, the little brown bat, which is being decimated by a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome. The disease has spread all across the eastern half of the country and is now moving westward from Oklahoma.

In 2010, Interior Department agencies spent $6.3 million researching and trying to prevent the spread of white-nose syndrome. That money was taken from other programs, and it was barely a start. What’s needed now is financing specifically allocated to staff continuous bat research. The Interior Department should not have to borrow from itself to protect these creatures that are so important to American agriculture. We know all of the talk in Washington these days is about cutting, but spending a little more now could save us a fortune later.

Glad that we're saving trees, Danon. You think we should raise our sites to a small rainforest?

Hoping your weren't washed away by the storm...........
That was a big one by the time it got to your side of the US.

Yeah, our own little rainforest - sounds great.

sumac, sounds like you may already have your own rainforest.........

Good clicking.

I just saw something strange this morning on the nat'l news --- chunks of ice the size of a house floating down the Mississippi river taking out docks and other stuff. Wow.

Keep the clicks acoming............

Hi danon, we have saved another tree today..........

One of my favorite "T" shirts = "I used to be schizophrenic, but now we are ok."

My favorite bumper sticker that I made up = "Read My Lawyers Lips"

Framing the Climate Debate

Barbara R. Jasny
How concerned are Americans on the whole about global warming? Yeager et al. have found that the answer may depend on what exactly the question is. Pollsters regularly pose a "most important problem" (MIP) question originally devised by George Gallup in the 1930s: "What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?" Only 1 to 2% of respondents to this question in three surveys conducted by the authors offered global warming or the environment as an answer. However, if instead the question posed was "What do you think will be the most serious problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?" global warming/environment emerged as the most frequent response, its percentage more than 10-fold higher than before. Shuldt et al. examined the partisan subtleties of wording choice. They found that the Web sites of conservative think tanks use the phrase "global warming" more frequently than "climate change," whereas the reverse was true of liberal think tank sites. They then surveyed a sample of Americans to probe the impact of these distinct phrases and found that self-identified Republicans were more likely (by a 3:2 margin) to consider climate change a real phenomenon than global warming. Democrats were not affected by the wording, nor did educational attainment appear to favor one response over the other.
Public Opin. Q. 75, 125;115 (2011).

There you are.......... I thought you may have gotten washed away by the weather in your area......

Thanks for the article --- both libs and cons are correct - they just have a different way of saying it. Sort of makes em feel better I suppose.

April 10, 2011

Bluefin Tuna Catch a (Small) Break

The numbers of endangered bluefin tuna are rapidly dwindling, due to vast overfishing fueled by Japan’s insatiable sushi appetite. The international body set up to conserve these fish has utterly failed to do its job. But a small and clever innovation may slow their decline: special hooks designed to help commercial fishing boats in the Gulf of Mexico avoid catching bluefin accidentally.

The hooks are simply thinner than usual, and bend under the weight of a bluefin, whose average size when caught in the gulf is 485 pounds. The hooks still work for yellowfin tuna and swordfish, which weigh a lot less. Fishing for bluefin in the gulf has been illegal since the 1980s, but longline boats often catch them without meaning to. Whether landed or released, the bluefin die.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will require the 50 longline vessels in the gulf to start using the hooks on May 5. Some fishermen are already using them, because they work so well. The sooner the better, because the gulf is where the bluefin spawn each spring.

Even if the new hook ends bluefin bycatch completely, it will only slow the species’ extinction spiral. The only real hope for survival is for the world to ban international trade in bluefin, as it has for the tiger and blue whale.

The United States supports such a move, and the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species could have done so last year. But its members buckled under ferocious lobbying from Japan. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, responsible for regulating the bluefin catch, has for years ignored the advice of its own scientists and set quotas unsustainably high. Stocks of Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin dropped by more than 60 percent just in the last decade. Time is running out.

Clicks done. Hope those wildfires are nowhere near you Danon.

Nope sumac, TX is still a large area of land........ The fires are in the West and S West........ That's hundreds of miles away from me........ Thanks!!!!

Great creaking everyone..............!

Hey y'll, the weathers finally warming! Hu-friggin'-ray!

Lots of damage...houses exploding from leaking propane tanks that generally arn't buried underneath 10 feet of snow-there may be involuntary evacuations pronounced for those living in eastern Placer Co. Tahoe is faring ok...hoping Mother Nature doesn't warm the area to quickly. Amazing how much snow/rain/ fell during the winter...and we may not be done yet!

Landscaping singin' right along with the pines...trees dressing for summer...rosa banks sprouting a zillion flower clusters, lawns look amazing...beautiful Spring.

Had enough rain yet, sue? Yaaaaaaaaaa! Haven't been watching much news lately...super busy...what fires, Dan! Fareing better than poor Japan! Sure, i'll support nuclear power...especially the plants built on the San Andreas Fault. I cannot fathom the stupidity!

Another bit of sad news...the damned government has decided to eliminate protections for gray wolves. The language being considered removes federal protections from wolves (“delists” wolves from the endangered species list) not only in Idaho and Montana... but also in states like Oregon and Washington where the wolf population is only now beginning to get a toehold. Tucked neatly away in the 'funding bill' so the government can keep running (what a crock of crap)! I have some 'language' for the lame brains calling themselves lawmakers. Go to hell and take your lobby friends with you. Ass holes.

Other than my continued (and it seems futile) efforts to save wildlife, life is ok...except for the lieing sacks of doodoo dictating how Americans should live...anyhooo that's all the news. Can't be ranting all day...have much to do.

No, i am not politcally correct, never will be, and till my dieing day i'll be fighting for those with no voice.

Hi Stradee............. I like the term "lieing sacks of ****"

Well, if you meet a Congress person --- and their lips are moving --- you know they are lieing.............

Thanks.................

Dan, you bet!

You and sue and all the wildclickers, have a good week and keep the faith.