Category: Environment & Weather

A report on the legislation in The New York Times begins:

Private companies and individuals would be able to buy large tracts of federal land, from sagebrush basins to high-peak hiking trails around the West, under the terms of the spending bill passed Friday by a two-vote margin in the House of Representatives.

On the surface, the bill reads like the mundane nip and tuck of federal mining law its authors say it is. But lawyers who have parsed its language say the real beneficiaries could be real estate developers, whose business has become a more potent economic engine in the West than mining.

Key point: “Environmental groups, looking to the database of mining claims created by their colleagues at the Environmental Working Group, say private owners could gain title to 5.7 million acres of federal forests, rocky promontories and grasslands.”

Another: “‘They’d have to be willing to defraud the U.S. government,’ said Carol Raulston, a spokeswoman for the mining industry’s trade group, the National Mining Association.”

Anyone think developers and mining companies wouldn’t be willing to try and defraud the government?

While environmentalists worry about the backyard of ANWR, the developers are stealing the whole house.

Panda Cam from the San Diego Zoo.

Link via Ed Bott

After three decades of successful conservation efforts involving federal and state agencies and many other partners, the greater Yellowstone population of grizzly bears has recovered and no longer needs the protection of the Endangered Species Act, Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced today.

As a result, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to remove the Yellowstone population from the list of threatened and endangered species. Four other grizzly populations in the lower 48 states have not yet recovered and will continue to be protected as threatened species under the Act.

“When it was listed in 1975, this majestic animal that greeted Lewis and Clark on their historic expedition stood at risk of disappearing from the American West,” Norton said. “Thanks to the work of many partners, more than 600 grizzlies now inhabit the Yellowstone ecosystem and the population is no longer threatened.” “With a comprehensive conservation strategy ready to be put into place upon delisting, we are confident that the future of the grizzly bear in Yellowstone is bright,” she said. “Our grandchildren’s grandchildren will see grizzly bears roaming Yellowstone.”

U.S. Department of the Interior

Again, the Astronomy Picture of the Day deserves your click.

“The NHC does not use the letters X, Y or Z to name storms. This is the first time it has exhausted the Roman alphabet and has had to resort to the Greek one to name storms in the Atlantic basin.”

Yahoo! News

Why not aAron, aBraham, aChilles, aDrienne, aEsop, aF…? Guess it wouldn’t work. I can’t think of any aF names.

A study conducted by scientists in the U.S. and Italy warns that summers could be a lot hotter in a hundred years because of global warming caused by greenhouse gases.

“Summer is likely to be more severely hot everywhere in the U.S.,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University who co-authored study.

“In the Southwest, if you imagine the hottest two and a half weeks of the year, you’re looking at that becoming three months long. Phoenix [Arizona] will get three months of what is now the hottest two weeks of the year.”

Winter weather could be affected as well, Diffenbaugh said. “You’re looking at the coldest couple of weeks of the year not existing anymore in lot of places,” he said.

“Certainly winter as we know it likely will disappear in the Northeast.”

National Geographic News

In NewMexiKen’s view Phoenix already gets “get three months of what is now the hottest two weeks of the year.”

Oh well, I intend to move to a milder climate before 2105 anyway.

The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in a century, continuing a trend toward less summer ice that is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, various experts on the region said today.

The findings are consistent with recent computer simulations showing that a buildup of smokestack and tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases could lead to a profoundly transformed Arctic later this century in which much of the once ice-locked ocean is routinely open water in summers.

Source: The New York Times

But today two Japanese scientists, Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, report in a leading British biological journal that they have made the world’s first observations of a giant squid in the wild.

Working about 600 miles south of Tokyo off the Bonin Islands, known in Japan as the Ogasawara Islands, they photographed the creature with a robotic camera at a depth of 3,000 feet. During a struggle lasting more than four hours, the animal, about 26 feet long, took the proffered bait and eventually broke free, leaving behind an 18-foot length of tentacle.

The giant squid, the researchers conclude, “appears to be a much more active predator than previously suspected, using its elongate feeding tentacles to strike and tangle prey.” The tentacles could apparently coil into a ball, much as a python envelops its victims.

Source: The New York Times

Like the one that almost got Captain Nemo!

Update: National Geographic has photos.

NewMexiKen doesn’t actually think hurricanes are to be taken lightly, but I just couldn’t neglect reporting on this particular Pacific storm:

Hurricane Kenneth is just one of a series of tropical storms which have formed in the middle of September off the coast of Baja California. At the time of this image, it was bracketed by Hurricane Jova to the west and Tropical Storm Max to the east.

— NASA

NOAA’s map showing Strike Probabilities for Rita.

A fascinating article about whale watching off Santa Barbara from the Los Angeles Times. It concludes:

But a blue it is.

A huge blue. Gently swimming across our bow, it breaks the surface with a head like a Titan rocket. Then more of it follows, and more still. And yet more after that — a vast, undulating grain silo moving through the choppy water, its glistening topside and the great bulk beneath reflecting the daylight and illuminating the dark sea.

Rhythmically, it blows, replenishing oxygen after diving and taking a throat-engorging gulp of krill. The ph-whoosh of its twin blowholes could be the sound of an air leak from deep inside the membrane of the planet.

Then something unexpected happens. The experts and whale-watching veterans start dancing on tiptoes.

Regal and blasé, blues almost always ignore a boat nearby. They surface, breathe for a few moments and vanish again for 10 or 15 minutes at a spell. But this one turns to investigate, slow and wide, in the way a ship would change course.

Now, it is heading for us. Its colossal torso carves waves through the Pacific and churns up a trail of backwash. Gouts of steam jet skyward as it exhales.

The Condor Express is 75 feet long. This whale figures to be 80 feet, some aboard estimate 90 — almost the length of a basketball court.

It comes alongside the starboard rail. A couple of car-lengths pass before a bulging, monstrous eye, still below the surface, glides by. For just an instant, the world of water meets the world above. All those years ago, the grade-school teacher was wrong, wonderfully wrong. The living proof fills you with joy.

From the Los Angeles Times, A Southwestern legend returns:

“WHAT DO I DO about a leopard in my yard?”

My mom is on the phone, and I’m not sure how to answer. She lives in the Catalina Mountain foothills north of Tucson where mountain lions can occasionally cause a stir. But a leopard?

She tells me that it all began with the barking of her Maltese dog, and when she looked out the window, she saw a large cat moving along the inside wall of her courtyard. The cat, which measured nearly 5 feet long — with a tail of comparable length — leapt over the wall and disappeared. I told her to call Arizona Game and Fish.

Tim Snow, a specialist with the department, arrived at her home a few minutes before I did, and although we searched, we couldn’t locate any tracks in the dry ground. Tim told me that he gets a few reports like this every year from the Catalina foothills. What my mom had seen in her yard, identified from a lineup of various photographs, was a jaguar, the dappled cat, the world’s third largest and the only one in the New World that roars.

At Slate, C. Josh Donlan suggests we “rewild” America. He begins:

As the first Americans strolled onto their open real estate 13,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, their continent quickly lost much of its grandeur. More than 60 North American species weighing over 100 pounds went extinct, including the continent’s own elephants, lions, camels, and cheetahs. The cause was likely overhunting; the result was elephants trotting in the circus ring rather than roaming the land. Meanwhile, most of the Earth’s remaining large wild animals in Africa and Asia are threatened with extinction in the coming century.

“Rewilding”—bringing elephants, cheetahs, and lions out of captivity to run free in parts of North America—could help save these megafauna from global extinction. More important, it would restore to the continent biological functions lost millenniums ago. The big guys would help stop the march of the pests and weeds—rats and dandelions—that will otherwise take over the landscape. And they would promote the natural processes that generate biodiversity. For example, for more than 4 million years before its extinction, the American cheetah preyed on the deerlike pronghorn, a relationship that helped engender the pronghorn’s astonishing speed.

My god, people go crazy now when some poor bear wanders down from the mountains. Can you imagine the reaction to an elephant?

An essay in The New York Times assesses “Mother Nature’s Blockbusters” — beauty vs. the sublime. (Thanks to Veronica for the pointer.)

Museums may display what man has made of nature, but these parks and preserves display what nature has made of itself. Works of culture transform nature; they picture it, use it, abstract from it. One is humbled by the Canadian Rockies and Glacier National Park in Montana because nature doesn’t return the compliment. It makes nothing of culture; it looms over it, declaring its supreme autonomy and power.

While an article in the Los Angeles Times tells of the nature of the beast.

A chilling race transforms a couple’s 10-day rafting trip through Alaska’s Arctic wildlife refuge. Their exclusive story drops us into the path of a grizzly intent upon only one thing — its prey.

From a surprising article in the Los Angeles Times:

But what he’s uncovered already is surprising, both for the seasoned wilderness traveler as well as the day hiker who stares longingly at a gushing river and wonders whether it’s safe to take a slug. At many trails and backcountry camps throughout California, signs warn visitors off casual sipping. But are the dangers of Giardia lamblia, E. coli, Cryptosporidium and other bugs that wreak intestinal havoc grossly exaggerated?

Derlet thinks so, and his research reveals that the water is much cleaner than most people believe. His findings thrust him into the middle of a long-simmering controversy that’s blatantly at odds with what many state biologists preach and what wilderness classes teach: Purify water before drinking. But is that really necessary? Do those high-priced pumps, chemical disinfectants and elaborate filtration gadgets truly merit a place in the backpack?

…

The available scientific evidence, which is admittedly limited because of the scarcity of funding for testing wilderness water quality, confirms Derlet’s findings. The threat is comparable to the chances of beachgoers being attacked by a shark, according to University of Cincinnati researchers who studied the danger giardia poses to backpackers, namely “an extraordinarily rare event to which the public and the press have seemingly devoted inappropriate attention.”

Chinese elephants are evolving into an increasingly tuskless breed because poaching is changing the gene pool, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

Five to 10 percent of Asian elephants in China now had a gene that prevented the development of tusks, up from the usual 2 to 5 percent, the China Daily said, quoting research from Beijing Normal University.

“The larger tusks the male elephant has, the more likely it will be shot by poachers,” said researcher Zhang Li, an associate professor of zoology. “Therefore, the ones without tusks survive, preserving the tuskless gene in the species.”

Reuters via AOL News

From the article mentioned in the next entry:

Just this last year [Stewart Udall] rafted down the Colorado River from Lees Ferry — named for Udall’s grandfather — and, with a grandson, trekked from the floor of the Grand Canyon up Bright Angel Trail some 7,000 feet to the South Rim. His family had cautioned against it, and he rejected a Park Service offer of a mule. “They wouldn’t have liked it if I hadn’t made it,” he recounted, “but what a way to go.” Once at the South Rim, Udall marched straight to the bar at the Tovar Lodge and ordered a martini.

A profile of The West’s defender of wild places, Stewart Udall, from the Los Angeles Times. It begins:

On a late spring day, with streambeds roaring and the sun breaking through the thin mountain air, Stewart Udall has just crossed a calf-deep creek, rushing with late-season snowmelt from the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico. His corduroy pants are drenched at the cuffs, his sneakers muddied and soaked. Udall is on the Rio en Medio Trail, a popular and well-watered seven-mile hike a good half hour out of Santa Fe.

Udall, who turned 85 in January, has slowed down in recent years. Age, the death of his wife and a degenerative eye condition have contributed, but once on the trail, he gamely sloshes ahead, grasping drooping branches and, if needed, an outstretched hand.

“This is good wilderness,” he says, his somber voice lightening up. “Any time you have to struggle a bit to cross a stream you’ve got good wilderness.”

Good wilderness. That’s what Udall can boast about. As secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — and one of the architects of the Wilderness Act — he is perhaps the politician most responsible for the public lands you hike, the rivers you kayak, the mountains you climb and the wilderness you contemplate. And it is this legacy that he is most fearful will be lost.