City Coyotes
Coyotes and humans in close proximity. Coyotes are
becoming very comfortable in urban settings.The challenge is for humans to
understand how to interact with their neighbors without conflict. It is a wildlife management issue and a
political issue.
There’s much researchers still don’t know
about urban coyotes, according to one biologist who has been working to gather
more scientific information on coyotes specifically in the Southern California
area.
“We’re seriously lacking in a lot of
scientifically based information when it comes to coyote management,” said
biologist Niamh Quinn of the University of California Division of Agriculture
and Natural Resources.
The urban coyote issue is complex, Quinn
said, and can quickly become clouded — and heated — by feelings. It’s very emotional and political,” she
said. “It should be influenced by science and only science, not emotion and
politics.”
Quinn dismisses the often-repeated layman’s
theory that the coyotes are coming in “from the hills” because of the drought
and are starving in the city. Several generations of coyotes now have been
born and raised — and are staying — within city boundaries, she said,
apparently finding more resources than they would in rural areas.
“These coyotes are (now originally) from
urban neighborhoods,” Quinn said. “They’re potentially just reproducing
successful generation after successful generation.”
Plastic In the Oceans
Massive
islands of plastic bottles, foam and other litter. And,it almost all comes from land-based sources. And, the real killer isn’t what’s floating on
the surface, it’s the microplastics – fragments that breakdown and enter the
food chain.
The graph, provided by UK-based Eunomia
Research & Consulting, shows that more than 80 percent of the annual input
of plastic litter, such as drink bottles and plastic packaging, comes from
land-based sources. The remainder comes from plastics released at sea, such as
lost and discarded fishing gear.
Significantly, Eunomia was able to come up
with a new estimate of annual global emissions of “primary” microplastics, such
as microbeads, fibers or pellets. (“Secondary” microplastics are the result of
larger pieces of plastic breaking down into smaller pieces.)
The firm calculated that emissions of
microplastics range from 0.5 to 1.4 million tonnes per year, with a mid-point
estimate of 0.95 million tonnes. Vehicle tires are the biggest culprits,
releasing 270 thousand tonnes of debris into our waterways annually.
These tiny non-biodegradable pieces of
plastic are a cause for worry, as they are being gobbled up by plankton and
baby fish like junk food, and works its way up the food chain. Microplastics
have been found in in ice cores, across the seafloor, vertically throughout the
ocean and on every beach worldwide. As EcoWatch mentioned previously, microplastics
are also very absorbent, meaning they pick up the chemicals it floats in.
Roughly 8 million tons of plastic is dumped
into the world’s oceans every year, and according to a new study, the majority
of this waste comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, the
Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
It appears that these five countries are
responsible for up to 60 percent of the marine plastic entering our oceans,
according to Stemming the Tide, a study released last month by the Ocean
Conservancy and McKinsey Center for Business and Environment.
Why are these parts of Asia leaking so much
plastic? Well, as the study suggests, these emerging countries are experiencing
rapid economic growth, reduced poverty and improved quality of life. This
development is, of course, fantastic. However, as these economies grow, so does
the consumer use of plastic and plastic-intensive goods.
The caveat of this increased plastic demand
is that these countries do not yet have waste-management infrastructures that
can tackle the accompanying excess waste.
ExxonMobile – Liars
Exxon trying to pretend that they didn’t know in the 1970s that fossil fuels were going to increase global C02 build-up. No, they did and instead of looking for a
solution they went to work developing a network of phony think-tanks and paid “expert”
deniers. I look forward to the results
of the 17 state investigation already in progress – and hope for more to come.
Acting like a wounded and cornered beast,
ExxonMobil has launched what appears to be a blatantly retaliatory and
frivolous lawsuit against Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.
Beneath a very thin veil, this legal
maneuver by Exxon is seemingly an effort to intimidate any and all who seek to
hold the oil giant accountable for its multi-million dollar campaign to attack
climate science and sow doubt through decades of deception.
Just to remind everyone – 17 Attorneys
General are investigating what Exxon knew about climate science and when, as
well as what the company has done to potentially mislead policymakers and the
public in order to delay action to address climate change.
Exxon has claimed that there has always been
uncertainty within the company about the role of fossil fuels in causing
climate change.
Yet, as InsideClimate News and the LA Times
and Columbia School of Journalism and the Center for International
Environmental Law and other investigations have pointed out, Exxon and others
in the oil industry had advanced knowledge of the link between fossil fuel combustion
and global warming decades ago.
View From The Top
There are two types of
auroras - Aurora Borealis, which means 'dawn of the north', and Aurora
Australis, 'dawn of the south.'
The lights are created
when charged particles from the sun enter Earth's atmosphere.
Usually the particles
are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field, but some enter the atmosphere and
collide with gas particles.
These collisions emit
light, in many colours although pale green and pink are common.
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