DAILY QUICK READ - JULY 13, 2016

It’s the Speed of Things

The natural world is always changing.  That’s why we believe in evolution.  But, human caused climate change accelerates the process.  Not quick a global extinction event, but pretty close.  Stress, disease, lack of natural predators all feed this discrete disaster.

Much of New England has been slammed by a gypsy moth infestation that has denuded trees of leaves on some 150,000 acres in Massachusetts alone, forestry managers say.

The gypsy moth population exploded this spring across large swaths of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island after drought conditions impeded the spread of a fungus that usually keeps the number of gypsy moth caterpillars under control.

It was the second year in a row that a lack of springtime rain triggered an explosion of the voracious caterpillars, which can strip the leaves from trees with alarming efficiency.

Caterpillar defoliation can have cascading effects on local ecosystems… Removing the forest canopy can make it too hot for nesting birds, which abandon their nests, and it eliminates habitat for insects that feed many bird species.

Exposed nests are also subject to infiltration by cowbirds, which, like cuckoos, lay their eggs in the nests of other species. When cowbird hatchlings emerge, they force the other chicks from the nest.

Gypsy moth caterpillars also devour oak pollen that produces acorns, an important food source for turkeys, deer, bears, and other animals.

Acorn shortages can also eradicate large numbers of white-footed mice, which depend on the nuts to get through the winter. In springtime, the mice feed on gypsy moth caterpillars, helping to control their population.

Greed, Greed, Greed

Democratic Senators are trying to highlight the coordinated lies and the organizations hired to do the lying.  Fossil fuel companies and their enablers have been identified.  Will they every face prosecution?

Championed by Senators Whitehouse, Markey, Schatz, Boxer, Merkley, Warren, Sanders and Franken, the resolution condemns what they are calling the #WebOfDenial—"interconnected groups—funded by the Koch brothers, major fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, identity-scrubbing groups like Donors Trust and Donors Capital and their allies—developed and executed a massive campaign to deceive the public about climate change to halt climate action and protect their bottom lines."

As DeSmog Blog, ExxonSecrets, Climate Investigations Center and others have documented repeatedly over the past decade, the oil and coal industries and their friends have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on an immoral and potentially fraudulent campaign to deceive the public about the scientific consensus on manmade global warming and the need for urgent action to curtail fossil fuel pollution.

Just last week, DeSmog Blog published the latest round of Exxon's funding of climate denial groups still peddling doubt, bringing the total known funding from Exxon to nearly $34 million over two decades. Add to that the nearly $90 million pumped into the denial machine by the Koch Family Foundations, as well as the largesse emanating from the dark money ATM, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Plague Dogs

M&M are often considered a cure around my house.  Using them to vaccinate massive populations of prairie dogs in order to save ferrets, that is awesome.

The US government is set to unleash drones that fire vaccine-covered M&Ms in a bid to save the endangered black-footed ferret, a species that is facing a plague epidemic across America’s great plains.

The US Fish and Wildlife (FWS) has developed a plan to bombard ferret habitat in Montana with the vaccine, which will be administered via specially designed drones that will be able to shoot M&Ms in three directions simultaneously.

The vaccines will be targeted at the prairie dog population at the UL Bend National Wildlife Refuge in north-eastern Montana. Black footed ferrets – North America’s only native ferret – are completely dependent upon prairie dogs, which are a type of burrowing rodent, for their food and shelter.

Choking on Our Own Garbage

The oceans are full of garbage, yet supposedly advanced societies can’t figure out how to deal with the waste they create.

Over the past several weeks, Hong Kong residents have become increasingly angry about the unprecedented amount of trash landing on the city’s beaches.

While Hong Kong certainly generates plenty of its own garbage, activists and residents noticed that a majority of the trash landing on the city’s beaches had labels popular in mainland China, not Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department (EPD) believes the mainland is to blame, too. The amount of trash surfacing on the city’s beaches is six to ten times the ordinary amount at this time of year, the EPD said in a statement to Quartz. Floods and storms in mainland China are the reason.

Water from the storms flows into China’s municipal sewage system, out into streams, into the Pearl River, and eventually, out into the South China Sea. This water carries a huge amount of trash because China has a number of open dump sites that are not well maintained or regulated (more on this below).

Normally, that trash would just drift further out into the South China Sea. But winds blowing from the southwest towards the northeast caused the filthy water to flow towards Hong Kong in recent weeks…

195 to 1

Sadly, Donald Trump is not the only person running for the Republican presidential nomination who rejected the science of climate change.  Still he is unique in the world in his stupidity.

Donald Trump would be the only national leader in the world to dismiss the science of climate change should he become president, putting him out of step even with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea.

The potential isolation of the US on climate change has been laid bare by a new Sierra Club report which found universal acceptance of climate science among the leaders of the 195 countries recognized by the US state department.

Close US allies such as Britain, Israel, Canada and France all have heads of government who have voiced their understanding that the world is warming primarily due to human activities.

Even totalitarian or undemocratic leaders accept mainstream climate science, with Assad calling for nations to “respond more effectively” to the issue and Kim supporting a tree-planting initiative to mitigate greenhouse gases. The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, has labelled climate change a “major global challenge”.

By contrast, Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called global warming “bullshit” and a “hoax” that was “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing noncompetitive”.