DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 29, 2016

Peru Fails to Enforce Laws

More in The Guardian’s expose of the government actors in the illegal wildlife trade.  In Peru, local government fails completely to enforce existing laws. 

Wildlife is part of the town’s daily trade. A ban on selling bushmeat is openly ignored in Belén’s market. Deep-auburn slabs of the smoked meat of the endangered South America tapir (Tapirus terrestris) are stacked high on trestle tables. The protruding hoof of a peccary or the paw of an agouti betray the fact that there is hunted game on sale.

A yellow-footed tortoise (Chelonoid denticulata), listed as vulnerable by the IUCN red list, is butchered for the pot while still quivering, its head moves from side to side. The woman cutting up its front-parts remarks: “This animal dies when it’s in the pot.” Biodiversity served up in all its gory detail. The soft-shelled eggs of the taricaya, an Amazon river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis), also listed as vulnerable, are served in pungent heaps to customers in the rubbish-strewn alleys.

Indigenous communities are allowed to hunt and eat wild game but selling the meat is prohibited. But old habits die hard, says Clelia Rengifo, the head of wildlife trafficking control for the regional government of Loreto, Peru’s largest Amazon region which occupies one-third of the country, an area bigger than Germany.

More Guardian Reporting

The Guardian exposes senior government officials in Laos racking profits from the illegal wildlife trade.  Maybe it’s time the U.S government took a stand and put pressure on these governments. 

Officials at the highest level of an Asian government have been helping wildlife criminals smuggle millions of dollars worth of endangered species through their territory, the Guardian can reveal.

In an apparent breach of current national and international law, for more than a decade the office of the prime minister of Laos has cut deals with three leading traffickers to move hundreds of tonnes of wildlife through selected border crossings.

In 2014 alone, these deals covered $45m (£35m) worth of animal body parts and included agreed quotas requiring the disabling or killing of 165 tigers, more than 650 rhinos and more than 16,000 elephants.

Trading in all three of those species is prohibited by Lao law and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species(Cites) which came into force in Laos in 2004. The Lao government has publicly paraded its commitment to the convention.

Reprieve for Pangolins

The gentle, shy pangolin is the world’s most trafficked animal.  All for bullshit reasons.   At the Cites convention this week, the pangolin was given a total ban international trade.  Now if governments will actually enforce this action.

Pangolins, the world’s most illegally trafficked mammal, were thrown a lifeline at a global wildlife summit on Wednesday with a total trade ban in all species.

More than a million wild pangolins have been killed in the last decade, to feed the huge and rising appetite in China and Vietnam for its meat and its scales, a supposed medicine. The unique scaly anteaters are fast heading for extinction in Asia and poachers are now plundering Africa.

But the 182 nations of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) unanimously agreed a total ban on international trade on all species at the summit in Johannesburg, prompting cheers and applause from delegates.

Cites works to crack down on wildlife trafficking, currently a $20bn-a-year criminal enterprise, and to ensure the legal trade in food, skins, pets and traditional remedies does not threaten the survival of species. The summit also boosted protection for the barbary ape on Wednesday, Europe’s only wild primate, and a spectacular-horned mountain goat.

Tick Tock….

Point of no return passed?  An open question right now.

"The last time our planet saw 400 ppm carbon dioxide in our atmosphere was about 3.5 million years ago, and global climate was distinctly different than today," David Black, associate professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York, tells The Christian Science Monitor in an email.

"In particular, the Arctic (north of 60°) was substantially warmer than present, and global sea level was anywhere between 15 and 90 feet higher than today," Professor Black says.

"It took millions of years for the atmosphere to reach 400 ppm CO2 back then, and it took millions of years for the atmospheric CO2 to drop to 280 ppm right before the industrial revolution. One of the things that really concerns climate scientists is we as humans have taken only a few centuries to do what nature took millions of years, and most of that change was just in the last 50-60 years."

While global concentrations have spiked above the 400 ppm level for several years, the summer growing season has always absorbed enough atmospheric CO2 through photosynthesis to keep concentrations below that mark for the bulk of the year.

DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 27, 2016

Major Guardian Report – Illegal Wildlife Trafficking

Please take the time to read this and follow along as The Guardian expands the story this week.

A major investigation into global wildlife crime today names for the first time key traffickers and links their illegal trade to corrupt officials at the highest levels of one Asian country.

The investigation, published by the Guardian, exposes the central role of international organised crime groups in mutilating and killing tens of thousands of animals and threatening to eliminate endangered species including tigers, elephants and rhinos.

The in-depth reporting identifies suspected traders across several continents, from South Africa to Thailand and in the markets of China, where animal parts are used in traditional medicines. Many iconic animals are heading toward extinction: only 30,000 rhinos are alive today, 5% of the number four decades ago. About 1,000 are killed by poachers annually – and that figure has risen each year in the last six.

Elephants are being killed in even greater numbers: 20,000 for their tusks last year alone. Tigers, currently numbering 3,500 in the wild, are also in imminent danger.

But smaller animals, too, are facing extinction. Scaly anteaters, called pangolins, are shipped live in fishnet bags across borders for their scales, which are believed by some to help mothers breastfeed. Several vulnerable sub-species of turtles, pythons, antelopes and birds are also in sharp decline.

Existential Coffee Crisis

This shit is getting real now.  Climate change may result in a massive loss in the land available for the cultivationof coffee.  Can the complete collapse of civilization be far behind?

Already climate change is causing trouble for coffee farmers. With warmer, wetter weather overall, growers are experiencing infestations such as coffee leaf rust and the berry borer in high-altitude locations that used to be unsuitable to such pests. Hot spells and cold snaps are killing crops; the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais lost one-third of its yield in 2014 due to drought. From the report:

“Even half a degree at the wrong time can make a big difference in coffee yield, flavour, and aroma. Around the Bean Belt, rising minimum growing temperatures, changes in rainfall patterns, and rising pest and disease incidence, are already making life harder for coffee farmers.”

Some countries will become unsuitable for coffee production altogether, such as Mexico, which is projected to be unviable by the 2020s. The report says that most of Nicaragua will lose its coffee zone by 2050, and Tanzanian Arabica will reach critically low levels by the 2060s. There are regions that could benefit from the changing climate by becoming coffee growers, such as the highlands of East Africa, Indonesia, Papua-New Guinea, and the Andes, but these would still be affected by more extreme and unpredictable weather. Additional expansion would result, too, in the destruction of more forests to make way for new plantations.

Thoughtful Essay on Wolf Reintroduction (in Britain)

There are extremes at both sides of the reintroduction argument no matter where it takes place.  Well worth the read.

Wolves carry a lot of mythological baggage with them, invoking both unreasonable fear of the darkness of the forest- or perhaps the even darker, animalistic side of our own nature- and also unrealistic expectations of a return to some kind of pristine wilderness. In reality, as wild creatures, they are adapting readily to anthropogenic landscapes and hybridising with dogs and other animals,  challenging our conceptions of what constitutes "wild" (Buller 2008).

If the strongest argument for wolf reintroduction is that, how can we expect other countries to protect wildlife if we cannot do the same here, the counter might be that big animals pose a huge challenge to farmers elsewhere also ,and  how much biodiversity value would they really bring to Britain anyway?

Fractious debates between conservationists and farmers are likely to continue, but in Britain at least, there would seem to be a huge amount of other restoration work to be done in any case before there need be serious consideration of bringing back the wolf.

DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 23, 2016

On Thin Ice

The United States may be on its way to electing a president who thinks global warming and climate change are hoaxes.  If Trump wins, it is likely Republicans will control both houses of Congress and potentially achieve a Supreme Court majority as older justices retire.  So, all three branches of the U.S. government would then be dedicated to climate change denial.  We are so screwed it this happens.  Oh, by the way scientists have discovered the rate of ice sheet melt in Greenland is much worse than the very bad original projections.

Researchers have been tracking Greenland's ice sheet melt by measuring the shrinking mass of the island via satellite. It now seems there was an error in measurement. A new study published in the journal Science Advances finds the ice is melting 7 percent faster than previously thought.

Scientists use satellites to map Earth's gravity field, gathering information about the distribution of mass around the globe. Earth doesn't exert gravity equally in all directions. Where there is more mass, satellites detect a stronger gravitational pull.

Using satellite data, scientists can measure various geophysical phenomena, including the melt of the Greenland ice sheet. As ice dissolves, the island loses mass and exerts a weaker gravitational pull—at least that's the idea.

Mall Animals

While the world’s best zoos are under fire for keeping wild animals captive, the Chinese have been industriously laboring to turn a wide variety of wild creatures into shopping mall attractions. Which is worse – highly dedicated professionals working to save entire species or shopping mall proprietors stuffing whales, wolves and polar bears into mall displays to attract a few more shoppers?

The Grandview, a glitzy shopping mall in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is home to the “world’s saddest polar bear,” three-year-old Pizza. Pizza was brought to the world’s attention in March by NGO Animals Asia, which published a video of her lying on the ground, blinking morosely as visitors banged on the glass, aspiring for the perfect selfie.

It’s part of a huge investment by the mall to attract new visitors that’s being replicated across southern China. Exotic animals, and particularly ones that naturally live in cold weather and icy waters, have become key attractions at southern Chinese private businesses including amusement parks, malls, restaurants and even new resorts.

Even as animal parks in the west move away from keeping large sea creatures in captivity, or allowing humans to interact with them, these new businesses in China are stocking up on rare whale sharks and arranging penguin encounters. And because China has no laws that dictate how animals should live in captivity, and awareness about animal welfare is in its infancy, many of these animals are living in unnatural conditions that are making their lives miserable, animals rights activists say.

Humans are the only species that really doesn’t belong on this planet.

Cats…The Anti-Dog

You knew that when scientist began to conclude than humans would still be hunter gathers living in isolated tribes, that cat people would demand some credit to cats. Sad situation.

Cat populations seem to have grown in two distinct waves. First, Middle Eastern wildcats expanded with early farming communities to the eastern Mediterranean some 12,000 years ago. Presumably, newly founded grain stockpiles became infested with rodents and cats helped purge the pests earning their keep alongside humans.

Rat hunts will begin soon.  Right.

It’s not clear when cats became domesticated but the Egyptians might have had the first some 6,000 years ago. From Egypt, the felines rapidly expanded across the rest of Africa and Eurasia. For instance, a mitochondrial line common in Egyptian cats from the fourth century B.C.E. was found in cat DNA collected from samples in Bulgaria, Turkey and sub-Saharan Africa from around the same time. This was the second major wave of feline expansion. Cats made their way along with sea-faring people too, as evidenced by DNA found on a Viking site dating to between the eighth- and eleventh-century A.D. in northern Germany.

Rats Pants

The Ig Nobel prize isn’t just a funny, quirky event.  Some of this research is really interesting.  The rats pants experiments explain why polyester pants are no longer popular – natural selection, rules.

Investigations into rats wearing pants, the personalities of rocks and the truthfulness of 1,000 liars won Ig Nobel prizes on Thursday night at Harvard, where Nobel-winning scientists gathered to honor the strangest research of the year.

The ceremony, now in its 26th year, delivered a $10tn Zimbabwean bill (about 40 cents in US money) to winners. Those who traveled to Boston received their prizes from Nobel laureates: chemist Dudley Herschbach, economist Eric Maskin, Dr Rich Roberts and physicist Roy Glauber.

DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 22, 2016

200 Miles of Lightning

Not only awesome, but events like this cause scientist to rethink their definitions of natural events. 

Scientists have just observed the longest lightning bolt on record by a long shot. The lightning was spotted in Oklahoma, stretching almost from one edge to the other of the state.

The United Nation’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) officially made the announcement, stating that it easily beats the previous US record at 321 km (200 miles). In fact, it’s so long and it lasted for so long that it might force us rethink our understanding of lightning. Meteorologists believed lightning peaked up after 1 second, but this one lasted several seconds.

Centuries of Drought

The mechanisms of global warming could result in extensive droughts in California.  Droughts that make the current five-year dry spell nothing more than a footnote. 

Authors of the study, published Thursday in the online journal Scientific Reports, cautioned that it remains uncertain whether climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions will affect ocean dynamics in the same way as past climatic shifts.

The mechanics of global warming, caused by a rise in heat-trapping gases, differ from past warming related to changes in the Earth’s orbit, solar radiation or decreased volcanic activity.

“We don’t know how the Pacific Ocean is going to respond,” said Glen MacDonald, the paper’s lead author and a UCLA geography professor who studies climate change. “The climate models which we use … are very, very poor in predicting what is going to happen to the Pacific.”

Some global warming studies predict that Northern California could grow wetter. And a 2014 study co-authored by UCLA climate scientist Alex Hall concluded that overall rainfall amounts in Southern California won’t change much in coming decades.   

Nonetheless, MacDonald said his paper is a warning that “we simply cannot take off the table the possibility that the eastern Pacific will cool relative” to western ocean waters “and we’ll have La Niña-like conditions exacerbating aridity in California.”

Subversive Art in Service of Conservation

Imagine a landscape painting reminiscent of the Hudson River School and then step back to see that the work is painted on the sliced cross section of a once living tree.  That’s Alison Moritsugu’s work.  Both single pieces and elaborate landscapes made up of dozens of painted cross sections that provide a stunning visual sense of both beauty and devastation.

Art, by its expressive nature and use of symbols that can be interpreted in one way or another, can be a political act that influences the viewer into internalizing a certain ideology. So it was with American landscape paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries, which depicted bucolic sceneries of the New World that seemed like an empty Eden, perfect for colonization. But as we know, in reality the so-called New World was already populated by the indigenous peoples of this continent, and the gradual takeover of ancestral lands, large-scale disenfranchisement of millions and the negative environmental impact of colonization is something that these soft, pastoral paintings of the era conveniently overlook or romanticize.

Moritsugu's brush skillfully recalls the aesthetic style of these landscape painters of yore, yet simultaneously hints at a kind of historical greenwashing of America's colonial past. There is a deliberate, jarring contrast between the idealized, painted vision of nature and the viciously sliced section of tree it sits upon, prompting us to question the motives behind these images -- past and present -- that many of us so eagerly consume.

 “The Eagles, the Eagles Are Coming”

Is this a solution seeking a problem or do the Dutch have more concern over Sauron’s drones that we have here in the United States?   Or are the Dutch doing some research work for Amazon’s competitors?   

The Dutch National Police (DNP) plans to launch the most metal anti-drone program in existence: they will train bald eagles to take down flying unmanned threats. They’re also planning to equip them with armored talons.

It’s going to be a world-first for law enforcement, DNP officials say. In a statement released on Sept. 13, they announced that the DNP is the only police force in the world at this time who will include birds of prey in its done defense arsenal. The announcement comes at the end of a one-year testing partnership between the DNP and Guard from Above, a private company based in the Hague that trains raptors to attack drones in flight.

The tests were so promising that the police force recently purchased juvenile bald eagles which it plans to train for this purpose. The birds have a wingspan of around 3.3 feet (1 meter) right now, but they’ll grow to between 5.9 to 7.5 feet (1.8-2.3 m) in adulthood. That’s a lot of bird, and it seems they’re naturally out to get drones in the first place.

DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 20, 2016

Global Warming Timeline

Look at the history of the world's temperature from 20000 BC to the present.  

Concerned experts and activists have been struggling for years now to find new ways to explain the urgent but elusive nature of the climate-change threat. Because the data is complex and the effects are measured in small degrees over long terms, this is not an easy problem. But Randall Munroe, the resident nerd-genius behind the XKCD web comic, has found one brilliant solution: A long scrolling chart, like a timeline doing a headstand, that tracks millennia of human history against trends of cooling and warming (XKCD).

Climate Change Means No Forests

Hawaii, California, the Pacific Northwest….Millions of trees are dying.  Whole forests devastated.

“It’s heartbreaking. This is the biggest threat to our native forests that any of us have seen. If this spreads across the whole island, it could collapse the whole native ecosystem.”

Almost six years later and nearly 50,000 acres of native forest on the big island are infected with rapid ohi’a death disease. Rumors abound as to its origin: did it emerge from Hawaii’s steaming volcanoes? A strange new insect? Scientists still aren’t sure of where it came from or how to treat it.

In northern California, an invasive pathogen called Sudden Oak Death is infecting hundreds of different plants, from redwoods and ferns to backyard oaks and bay laurels. The disease is distantly related to the cause of the 19th-century Irish potato famine, and appears to have arrived with two “Typhoid Marys”, rhododendrons and bay laurels, said Dr David Rizzo, of the University of California, Davis.

Five years of drought in the west have not only starved trees of water but weakened their defenses and created conditions for “insect eruptions” across the US, said Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana. Bark beetles and mountain pine beetles, usually held in check by wet winters, now have more time to breed and roam. The latter have already expanded their range from British Columbia across the Rockies, to the Yukon border and eastward, into jack pine forests that have never seen the bug.

Push to Increase Pangolin Protection

Will it be enough?  Probably not.  This gentle creature is headed for extinction because humans place no value on wildlife.

Environmentalists have urged governments attending a global wildlife conference in South Africa this month to impose maximum restrictions on the trade of endangered pangolins, a scaly mammal that is the inspiration for two Pokemon characters.

The long-snouted, nocturnal pangolin, the size of a small dog and found in Africa and Southeast Asia, is the world's most illegally trafficked mammal, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

ENV said pangolins are shipped from Africa to meet demand in Asia, where products made from pangolins are prized for their supposed medicinal value and have led to local numbers falling.

The pangolin trade is already limited under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Environmentalists are pressing CITES to increase the trade restrictions to "only in exceptional circumstances" - the highest level of protection.

Read about pangolin trafficking in Myanmar.

“It’s All Just a Lie”

Big brave hunters shoot tame lions from vehicles.  The word despicable can’t even come close.  It applies to the owners of the private reserves, the guides and the “hunter”.  Yes, trophy hunting generated useful revenue for conservation in Africa, but this part of the industry has to be eliminated.

The guide whistles as the large, dark-maned lion walks just a few metres from the car. It looks around to face the American hunter and a single shot rings out in the South African bush.

The lion cartwheels from the force of the bullet - shocked and confused it roars, turns and quickly limps off into the bush.

"Shoot him again, shoot him again, shoot him again," the professional hunter frantically urges, as the hunter reloads, firing into the trees.

The video cuts to see the lion lying dead and the American walking up to him.

"Hey you," he says, "I'm sorry, but I wanted you," before leaning down and kissing the lion.

Every year hundreds of lions are bred in captivity across South Africa for the purpose of being placed onto private game reserves for hunting.

Grist for the mill.         

"Eight lionesses were released [from captivity] literally the day before the clients arrived - in fact four were released as the plane was landing just down the road," Mr Gobbett told the BBC.

"We shot that first lion probably within half-an-hour," he said.

He explained how the lions appeared to be used to humans - how one was shot while hiding in a hole, another up against a fence.

A new report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) says in the decade between 2004 and 2014, 1.7 million animals were killed for their "trophy".

At least 200,000 of them were threatened species such as elephants, rhinos or lions.

IFAW found that the US was the biggest importer of stuffed animal heads, while South Africa was the biggest exporter - and lions were by far the most traded.

"Right from the start, the guys are told it's very dangerous - that these are wild animals… and of course they take it all in," Mr Gobbett said.

"It's all: 'You got so lucky, that was such an amazing shot.' Slaps on the back: 'You're such a hero, look at what you've done - you have got your king of the jungle.'

"Meanwhile, it's all just a lie."

We are the Asteroid

Mass extinction in the oceans will start with the largest, most complex creatures.  The reverberations could impact the oceans for millions of years.  Oh, yeah, humans are the cause of these extinctions, climate change is likely to take care of many of the smaller species as the oceans warm and acidify.

“The preferential removal of the largest animals from the modern oceans, unprecedented in the history of animal life, may disrupt ecosystems for millions of years even at levels of taxonomic loss far below those of previous mass extinctions,” the authors write.

Interestingly, if climate change was the key driver of species losses, you’d expect a more evenly distributed set of risks to organisms.

“I’ve worked on the Permian mass extinction quite a bit, it shows environmental evidence of ocean warming, ocean acidification, and deoxygenation, the loss of oxygen from seawater,” says Payne. These are the very same threats to the oceans that we’re worried about now due to ongoing climate change. But the Permian extinction, some 250 million years ago, did not feature a selective disappearance of large-bodied organisms, Payne says.

Thus, as previous work has also suggested, the current study underscores ecosystem risks are not being principally driven by a changing climate — yet. Rather, they’re being driven more directly by humans which species hunt and fish, and where they destroy ecosystems to build homes, farms, cities, and much more. But as climate change worsens, it will compound what’s already happening.

Tool Users

Corvids are amazing.  Intelligent, tool users and even tool makers.  Unfortunate the 'alalā became extinct in the wild before we understood how amazing they are.

For more than a decade, Rutz has been studying New Caledonian crows, the first member of the genus Corvus known for natural tool use. Without anyone teaching them how, chicks from the Pacific island species would instinctively pick up twigs with their beaks and use them to scrape up food. They could even break off branches and fashion them into hooks or barbs that suited their needs. But — as far as anyone knew — the birds were a biological oddity. Science had found no other crows like them.

Still, "I had a suspicion that there may be undiscovered tool users out there," Rutz said. "There are over 40 species of crows and ravens, and so many of them are understudied, I thought, 'okay, maybe one of them.'"

A quick image search revealed his best target: the large, all-black Hawaiian crow, known on its home island as 'alalā. It has a straight, blunt beak, and though its eyes are relatively small, they are extremely forward-facing, an adaptation that typically allows for depth perception. Rutz called up the program manager at a captive breeding facility in Hawaii run by the San Diego Zoo.

"I said, 'Look this may sound a bit crazy but I have a hunch your birds may be tool users,'" he recalled. "And the guy replied, 'oh yeah, they do all sorts of funny things with sticks.'"

"Now we can cautiously start constructing evolutionary arguments about the origins of tool use," Rutz said. "And of course, ultimately this enables much broader comparisons, with non-tool using species, with primates. We can ask whether similar ecological conditions seemed to drive the evolution of this behavior in different parts of the animal kingdom. That's where it gets exciting."

DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 12, 2016

Lots of climate change and 6th Extinction stuff today.  And, one story of bird conservation by the U.S. Army - thank you "First Team!"

But first ; from More Trees Less Assholes:

We are the Asteroid

A lesson in extinction.  

Curiosity Drives Science Understand

What you know about science doesn’t determine your position on climate change, but your curiosity and willingness to learn does influence your ability to accept positions thatare different than your own.

Time and time again, research has shown that political affiliation greatly influences people’s opinions on leading scientific issues like fracking, climate change, vaccines, or nuclear power. And before you jump to conclusion, virtually everybody lets politics get the better of them since having a top education or scoring high on science tests does little to nothing to cure bias. Instead, the least vulnerable people to bias might be the curious, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Yale University think the key might lie in curiosity. A team there led by Dan Kahan assessed study participants using two scales. One scale gauged their scientific literacy and thinking using a fairly standard questionnaire packed with questions about science facts and methods. The other scale was far more ingenious and innovative and was meant to gauge scientific curiosity and not how much science they already knew.

“The data we’ve collected furnish a strong basis for viewing science curiosity as an important individual difference in cognitive style that interacts in a distinctive way with political information processing,” the Yale researchers wrote in their paper.

Denial Is Just Business for Republicans

Driven by the Tea Party, the right wing media and billionaires who just want more money, the Republican Party has decide to do nothing about global warming and climate change.  In other words the rest of us can go to hell – which will be most places on the planet in another century.

"What was once a modest tendency for Congressional Republicans to be less pro-environmental than their Democratic counterparts has become a chasm—with Republicans taking near-unanimous anti-environmental stances on relevant legislation in recent years, especially 2015," the study said.

As they stoked fears about the U.S. government attempting to pass legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the Tea Party normalized climate denial throughout the Republican Party, according to Oklahoma State University's Prof. Riley E. Dunlap and Jerrod H. Yarosh, and Michigan State Associate Professor Aaron M. McCright.

Conservative newspaper The Wall Street Journal was found to publish inaccurate information on the topic, according to a report by Media Matters for America.

"Out of 93 climate-related opinion pieces published in the Journal during the time period examined, 31 featured climate science denial or other scientifically inaccurate claims about climate change (33 percent)," Media Matters for America said.

A 2013 study found that those Americans who consumed news from conservative news sources such as Fox had a higher distrust of science and scientists, than did those who read or watched non-conservative media.

Breaking through to those who fiercely deny the existence of climate change is no easy task, the Oklahoma State University researchers concluded.

The countermovement includes "fossil fuel corporations and business allies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, conservative think tanks and their funders, conservative media, and a large supporting cast of front groups, bloggers and contrarian scientists," the Oklahoma State University study said.

Ft. Hood – Armor and Songbirds

Some of the great conservation stories come from military facilities. 

War transformed the nature of farmlands of central Texas. During World War II, what had been a landscape checker-spotted with oak-juniper woodlands turned into a busy Camp Hood. This had some unexpected results for wildlife, including the endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler.

Today, live weapons fire from helicopters, the roar of mechanized combat vehicles, and the clomp of tanks rumbling over the terrain like massive bulldozers with cannons are all common sights and sounds at Fort Hood.

And as of late, two songbirds are also increasingly common: the Golden-cheeked Warbler and the Black-capped Vireo. In seemingly incongruent fashion, the wispy songs of these two federally endangered birds sweeten the springtime air of Fort Hood.

Fort Hood has been a willing and eager partner in conservation of these rare birds for almost a quarter century.

As a result of more than two decades of research and conservation work at Fort Hood on the vireo and warbler, today the base operates without the training restrictions that had previously been in place.

Fort Hood has demonstrated that natural resources entrusted to the Department of Defense's care are not only sustained, but can be improved, all while ensuring that military training and testing are uncompromised.

Fort Hood serves as a model for other military installations across the country, clearly demonstrating that national defense and conservation are not mutually exclusive.

DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 9, 2016

Better to Lead the World

Despite Republican and business opposition, California continues to lead the nation in reducing carbon emissions.  The moves are being attacked by business interests, who apparently don’t realize that California has the world’s sixth largest economy, with one of the fastest growth rates in the nation.  California’s economy slots between Germany and France – two nations with equally ambitious emission reduction programs.

California is already on track to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Now under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, the state will ratchet up its fight against climate change by launching an ambitious campaign to scale back emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

"This is big, and I hope it sends a message across the country," Brown said.

California reduced emissions by imposing limits on the carbon content of gasoline and diesel fuel, promoting zero-emission electric vehicles, and introducing a cap-and-trade system for polluters.

But not everyone agrees. The two new laws signed by Brown faced fierce opposition from the state's business community, including the oil industry, as well as from Republicans.

Brown noted at the signing ceremony that opponents are not going away. The San Francisco Chronicle carried this quote: "There's powerful opposition," Brown said. "These are real people with real bucks and real influence."

"THE CLOCK IS TICKING."

Without wild spaces,there can be no wildlife.  And, humans are destroying the planets wild spaces at an alarming rate.

The untouched wilderness on this planet is disappearing — and disappearing fast. That's bad news, and not just because trees look nice: we depend on vast swathes of pristine nature to support diverse forms of life, to keep climate change at bay, and to ensure that local economies thrive. But for all their importance, we're doing a pretty bad job ensuring wild places stay wild, new research shows.

The problem with developing wild places is that ecosystems operate as a whole: cut off parts of it, and who knows what could happen to the rest. Nevertheless, since the 1990s, we've managed to carve away 10 percent of the last untouched places on Earth, according to a study published today in the journal Current Biology. And that came as a bit of a surprise.

Street Art and Nature

Two Swiss street artists are bringing the reality of environmental issues to buildings in urban areas.  Great art with a powerful message.

The immediacy of city life can make it all too easy to think of environmental woes as being the problems of faraway places. But two Switzerland-based street artists who call themselves NEVERCREW make humanity’s fraught relationship with nature impossible for urbanites to ignore.

Christian Rebecchi and Pablo Togni have been working together since meeting 20 years ago at the Liceo Artistico C.S.I.A., an art school in Lugano, Switzerland. And they’ve clearly hit their stride. NEVERCREW has introduced its skillfully executed and unique pieces, like oil-dipped polar bears and commodified whales, to walls in cities around the world, including New Delhi; Belgrade, Serbia; Munich; Hamburg, Germany; Manchester, England; and Rochester, New York. The artists recently completed their latest paintings, a two-part series of a bear and a whale trapped inside a plastic bottle, for the Vancouver Mural Festival and Denmark's WE AArt Festival.

The duo’s recent large-scale murals feature stunningly realistic mash-ups between wildlife and industrial objects. The combination forces viewers to confront themes like climate change, pollution, and the exploitation of natural resources—systems in which we all participate, however unwittingly.

Indians Saving Wolves

Incredible story of the Nez Perce taking on the responsibility to establish wolves in Idaho. 

In Idaho, an alliance of sportsmen, ranchers, and lawmakers staunchly opposed to the wolf’s reintroduction made sure that state lawmakers refused to aid any federal program to re-establish the species. But Idaho’s balking left an opening for a third party — in this case, the Nez Perce — to manage federal efforts to bring the wolves back. Having already proved themselves in a trial role with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service overseeing small tracts of forests on reservation land, the Nez Perce tribal government seized this much larger opportunity to manage resources on millions of acres of federal land outside the borders of their reservation. Bureaucrats were dubious: One tribal wildlife biologist mused that state lawmakers were whispering among themselves, “Give it to them [the Nez Perce] — they just might fail.”

This was a success story not only for the wolves, but also for the tribe, which recovered its own identity as a steward of forests and wildlife. “There was an unusual kinship between the Nez Perce and the wolf; each had been persecuted and driven off the land. For the Nez Perce to help bring back the wolf offered a way for the tribe to bring back itself,” writes Theodore Catton, a public historian who specializes in research for the National Park Service, in American Indians and National Forests.

Read the book.

DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

Let’s start a new day with this.  Yosemite’s Half Dome at sunrise.  A Mark Lilly photograph.

Good News

Humpbacks are moving off the endangered species list.  But, even good news is fraught with peril.  Even recovering species hover so close to the brink that we need constant attention and effort to prevent falling back.

And now, efforts to protect humpbacks from their most fearsome predator—human beings—are having an impact. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced that most populations of humpback whales, which had been on the brink of extinction, are being removed from the endangered species list.

The announcement, described by NOAA as a “true ecological success story,” comes after 40 years of federal protection that have allowed the whales’ numbers to rebound.

Still, four of the 14 distinct population segments remain on the endangered list, and one—the Mexican whales that feed along the California coast in the fall and summer—is still designated as threatened.

More Good News

Evidence of what we can do if we prioritize and put the effort into making a difference.  Pandas are making a comeback.  Amazing what can be done if we protect their habitat and food supply.

The bears, China's national icon, were once widespread throughout southern and eastern China but, due to expanding human populations and development, are now limited to areas that still contain bamboo forests.

The success is due to Chinese efforts to recreate and repopulate bamboo forests.

Bamboo makes up some 99% of their diet, without which they are likely to starve.

Pandas must eat 12kg (26 lbs) to 38kg worth of bamboo each day to maintain their energy needs.

There are now an estimated total of 2,060 pandas, of which 1,864 are adults - a number which has seen their status changed from "endangered" to "vulnerable", on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)'s Red List.

"It's all about restoring the habitats," Craig Hilton-Taylor, Head of the IUCN Red List, told the BBC.

"Just by restoring the panda's habitat, that's given them back their space and made food available to them."

A loss of habitats was what caused the number of pandas to drop to just over 1,200 in the 1980s, according to Mr Hilton-Taylor.

"You need to get the bamboo back and slowly the numbers will start to creep back," he said.

Is It All for Nothing?

The oceans are all that stands between being a blue green living planet and a burnt out cinder.  Once we lose the ocean’s ability to mitigate global warming extinction events will be daily occurrences.

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is currently hosting the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii, has recently released a report detailing the state of the ocean in response to climate change, and it’s not good.

The ocean has played a disproportionate role in mitigating the effects of human caused climate change, but increasingly extreme storms, bleaching coral, and massive fish die-offs are indications that the oceans can't take much more.

"We all know the oceans sustain this planet, yet we are making the oceans sick," Inger Andersen, IUCN’s director general, said at the World Conservation Congress. "Without this oceanic buffer, global temperature rises would have gone much, much speedier."

Pot Used to be for Tree Hugging Hippies

Now it’s just a business.  And, one that is destroying old growth redwood forests.

We shadow the Eel River, swollen from El Niño rains, as it meanders past the county's last sawmill and then head into SoHum, as locals call southern Humboldt. Flying toward the Pacific Ocean, we pass over redwood-covered hills pockmarked by dozens of clearings hacked from the forest. This land is zoned for timber production, but loggers didn't cut down those trees. In just about every clearing, long white cylinder-shaped structures appear, resembling, some say, rolling papers. It's an apt observation. The buildings are greenhouses and inside, marijuana plants are grown for Humboldt County's multibillion-dollar cannabis industry.

Growers have fragmented forests by cutting trees to build greenhouses and roads on steep hillsides, choking creeks home to endangered salmon with sediment, fertilizers and pesticides and sucking streams dry during a record drought to irrigate marijuana crops. Once-still forests echo with the racket of hundreds of diesel generators. Rat poison and other toxic chemicals used by some growers to protect their plants are killing rare wildlife like the Pacific fisher.

Labor Day - 2016

A day when the rights of workers and labor unions is recognized.  Unfortunately, for most Americans it is commemorated as the last day of summer – schools reopen, seasonal resorts close and hundreds of thousands workers get up and go to their jobs in services industries just like any other day.

On Sept. 5, 1882 — a Tuesday — 10,000 workers took unpaid time off to march in a parade from City Hall to Union Square in New York City as a tribute to American workers. Organized by New York’s Central Labor Union, It was the country’s first unofficial Labor Day parade. Three years later, some city ordinances marked the first government recognition, and legislation soon followed in a number of states.

Then came May 11, 1894, and a strike that shook an Illinois town founded by George Pullman, an engineer and industrialist who created the railroad sleeping car. The community, located on the Southside of Chicago, was designed as a “company town” in which most of the factory workers who built Pullman cars lived.

When wage cuts hit, 4,000 workers staged a strike that pitted the American Railway Union vs. the Pullman Company and the federal government. The strike and boycott against trains triggered a nationwide transportation nightmare for freight and passenger traffic

At its peak, the strike involved about 250,000 workers in more than 25 states. Riots broke out in many cities; President Grover Cleveland called in Army troops to break the strikers; more than a dozen people were killed in the unrest.

After the turbulence, Congress, at the urging of Cleveland in an overture to the labor movement, passed an act on June 28, 1894, making the first Monday in September “Labor Day.” It was now a legal holiday.

With the power of the corporation over the individual at a level in many way comparable (except for violence) to the 1880s, it is important to reflect how the equation between the people who do the work and those who profit from that work has changed over the last fifty years. 

Here is the future of labor in the United States.   Think how this disruptive technology effects the wages of workers as the number of jobs shrinks and the ramifications for social programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 3, 2016

People Are Stupid – Millions of Bees Die

Aerial spraying of potent pesticide at the wrong time.  So while states do stupid things to stop Zika, the Republican controlled Congress does nothing. 

“There was no need for a bee suit Monday morning to go down there, because there was no activity. It was silent,” Ms. Stanley said on Thursday. “Honestly, I just fell to the ground. I was crying, and I couldn’t quit crying, and I was throwing up.”

For Ms. Stanley and her business, the death toll easily exceeds two million bees, and Dorchester County officials are still tabulating how many more might have been killed when a day of aerial spraying, scheduled to combat mosquitoes that could be carrying viruses like Zika, went awry.

Dr. Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a bee researcher at the University of Maryland, said the deaths of the bees in South Carolina were unnecessary, and that there were ways to guard against mosquitoes without simultaneously killing valuable pollinators.

Peer Pressure – Among Dogs

How do you get a dog to stay motionless in an MRI for eight minutes?  Treats don’t work, but peer pressure does.

…scientists analyzed scans of dogs’ brain activity when hearing words. And to get those scans, they needed their subjects — 13 family pets — to lie completely motionless in an fMRI scanner for eight whole minutes while wearing earphones and a radiofrequency coil on their heads.

[Successfully trained dogs], you can see in their eyes when a drop of water falls on their noses and they know, ‘I cannot lick it.’ It’s really … I don’t know what to say. They are not forced. They are asked. You can’t imagine how happy they are at the end. They bounce to the others like, ‘Okay, I did it! I did it!’ We are really seeing that they are proud.

Despair Is Appropriate

The Republican War on science has resulted in this.  Of course they had lots of help from the extraction industry and the right wing media.

Since 2001 polling company Gallup has been asking US voters for their views on aspects of climate change, such as if they think it’s happening, if it’s caused by humans and if they are concerned about it.

In 2001, 53 percent of Republican voters agreed that global warming was caused by humans, compared with 70 percent of Democrats — a gap of 17 percentage points. But by 2016, this gap had blown out to 41 percentage points, with only 43 percent of Republican voters accepting climate change is human-caused.

These “partisan gaps” had widened across all areas since 2008, except when voters were asked if they thought global warming had already started, where the gap remained at 34 percentage points.

“I fear polarization will be difficult to overcome because Republican reluctance to accept the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change is in a self-reinforcing loop. 

There are top-down cues from Republican political elites and their supporters from conservative think tanks to conservative media — especially the Murdoch media— that influence voters, as well as bottom-up pressure from party activists such as Tea Party supporters who act as ‘enforcers’ of party principles, especially in primary elections to select Republican candidates.

The result is that global warming has joined God, guns, gays, and abortion as core elements of Republican identity, and this will be hard to change.”