Daily Quick Read - July 9, 2019

Golden Eagle Chicks Discovered

A pair of golden eagle chicks was discovered in California’s Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in May.  These are the first golden eagle chicks found in the 156,671 acre site since the 1980s.

Loss of habitat for nesting and hunting has reduced their range in much of the state, according to Katy Delaney, an ecologist with Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service.

“Humans are the greatest threat to golden eagles,” Delaney said. “In the past, they were trapped and shot throughout their range and today, they are vulnerable to habitat loss. Like their mammalian carnivore counterparts, they can die from eating poisoned prey as well as from lead poisoning, electrocution on power lines and collisions with wind turbines.

“We haven’t seen them in so many years, though they could have been around and staying away from people,” she added. “We just went through a huge fire and drought, and we’re also not going to see a decrease in urban development. Nonetheless, this is a good thing for our mountains. We not only have mountain lions here, but we have golden eagles, too.”

The Water's Boiling – Will The Frog Jump
Democrats spent 16 minutes of the 240 minutes available to them in the first two candidate debates discussing climate change.  Yes, over the course of the two nights of the event, the words “climate change” were spoken, but not in any meaningful way.  Frightening and yet, the Democrats are the party that supposedly takes climate change seriously.  Republicans still don’t acknowledge that anything other than “weather” is happening.  So, we face two possible courses – continued words and small concessions to the inconvenience that occur or implementing a full on planet wide action plan to address the issue.

….discussing the relative likelihood of some sort of tipping point event, that would cause people in the United States and/or other countries to see climate change as a genuine crisis of immediate and existential proportions, as opposed to what it remains, which is something almost everybody continues to ignore for almost all practical purposes…

Bees Are Necessary – Counting Them Not So Important?

The Trump Two Step.  First, you relax or eliminate scientifically developed environmental standards or requirements.  Second, you make sure know one can figure outhow much damage you’ve done by silencing the scientists.

The suspension of the Honey Bee Colonies report is at least the third bee-related data set to be halted or reduced under the Trump administration, and comes three weeks after Trump's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the emergency use of bee-killing pesticide sulfoxaflor on 13.9 million acres. It also comes as the population of bees, which help pollinate a third of edible crops, has been declining since 2006.

"This is yet another example of the Trump administration systematically undermining federal research on food safety, farm productivity and the public interest writ large," Union of Concerned Scientists economist Rebecca Boehm told CNN.

Sizzling Hot Lava

The are still places on the earth where humans have never set foot.  This is one of them. 

                                                       Bucktrout/British Antarctic Survey

A huge lake of sizzling hot lava has been discovered in a volcano on a remote sub-Antarctic island in the South Atlantic Ocean. It's only the eighth lake of molten rock ever discovered on Earth.

By looking at satellite images of the uninhabited island between 2003 and 2018, the researchers found that the snow-covered volcano of Mount Michael on Saunders Island, usually cloaked from view by heavy clouds, contains a lake of lava within its crater, between 300 and 700 feet (90 and 215 meters) in diameter.

Measurements show that the molten rock in the lava lake is hot: between 1,812 and 2,334 degrees Fahrenheit (989 and 1,279 degrees Celsius).

Because the island is so remote, very few researchers have ever been to Mount Michael. "It has been visited at the bottom very rarely, and no one has ever got to the summit."

Our Garbage Is Making People Sick On the Other Side of the World

“Out of sight, out of mind” has been the true goal of recycling in the United States.  Unfortunately, by the time our waste ends upin this small town in the Philippines, there’s not place left for it to go.

The area on the outskirts of the Philippine capital of Manila has been dubbed Plastic City. Its ramshackle streets are home to tiny houses sandwiched next to large factories belching out fumes. Residents have been plagued by foul odours, which they claim come from a neighbouring recycling plant, STC Enterprises. Locals allege emissions from the plant have caused several residents to develop a lingering cough, a claim the plant owners deny.