Fox Has Done Its Work

The divide between Democrats and Republicans regarding climate change is profound.  The work of the right wing think tanks, their media megaphone and, of course, their corporate pay masters has created enormous head winds against meaningful action in the U.S.

What’s clear is that U.S. policies on addressing climate change could go two very different ways, depending on what happens November 8. If Clinton is elected, she will likely use the various regulatory actions mentioned in Pew’s analysis to try to curtail greenhouse gas emissions and thereby lessen the effects of climate change. If Trump is elected, climate change denier Myron Ebell will lead the Environmental Protection Agency’s transition team, and perhaps global warming will just magically disappear altogether. Or not.

Let’s Continue to Destroy Montana

Montana has been owned by the mining interests for over a century.  It looks like they are working to extend that ownership for another century.  Sadly, Montana Republicans and a Canadian mining company have turned to an idiotic climate change denier for help.

What do members of a sovereign citizen-style shadow government group, rank and file Republicans and a mining company all have in common?

Well, if they’re in Montana, then they’re all supporters of a speaking tour by British climate science denier Lord Christopher Monckton.

The hereditary peer has long held the debunked views that human-caused climate change is largely a scam and that the science is enabling the likes of the United Nations to put in place an all powerful world government.

Monckton has no science qualifications and his proclamations on climate science have been repeatedly ridiculed and dismissed by genuine climate scientists.

One of Monckton’s first appearances was at the Fall meeting of the Gallatin County Republicans.

Is it surprising that America is now more polarized on climate change policy than ever before, when GOP groups continue to listen to non-experts like Monckton?

More concerning perhaps, is that Monckton will also be sharing his non-expertise on global warming with students of Montana Tech on 6 October.

When some at the prestigious University College London realized that Monckton’s “science conference” had reserved one of its rooms for the gathering, they cancelled the booking.

Perhaps Montana Tech is not quite so discerning?

You can see an example of the consequences of unconstrained mining operations on Montana here.

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 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.”

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 29, 2016

Donald Trump Is Dangerous

OK.  That’s not a man bites dog headline is it?  The Republican Party’s assault on science has culminated in Trump’s studied ignorance of the real world.  Now Scientific American is calling him out on that ignorance.

…one of the two major party candidates for the highest office in the land has repeatedly and resoundingly demonstrated a disregard, if not outright contempt, for science. Donald Trump also has shown an authoritarian tendency to base policy arguments on questionable assertions of fact and a cult of personality.

…the major Republican candidate for president has tweeted that global warming is a Chinese plot, threatens to dismantle a climate agreement 20 years in the making and to eliminate an agency that enforces clean air and water regulations, and speaks passionately about a link between vaccines and autism that was utterly discredited years ago, we can only hope that there is nowhere to go but up.

We encourage the nation's political leaders to demonstrate a respect for scientific truths in word and deed. And we urge the people who vote to hold them to that standard.

Third Pole Is Melting

One billion people may lose the source of the water within 50 years.  But, Everest may become a much easier climb in shorts and t-shirts. 

The Himalayan Mountains and Tibetan Plateau, dubbed the "Third Pole" for having the largest ice mass on Earth after the polar regions, are rapidly losing their glaciers. Eighteen percent of China's glaciers have vanished in the past 50 years according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Air pollution and rising air temperatures are combining to increase glacial melt, threatening water supplies for one billion people.

Most of the 5,500 glaciers in the Himalaya-Hindu-Kush region—home of Mount Everest—may vanish by the end of this century. The long history of climbing through the Khumbu Icefall and up the Lhotse Face may become a rock scramble instead.

Hummingbirds Are Simply Amazing

A 3,000 mile migration for some, extinction for many.  Habitat destruction is the leading cause.  That’s something we could fix.

Imagine a Rufous Hummingbird traveling more than 3,000 miles on his annual spring migration from Mexico to British Columbia. Armed with a prodigious mental map of every place he's ever found food, the tiny bird heads to a familiar spot in California where he remembers a field full of flowers. He arrives only to find a big-box store and a giant parking lot. No flowers, no nectar. But the hummingbird has no time to waste; he spends the majority of his waking life gathering food to survive. So he flies on.

The Americas are home to 365 species of hummingbirds. Of these, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists 28 species, or roughly 8 percent, as endangered or critically endangered. For most of these declining hummingbirds, loss of habitat is the leading threat to their survival.

11 Places to See

Before it’s too late.  Even, always optimistic travel publicans are facing the reality of global warming.  These are good places to go, however, as you won’t run into any Republicans at any of them, otherwise they might have to admit that climate change is real.

Get your reservations.

Climate Change Isn’t The Only Problem

Human behavior is a larger threat today than climate change.  We might not be able to fix climate change tomorrow, but there are things we can do to protect wildlife right now.

Climate change is dangerous, and it’s happening now. It threatens wildlife and the ecosystems they live in. It will make life harder for billions of people, with the greatest harm hitting the world’s poorest people. It may make some parts of the world uninhabitable for humans, and will almost certainly drive many species to extinction.

But there are a half-dozen other environmental threats that are even worse.

That’s according to a study published this month in Nature, generally considered the world’s most respected scientific journal. According to the study, which lists ten kinds of human-caused environmental damage and ranks them according to the number of wildlife species they now threaten, climate change comes in at just seventh place behind things like logging, farming, and urban development.

National Parks At 100

Great collection of vintage posters promoting our national parks.

A collection of posters created to promote tourism to the national parks is part of the creative legacy of the New Deal developed by Franklin D Roosevelt. Between 1938 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration and its Federal Arts Project designed a series of artworks promoting, and inspired by, the landscapes and wildlife of the parks. The collection is housed in the Library of Congress.

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 25, 2016

Imagine All That Happened

Not the most attractive tree in Europe, but maybe the oldest.  A living thing that was growing and surviving without a thought to the history of war, plague and “progress” that was happening around it.

…in Europe, trees that reach 1,000-years-old are a rarity. So the discovery of a Bosnian pine tree (Pinus heldreichii) that is at least 1,075-years-old is a big deal. It stands in a grove in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece along with of a dozen other pines at or close to the millennia mark. The tree, dubbed Adonis, is believed to be the oldest living tree in Europe.

“It is quite remarkable that this large, complex and impressive organism has survived so long in such an inhospitable environment, in a land that has been civilized for over 3,000 years,” Paul Krusic a member of the expedition that found the tree says in a press release.

So Just Move!

This is a tragic story.  Shishmaref, Alaska has been occupied for more than 400 years (the oldest colonial city in the United States was founded 450 years ago) and now it is uninhabitable due to climate change.  But, the real tragedy of this piece is that the climate denying nut jobs are blaming the occupants of Shishmaref for having the ground literally washed from beneath their feet.

Because of complications due to climate change, Shishmaref is gradually being devoured by the Chukchi Sea. The island is eroding because the permafrost that was its fundamental foundation is disappearing and because the ocean doesn't freeze as long and as hard as it used to freeze.

Since the Chukchi Sea is where typhoons eventually go to die, and since they no longer can beat themselves to death over deep sea ice, the storms regularly tear great chunks out of the island. Houses have collapsed. You can see the legacy of the ongoing losing battle against the winds and tides in the hunks of the previous seawalls that are strewn around the rocky beach.

People have been living in Shishmaref for over 400 years. On Friday, the residents of Shishmaref voted (again) to abandon their village rather than try to save it from the merciless pounding that doesn't seem to promise to get better any time soon.

We Saw Ourselves

Fifty years ago this week mankind got its first look at Earth rise as seen from just above the surface of the Moon.   There have been more iconic photos of the Earth from space, but this was the first time that we could actually see this tiny speck as it might appear from another celestial body.  It’s a reminder that this remarkable place is the only planet we have.  And, this is the story of how that photo (and many more) have been preserved for mankind.  Not just preserved, but restored to their full resolution and quality.  Hopefully, we can preserve the planet with as much diligence.

On Aug. 23, 1966 — 50 years ago Tuesday — Lunar Orbiter 1 took the above photo: the first-ever of Earth rising up above the cold, bright dust of our planet's biggest satellite.

However iconic, it looks pretty crummy.

That's because 1960s technology couldn't access the full depth of the data NASA had on its tapes. So after printing out what it needed to select landing sites, the space agency mothballed the tapes in a Maryland storage unit.

The tapes were well-kept, but the refrigerator-size tape drives — the only devices capable of accessing the data — had sat in the barn of Nancy Evans, a former NASA employee who saved them from going into the garbage, for the better part of a few decades.

That is, until space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo found out about the situation through a web group in 2005.  Wingo immediately contacted Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and founder of NASAWatch.com, for help.

Climate Change – A Hoax

If only those kooks and nuts trying to sell this bogus theory of global warming (fat Al Gore included) would just produce peer reviewed science like Exxon and Koch Industries provide.  Oh wait, do I have that wrong?  What’s this – human influence on climate change as early as the 1830s?  Unpossible!

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, no one would have thought that their burning of fossil fuels would have an almost immediate effect on the climate. But our new study, published Wednesday in Nature, reveals that warming in some regions actually began as early as the 1830s.

That is much earlier than previously thought, so our discovery redefines our understanding of when human activity began to influence our climate.

By pinpointing the date when human-induced climate change started, we can then begin to work out when the warming trend broke through the boundaries of the climate's natural fluctuations, because it takes some decades for the global warming signal to "emerge" above the natural climate variability.

According to our evidence, in all regions except for Antarctica, we are now well and truly operating in a greenhouse-influenced world. We know this because the only climate models that can reproduce the results seen in our records of past climate are those models that factor in the effect of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by humans.

DAILY QUICK READ - JULY 28, 2016

Fireflies For the People

A community in Mexico has figured out how to save its old-growth forest by utilizing the power of fireflies.  This is how we save the world.

Thousands of them light up a magical spectacle at dusk in the old-growth forests on reserves such as the Piedra Canteada park, about 45 miles (75km) east of Mexico’s sprawling capital city.

Piedra Canteada in Tlaxcala state isn’t a government-run park, but a rural cooperative that has managed to emerge from poverty and dependence on logging with the help of the fireflies.

For years, economic forces, including low prices for farm produce, forced rural communities like Piedra Canteada to cut down trees and sell the logs. Then, in 1990, community leader Genaro Rueda Lopez got the idea that the forest could bring tourism revenue from campers.

Business was slow for years. Then in 2011, community members realized the millions of fireflies that appear between June and August could draw tourists from larger cities where few people have seen them in significant numbers. Indeed, around the world, deforestation and urban growth are threatening the more than 2,000 species of fireflies with extinction.

Climate Change – the Hoax Continues

Bill Nye in a few minutes tells truth regarding the incredible lies and conspiracies from the right.

First, our favorite science guy, Bill Nye, is back with a new video aimed at debunking climate change conspiracy theories. Vocativ combs through online conspiracy forums to see what "climate change truthers" are saying, then Nye takes down the wacky theories one by one. We won't get into every one as they've been repeatedly debunked before, but Nye takes on the truthers with his usual flair (and bow tie).

"It's not that the world didn't used to be warmer in the ancient dinosaur days," Nye said, "It's the speed at which the world is getting warmer ... that's so troublesome."

Nye also reminds viewers of the original #ExxonKnew conspiracy, saying, "The fossil fuel industry works very hard to maintain their status quo."

Trump Will Destroy the Planet

Thank God there are still people who want to save it.

There is no more immediate and existential a threat to the planet than the climate crisis. Glaciers are cracking. Deserts are expanding. And, god knows, the weather is speaking loudly for itself here this week. Still, the Republicans adopt a platform that is the climatic equivalent of inviting the leadership of Daesh to the White House Easter Egg Roll, as MotherJones reported.

One day, when we're all fighting for elbow room on a rapidly disintegrating cinder, we can discuss this further. However, instead of thinking about that, and instead of praying to Gaia to turn He, Trump altogether into a ferret, how's about we meet three people who make sense, not merely on addressing this impending catastrophe, but also on how to organize politically to do something about it? On Tuesday, a climate and environmental caucus met for the first time to map out strategies they can use both within and without the political process.

Origins of Human Speech

What can an ape teach us?

An ape at the Indianapolis Zoo is giving scientists insight into how human speech may have evolved across time. Scientists from Durham University in the United Kingdom discovered that orangutans might be able to control their voices after an eight-year-old orangutan named Rocky mimicked the pitch and tone made by researchers.

Rocky, now 11 years old, was studied from April to May in 2012 when researchers played a “do-as-I-do” game with the ape. Essentially, a researcher would make a random sound that varied in pitch and tone and Rocky would mimic the noise. The team then compared the more than sounds made by the ape with a database housing thousands of hours of clips of over 120 orangutans in the wild and captive.

By cross-referencing Rocky’s "mimic" vowel-like noises with the database, the researchers were able to verify that none of the "mimic" noises were found naturally within the orangutan population. Thus, the team was able to confirm that Rocky is capable of learning new sounds and controlling his voice instead of merely creating a "normal orangutan call with a personal twist."

Love This!

DAILY QUICK READ - JUNE 18, 2016

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.

And 60% of the plastic pollution in the oceans comes from just five countries .

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

Spectacular photos  taken by British astronaut Tim Peake.

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.