Trickle down biology

Though few in number, they have an effect that affects the whole system for the better.

Credibiltiy and global warming

The assertion that the glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains were rapidly melting was made for political reasons. Those writing the influential UN report knew it had no basis

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
....
The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.
It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.
The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.
Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

Why does Glaciergate matter?

To understand why the future of Himalayan glaciers should arouse such peculiar passion, one must recall why they have long been a central icon in global warming campaigners' propaganda. Everything that polar bears have been to the West, the ice of the Himalayas has been – and more – to the East. This is because, as Mr Gore emphasised in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, the vast Himalayan ice sheet feeds seven of the world's major river systems, thus helping to provide water to 40 per cent of the world's population.

Credibility is a terrible thing to lose, and the climate warming folks are rapidly losing it.

The American media seems to slow on this story. It is getting much more in Britain and, of course, India.

Fish kill in Florida

The cold snap in Florida resulted in a huge fish kill:

Bob Pucinelli, former Bay area outdoors radio host, reported from the Everglades that the temperatures in some creeks there was 47.5 degrees, far below the 55 that is usually lethal for snook. The Bay area temperature was 41 degrees in many canals that had provided cold refuges for the fish in other seasons, according to captain Scott Moore, a leading Bay area snook conservationist. And north of Tampa Bay, the water was far too cold for survival of snook that had gradually migrated there over a succession of 10 warm winters. In fact, water on the flats was so cold, it killed some reds and trout in the Homosassa area.
There will be survivors, to be sure. Fish in spring outflows such as those in the Chassahowitzka, Homosassa and Crystal rivers should be fine, as will those huddled into the hot-water outflows from the state's many power plants.

There was, however, a silver lining:

While it might take snook and other saltwater game fish years to rebound, the cold snap should at least temporarily help less-popular freshwater natives such as sunfish by knocking off walking catfish, Mayan cichlids and other tropical exotics that have invaded the Everglades and many of South Florida's canals and ponds, said Loftus, who retired from the park last year and now runs a consulting business, Aquatic Research and Communication in Homestead.

I wonder how global warming can be blamed for this.

The center of the earth

Al Gore's new mantra seems to be "Drill, Baby, Drill." Do you see anything wrong with this clip?



People are learning science from a guy whose worst grade in college was in a natural science course.

Something to worry about

While lots of people are worried about the possibility of doom and gloom from global warming, there are other, more likely things to worry about. 150 years ago the sun sent a solar storm our way that resulted in visible auroras as far south as Havana. It also generated enough current in telegraph lines that the operators disconnected the batteries and ran them on the electricity in the air. It was, based on readings of ice cores, twice as big as any other solar storm in the last 500 years. Today it would wreak havoc with electrical transmission and could disrupt the world for years.

Controlling invasive species

Australia has a problem with an invasive species, the camel. There are, according to an AP article, one million of them in Australia and their population doubles every nine years. The solution may be to shoot them from helicopters, which is how wolves are controlled in Alaska. Some people have suggested birth controlling them, which may be how feral horses will be controlled in the U.S. Is there any problem for which birth control is not the solution for some people?

Greenpeace and unintended consequences

I found this rather old post about dolphin-safe tuna fishing from on link on Newmark's Door:

By trying to help dolphins, groups like Greenpeace caused one of the worst marine ecological disasters of all time. Few other fisheries are as bad for groups like sharks and sea turtles as the purse seine fishery, and none are as large in scale.

Global warming?

According to an article in the Winnipeg Free Press, spring has been late in the Canadian arctic this year:

It is the winter that refuses to go away in northern Manitoba and most of the eastern Arctic.

Prolonged cold snowy conditions in the Hudson Bay area are expected to obliterate the breeding season for migratory birds and most other species of wildlife this year.

There are two explanations for why we have this unusual spring. One is the global warming theory of greenhouse gasses, explained in the article:

According to NOAA scientists, although the Arctic is warming, more frequent annual oscillations in temperature are likely to occur, often resulting in late springs.

"Such major oscillations are part of a bumpy ride toward global warming," said Thomas Karl of the National Climate Center. "For awhile at least this will be the shape of things to come."

The other is a solar output theory, which notes that solar activity is not only at a low point in its cycle, but this cyclical low is unusually low. One of the problems is that the global warming theories seem to be non-falsifiable--they can be used to explain any and every event. That makes them non-scientific.

The Obama administration is betting big on the greenhouse theory even though there is increased skepticism about it among scientists. Time will tell if that is a good bet.

(It is remarkable how little attention the late arctic spring has gotten in the press. Shouldn't this be a bigger story? Thousands of adolescent geese will freeze to death this fall because they will not be big enough to fly south. Maybe the animal rights people should be mounting rescue efforts.)

Toad Chorus announces spring

I finally heard the songs of the toads in the seasonal pond east of Weston Cemetery. Unfortunately, when the toads try to get to the pond, they must cross a road, and a lot of them do not make it. On Sunday morning I saw six of them that had been killed by cars.
There were four near the main entrance to Weston Cemetery. They had been run over repeatedly and were very flat.
If the tadpoles make it to tiny toad status, many will have to cross the roads in the other way and there will be a repeat of the carnage.

My rant for Earth Week: The people who oppose wind farms often talk about the number of birds that will be killed by the rotating blades. The mere thought that anything could be killed by these blades strikes some people as reason to oppose wind farms. I wonder if these people ever get out of their cars and look at what is on and along the roads of American. There are dozens of birds, mammals, amphibians, or reptiles killed on every mile of even moderately busy roads. (And if we were worried about non vertebrates, it would be tens of thousands per mile. Check out any country road after a heavy rain for dead earthworms.)

A few years ago I thought it would be interesting to offer an offset to the wind-farm bird kills. Just as Al Gore says it is OK for him to use as much energy as a dozen normal people use because he offsets his carbon footprint, it would be OK for the wind farms to kill birds if for every bird they killed they saved a bird somewhere else. I could provide that service for a fee. I would go to the animal shelters, adopt cats, and kill them. Fewer cats, more birds.

It is good to rant every so often. I find it hard to take seriously the Al-Gore type of environmentalists, who talk the talk but cannot walk the walk. (By the way, electricity is fungible. That means paying for "green" electricity from the grid is nonsense.)

(Also posted at rensselaeradventures.blogpsot.com)

Bigger is more satisfying

New estimates of the Milky Way galaxy suggest it is about the same size as Andromeda, our close galactic neighbor a mere 2 million light years away. So next next time I meet an Andromedan, I will not have to suffer its contempt for us rural hicks. Now we are as big as they are.

a creek circle

Here is a very strange natural phenomenon, a creek circle. Check out the youtube video.

Environmentalists who do not know much

From OK:

GREEN campaigners called police after discovering an illegal logging site in a nature reserve – only to find the culprits were a gang of beavers.

Environmentalists found 20 neatly stacked tree trunks and others marked with notches for felling at a beauty-spot in Subkowy, northern Poland.

But when officers followed a trail left by a tree which had been dragged away, they found a beaver dam right across the river, as reported by the Austrian Times.

A police spokesman said: "The campaigners are feeling pretty stupid. There's nothing more natural than a beaver."

Waste water plant breeds salmon

Here is a weird story: Chinook salmon breed in a waste water treatment plant in East Chicago and have been doing it for 20 years. It is not clear how they got there, but they have to swim up a shallow stream to the drainage pipe and then 200 feet in the drainage pipe to get inside the plant.

The salmon began spawning in East Chicago after the city built a new plant and switched from using chlorine to purify the water to using banks of ultraviolet light bulbs. The open channel behind the plant that runs into the Grand Calumet was a murky brown stream with a faint chemical smell from the chlorine before the change, but turned into a natural haven afterward.

When the fish returned, so did herons, kingfishers, then foxes and a colony of beavers. Naturalists from the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and environmental groups have identified dozens of fish species outside the plant in numbers common only to the cleanest freshwater streams: rainbow trout, crayfish and largemouth and smallmouth bass.

Getting ready for Thanksgiving

Sarah Palin was back in the news last week because some people were horrified that she gave an interview with turkeys being slaughtered or bled (I could not tell which) in the background. The commentary seemed to divide into two camps: the horrified and those who said that if you eat meat, you should not be afraid to see how that meat gets to your plate.

In our society we have managed to separate ourselves from a lot of unpleasantness that is necessary for life. An attraction of a show like Dirty Jobs is that it reminds us of that fact. Older societies were not so far away from those facts (unless you were very rich, in which case you could say things like, "Let them eat cake"). Primitive man was uncomfortable killing animals for meat, and as a result the whole process was sanitized with religious ritual. The main point of animal sacrifice in the Bible or in the Greek epics was not to waste animals, burning them for the gods or God, but to slaughter them for human consumption.

One of the troubling things about hunting is that some hunters do not seem to be troubled by the taking of life, but rather seem to be quite delighted by it. I have no problem with people hunting for meat. But some have no interest in the meat--they hunt for sport, and I do not respect that, even if their hunting is necessary to preserve a balance given that we have eliminated natural predators (especially wolves).

One of the comments I saw (I do not remember where) was from a farmer pointing out that farming itself centered on killing. He said that nature took care of the growing, and what the farmer spent his time doing was killing the competition: the weeds, the insects, the rodents, and anything else that threatened the crop. If you think of farming in that way, then there really is no escaping animal slaughter even if one becomes a vegan. Not only plants but also animals died for your whole wheat bread, your soybean tofu, and your three-bean salad.

Update. You might think you can avoid the slaughter by going organic. I doubt it. I garden organically, but when I saw the critter in this picture, I killed it. I did not eat it, though I think it is edible. Any gardener who does not kill the insects that feed in the garden will not have much to harvest.

Two stories of overpopulation

Indiana has had a problem with the deer overpopulation in the state parks and forests. When the deer, which no longer have natural predators here, become too numerous, they destroy the vegetation. The solution has been to close the state parks for a few days and allow hunters to kill deer.

Meanwhile areas of the west have a problem with horse overpopulation on public lands. When the horses (and burros) become too numerous, they destroy the vegetation and habitat. The solution has been to round up the horse and let people adopt them. Some that cannot be adopted become wards of the state.

Some obvious questions: Why not have a horse hunt? Does it make sense to protect horses in the wild given that they are an invasive species, not native to the habitat? Does it good policy to spend $38 million a year managing a "wild" horse population of 30-35 thousand? Why should it be illegal to butcher horses for meat? Why do we seem to demand different treatment for animal species that we view as pets?

Freegan meat

From the Rensselaer Republican newspaper of November 14, 2008 (A-10):

Road Kill
The Jasper County Sheriff's Department has a road kill list, where interested parties can sign up to be notified if a deer is killed on the highway... You must provide your name, phone number and areas you are willing to go pick up the animal carcass. A deer kill slip will be provided to recipient. There are no fees for this process. Also, the deer will not count toward the hunting limit for the year. The recipient is responsible for his or her own deer processing.

If I knew how to process a deer, my name would be on that list. The locker plants in the area charge $50 to process a deer. (Also, we just purchased a quarter of a steer, so we probably would not have room in the freezer even if I did know how to process it.)

New record in aviation

The new record is 7000 miles, nonstop. The birds lose half their body weight during the flight from Alaska to New Zealand.

Climate change

I stumbled on an interesting site about Climate Change. It links to both the pro and con sides:
http://climatedebatedaily.com/

Squash Opportunity Cost

When I was a graduate student living in the Eagle Heights Apartments at the University of Wisconsin, I planted my first garden, and every summer since then I have continued to garden. This summer I have been worrying about the costs involved in my garden.

The most obvious cost is the time of gardening itself. Is it really worth doing? When I came to Rensselaer 30 plus years ago, the college had recently started allowing faculty and staff to have gardens on a two-acre plot of land west of the college. In those early years the entire two acres was divided up and planted in plots that were as large as 100 feet by 25 feet. But over the years the number of gardeners dropped, and gradually the only a small part of the area was being planted. In the summer of 2006 I was the only one left. In the summer of 2007 the physical plant people just ignored my requests for garden space, so I moved my garden to my back yard. Did the rest of the people decide that their time was better spent doing something else? They did not even know that a herd of deer had made gardening much more difficult than it had been in the past.

In the spring when the garden looks empty, I have a tendency to over plant. This spring some animal kept nipping the pea plants as they emerged, so I thought I should put something in the emptiness that resulted. I put in a couple of squash. Now two months later the squash are trying to take over everything. I have not had good luck in the past with squash. I have always had problems with squash vine borers, which are moths that as adults look like bees, but as larvae live in the vines of squash plants, and if they are too numerous, kill them.

If my huge squash plants do not get killed by the squash vine borers (and I know they are there, because I have killed three adults and been unable to catch several others), I will have a bumper crop of acorn squash. But if the plants do get killed, I have sacrificed the chance to use that space for things that are pretty sure to produce, like beans and beats. I guess life is good when that is the sort of thing you are worrying about.

My other space allocation decision that I wonder about is my decision to plant potatoes. My colleague Brian offered potatoes to anyone who wanted them this spring. Brian belongs to a seed saver exchange that I think tries to preserve old varieties of plants. One of the varieties of potatoes he offered was Carola and I took a few. However, I wonder whether, given the limited space I cultivate and the very low cost of potatoes in the store, I should be growing potatoes at all. I know that I should not grow sweet corn. The yield is too low (and uncertain given the raccoons who stroll by at night), and most years I am given plenty by my friend Marge whose husband farms.

So a garden is not really free food. I justify spending the time there by telling myself that it is a hobby. A hobby is something that you cannot justify on a simple cost-benefit tabulation. You have to include the benefits of enjoyment, and that enjoyment often seems a bit strange to people who do not share the hobby, to make the benefits exceed the costs.

Update, Oct 4, 2008

I got lucky this summer. The bugs did not kill the squash and they spread out to cover much of the back yard.
The end result was a decent harvest of squash. Here a a few of them. If I plant them next year, I will put them some place else, where they can interfere with the grass, not other garden plants.

Something odd

A couple weeks ago I was in Indianapolis and visited a park on the southeast side of town. There were some geese, and they had a little family. But something was not quite right. Click on the picture to enlarge it, and you should see what was odd about this family.