Destruction Of Sumatra Forests Driving Global Climate Change And Species Extinction

March 3rd, 2008

– A quote for the piece below:

At last December’s Bali Climate Change Conference, the Indonesian minister of Forestry pledged to provide incentives to stop unsustainable forestry practices and protect Indonesia’s forests.

– Oh, Pleeeeze. Haven’t we heard this before from just about every country that’s cutting down their forests for profit? ➡, ➡, ➡ and ➡

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ScienceDaily (Feb. 29, 2008) — Turning just one Sumatran province’s forests and peat swamps into pulpwood and palm oil plantations is generating more annual greenhouse gas emissions than the Netherlands and rapidly driving the province’s elephants into extinction, a new study by WWF and partners has found.

The study found that in central Sumatra’s Riau Province nearly 10.5 million acres of tropical forests and peat swamp have been cleared in the last 25 years. Forest loss and degradation and peat decomposition and fires are behind average annual carbon emissions equivalent to 122 percent of the Netherlands total annual emissions, 58 percent of Australia’s annual emissions, 39 percent of annual UK emissions and 26 percent of annual German emissions.*

Riau was chosen for the study because it is home to vast peatlands estimated to hold Southeast Asia’s largest store of carbon, and contains some of the most critical habitat for Sumatran elephants and tigers. It also has Indonesia’s highest deforestation rate, substantially driven by the operations of global paper giants Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) and Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Limited (APRIL).

At last December’s Bali Climate Change Conference, the Indonesian minister of Forestry pledged to provide incentives to stop unsustainable forestry practices and protect Indonesia’s forests. The governor of Riau province has also made a public commitment to protect the province’s remaining forest.

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Global Warming Paradox?

March 3rd, 2008

– Truth is scarier than fiction sometimes. An article like this makes me want to bump the “We Are Toast” indicator up a couple of notches.

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By John Tierney

If only the masses could understand the science of global warming, they’d be alarmed, right? Wrong, according to the surprising results of a survey of Americans published in the journal Risk Analysis by researchers at Texas A&M University.

After asking a national sample of more than 1,000 Americans how much they knew about global warming and how they felt about it, the researchers report that respondents who are better-informed about global warming “both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming.” Another unexpected result: “Respondents who showed a great deal of confidence that scientists understand global warming and climate change showed significantly less concern for the risks of global warming than did those who have lower trust in scientists.”

The researchers offer several possible explanations for this apparent paradox. Paul Kellstedt, the lead author and a professor of political science at Texas A&M, told me that previous researchers found that a campaign to increase public understanding of genetically modified foods didn’t lessen public fears, and that more widespread “scientific understanding” of research on embryos actually diminished support for that research. “What those two studies show, and what ours does, too,” he said, “is that more information given to the mass public does not automatically translate into more support for what are (in the public’s mind) controversial areas of scientific research. In fact, more information, in all three cases, seems to have the opposite effect, creating opposition to the research area in question.”

It’s also possible that the better-informed people were being more realistic when they said didn’t feel personally responsible for global warming. As the researchers note in the paper:

Global warming is an extreme collective action dilemma, with the actions of one person having a negligible effect in the aggregate. Informed persons appear to realize this objective fact. Therefore, informed persons can be highly concerned and reasonably pessimistic about their ability to change climate outcomes.

More… ➡

– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com :arrow: as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

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Iran to Punish Apostasy with Death

March 1st, 2008

 – Most people who believe that their religion is the best religion seem to find no irony in the idea that those who don’t want to believe, of their own free will, should need to be pressured to believe – in this case under penalty of death.

– It’s always seemed to me that if something is the ‘best’, then its superior qualities should be self evident to all.  And if folks have to be compelled to believe in its superior qualities, then I can think of no better indictment of its inferior nature.

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Apostasy — or the formal renunciation of religion — is already punishable in Iran with death. But now, Iran wants to make the death penalty for apostasy part of the penal code. The European Union is concerned and has asked Iran to reconsider.

The European Union this week sent a letter to authorities in Iran expressing its concern over a proposed change to the penal code that would make apostasy punishable by death.

The EU is responding to news that the Islamic Republic is planning to subject “apostasy, heresy and witchcraft” to the Hudud — the body of fixed punishments assigned to crimes that are considered violations of the “claims of God.” Other Hadud crimes include alcohol consumption, theft, highway robbery and illegal sexual intercourse.

As the news agency Reuters reported earlier this week, the EU, which opposes the death penalty as a matter of policy, expressed “acute concern” over the proposed penal code revision.

“These articles clearly violate the Islamic Republic of Iran’s commitments under the international human rights conventions,” Slovenian leaders, who currently head the rotating EU presidency, wrote in a statement.

“The EU calls upon the Iranian authorities, both in government and parliament, to modify the draft penal code in order to respect the obligations.”

The death penalty has already been applied to apostates in Iran — but this was never, since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979, institutionalized as a matter of legal practice.

Iran typically dismisses Western criticism of its legal system, claiming that Islamic law is fundamentally different.

More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Religion - The Right Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

The Language of Autism

March 1st, 2008

– This video is an eye opener. If you think you know what autism is all about, you need to watch it.

– Be patient – the first part shows the author engaged in seemingly random autistic behaviors. But, the second part begins when the text “A Translation” appears on the screen and at that point, it really gets interesting.

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Click here to see the video –> ➡

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– research thanks to Katy A.

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080228 – Our personal business in the news

February 28th, 2008

– We make our living owning and operating a wholesale/retail nursery business here in the Pacific Northwest corner of the U.S. Recently, we rescued a large Japanese Maple from the chain saws and transported it back here to our nursery. A local paper came out that day and did a story on what it takes to rescue big trees and the story came out in today’s Everett’s Herald Newspaper.

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Transplanting big trees is a labor of love for Monroe nursery owner

By Debra Smith
Herald Writer

The thieves were smart enough to recognize that the old Japanese maple in a Mercer Island yard was worth thousands.

That’s where the smarts ended.

The tree probably looked like an easy haul. It had been dug up, its roots neatly packaged into a burlap ball for a move the next day. But the Japanese maple was a lot heavier than its graceful bare limbs suggested, weighing in about 2,000 pounds.

“They were stupid,” said Sharon Ronsse, the nursery owner coordinating the move. “They tried to move it, broke the root ball. It took five years of babying to recover it.”

Transplanting big old trees involves more than shovels and a big truck. It requires skill, patience, the right conditions and often thousands of dollars. It’s risky — for the tree and the mover. Only a handful of businesses in Snohomish County do it.

Ronsse’s company, Woods Creek Wholesale Nursery in Monroe, is one of them. The nursery, which she co-owns with husband Dennis Gallagher, sells 500 kinds of plants and trees. But it’s the old Japanese maples and other special specimens the business salvages, often from yards where homeowners don’t like the trees or they have become too big.

Ronsse considers what she does a rescue operation, since the alternative is usually cutting down the tree. She does it, she said, more for altruistic reasons than the cash. Japanese maples are a passion: She loves the layering, the coloring and the textures. They’re living beings that should be treated accordingly, she said.

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This Is Your Brain On Jazz: Researchers Use MRI To Study Spontaneity, Creativity

February 28th, 2008

– Several of my friends are Jazz Aficionados.   Some jazz I enjoy but much of it is a mystery to me.   But, I see from this article that they are probably onto something.

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A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.

The joint research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and musician volunteers from the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, sheds light on the creative improvisation that artists and non-artists use in everyday life, the investigators say.

It appears, they conclude, that jazz musicians create their unique improvised riffs by turning off inhibition and turning up creativity.

The scientists from the University’s School of Medicine and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders describe their curiosity about the possible neurological underpinnings of  the almost trance-like state jazz artists enter during spontaneous improvisation.

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Scientists blame ocean dead zones on climate change

February 28th, 2008

Peering into the murky depths, Jane Lubchenco searched for sea life, but all she saw were signs of death.

Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of bacteria. At times, the camera’s unblinking eye revealed nothing – a barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs and fat rockfish.

“We couldn’t believe our eyes,” Lubchenco said, recalling her initial impression of the carnage brought about by oxygen-starved waters. “It was so overwhelming and depressing. It appeared that everything that couldn’t swim or scuttle away had died.”

Upon further study, Lubchenco and other marine ecologists at Oregon State University concluded that that the undersea plague appears to be a symptom of global warming. In a study published in the journal Science, the researchers note how these low-oxygen waters have expanded north into Washington and crept south as far as the California state line. And, they appear to be as regular as the tides, a cycle that has repeated itself every summer and fall since 2002.

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Antarctic glaciers surge to ocean

February 23rd, 2008

By Martin Redfern
Rothera Research Station, Antarctica

UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica.

If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea level.

The new evidence comes from a group of glaciers covering an area the size of Texas, in a remote and seldom visited part of West Antarctica.

The “rivers of ice” have surged sharply in speed towards the ocean.

David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey, explained: “It has been called the weak underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and the reason for that is that this is the area where the bed beneath the ice sheet dips down steepest towards the interior.

“If there is a feedback mechanism to make the ice sheet unstable, it will be most unstable in this region.”

There is good reason to be concerned.

Satellite measurements have shown that three huge glaciers here have been speeding up for more than a decade.

The biggest of the glaciers, the Pine Island Glacier, is causing the most concern.

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Greenland’s Rising Air Temperatures Drive Ice Loss At Surface And Beyond

February 23rd, 2008

A new NASA study confirms that the surface temperature of Greenland’s massive ice sheet has been rising, stoked by warming air temperatures, and fueling loss of the island’s ice at the surface and throughout the mass beneath.

Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is home to enough ice to raise sea level by about 23 feet if the entire ice sheet were to melt into surrounding waters. Though the loss of the whole ice sheet is unlikely, loss from Greenland’s ice mass has already contributed in part to 20th century sea level rise of about two millimeters per year, and future melt has the potential to impact people and economies across the globe. So NASA scientists used state-of-the-art NASA satellite technologies to explore the behavior of the ice sheet, revealing a relationship between changes at the surface and below.

“The relationship between surface temperature and mass loss lends further credence to earlier work showing rapid response of the ice sheet to surface meltwater,” said Dorothy Hall, a senior researcher in Cryospheric Sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of the study.

A team led by Hall used temperature data captured each day from 2000 through 2006 from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite. They measured changes in the surface temperature to within about one degree of accuracy from about 440 miles away in space. They also measured melt area within each of the six major drainage basins of the ice sheet to see whether melt has become more extensive and longer lasting, and to see how the various parts of the ice sheet are reacting to increasing air temperatures.

The team took their research at the ice sheet’s surface a step further, becoming the first to pair the surface temperature data with satellite gravity data to investigate what internal ice changes occur as the surface melts. Geophysicist and co-author, Scott Luthcke, also of NASA Goddard, developed a mathematical solution, using gravity data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) twin satellite system. “This solution has permitted greatly-improved detail in both time and space, allowing measurement of mass change at the low-elevation coastal regions of the ice sheet where most of the melting is occurring,” said Luthcke.

The paired surface temperature and gravity data confirm a strong connection between melting on ice sheet surfaces in areas below 6,500 feet in elevation, and ice loss throughout the ice sheet’s giant mass. The result led Hall’s team to conclude that the start of surface melting triggers mass loss of ice over large areas of the ice sheet.

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Rat Invasions Causing Seabird Decline Worldwide

February 23rd, 2008

– I wrote about this recently with regard to new Zealand’s natural history but the problems associated with rats being distributed world-wide into new environments is a major global ecological disaster.

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Invasive rats on ocean islands are threatening the survival of many of the world’s seabirds, according to a new report.

The global analysis found that non-native rats have been observed preying on roughly a quarter of all seabird species, often with disastrous consequences. (See photos of rat-seabird conflict.)

The voracious rodents attack bird nesting colonies, eating eggs, chicks, and sometimes even adult birds.

Now 102 of 328 recognized seabird species are considered threatened or endangered by the World Conservation Union, with predation by invasive species ranking among the top dangers.

“Seabirds are important ecological actors in the oceans and on islands, but 30 percent of all seabirds are at risk of extinction,” said study co-author Bernie Tershy of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“Invasive rats are likely the single largest threat to seabirds,” said Tershy, also a former grantee of the National Geographic Conservation Trust. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)

Smaller seabird species and those that nest in burrows or rock crevices are particularly at risk, the study said.

That group includes storm-petrels, auklets, murrelets, and shearwaters, according to lead author Holly Jones of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

“Rats can have a larger impact on entire seabird populations in species with adults that are small enough to prey on,” Jones said.

“Burrow- and crevice-nesting seabirds share the same underground habitat [as rats], which makes a predation encounter more likely.”

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