History > 2007 > USA >

Nature, Wildlife, Climate, Weather (III)

Feeling Warmth, Subtropical Plants Move North

NYT

3 May 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/science/03flowers.html

Rain Continues

to Plague Flooded Texas

June 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:28 a.m. ET
The New York Times

MARBLE FALLS, Texas (AP) -- More rain fell Thursday in flood-weary parts of Texas, where evacuations were under way and residents were bracing for even more of the constant downpours that have killed 11 people in recent days.

Officials reported calls for dozens of rescues in San Antonio, and hundreds of people were being ordered to leave their homes near the bloated Brazos River in North Texas.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, acting as governor while Gov. Rick Perry is out of the country, surveyed damage Thursday in the lakeside community of Marble Falls, which was drenched by as much as 18 inches of rain early Wednesday. No one was killed, but there were 32 water rescues and widespread damage.

''I haven't seen so much destruction since I was on the ground right after Hurricane Rita,'' Dewhurst said. ''What these folks need is just a break in the rain and a chance to dry out.''

In North Texas, rains continued falling west of Fort Worth, and evacuations of about 300 homes were ordered in Parker County as the Brazos River began creeping into some backyards.

Firefighters and National Guard troops went door to door notifying residents of the mandatory evacuation, but some refused to leave, said Lt. Jason Williams of the Parker County firefighters' search and rescue team.

Among those holding out was Donna Thorpe, who said she and her family had been watching the water rise for more than 24 hours and marking it with a measuring stick.

''Every two hours we'd get up and go down and measure,'' Thorpe said. ''Every two hours you get up and go down. You really don't sleep. You're so nervous about it, how quick it can come up.''

Overnight rainfall in Central Texas was far short of the 10 inches that were forecast, but more was expected Thursday, and flash flood warnings were in effect. Storm systems near Austin and San Antonio were expected to dump as much as 10 inches Thursday, the National Weather Service said.

In Oklahoma, where all 77 counties are under a state of emergency, 46 homes in Pottawatomie County have sustained major damage, officials said. Three water rescues were necessary Thursday in Kingfisher County in central Oklahoma.

Marble Falls, about 40 miles northwest of Austin, took the brunt of the deluge Tuesday and Wednesday, with numerous people stuck on rooftops, in trees and on houses. The city was spared rain overnight, but a light drizzle fell on and off throughout the day Thursday.

The focus shifted to cleanup even as drizzle continued to fall. Piles of rubble and debris littered street corners, and streets were covered in a layer of mud and tree limbs throughout town.

''We're through the crisis point, and now we're at the point it's time to roll up our sleeves and get dirty,'' Mayor Raymond Whitman said.

As many as 150 homes and businesses were damaged, city spokeswoman Christine Laine said.

In Georgetown, north of Austin, three homes containing 10 people were evacuated Thursday morning because of flooding on a branch of the San Gabriel River, said Keith Hutchinson, city spokesman. No injuries were reported.

Authorities also closed several impassable roads in surrounding Williamson County. Some cars stalled in the high water, but the occupants were able to escape without the help of rescue workers, county spokeswoman Connie Watson said.

In San Antonio, 47 streets were closed and there were 39 calls for high-water rescues, although it's unclear how many people were rescued, said Sandy Gutierrez, a spokeswoman for the city Emergency Operations Center.

The heaviest rainfall in the region Thursday was in San Antonio's Bexar County and Comal County, where 3 to 5 inches had fallen since 7 a.m., said National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Lenz.

Whitman said some looting had been reported in flood-damaged areas of Marble Falls on Wednesday. Extra police officers were on duty overnight, and no more looting had been reported by Thursday morning, a city spokeswoman said.

Most residents of the town of 7,200 remained without running water after flash floods damaged the city's water plant. Bottled water brought in by state emergency workers was available. State environmental officials were assessing damage to the plant, Dewhurst said.

The Texas National Guard dispatched troops and vehicles to Central Texas, as well as other areas hit by storms from the Oklahoma border to the Rio Grande Valley. About 150 troops and 50 vehicles were mobilized.

It's the wettest year on record in Austin, with more than 30 inches of rain since January, and Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco and Wichita Falls have received near-record amounts. The rainfall has more than compensated for a drought that gripped much of Texas in 2005-06, Lenz said.

Associated Press writers Rich Matthews in Granbury, Elizabeth White in New Braunfels and Angela K. Brown in Fort Worth contributed to this report.

Rain Continues to Plague Flooded Texas, NYT, 29.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Flooding.html

Some Normalcy Returns to Tahoe

June 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:47 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. (AP) -- A measure of normalcy began to return to this resort community Thursday, even as crews battled an unpredictable mountain wildfire for a fifth day. Sunbathers ventured to some beaches, and the smoke lurking in the mountains largely cleared.

But it was a tale of two Tahoes. A few miles from the tourist belt, entire neighborhoods lay in ruin, eerily silent because residents remained officially barred from returning. Many urgently wanted to sift through the ash and grieve.

''Of course they want to see it. That's what finalizes it -- it's like the funeral,'' said Barbara Rebiskie, a U.S. Forest Service investigator who stood in an unincorporated community near Meyers, a few miles south of the lake.

A few people were so determined to return that they defied evacuation orders, returning repeatedly on bicycles and were arrested for trespassing, said El Dorado Sheriff's Deputy Phil Chovanec.

The amount of land burned held steady at 3,100 acres as of Thursday night, with the fire's containment officially at 70 percent. A total of 254 homes had been destroyed and 3,500 people evacuated since the fire broke out Sunday, said Rich Hawkins, a Forest Service fire incident commander.

Among many firefighters, there was a sense of rising confidence that they were gaining the upper hand against a blaze that has hop-scotched and erupted erratically. ''Demobilization'' was the term of the afternoon, and about 500 firefighters were expected to leave Friday.

''Basically, I think the whole fire is in the mop-up stage,'' said Dave Ingrum, chief of a strike team based in San Joaquin County. ''I think it's pretty obvious from the lack of smoke.''

He hastened to add that he was not in communication with crews elsewhere and did not have a sense of the larger picture. Still, some fire officials elsewhere echoed his comments.

Rebiskie said it was too early to declare victory. Jim Wallman, the command center meteorologist, stressed that winds could pick up late Thursday.

Authorities had pinpointed the cause of the blaze but will not announce it until Friday, Hawkins said, adding that he believed it was accidental.

Near Meyers, in what was once an area of handsome mountain cabins amid fir trees, cars slumped on their rims, tires vaporized. Aluminum superheated by the inferno had trickled into the streets and then solidified, leaving shiny rivulets on pavement. Driveways led to empty spaces where houses once stood. ''For Sale'' signs swung in the breeze.

Only public safety officials, utility workers and journalists were permitted into the area because authorities feared unstable trees and power lines could injure residents. Utility crews worked through the night and all day Thursday to restore electricity and other services.

''We haven't been able to have closure,'' said Che DeVol, whose home was destroyed. He and his father visited a victim assistance center set up at Tahoe Community College but he hasn't been back to the family's home of 22 years.

''To stand there and at least rake through our stuff, that's the hardest part,'' he said.

The region here is a finger of development jutting into vast state and federal forest tracts.

''A lot of these people knew the potential but said, 'It's not going to happen,''' said Ingrum, who was part of the strike team sent to guard against flare-ups in Meyers, where the fire swept through on Sunday. ''Guess what? Everybody's awake now.''

Authorities were closing in on pinpointing the cause of the blaze, said Beth Brady, spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service's fire investigation team.

As the weekend approached, and beyond it a holiday week, there were signs of tourism rebounding. Power boats prowled the turquoise waters of Lake Tahoe, and a parasailer floated carefree above. A few sunbathers were out at midday, but a fleet of personal watercraft bobbed in the shallows unused.

Farther south, in Kern County, firefighters were working to contain a fire in a steep canyon that had already burned 11,400 acres, destroying 12 homes and six outbuildings, state fire spokesman Craig Tolmie said. About 60 residents were evacuated because of that fire, which was 60 percent contained on Thursday.

Elsewhere, a wildfire near a gateway to Yellowstone National Park grew to roughly 3,000 acres Thursday, fanned by high temperatures and erratic wind. Evacuation orders were in effect for some resorts near West Yellowstone, Mont.

In Alaska, a California man was cited with a misdemeanor on suspicion of failing to exercise due care in preventing the spread of what became a destructive wildfire, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Charles Partridge Jr., 60, and his wife were preparing to build a cabin for their son and his fiancee when a handheld grinder caused sparks to fall into dry grass.

The charge allows the state to recoup a portion of firefighting expenses, which by Wednesday exceeded $3.9 million. Efforts by the newspaper to reach Partridge were unsuccessful.

Firefighters on the Hawaiian island of Maui were fighting a blaze that burned an estimated 1,400 acres and destroyed at least one house. Several homes near Olowalu, where the fire is believed to have started Wednesday, were ordered evacuated, and the Red Cross opened two emergency shelters. No injuries were reported.

Associated Press writers Aaron C. Davis and Joe Mullin contributed to this report.

    Some Normalcy Returns to Tahoe, NYT, 29.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Wildfires.html

Wildfire Destroys at Least 220 Homes

June 25, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN HOLUSHA

More than 220 homes and other structures have been destroyed by a wind-driven blaze near Lake Tahoe today, forcing 1,000 people to flee their homes, as the tinder-dry western part of the country moved into the summer fire season.

The fire produced a thick layer of smoke that inhibited firefighting operations from the air, and prompted health authorities to warn nearby residents to stay indoors with their windows closed to avoid breathing the contaminated air.

“This is the biggest disaster that has happened to this community in, probably, forever,” said Lt. Kevin House of the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department in a televised interview. He said he was glad that there had not been any reports of injuries so far.

The fire, believed to be the result of human activity, started Sunday afternoon and had charred 2,000 acres, mostly on the California side of the lake, by early today. More than 460 firefighters were battling the fire overnight, and more were expected on the scene today.

Meanwhile, a “red flag” warning was issued by the National Weather Service for all of southern California because of the high level of danger for fire. The area has had only three inches of rain in recent months, compared with 15 inches in the same period in a normal year.

Authorities advised resident to be careful about how they use backyard barbecues and dispose of cigarettes.

Moisture is in short supply in northern parts of California and in neighboring Nevada as well, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Lake Tahoe. A survey of the snow pack in the Tahoe area in May found it to be 29 percent of normal levels, the lowest since 1988.

    Wildfire Destroys at Least 220 Homes, NYT, 25.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/25/us/25cnd-fire.html?hp

Pests That Bite and Slither? Call Snake Wranglers

June 16, 2007
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES, June 14 — For Sam the Weimaraner, things had been quite grave. A rattlesnake bite to the snout — the unhappy result of flower bed pursuit — had left him unconscious, lying in his owner’s garage in Topanga Canyon, an IV dangling from his paw.

It was the second snake bite to the nose in three weeks. Action had to be taken. The snake whisperer was summoned.

Throughout Los Angeles, there are a handful of people who have a deep adoration for limbless reptiles, and are willing, in fact eager, to remove them from the property of others. Armed with cloth gloves, a large plastic bin and a snake hook, which looks like a giant dental tool, they snoop under rocks and peek through piles of wood.

“We remove them, release them and give them another chance to go on with their lives,” said Jason McElroy, the owner of Southern California Snake Removal.

While the snake wrangling business is often bustling in the spring, when snakes come out to mate, business is especially booming this year because of an extreme drought. (Mr. McElroy’s usual two calls a day have swelled to roughly nine). Since last July, it has rained 3.21 inches in Los Angeles, almost 12 inches below normal for that period.

Thousands of rattlesnakes make their home in the many hills that surround the city and are now coming down into the canyons and hillside properties in droves. They are in search of the prey that have fled the parched hills to find food and water in residential gardens.

Unlike exterminators, who have little use for their prey, Mr. McElroy and his brethren are simpatico with the snakes. “Rattlesnakes are a very important part of our hillside,” said Mr. McElroy, who has collected snakes for 22 years. “Every animal deserves the right to live.” Snakes that are coaxed from hiding are removed to the wild, never to return to the residence where they were found, he said.

Mr. McElroy, who charges $125 a visit, documents his catches on his Web site, socalsnakeremoval.com. This is where you will find a pair of Southern Pacific rattlesnakes taken from Sherman Oaks, copulating at the time of removal.

The only downside to the job is getting insurance. “Most people hang up on you,” Mr. McElroy lamented. “I had to go through 20 insurance companies. I think it is because it costs like $200,000 to treat a snake bite.”

One day this week Mr. McElroy dispatched a part-time worker, Darren Wilson, a fellow snake hunter, owner, admirer and wrangler, to the home of Judith Pierce, owner of the bitten dog, Sam. (Thanks to the quick house call by his veterinarian, Sam, 3, made a hearty comeback.)

“I’ve lived here six years, and I’ve never seen snakes like this year,” Mrs. Pierce said, noting that her gardener had already done in one rattlesnake with a shovel.

Mr. Wilson arrived and began to turn over stones and poke around in railroad ties in Mrs. Pierce’s spectacular garden, which grows up a hill. He searched among the hydrangea, artichokes, sorrel and chives.

“Uh huh, there is some lizard poop right here,” he said. “Sometimes you turn over a can, and you find four at a time.”

He poked around near a hole in the stone wall. “No. Just an earthworm and a nice-looking centipede,” he said, somewhat disappointed.

Mr. Wilson then happened upon a little shed full of holes and damp leaves. But all he turned up was a large rodent nest and one dead mouse.

Deflated, he began to measure Mrs. Pierce’s yard for a mesh snake fence, a barrier that would keep the elusive slithering beings at a distance. He glanced around the yard with a look of longing.

“I wonder how many other species she’s got around here?” Mr. Wilson said.

Finished, the snake whisperer went back to his brown Volvo and made his way out of the canyons, his plastic snake tub empty beside him.

“A lot of people are like, ‘What’s going on with you and snakes?’ ” he said. “But I say, ‘Once you get into them, you just can’t stop.’ ”

    Pests That Bite and Slither? Call Snake Wranglers, NYT, 16.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/us/16snakes.html?hp

Researchers Track Butterfly Populations

June 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:39 p.m. ET
The New York Times

MIAMI (AP) -- The volunteers tote a butterfly net, binoculars and field guides around the Miami Metrozoo grounds, scanning the plants and flowers for fluttering wings. But they aren't searching for a rare species or collecting specimens for display -- they're counting butterflies for the Florida Butterfly Monitoring Network, then leaving the insects to continue their zigzagging flights through the humid air.

As the summer butterfly watching season warms up, researchers hope similar counts organized by the North American Butterfly Association and a few separate state monitoring networks will contribute new data to help track butterfly populations and develop land management strategies.

The counts turn butterfly enthusiasts into citizen scientists who record butterfly sightings in city and suburban parks, zoo-owned conservation lands and other open spaces across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Basic counting gives researchers a picture of where butterflies currently thrive, and alerts them to population and habitat changes, said Jaret Daniels, a researcher at the University of Florida's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity who modeled the Florida network in 2003 after similar networks in Illinois and Ohio.

The counts may help scientists prevent any more butterflies from becoming as rare as the Miami blue, a quarter-sized species now found only on one island in the Florida Keys, Daniels said. The Miami blue was abundant throughout South Florida a generation ago, and scientists were slow to recognize the extent of its decline.

''Once we have multiple years of data, we can start looking at trends of these species, and identify declining species before they become so rare that they need to be listed'' as endangered species, Daniels said.

All the counts follow roughly the same protocol: Volunteers walk at a steady pace along a fixed route through a predetermined location, counting the butterflies within view. Butterflies can be briefly caught for identification, but volunteers can't chase butterflies too far from the designated path. All individual butterflies seen during the count, along with the weather, are noted on a data sheet later submitted to NABA or one of the state networks.

At Miami Metrozoo, a monthly count is split between the natural pine rockland and a cultivated butterfly garden in the children's zoo. Volunteers have been trained to identify dozens of species drawn to the wild and manmade habitats.

On a recent morning just after a rainfall, a handful of tiny butterflies are spotted from a gravel path through the rockland. A pale blur no bigger than a quarter is easily identified mid-air as a common Florida butterfly, the Cassius blue.

''The low-level flying, the erratic path, then you can see the tinge of blue,'' said volunteer Yvonne Leung, 55, of Miami.

A darker dot fluttering above the gravel is harder to identify by flight pattern alone. Adam Stern, the zoo's invertebrates expert, traps it in a butterfly net and gingerly transfers it to a clear plastic container so the volunteers can compare its tawny-orange wings with pictures in their field guides. After a minute, they conclude it's a Baracoa skipper and release it; Stern would have photographed it for identification later if the group had not been able to name the minuscule, fast-flying butterfly common to South Florida lawns.

More butterflies are counted in the walk through the gardens in the children's zoo: Striped zebra longwings, including one laying eggs, and bright orange Julias float in the sunbeams breaking through the clouds.

The diversity of butterflies flying across the zoo's property has surprised Stern since he began leading the Metrozoo counts four years ago, with some species differentiated only by subtle markings.

''So what you thought was one type of butterfly, once you stopped to look at it, actually became four different butterflies that you'd been counting as one,'' he said.

About 3,000 people participated in 483 NABA counts across the continent last year, according to the New Jersey-based organization. While the participants are mostly amateurs, they collect information individual scientists cannot easily access, such as large-scale surveys of migratory species across multiple states, said Leslie Ries, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland who is analyzing three decades of NABA counts. She has found the data matches results independently compiled by the Illinois and Ohio butterfly monitoring networks from about 100 sites across each state.

Through the data, the seemingly inconsequential butterfly shows how people have altered the environment, said Joe Keiper, curator of invertebrate zoology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, which organizes the data collected by the Ohio monitoring network.

According to the counts, the most common butterfly now in Ohio is the cabbage white butterfly -- a species native to European lawns and meadows, Keiper said. The absence of a species from a site count is also revealing -- such as in the case of the West Virginia white, whose forest habitat has been decimated by development and exploding deer populations.

The national and statewide counts have encouraged some butterfly watching groups to keep statistics that might help local conservation efforts. The Miami Blue Chapter of NABA, for example, has adopted the nationwide count protocol into all their field trips through southern Florida and the Keys.

''We think if we keep track a little bit better, use these walks as censusing devices, who knows when we're going to want to have an argument with Everglades National Park over burning or mowing or herbicides?'' said Elaine Neuhring, the chapter's program chair. ''If we could pull out three years of censusing, wouldn't that be interesting?''

------

On the Net:

Florida Butterfly Monitoring Network: http://www.flbutterflies.net

North American Butterfly Association: http://www.naba.org

Ohio Lepidopterists Long-Term Monitoring of Butterflies: http://www.ohiolepidopterists.org/bflymonitoring/

Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network: http://www.bfly.org 

    Researchers Track Butterfly Populations, NYT, 15.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Counting-Butterflies.html

Pollution, Ships Threaten Coral Reefs

June 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:32 a.m. ET
The New York Times

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) -- Just below the sea's surface off Florida's southeast coast lies a virtual gold mine.

It's not sunken treasure or a Spanish galleon but rather nature's bounty: rows of coral reefs that generate billions of dollars a year in tourism spending.

But pollution, warming waters from climate change, commercial fishing, development and ship groundings are jeopardizing them. With 84 percent of the nation's coral reefs located along Florida's 1,350 miles of coastline, officials are moving quickly to protect them.

On Thursday, Tim Keeney, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary for oceans and atmosphere and a key high-level figure within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, got a firsthand look at reef damage and repair and recovery efforts.

''Just gorgeous. That's impressive,'' said Michael Sole, Florida's environmental chief, who joined Keeney. He had just returned to the boat after scuba diving off Fort Lauderdale, where he viewed elkhorn and staghorn coral, recently listed as endangered species.

''Taking appropriate measures to improve our understanding is key because you can't manage what you don't understand,'' Sole said. ''Our ocean resources pump billions of dollars into our economy.''

The state is managing underwater nurseries to grow coral that will be transplanted onto natural reefs, seeking to end the pumping of treated wastewater into the ocean and plowing ahead with research into artificial reefs.

Florida is also spending $2 million to remove some 700,000 old tires from the ocean floor off Fort Lauderdale that were dumped there in the 1970s with the intent of creating an artificial reef. It didn't work, and now the tires are scouring the ocean floor and wedging against the natural reef, killing coral.

''The first thing you think when you see it is these things don't belong here. It's a wasteland,'' Keeney said after surveying the tires.

Scientists warn that up to half of the world's coral reefs could disappear by 2045. The reefs serve as breeding grounds for many commercial fisheries, so without them, an important food source for humans could be lost.

Reefs also serve as natural barriers to tidal surges created by powerful storms. Degrading them could put coastal communities at risk.

''We're talking about a major economic engine that people don't understand,'' said Richard Dodge, executive director of the National Coral Reef Institute. ''They support people's incomes and livelihoods.''

Reef-related activities generate more than $4 billion for the economy of southeast Florida alone, Dodge said.

Congress is considering the reauthorization of the Coral Reef Conservation Act, which would add another layer of protection for the nation's reef system, Keeney said.

Under current law, the federal government has no authority to fine boats or ships for running aground on coral reefs that are not located within marine sanctuaries or to penalize people who destroy them, he said.

''It doesn't allow us to go into areas outside protected areas and hold parties responsible for the damage,'' Keeney said.

Reauthorization of the act would create that authority and also build a federal fund to restore damaged reef systems, he said. States and counties currently have limited authority.

There have been 12 major ship groundings on reefs outside Port Everglades, just south of Fort Lauderdale, since 1993. The port has three reefs off its shore and narrow channels and tight spots for maneuvering among them.

As Thursday's trip neared its end, Keeney peered out over the glistening, emerald green ocean and pointed to a pod of dolphins bobbing along a reef. Several large freighters passed by in the distance, heading toward Port Everglades.

''People are just now starting to appreciate the value of reefs,'' Keeney said. ''It takes a long, long time to grow these coral reefs and in a very short period of time, we can destroy them if we're not careful.''

    Pollution, Ships Threaten Coral Reefs, NYT, 15.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Coral-Reefs.html

Some Common Birds Not So Common Anymore

June 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:02 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The populations of nearly two dozen common American birds -- the fence-sitting meadowlark, the frenetic Rufous hummingbird and the whippoorwill with its haunting call -- are half what they were 40 years ago, a new analysis found.

The northern bobwhite and its familiar wake-up whistle once seemed to be everywhere in the East. Last Christmas, volunteer bird counters could find only three of them and only 18 Eastern meadowlarks in Massachusetts.

Twenty different common bird species -- those with populations more than half a million and covering a wide range -- have seen populations fall at least in half since 1967, according to a study by the National Audubon Society. The bird group compared databases for 550 species from two different bird surveys: its own Christmas bird count and the U.S. Geological Survey's breeding bird survey in June.

Some of the birds, such as the evening grosbeak, used to be so plentiful that people would complain about how they crowded bird-feeders and finished off 50-pound sacks of sunflower seeds in just a couple days. But the colorful and gregarious grosbeak's numbers have plummeted 78 percent in the past 40 years.

''It was an amazing phenomena all through the '70s that's just disappeared. It's just a really dramatic thing because it was in people's back yards and (now) it's not in people's back yards,'' said study author Greg Butcher, Audubon's bird conservation director.

Many of the species in decline depend on open grassy habitats that are disappearing because of suburban sprawl. Climate change and invasive species are to blame, too, he said.

''Most of these we don't expect will go extinct,'' Butcher said. ''We think they reflect other things that are happening in the environment that we should be worried about.''

Audubon Board Chairman Carol Browner, former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator, called the declines ''a warning signal.''

''We are concerned. Is it an emergency? No, but concerns can quickly become an emergency,'' Browner said.

Compared to 1967, there are 432 million fewer of these bird species, including the northern pintail, greater scaup, boreal chickadee, common tern, loggerhead shrike, field sparrow, grasshopper sparrow, snow bunting, black-throated sparrow, lark sparrow, common grackle, American bittern, horned lark, little blue heron and ruffed grouse.

''Things we all think of as familiar backyard birds ... they appear in books and children's stories and suddenly some of them are way less familiar than they should be,'' said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell ornithology lab, who was not part of the study.

The northern bobwhite had the biggest drop among common birds. In 1967, there were 31 million of the plump ground-loving bird. Now they number closer to 5.5 million.

''If you look in the northeast, it's almost gone from New England and pretty much New York as well...,'' Butcher said.

In some cases, there are still plenty of birds left, despite large surprising drop-offs. The common grackle used to be as plentiful as people in 1967, with both human and grackle populations hovering around 200 million. Now the grackle is down to 73 million and humans are up to 300 million.

But while these common birds are in decline, others are taking their place or even elbowing them aside. The wild turkey, once in deep trouble, is growing at a rate of 14 percent a year. The double-crested cormorant, pushed nearly to extinction by DDT, is growing at a rate of 8 percent a year and populations of the pesky Canada goose increase by 7 percent yearly.

Many of the birds that are disappearing are specialists, while the thriving ones are generalists that do well in urban sprawl and all kinds of environments, Butcher said. In a way it's the Wal-Mart-ization of America's skies, he said.

''The robins, the Carolina wrens, the blue jays, the crows, those kinds of birds, are doing just fine, thank you,'' Butcher said. ''They really get along in suburban habitats, most of them even like city parks, so they are not as susceptible to the human changes in environment.''

But nothing matches the take-over ability of one invading bird.

''Right now the Eurasian collared-dove is conquering America,'' Butcher said. A dove-like bird that first entered Florida in the 1980s, it now is the most prevalent bird in the Sunshine State and is in more than 30 states.

''Soon you'll be seeing Eurasian collared-doves in any city in the world,'' he said.

------

On the Net:

http://www.audubon.org/ 

    Some Common Birds Not So Common Anymore, NYT, 14.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bird-Declines.html

Birds in Decline, on Rise

June 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:23 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The National Audubon Society examined 40 years of U.S. winter and summer bird count records and found which common bird populations are decreasing most and which are increasing most:

BIGGEST DECLINES:

1. Northern bobwhite.

2. Evening grosbeak.

3. Northern pintail.

4. Greater scaup.

5. Boreal chickadee.

BIGGEST INCREASES

1. Wild turkey.

2. Greater white-fronted goose.

3. Glossy ibis.

4. Double-crested cormorant.

5. Canada goose.

    Birds in Decline, on Rise, NYT, 14.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bird-Decline-Glance.html

Proposal Would Cut Spotted Owl's Habitat

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:01 a.m. ET
The New York Times

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) -- The Bush administration proposes cutting 1.5 million acres from Northwest forests considered critical to the survival of the northern spotted owl.

The move could reopen the 1990s debate over timber production on public lands, in which logging companies argued that efforts to save the owl contributed to the Northwest timber industry's decline.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed Tuesday to reduce the critical habitat for the owl from 6.9 million acres of federal lands by 22 percent, to 5.4 million acres.

''One of the most upsetting things about this proposal is that the spotted owl wars of the '90s had simmered down quite a bit, and a kind of balance had been reached regarding logging and old growth forests,'' said Kieran Suckling, policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group in Tucson, Ariz.

The new proposal ''sets the stage for reopening those wounds,'' he said.

The owl was declared a threatened species in 1990 due primarily to heavy logging in the old growth forests where it nests and feeds. While old growth forests suitable for owl habitat have increased, owl numbers have continued to decline, recent research shows. The spotted owl faces a new threat from a cousin, the barred owl, that has been invading its territory.

The proposal was a result of a settlement in a lawsuit brought by the timber industry. A final decision is due by June 1, 2008.

Among places removed are the Fort Lewis military base in Washington state and national forest areas designated as wilderness since 1992. The service did not evaluate whether the proposal includes more or fewer areas known as late successional reserves, where most logging is prohibited to protect owl and salmon habitat.

Critical habitat does not by itself bar logging, but it does require federal agencies to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service to see whether a specific project, such as a timber sale, would jeopardize the recovery of an endangered species.

The Bush administration's efforts to boost Northwest timber production have been stymied by court rulings, including several that tossed out plans to log in critical owl habitat.

The proposal is based on a new draft recovery plan that designates areas critical to the owl's recovery and calls for killing some barred owls that have taken over spotted owl habitat, the Fish and Wildlife Service said. It depends on better technology to map forests favored by owls and better understanding of what land the owls favor.

''This is not an effort to get out the (timber) cut,'' said Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Joan Jewett. ''This is an effort to identify where forest areas are most important to the conservation and recovery of the spotted owl.''

But Dominick DellaSala, director of the National Center for Conservation and Policy and a member of the spotted owl recovery team, said the changes are designed to increase timber production.

He noted that some of the biggest pieces of critical habitat removed from the new proposal are on U.S. Bureau of Land Management land in Western Oregon, where the agency is working on a major new plan to boost production.

Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, the timber group that sued the administration, said the groups' initial analysis was that the critical habitat areas should be even smaller.

''The critical habitat should have a link to where the owls are and what the greatest threat is,'' West said. ''The greatest threat is the barred owl, not the loss of mature forest habitat.''

He said environmentalists are using the owl as a surrogate to protect old growth forests, ''instead of focusing on what the owl needs to survive.''

The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan cut timber production on national forests in Washington, Oregon and Northern California by more than 80 percent to protect owl and salmon habitat, contributing to mill closures and job losses that were particularly painful in rural areas with no other industry. The plan served as a de facto recovery plan until a new one was drafted this year.

Since then, the Northwest economy has turned to other industries, particularly high-tech, retirement and tourism, but some rural areas continue to struggle.

    Proposal Would Cut Spotted Owl's Habitat, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Spotted-Owl.html

Maine Scientists to Study Right Whales

June 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:58 p.m. ET
The New York Times

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) -- Scientists are studying endangered right whales this summer to learn more about their behavior and assess the risks posed by lobster gear.

Three initiatives are under way in New England aimed at developing gear that won't harm the whales without putting too much of a burden on Maine's nearly 6,000 commercial lobstermen.

The efforts come as the federal government considers a new rule that would ban floating lobster lines. Supporters of the rule say keeping rope between traps closer to the bottom would help to prevent right whales from becoming entangled.

Some fishermen are in denial about the new rule, but most are anxious about how it will affect them financially, said Jeff White, a 37-year-old lobsterman from York.

''It's hanging over our heads,'' he said.

Conservationists have lobbied for years for the right whale. Only 300 or so remain, and most have scars from entanglements with fishing gear. But a lot is still unknown about the animals, which spend the winter in warm waters to the south and migrate to the Gulf of Maine each spring before returning south in the fall.

There's a lot that scientists don't know about how the whales behave when they're in Maine waters because they are so hard to find, said Erin Summers, a scientist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

Before federal policy makers issue new rules on lobster gear, she said, they should know whether whales feed over Maine's rocky bottom and how deep they dive if they do feed. Right now, nobody knows, she said.

She hopes a group of scientists on board the R/V Stellwagen will find some answers this summer when they attach tags to right whales using suction cups. The vessel is standing ready to depart Salem, Mass., as soon as a group of right whales spotted near Georges Bank off southern New England moves into the Gulf of Maine.

The team will then drop a set of buoys into the water that will emit electronic signals to the tags, allowing researchers to track the whales' movements over an 18-hour period and observe where they swim and how far above the ocean bottom they are.

''We are trying to understand what their behavior is in the water column so regulations made for the lobster industry aren't based on guessing,'' said Alex Loer, owner and captain of the vessel.

The project, which will continue until July 10, will take place between Mount Desert Rock, a treeless island about 25 miles off Mount Desert Island, and Jeffreys Ledge off the New Hampshire and southern Maine coast.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Maine Department of Marine Resources are working with fishermen to test different types of ''low profile'' lines, which float just a few feet off the ocean floor to reduce chafing on the rocky bottom. Tiny electronic recording devices attached to the lines provide information about how far off the bottom the lines float during different stages of the tide cycle.

In yet another project, a consortium called the Conservation for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction this summer is testing abrasion-resistant groundlines. The group includes representatives from the University of New Hampshire, Duke University, the Maine Lobstermen's Association and the New England Aquarium.

In recent years, the group has tested several ''crazy'' ideas, such as glow-in-the-dark lines and lines encased in rubber, said Patricia McCarron, executive director of the Maine's Lobstermen's Association.

''If they make it, we are finding fishermen to give it a field test,'' she said. ''We are taking this very seriously. We aren't going to say 'no' until we try it out.''

------

Information from: Portland Press Herald, http://www.pressherald.com 

    Maine Scientists to Study Right Whales, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Whale-Research.html

Midwest Residents Clean Up Storm Damage

June 8, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:53 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) -- Cleanup crews began assembling Friday to salvage remnants of a northern Wisconsin resort demolished by one of at least five tornadoes that swept across the state.

Severe thunderstorms spawned tornadoes, produced baseball-size hail and dropped more than 6 inches of rain Thursday across the Upper Midwest, killing a swimmer in Illinois. Four people in Wisconsin were injured, none seriously.

Some of the worst damage was at the 25-acre Bear Paw Outdoor Adventure Resort near White Lake in Wisconsin. The northwoods resort runs along the Wolf River.

''Our restaurant's totally gone. There's maybe two walls standing,'' co-owner Shirlee Roshe said. ''Our entire retail shop was blown across the road. Most of the merchandise was between the highway and the field on the other side of the highway.''

At least one kayak was thrown more than 30 feet into the remnants of snapped pine trees.

''Most of our buildings are gone. I was just sickened,'' Roshe said as she headed to the property to direct volunteers on cleanup efforts.

She said one employee on the property suffered minor cuts to the head.

Hailstones 4 inches wide fell in Wisconsin Rapids, knocking out the windshields of several cars, including a police cruiser, dispatcher Karen Ryun said.

In Illinois, 19-year-old Joshua Simpson drowned Thursday while trying to save a female friend who was having trouble swimming in the choppy waters of Lake Michigan near Waukegan, authorities said.

About 7,000 ComEd customers in northern Illinois were without power Friday morning, spokesman Jeff Burdick said. He said more outages were expected as moderate winds could knock already-weakened branches onto power lines.

Heavy winds whipped across Chicago, snarling air travel. About 400 flights at O'Hare International Airport were canceled Thursday evening, according to Wendy Abrams, spokeswoman for the Chicago Department of Aviation.

Claudia Boelter of Elizabeth, Minn., took cover in a neighbor's house after seeing a tornado touch down on a nearby lake.

''My husband was pulling some lawn furniture off of our deck, when all of a sudden a black cloud came out right in front of us,'' she said. ''We ran next door, and I looked out their living room window. I could see this cloud that was down on the lake, rotating and pulling water up.''

Hail the size of golf balls was reported in parts of Minnesota. Gusty winds knocked out power in parts of the Twin Cities.

In North Dakota, where the storms began late Wednesday, heavy rain washed out roads. Bowman County emergency manager Dean Pearson said he had reports of 1 1/2 to 6 1/4 inches of rain overnight.

''We've got some roads that are washed out and some areas that are still running over the roadway,'' Pearson said. ''It's been slow getting started (to assess the damage) because it's so muddy that it's hard to get around.''

Associated Press writers Todd Richmond in Madison and Gretchen Ehlke and Colin Fly in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

    Midwest Residents Clean Up Storm Damage, NYT, 8.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Severe-Weather.html

Report: Warming Threatens Cultural Gems

June 6, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:13 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Rising seas, spreading deserts, intensifying weather and other harbingers of climate change are threatening cultural landmarks from Canada to Antarctica, the World Monuments Fund said Wednesday. Other cultural sites are under threat from spreading wars and populations.

New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged historic neighborhoods, the Church of the Holy Nativity under Palestinian control in Bethlehem, cultural heritage sites in Iraq and Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary in Peru are among the locations listed on the fund's top 100 most endangered.

The U.S. locations also include historic Route 66, the fabled east-west highway flanked by eccentric, deteriorating attractions, and the New York State Pavilion, a rusting remnant of the 1964 World's Fair in New York City's Queens borough.

''On this list, man is indeed the real enemy,'' Bonnie Burnham, president of the New York-based fund, said in a statement. ''But, just as we caused the damage in the first place, we have the power to repair it.''

This year's list of the 100 most endangered sites includes 59 countries. The United States is home to more listed sites than any other country at seven, including types of development such as ''Main Street Modern'' public buildings that symbolized progress after World War II. There are six sites listed in Peru and five each in India and Turkey.

This year's list is the first to add global warming to a roster of forces the organization says are threatening humanity's architectural and cultural heritage. Other factors include political conflict, pollution, development and tourism pressures, and a thirst for modernity in buildings and lifestyles.

The list is issued every two years. It is intended as a cultural clarion call, and the organization suggests it has been a successful one.

More than three-quarters of the places listed in previous years are no longer imperiled, according to the organization, which has given more than $47 million to help save about 200 sites since 1996.

A group of experts chose the sites from hundreds of nominations submitted by governments, conservationists and others. The selections were based on the sites' importance and the urgency of the dangers to them, the organization said.

On Herschel Island, Canada, melting permafrost threatens ancient Inuit sites and a historic whaling town. In Chinguetti, Mauritania, the desert is encroaching on an ancient mosque. In Antarctica, a hut once used by British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott has survived almost a century of freezing conditions but is now in danger of being engulfed by increasingly heavy snows.

Other sites face different perils. Political conflicts are clouding the future of all Iraq's cultural heritage sites and the remains of two ancient, giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan's province of Bamiyan, in the fund's view. The statues were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, but there have been some efforts to restore them.

Growth pressures are being felt in places such as Ireland's Hill of Tara, an earthen fort where Celtic chieftains jockeyed for power and legend says St. Patrick confronted paganism. A planned highway, intended to ease commuting between Dublin and a northwestern suburb, would pass near the hill.

Other places, such as Peru's famed Machu Picchu, are considered threatened by their own popularity. A new bridge recently opened to cater to backpackers headed to Machu Picchu, although government cultural experts said it could bring too many tourists to the delicate Inca ruins.

Some of the other highlights of the World Monuments Fund's 100 Most Endangered Sites list:

-- CANADA: Herschel Island, Yukon: At the edge of the Beaufort Sea off the north coast of the Yukon Territory, the island was first inhabited a millennium ago by the Thule ancestors of the Inuit. Rising sea levels, eroding coastlines and melting permafrost threaten the island's many cultural resources.

-- CHINA: Modern Shanghai: At the mouth of the Yangtze River, the key economic center in China has experienced unprecedented growth and social change, fostering a lack of awareness of the value of landmarks from the 1920s to the 1940s.

-- IRAQ: Cultural Heritage Sites of Iraq: Long known as the cradle of civilization, Iraq is home to more than 10,000 cultural heritage sites dating back 5,500 years. Archaeological sites and historic buildings are threatened by war, vandalism and looting.

-- ISRAEL, JORDAN, PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES AND SYRIA: Jordan River Cultural Landscape: At the heart of millennia of history, religion and culture, the river is considered holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Modern dams have reduced the lower river's flow some 90 percent, threatening flora and fauna.

-- UNITED STATES: Main Street Modern: Buildings of the recent past that lack a consensus on preservation but are considered worth saving by the monuments fund include Paul Rudolph's Riverview High School, built in 1957 in Sarasota, Fla., and Marcel Breuer's Grosse Pointe Public Library, built in 1953 in Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich.

------

On the Net:

www.worldmonumentswatch.org/ 

    Report: Warming Threatens Cultural Gems, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Endangered-Monuments.html

To Keep Its Parakeets Wild, San Francisco Bans Handouts

June 6, 2007
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 — In what may be a legislative first for San Francisco, the city’s Board of Supervisors on Tuesday banned the feeding of a tourist attraction.

A flock of wild green-and-red parakeets spend the evening happy hour in downtown Ferry Park, where dozens of locals and curious tourists have been assembling for the last year or so to feed the birds, often by hand. Children giggle; their parents snap photos.

But that behavior — the feeding, not the giggling — has upset some longtime bird watchers, who fear the parakeets will become too domesticated to feed on their own. And on Tuesday the board voted 10 to 1 to ban it.

Chief among the ban’s supporters is Mark Bittner, a 55-year-old writer and formerly homeless musician whose own feeding of the birds was made famous in a 2005 documentary film, “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.”

Mr. Bittner, whose wife, Judy Irving, shot the film, said he did not want to ruin other people’s fun but was simply concerned about the birds, who he said could be snatched or might bite unfamiliar feeders. He said he stopped feeding the parakeets in 2006.

“In some ways, people see it as, ‘Well, he did it, why can’t we?’ ” said Mr. Bittner, who credits the feeding — and film — with changing his life. “But I was doing it alone, and I was careful to never let other people feed them.”

Mr. Bittner’s sentiment was echoed by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, the board president, who said “copycat feeders” were threatening the “physical and psychological health” of the parakeets.

“It’s kind of like what we’re taught when we go to Yosemite, not to feed the wild animals,” Mr. Peskin said. “I know a number of people are getting an immense amount of pleasure from feeding these birds, and they’re well-meaning folks, but it’s necessary to protect the birds.”

But for some fans of the evening feedings, the board’s action smacked of favoritism. Jeff Ente, a marketing consultant who said he started feeding the birds in April 2006, said Mr. Bittner was a curmudgeon who was simply being proprietary over his former co-stars.

“I understand why it would be difficult for him to see other people feeding the birds. If you came to a park and saw a bunch of strangers feeding your kids, you wouldn’t like it either,” Mr. Ente said. “I feel for the guy. But it’s really been a remarkably well-behaved crowd.”

An online forum devoted to the parakeets quickly grew heated as word of a ban on feeding spread. “It’s a bit like Baghdad in there,” said Mr. Ente, who started the forum, which he said had been “decimated by sectarian strife over this parrot conflict.”

Mr. Peskin says the new ban, which specifically forbids feeding “red-masked parakeets,” the park’s breed, will be enforced with signs and police warnings at first.

“Obviously the city doesn’t want to give tickets to folks for this,” Mr. Peskin said. “But if we have to, we will.”

    To Keep Its Parakeets Wild, San Francisco Bans Handouts, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/science/earth/06parrot.html

Sea Lions Hit by High Levels of Acid Poison in California

June 6, 2007
The New York Times
By REGAN MORRIS

LOS ANGELES, June 5 — A distressed, possibly pregnant sea lion was wheeled recently into the Marine Mammal Care Center here, just as two other lions were herded into cages in preparation for their return to the ocean.

“That’s just the way it is,” said Lauren Palmer, the chief veterinarian at the center. “Two go out and more come in.”

Peter Wallerstein of the Whale Rescue Team, a private group authorized by Los Angeles to rescue whales and other marine mammals, said he had found the sea lion on the sand in nearby Manhattan Beach. Mr. Wallerstein said he feared she could have been poisoned by domoic acid, a toxin released by large blooms of algae that causes seizures in sea lions.

Southern California marine mammal hospitals have been overwhelmed by sea lions sick from the acid, which appeared in record levels off the coast of Los Angeles in April. Domoic acid poisoning has killed hundreds of the animals across Southern California this spring and thousands since a major outbreak in 2002, and has also afflicted animals in Monterey Bay, south of San Francisco.

“In over 22 years of marine mammal rescues, I’ve never seen such distress of marine mammals,” Mr. Wallerstein said. “The stress and the fright, it’s kind of shocking.”

The center here has taken in about 120 sea lions since March 1 and about 70 of those are suspected of having domoic acid poisoning, Dr. Palmer said. So far, about 35 percent of those who were found to have the poisoning have died; others have recovered and have been released, she said.

Some sea lions at the center were young, emaciated pups, tiny bones poking through their sleek coats.

On April 26, domoic acid toxin levels in plankton along the Los Angeles coast were twice the previous recorded high, said Astrid Schnetzer, a research professor at the Caron Lab for Marine Environmental Biology at the University of Southern California. The toxin levels have since dissipated, but Ms. Schnetzer said a recurrence was possible.

With an estimated population of 200,000 to 300,000, California sea lions are nowhere near endangered, but the deaths and the high toxin levels have scientists and environmentalists concerned. Ms. Schnetzer said scientists at the Caron Lab could not explain the high levels but were studying a combination of factors like climate change, pollution and nutrients in the water.

Dr. Palmer and others emphasized that the commercial fish available in grocery stores and restaurants was safe because of government monitoring. Joe Cordero of the National Marine Fisheries Service, however, did urge anyone fishing off piers in Southern California to think twice before eating the catch (although he said the toxins generally appear in fish guts, not the flesh).

About 50 dolphins, a minke whale and scores of sea birds have also been killed by this season’s toxic algae bloom, said Mr. Cordero, who had also monitored the two wayward humpback whales in the Sacramento River and dismissed suggestions that they were affected by domoic acid.

Mr. Wallerstein said he had seen a change this season with more male sea lions and pups becoming sick. Normally, domoic poisoning affects pregnant sea lions, mainly because blooms come at the same time as the spring breeding season, when pregnant sea lions eat more.

Last month, on the rocky beach in the Los Angeles district of San Pedro, Mr. Wallerstein watched proudly as the two rehabilitated sea lions and two abandoned elephant seal pups clambered awkwardly into the sea.

“I very rarely get to see that,” Mr. Wallerstein said of the two lions, frolicking in the surf before heading out to sea.

    Sea Lions Hit by High Levels of Acid Poison in California, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/us/06sealions.html

Small Quakes Shake Calif. - Mexico Border

June 3, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:07 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CALEXICO, Calif. (AP) -- A pair of small earthquakes shook desert communities near the U.S.-Mexico border, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

The initial magnitude-3.1 quake struck at 11:33 p.m. Saturday night and was centered 42 miles southwest of Ocotillo, according to a preliminary report from the U.S. Geological Survey.

It was followed by another magnitude-3.1 temblor at 1:58 a.m. Sunday that was centered 20 miles southeast of Calexico, according to the USGS.

The communities are about 36 miles apart in southeastern California.

    Small Quakes Shake Calif. - Mexico Border, NYT, 3.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-BRF-SoCal-Quakes.html

Lake Okeechobee Drops to a Record Low

May 31, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

CANAL POINT, Fla., May 30 — This state seems to seesaw perpetually between crises related to water: either too much or too little.

Wednesday was no exception, as the retreating waters of drought-sapped Lake Okeechobee, a vital reservoir for millions of residents in dry times, sank toward a new low.

Signaling the intensity of this once-a-century drought, roiling smoke clouds rose from exposed stretches of the saucerlike 730-square-mile basin midway between the crowded coasts. The plumes came from wildfires sweeping a 12,000-acre stretch of lakebed exposed as the waters retreated and sank about half an inch a day, water officials said.

The flames fed on weeds and grasses that normally provide hiding places for bass, but are now baked by the sun and dehydrated by relentless winds.

Officials at the South Florida Water Management District said the average lake depth on Wednesday matched the record low of 8.97 feet set in a long drought in 2001 and would certainly break the record overnight.

“This year is definitely a larger challenge than 2001,” said Carol Wehle, executive director of the water district. “We have drought all the way from Disney to Key West.”

Ms. Wehle said the easterly winds like those blowing over this town on the eastern shore of the lake were accelerating the drop in water by speeding evaporation.

“Add to that warmer temperatures and lots of sunshine and when it gets this dry it doesn’t take much for the fire to spread,” she said.

Thunderstorms predicted for this week, even a hurricane or two, are unlikely to end the water woes, Ms. Wehle said. “We need feet of rain, but coming every day throughout the summer,” she said. “When you have one big storm dumping a lot of water, the system can’t catch it.”

    Lake Okeechobee Drops to a Record Low, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/us/31lake.html

Biodiesel Makers See Opportunity as New York Seeks Greener Future

May 28, 2007
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA

On an industrial strip of land hemming Newtown Creek, pipelines snake low to the ground, connecting an array of giant beige oil tanks.

From outward appearances, this little patch of Texas in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, would not seem to easily fit into Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan for a greener, less petroleum-dependent future.

But this fuel terminal may soon be home to one of the largest biodiesel fuel manufacturing plants in the country. The terminal’s owner, the Metro Fuel Oil Corporation, is awaiting city approval to produce 110 million gallons of fuel a year from raw vegetable oils. The output would amount to more than 40 percent of the biodiesel fuel produced in the country last year.

The Greenpoint plant and a smaller proposed plant in Red Hook, Brooklyn, both scheduled to open next year, would be the first biodiesel refineries in the city, hitching onto an industry that has been concentrated in the Midwest and the South.

The growth and eastward expansion of the industry are being driven by high petroleum prices and government programs aimed at reducing pollution and demand for foreign oil. But these changes are also creating concerns that the push for alternative fuels, if not managed carefully, could have unintended consequences like deforestation and higher food prices in the race to convert more land for fuel crop production.

“We have to pick the right policies and the best technologies,” said Ron Pernick, co-founder of Clean Edge, a Portland, Ore., research and consulting company. “But when done right, the move to biofuels addresses a number of issues, from the volatile prices of fossil fuels, to reliance on foreign supplies, to climate change, to job creation.”

Metro, a family-owned company that employs about 130 people (another 35 would come on when biodiesel production begins, officials say), added biodiesel fuel to its traditional petroleum line about two years ago, trucking it in from out of state.

As oil prices spiked last summer, soaring to $78 a barrel, the demand for alternative fuels like biodiesel shot up. “You just couldn’t get enough of it,” said Tom Torre, the company’s chief operating officer. He and the company’s owners, Paul J. and Gene V. Pullo, envisioned barges steaming up the East River loaded with soybean oil from crushing plants in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

“The cost factors were there,” Mr. Torre said. “And we thought, ‘You know, we could put a plant right here in the city.’ ”

Supporters of biodiesel fuel say it is attractive because it comes from renewable sources, like soybeans, palm and seed oils and animal fats. It emits fewer greenhouse gases, which are linked to rising global temperatures, and less particulate matter than conventional diesel. Typically blended with conventional diesel, it can be used in most diesel engines and oil furnaces with little or no adjustment. On the downside, it typically costs more than regular diesel fuel.

Tri-State Biodiesel, the other New York operator scheduled to begin production next year, plans to use recycled restaurant grease as its feed source, said Brent Baker, the company’s chief executive. The company is awaiting state and city permits to begin producing 3 million gallons of biodiesel a year on an industrial site in Red Hook. Mr. Baker said he had agreements with some 400 restaurants in Manhattan to collect their used grease at no cost.

Oil refineries once crowded the banks of Newtown Creek in Greenpoint, belching smoke and noxious fumes until the last of them closed in the 1960s. Left behind was a terrain and waterway so contaminated that lawsuits over their cleanup continue to this day.

By contrast, biodiesel fuel makers say their production methods are vastly cleaner, and safer. The refining process is emission-free, typically mixing raw vegetable oil with an industrial alcohol like methanol and a catalyst, typically sodium hydroxide, to cause a chemical transformation. The byproducts include some methanol, which can be reused, and glycerin, which can be sold for use in soap and other products.

While the process is not entirely benign — the methanol is explosive — the National Biodiesel Board, a trade group, says biodiesel is no more toxic than table salt and biodegrades faster than sugar.

Community response for the Red Hook plant has been largely supportive, according to Tri-State. Fewer know about the plans for the Greenpoint plant, said Gerald A. Esposito, district manager of Community Board 1.

“The board hasn’t taken a position on it, but I’m kind of excited about it,” Mr. Esposito said. “It’ll bring jobs, and from what I understand there’s no odor; if there’s anything that spills it would be negligible.”

With plans for the New York refineries under way and others popping up or planned in New Jersey, Washington State and elsewhere, production of biodiesel could reach 1.7 billion gallons next year, up from 250 million gallons in 2006, according to the National Biodiesel Board.

While biodiesel is mainly used in transportation, Paul Nazzarro, a consultant with the biodiesel board, sees home heating as the next big growth sector, particularly in the Northeast, where heating oil has lost customers to natural gas.

Still, Mr. Torre and Mr. Baker say building a New York market will be a challenge, heightened by the price difference and the unfamiliarity of the product. And diesel cars do not meet New York State emissions standards.

Mr. Bloomberg’s environmental sustainability plan could help build the market, city officials say. Called PlaNYC, it includes a raft of measures, including the use of alternative fuels like biodiesel.

“By introducing things in New York, or by doing them ourselves or giving incentives, we also create a market,” said Daniel L. Doctoroff, deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding. “When you create a market, the price comes down, and as price comes down more people use the product, so you create a virtuous cycle.”

Elements of the plan call for eventually using biodiesel in school boilers, and in the city’s entire heavy-duty truck fleet, numbering in the thousands of vehicles. The city’s Parks and Recreation and Sanitation Departments are already using it.

The state requires a biodiesel content of at least 2 percent in the fuel used in all of its buildings and trucks. And last year, lawmakers in Albany enacted a tax credit that pays people up to 20 cents per gallon if they blend biodiesel fuel with home heating oil in their furnaces.

But as the biofuels market broadens, some industry watchers say there are downsides. Environmentalists warn of forests being razed, as is happening in Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia, to clear land for palm oil plantations used in biodiesel and sugar cane used in ethanol.

Some also worry that farmers may devote more land to fuel crops and less to crops meant to feed people and cattle, driving up prices of vegetables and meats.

Janet Larsen, research director for the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental group, says the amount of grain it takes to fill a sport utility vehicle’s 25-gallon tank with ethanol would feed a person for a year.

“Turning food crops into fuel crops does not make sense, economically or for the environment,” she said.

Mr. Baker says the concerns highlight the need for more fuel-efficient vehicles, and more research into resources like algae, which can yield more oil per acre than soybeans.

“I think anyone who looks into the question of sustainability will hear again and again that there is no silver bullet,” Mr. Baker said. “We have to be more efficient, we have to use less and we have to get more renewable fuels with fewer acres.”

    Biodiesel Makers See Opportunity as New York Seeks Greener Future, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/nyregion/28biodiesel.html

Peace Garden Getting $32M Makeover

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:25 a.m. ET
The New York Times

DUNSEITH, N.D. (AP) -- The 2,300-acre International Peace Garden, which straddles the U.S.-Canadian border and signifies the long-standing peace between the two countries, once exploded in colorful blooms and invited visitors with its picturesque waterfall.

Today, it has fallen victim to sinking foundations, overgrown trees and dandelions. Buildings are rotting and steel rods are beginning to peek through the sides of a monument made of four 120-foot-high concrete towers that signify the four corners of the earth.

''I can go to any structure on this place and show you something that needs fixing,'' said Doug Hevenor, who was the park's chief operations officer and is now its chief executive officer.

After years of neglect, the garden will finally get some of those repairs. North Dakota lawmakers this year doubled the amount of operating money for the garden and provided funds for repairs and expansion. Combined with money from donations, Canada's federal government and Manitoba province, $5 million will be available in the next two years for repairs and to start a $32 million expansion.

The park was conceived by Ontario horticulturist Henry J. Moore in 1928, and dedicated in 1932 on land donated by Manitoba and North Dakota. The garden is celebrating its 75th anniversary this summer.

The expansion plan for the park, bisected by the 49th parallel that marks the international border, includes a new stone-and-glass interpretive center, a tropical plant observatory, and a conflict resolution center that would mimic a Camp David-style retreat. The garden has a memorial made of 10 steel girders from the World Trade Center destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack.

Hevenor hopes to have the project finished in seven years. The most immediate repairs needed, though, are to both buildings and the land itself.

''We've never had the money to bring in an orchard high-reach truck to do (tree) pruning,'' Hevenor said, checking off just a few of the items on a long to-do list. ''It's been a decade since granular fertilizer has been applied to the turf. Last year was the first time in five years we've put herbicide down for broadleaf weeds and dandelions.''

The waterfall that provides the main drainage system needs valve and stone work, and is nearly blocked from public view by unchecked tree growth.

One of the first major repairs will be to the garden's main lodge, one of several buildings erected by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s during the Great Depression. The building's foundation is sinking in one area, and its floor and ceiling need major work.

The group Preservation North Dakota listed the building -- which Hevenor said has been visited by every sitting North Dakota governor since it was built -- first on its list this year of the most endangered historic properties in the state.

''It's a very important part of North Dakota and Manitoba,'' said Marsha Gunderson, president of the preservation group. ''We really feel that statewide the CCC projects have gone relatively forgotten or unnoticed ... and they have reached a point now where things are starting to degrade.''

Canadian funding for the park's operation has been consistent, and Hevenor said that country's government has committed to funding half of the $32 million expansion project. But contributions from North Dakota -- which promotes the ''Peace Garden State'' on its license plate -- have declined in recent years.

Ed Anderson, mayor of the Manitoba town of Boissevain and the provincial premier's designate on the nonprofit Peace Garden board, credited park officials for campaigning to get more money out of North Dakota, and said Canadian directors on the board are ''ecstatic about the response.''

''I think everyone realizes it's hard when trying to raise that amount of money at a time when there isn't a lot of money available,'' Anderson said. ''The USA was at war. There just wasn't a whole lot of money they could come up with.''

The state also is contributing $1.5 million toward the expansion project. Krauter said it is impossible to predict if that trend will continue in future years, but he said the Peace Garden has secured a place as ''one of our priorities.''

''It's one of those things that North Dakota can be proud of,'' he said. ''We've got it on our license plate. If we're going to do that, let's showcase it.''

Hevenor said the garden, which generates about $700,000 in annual revenue itself through fees and other profits, will do whatever it takes to find the money to complete repairs and finish the expansion project by 2014.

''We're looking to turn this facility into a year-round destination center,'' he said. ''If there's a stone that needs turning, we're going to turn it over.''

------

On the Net:

www.peacegarden.com

    Peace Garden Getting $32M Makeover, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Peace-Garden.html

Victim of Climate Change, a Town Seeks a Lifeline

May 27, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

NEWTOK, Alaska — The sturdy little Cessnas land whenever the fog lifts, delivering children’s bicycles, boxes of bullets, outboard motors and cans of dried oats. And then, with a rumble down a gravel strip, the planes are gone, the outside world recedes and this subarctic outpost steels itself once again to face the frontier of climate change.

“I don’t want to live in permafrost no more,” said Frank Tommy, 47, standing beside gutted geese and seal meat drying on a wooden rack outside his mother’s house. “It’s too muddy. Everything is crooked around here.”

The earth beneath much of Alaska is not what it used to be. The permanently frozen subsoil, known as permafrost, upon which Newtok and so many other Native Alaskan villages rest, is melting, yielding to warming air temperatures and a warming ocean. Sea ice that would normally protect coastal villages is forming later in the year, allowing fall storms to pound away at the shoreline.

Erosion has made Newtok an island, caught between the ever widening Ninglick River and a slough to the north. The village is below sea level, and sinking. Boardwalks squish into the spring muck. Human waste, collected in “honey buckets” that many residents use for toilets, is often dumped within eyeshot in a village where no point is more than a five-minute walk from any other. The ragged wooden houses have to be adjusted regularly to level them on the shifting soil.

Studies say Newtok could be washed away within a decade. Along with the villages of Shishmaref and Kivalina farther to the north, it has been the hardest hit of about 180 Alaska villages that suffer some degree of erosion.

Some villages plan to hunker down behind sea walls built or planned by the Army Corps of Engineers, at least for now. Others, like Newtok, have no choice but to abandon their patch of tundra. The corps has estimated that to move Newtok could cost $130 million because of its remoteness, climate and topography. That comes to almost $413,000 for each of the 315 residents.

Not that anyone is offering to pay.

After all, climate change is raising questions about how to deal with drought, wildfires, hurricanes and other threats that affect so many more people and involve large sums of money.

“We haven’t sat down as a society and said, ‘How are we going to adapt to this?’ ” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University and a lead author of a recent report by a United Nations panel on the impacts and vulnerability presented by climate change. “Just like we haven’t sat down and said, ‘How are we going to reduce emissions?’ And both have to be done.”

Amid the uncertainty, the residents of Newtok hear the skeptics, who question the price tag for moving such a small, seemingly inconsequential place. But residents here emphasize that they are a federally recognized American Indian tribe, and they shudder when asked why they cannot just move to an existing village or a city like Fairbanks.

They say their identity is rooted in their isolation, however qualified it has become over the last century by outside influences. It was the government, they say, that insisted decades ago that they and so many other villages abandon their nomadic ways and pick a place to call home. The current village site was once only a winter camp, and the people of Newtok say they are not to blame just because they are now among the first climate refugees in the United States.

“The federal government, they’re the ones who came into our lives and took away some of our values,” said Nick Tom Jr., 49, the former Newtok tribal administrator. “They came in and said, ‘You aren’t civilized. We’re going to educate you.’ That was hard for our grandparents.”

Newtok’s leaders say the corps’ relocation estimates are inflated, that they intend to move piecemeal rather than in one collective migration, which they say will save money. But they say government should pay, no matter the cost — if only there were a government agency charged with doing so. There is not a formal process by which a village can apply to the government to relocate.

“They grossly overestimate it, and that’s why federal and state agencies are afraid to step in,” said Stanley Tom, the current tribal administrator and the brother of Nick Tom Jr. “They don’t want to spend that much money.”

Still, Newtok has made far more progress toward moving than other villages, piecing together its move grant by grant.

Through a land swap with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, it has secured a new site, on Nelson Island, nine miles south. It is safe from the waves on a windy rise above the Ninglick River. They call it Mertarvik, which means “getting water from the spring.” They tell their children they will grow up in a place where E. coli does not thrive in every puddle, the way it does here.

With the help of state agencies, it won a grant of about $1 million to build a barge landing at the new site. Bids go out this summer, and construction could be complete next year, providing a platform to unload equipment for building roads, water and sewer systems, houses and a new landing strip.

Village Safe Water, part of the State Department of Environmental Conservation, plans to use money budgeted for repairs at the existing village to drill for water this summer at the new site. The corps is drafting a plan to build initial roads and an emergency center that would serve as a base of operations during construction. But the plan, for which the corps has not yet released a budget, needs financing from Congress.

There is no plan yet for how the village would move entire buildings, such as the Newtok School, which is relatively new and serves the village’s 125 children, preschool through high school.

So far, said Sally Russell Cox, a planner with the state division of community advocacy, “This is all on sticky notes.”

Senator Ted Stevens, the lion of Alaska politics, is now the ranking minority member on the Senate’s new Disaster Recovery subcommittee.

His aides say that, while he has yet to push for money to move specific villages, he was instrumental in passing legislation in 2005 that gave the corps broader authority to help. Despite the state’s past success at winning federal money, they say Alaska lawmakers are hemmed in by new scrutiny of so-called earmarks for special projects, Mr. Stevens’s status in the minority of the new Congress, public detachment from issues facing rural Alaska and needs in other places, like New Orleans.

And village relocation in Alaska is not a priority at the White House. The president’s proposed budget includes $1 million that could go to that purpose, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Saturday.

Bruce Sexauer, a senior planner with the corps in Alaska who wrote a report assessing the needs of various villages, said the residents of Newtok are descendants of the people who came across the land bridge from Asia. “They are the very first of the people that were inhabiting North America thousands of years ago. Talk about a rich and unique American culture. Is it worth it? There’s more to it than just economics.”

The administrative leaders of Newtok are mostly men in their 40s, nearly all of them related. They are widely praised by outsiders for their initiative and determination to relocate.

Yet nearly any place would seem an improvement over Newtok as it exists today, and not all of its problems are rooted in climate change. Some are almost universal to Alaskan villages, which have struggled for decades to reconcile their culture of subsistence hunting and fishing with the expectations and temptations of the world outside.

Excrement dumped from honey buckets is piled on the banks of the slow-flowing Newtok River, not far from wooden shacks where residents take nightly steam baths. An elderly man drains kerosene into a puddle of snowmelt. Children pedal past a walrus skull left to rot, tusks intact, in the mud beside a boardwalk that serves as a main thoroughfare. There are no cars here, just snow machines, boats and all-terrain vehicles that tear up the tundra.

Village elders speak their native Yupik more often than they speak English. They remember when the village was a collection of families who moved with the seasons, making houses from sod, fishing from Nelson Island in the summer, hunting caribou far away in the winter.

But, said Agnes Tommy, “It’s getting hard to remember.”

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Tommy, 84, watched a DVD of “The Day After” while her 17-year-old granddaughter, Nicole, a high school dropout, sat across the room with Eminem’s “Encore” thumping in her headphones. Nicole mused about moving to Anchorage, although she has never been there.

Many men still travel with the seasons to hunt and fish. Some will take boats into Bristol Bay this summer to catch salmon alongside commercial fishermen from out of state. But the waterproof jacket sewn from seal gut that Stanley Tom once wore is now stuffed inside a display case at Newtok School next to other relics.

Now Mr. Tom puts on a puffy parka to walk the few hundred feet he travels to work. He checks his e-mail messages to see if there is news from the corps or from Senator Stevens while his brother, Nick, sketches out a budget proposal for a nonprofit corporation to help manage the relocation, presuming the money arrives.

Nick Tom said the move could bring jobs for young people who may otherwise be tempted to leave. Other young people talk only of leaving for the new village.

“They’re going to move us to a mountain,” said Annie Kassaiuli, 11, eating a burrito in the school cafeteria. “We can pick berries.”

    Victim of Climate Change, a Town Seeks a Lifeline, NYT, 27.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/us/27newtok.html

Georgia Feeling Effects of Drought

May 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:51 p.m. ET
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- Neighbors are turning in neighbors for violating water restrictions, farmers are jittery about crops and churchgoers are praying for rain as Georgia suffers through one of its worst droughts in decades.

Sweltering conditions are expected to intensify. State climatologist David Stooksbury this week classified 74 of the state's 159 counties as being in ''extreme'' drought -- more than double the assessment he delivered just a few weeks ago.

And he said he's doubtful conditions will improve any time soon, with little rain in the forecast.

The drought has forced state officials to restrict when residents can water their lawns -- limiting it to early mornings on alternating days. Some cities, including Atlanta, have gone a step further, ordering residents to water lawns, wash cars and restrict other outdoor use to one day a week.

In the Atlanta suburb of Roswell, police are giving residents the option to call 24 hours a day to report water-use violations.

''We are neither encouraging or not encouraging calls. It's up to them,'' said Julie Brechbill, a Roswell spokeswoman. ''Our main concern is that our residents follow the restrictions because we're in a drought.''

In Columbia County east of Augusta, officials get five to 10 calls a day from neighbors reporting neighbors for water violations. Sick of people ignoring the rules, the county is disconnecting the water for violators, with nearly 50 households disconnected in recent weeks.

''It's like any rule or law: If you don't enforce it, than no one abides by it,'' said Margaret Doss, the water quality manager in Columbia County. ''These are our customers and we hate to punish them. But on the other hand, the drought is significant and it has to be handled properly.''

In rural areas, farmers worried about whether they should plant their crops are also facing a massive shortfall of hay, a key part of Georgia's $50 billion agriculture industry.

Bone-dry fields can't sustain enough grass to make hay. There's hardly a bale of hay to be found in Tifton and other Georgia towns.

''I don't know what I'm going to do,'' said Derrick Jones, a Tifton farmer who this week could only scrape up enough bales of hay from his property to feed his 300 head of cattle for a day or two. ''My only other option is to sell. That's not a good option, but it may be what we have to do.''

Larry Crumley, a farmer in nearby Berrien County, is hoping to use a bin of unused rye seed to feed his 200 cattle. ''It's down to that,'' he sighed. ''We've bought all the hay we can buy, and it will last until Monday.''

The lack of rain has given some residents a reason to ask for divine intervention. A group of churches in Moultrie, a south Georgia town, has started a weekly prayer service on Wednesdays to ask for rain.

''The community needed to come together and feel like you're doing something,'' said Rhonda Royals, a secretary who attended the first meeting Wednesday. ''And the only thing you can do is pray -- and pray hard.''

------

On The Net:

University of Georgia's drought site: http://www.georgiadrought.org

    Georgia Feeling Effects of Drought, NYT, 25.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Drought-Dilemmas.html

Study Finds Hurricanes Frequent in Some Cooler Periods

May 24, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Over the last 5,000 years, the eastern Caribbean has experienced several periods, lasting centuries, in which strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were cooler than those measured today, according to a new study.

The authors, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, say their findings do not necessarily conflict with recent papers asserting a link between the region’s hurricane activity and human-caused warming of the climate and seas.

But, they say, their work does imply that factors other than ocean temperature, at least for thousands of years, appear to have played a pivotal role in shaping storminess in the region.

The study compared a 5,000-year record of strong storms etched in lagoon mud on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques with data on ocean temperatures and climate and storm patterns. The analysis is being published today in the journal Nature.

The Woods Hole team found that stormier spans, including one from 1700 until now, were associated with a relative paucity of El Niño warm-ups of the tropical Pacific Ocean and also with periods of heightened monsoon intensity in West Africa.

El Niño episodes tend to change wind patterns in ways that weaken Atlantic Ocean hurricanes, and Africa is a nursery for storm fronts that can drift westward and develop into hurricanes.

Storm records extracted from sediments on the Gulf Coast by other scientists, and near New York City by the Woods Hole team, show a similar pattern, implying that the shifts from quieter to stormier times are not just a local phenomenon, the authors said.

Jeffrey P. Donnelly, the lead author, said the findings pointed to the importance of figuring out an unresolved puzzle: whether global warming will affect the Niño cycle one way or the other. More intense or longer Pacific warm-ups could stifle Atlantic and Caribbean hurricanes even with warmer seas, Dr. Donnelly said.

“Warm sea-surface temperatures are clearly the fuel for intense hurricanes,” he said. “What our work says is that without sea temperatures varying a lot, the climate system can flip back and forth between active and inactive regimes.”

He added that a disturbing possibility was a warming of waters while conditions in the Pacific and Africa are in their hurricane-nurturing mode.

“If you flip that knob and also have warming seas,” Dr. Donnelly said, “oh boy, who knows what could happen?”

Judith A. Curry, an atmospheric scientist at Georgia Tech, said the new study, together with other recent research on warming and storms by her and others, added to a picture of rising risk and lagging government action on reducing vulnerability of coastal populations in the Atlantic and Caribbean hurricane zone.

“The bottom line is that we are in an unusually active period of hurricane activity, as a result of a combination of natural variability and global warming,” Dr. Curry said. “Analyses have been done, plans have been put on the table, but nothing seems to be happening.”

    Study Finds Hurricanes Frequent in Some Cooler Periods, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/science/earth/24storm.html

Expert: Aquatic Virus Hits 2 Great Lakes

May 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:50 p.m. ET
The New York Times

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) -- A deadly, fast-spreading aquatic virus is reaching epidemic proportions in New York's two Great Lakes and has already spread into the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York, a Cornell University fisheries expert said Tuesday.

The viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus -- or VHS -- has now been identified in 19 species in Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, including muskellunge, New York's No. 2 sport fish, said Paul Bowser, a professor of aquatic animal medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Equally alarming, said Bowser, is the confirmation of VHS in walleye in Conesus Lake, which is the westernmost Finger Lake and is the only New York lake where VHS has been confirmed in a body of water other than the contiguous waters of the Great Lakes.

''The fact that VHS was found in this inland body of water is particularly disturbing in that it immediately brings up the question of how did it get there and what can be done to prevent the virus from moving to other bodies of water,'' said Bowser, who along with his colleagues at Cornell recently developed a new test that can identify the virus within 24 hours.

VHS was first detected in New York last year in fish from the St. Lawrence and Niagara rivers, as well as the state's two Great Lakes.

Of the 19 species affected, VHS has caused serious fish kills in six, Bowser said. In the remaining 13 species, Cornell scientists have detected the virus but have recorded no ''mortality events,'' he said. There are approximately 150 species of freshwater fish in New York.

''It has been found in a broad range of evolutionarily distinct species, both cold- and warm-water families. We don't think there is any species that is not susceptible,'' said Doug Stang, chief of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation's Bureau of Fisheries, which is monitoring 40 water bodies across the state to track the spread of VHS.

Bowser said he suspects that the virus is spread by airborne or terrestrial predators carrying infected fish, anglers using infected bait minnows or contaminated fishing equipment, and as a result of boating activities.

''Basically, we don't know how it got here, but it's here and it's spreading,'' said Bowser.

The virus, which causes internal bleeding in fish but poses no threat to humans, was discovered in the United States in 1988 in Coho and Chinook salmon in the Pacific Northwest. VHS made its first known appearance in the Great Lakes in 2005, killing freshwater drum and muskellunge.

Since then, it has been found in more than two dozen fish species throughout the Great Lakes basin.

This month, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources made a preliminary identification of the virus for the first time in the Lake Winnebago chain of inland lakes about 25 miles south of Green Bay on Lake Michigan. Confirmation is pending.

VHS-related die-offs killed millions of fish in Lake Erie and Lake Ontario last year. There have been three new fish kills this year in New York waters, Bowser said.

In the St. Lawrence River, hundreds of thousands of round gobies have succumbed and gizzard shad die-offs occurred in Lake Ontario west of Rochester and in Dunkirk Harbor on Lake Erie, he said.

''In that most of our VHSV-associated fish kills in 2006 were in May and June, we expect more to occur,'' Bowser said.

Other species that have tested positive include bluegill, rock bass, black crappie, pumpkinseed, smallmouth and largemouth bass, northern pike, yellow perch, channel catfish, brown bullhead, white perch, white bass, emerald shiner, bluntnose minnow, freshwater drum and burbot.

Containing the spread of the virus in New York will require restrictions on the movement of live fish, testing fish and surveillance, Bowser said.

''There will be inconveniences and disruptions that will occur. However, to do nothing could be disastrous,'' said Bowser, adding that VHS threatens the state's $1.2 billion sport-fishing industry and could have a devastating effect on aquaculture.

Last year, New York enacted a series of emergency regulations to curb the virus' spread, such as requiring that bait fish be used in the same body of water from which they were collected unless they have been tested. Those regulations will likely become permanent next month, said DEC spokeswoman Maureen Wren.

------

On the Net:

DEC emergency regulations: http://www.dec.ny.gov/press/28757.html

    Expert: Aquatic Virus Hits 2 Great Lakes, NYT, 22.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Fish-Virus.html

Climate Changes Said Harm Sunflowers

May 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:29 a.m. ET
The New York Times

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Imagine the Sunflower State without its sunflowers. That's one of the dire predictions contained in a new report on global warming released by the National Wildlife Federation, which says the Kansas state flower could move north to other states in a few decades.

Increasingly warm temperatures also could mean the end of the state tree, the eastern cottonwood, according to ''The Gardener's Guide to Global Warming.''

''Everything being equal, these plants won't thrive and will shift north,'' said Patty Glick, the report's author and senior global warming specialist for the National Wildlife Federation.

While conditions could change, Glick and other say projected increasing temperatures also could wipe out cool-weather grasses, such as Kentucky bluegrass, and many fescues that cover lawns in the region.

Some experts think global warming will cause temperatures in Kansas to rise an average of 5 to 12 degrees in the next several decades.

The projection that the sunflower could fade from Kansas' landscape surprised some experts and scientists.

''This is a plant that has survived for eons,'' said Dennis Patton, a horticulturist with the Johnson County Kansas State University Research and Extension office. ''It is hard to believe in this short period of time that the plant would be non-existent here. Same with the cottonwood.

''I guess what I come back to, it is a good wake-up call.''

John Blair, a Kansas State University professor and research scientist at the Konza Prairie research station north of Manhattan, has been conducting experiments for nine years on the effect of altered rain patterns on plants.

Blair said even if total rainfall doesn't change, computer models show the rain will come less often and will fall in strong downpours when it does come.

He is finding that plants with root systems able to reach water deeper in the earth have a better chance of survival. For plants in the wild, that means many perennials have a better chance than annuals such as the sunflower because of their more developed root systems.

What would the lack of a sunflower mean for Kansas, which has Mount Sunflower and hundreds of businesses, clubs and associations with sunflower in their titles?

''Maybe in 100 years the Texas bluebonnet will be the Kansas state flower,'' Patton said.

The Wildlife Federation report said the Missouri state tree and flower -- the flowering dogwood and the white hawthorn blossom -- are not endangered.

    Climate Changes Said Harm Sunflowers, NYT, 19.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-No-Sunflowers.html

Cleaning U.S. rivers, one refrigerator at a time

Thu May 17, 2007
8:20AM EDT
By Andrea Hopkins
The New York Times

PADUCAH, Kentucky (Reuters) - The day's catch from one of America's greatest rivers is massive: dozens of tires, coils of barge rope, thousands of plastic bottles, an old green couch -- and a single naked leg.

The clean-up volunteers spotted the severed limb of a small mannequin almost as soon as they landed on the bank of the Ohio River. The white plastic flesh was stained with mud from hip to toes, like most of the garbage that would soon fill the Living Lands & Waters barge to near overflowing.

"Dolls are the creepiest things you find," said Brent Pregracke, 37, one of about 100 people out on a recent spring day to help his brother Chad clean America's rivers one beer can -- or refrigerator -- at a time.

Chad Pregracke was considered little more than a boyish nut when he set out on the Mississippi 10 years ago in a small fishing boat, determined to clean a 435-mile stretch of America's most storied river.

Bored by college and disgusted by the trash littering the river near his home, Pregracke, then 22, tried to convince companies to fund his project. Only Alcoa Inc. signed on -- and Pregracke took their $8,400 check and got to work.

Ten years later, Pregracke has dozens of sponsors, an $800,000 annual budget, a board of directors, office staff and five full-time crew members who share his mission.

Pregracke planned to work himself out of a job within a few years, and volunteer drives have scoured many shores clean. In 2006 alone, the project pulled 3.5 million pounds of trash from various rivers, including 615 refrigerators and 22,396 tires.

"We barely find cans in the weeds on the upper Mississippi, and the garbage is not returning," Pregracke said.

But for every river he cleans, Pregracke finds another full of trash, and his sunburned, mud-splattered crew has expanded their efforts to include the Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Potomac and Anacostia rivers.

COUCHES AND CARS

The volunteers who came out to clean the Ohio River as part of a competition between local barge companies had no problem finding trash.

"It's disgusting. I didn't think we'd find so many tires," said Susan Hall, 47, who usually spends her days behind a desk at Ingram Barge Co. in Nashville.

Nearby, four co-workers strained to pull a couch out of the mud, while another shoveled dirt from a barrel so it could be lifted into a boat.

Weird things are pulled from America's rivers. The crew once discovered a horse head in a cooler, and they've pulled tractors, cars and boats from the bottom. Messages in bottles are common.

Crew member Jenn Branstetter, 28, has seen it all. In March, she pulled a small suit of armor out of the mud.

"My knight in rusty armor," she laughed. Bottles of methamphetamine chemicals are considerably less charming.

Branstetter joined the group in 2005 after what was supposed to be a two-week volunteer effort in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Inspired, Branstetter quit her two jobs and hasn't looked back.

"I feel good out here," she said. "It's hard work and it's bizarre how comfortable you get being dirty. But at the end of the day, it's a good kind of tired."

Pregracke's determination to forge ahead despite legal wranglings and myriad river mishaps -- chronicled in his book "From the Bottom Up," published in April -- has inspired many.

Towboat captain Mike Hanlin, 65, in charge of steering the group's barges through busy industrial waterways, joined the project in 1999 after retiring as a school administrator. He had a Master's license and planned to spend his retirement piloting yachts. Then he heard about Pregracke's project.

"In my wildest imagination, I never would have thought it would turn into what it has," Hanlin said. "It's not often you get to be part of a dream."

Volunteers are equally enthusiastic.

"We have garbage groupies who follow us around, driving three hours to get to the next cleanup," said crew member Tammy Becker, 30, who runs onboard workshops on river management and restoration for visiting teachers.

The executives who once dodged calls from the crazy kid who wanted to clean rivers have also become believers.

"He tried to call me for about a year. Finally I gave him 20 minutes," recalled John Eckstein, president and CEO of Marquette Transportation Co. in Paducah. "Two hours later we were friends."

Sweating and dirty from a day with his employees cleaning the Ohio River, Eckstein said Marquette now tries to give Pregracke whatever he needs -- from unused barges to free tows upriver, a perk worth thousands of dollars.

Pregracke said the best days are those when a hundred people come out to help, or when boatloads of strangers applaud him as they drive past. But he said when the crowds are gone, he's just a regular guy, pulling garbage out of the mud.

"I didn't do this to be inspirational," he said. "I saw a problem and decided to do something about it."

    Cleaning U.S. rivers, one refrigerator at a time, R, 17.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1429635320070517

Analysis Finds Large Antarctic Area Has Melted

May 16, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

While much of the world has warmed in a pattern that scientists have linked with near certainty to human activities, the frigid interior of Antarctica has resisted the trend.

Now, a new satellite analysis shows that at least once in the last several years, masses of unusually warm air pushed to within 310 miles of the South Pole and remained long enough to melt surface snow across a California-size expanse.

The warm spell, which occurred over one week in 2005, was detected by scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Balmy air, with a temperature of up to 41 degrees in some places, persisted across three broad swathes of West Antarctica long enough to leave a distinctive signature of melting, a layer of ice in the snow that cloaks the vast ice sheets of the frozen continent. The layer formed the same way a crust of ice can form in a yard in winter when a warm day and then a freezing night follow a snowfall, the scientists said.

The evidence of melting was detected by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite, the QuickScat, that uses radar to distinguish between snow and ice as it scans the surfaces of Greenland and Antarctica.

There have been other areas in Antarctica where such melt zones have been seen, but they are not common so far inland, said Son Nghiem, a scientist at the NASA laboratory who directed the analysis with Konrad Steffen, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Some melting also occurred at an elevation of more than 6,000 feet, in regions where temperatures usually remain far below freezing year-round.

It is too soon to know whether the warm spell was a fluke or a portent, Dr. Nghiem said.

“It is vital we continue monitoring this region to determine if a long-term trend may be developing,” he said.

Dr. Steffen said if such conditions intensified or persisted for a long time, the melting could conceivably produce streams of water that could, as has been measured in Greenland, percolate down to bedrock and allow the thick ice sheets coating the continent to slide a bit faster toward the sea.

    Analysis Finds Large Antarctic Area Has Melted, NYT, 16.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/science/earth/16melt.html

West Nile Virus Decimates Suburban Birds

May 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:38 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Birds that once flourished in suburban skies, including robins, bluebirds and crows, have been devastated by West Nile virus, a study found.

Populations of seven species have had dramatic declines across the continent since West Nile emerged in the United States in 1999, according to a first-of-its-kind study. The research, to be published Thursday by the journal Nature, compared 26 years of bird breeding surveys to quantify what had been known anecdotally.

''We're seeing a serious impact,'' said study co-author Marm Kilpatrick, a senior research scientist at the Consortium of Conservation Medicine in New York.

West Nile virus, which is spread by mosquito bites, has infected 23,974 people in confirmed cases since 1999, killing 962, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But the disease, primarily an avian virus, has been far deadlier for birds. The death toll for crows and jays is easily in the hundreds of thousands, based on the number dead bodies found and extrapolated for what wasn't reported, Kilpatrick said.

It hit the seven species -- American crow, blue jay, tufted titmouse, American robin, house wren, chickadee and Eastern bluebird -- hard enough to be scientifically significant. Only the blue jay and house wren bounced back, in 2005.

The hardest-hit species has been the American crow. Nationwide, about one-third of crows have been killed by West Nile, said study lead author Shannon LaDeau, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington. The species was on the rise until 1999.

In some places, such as Maryland, crow loss was at 45 percent, and around Baltimore and Washington, 90 percent was gone, LaDeau said.

While crows are scavengers and often disliked, they play a key role in nature by cleaning up animal carcasses, LaDeau noted. Researchers will next look into what species benefit from the disappearance of crows.

Researchers noted the die-offs came in patches, with many in some places and none in others. Maryland appeared to be the epicenter of bird deaths, though that was partly because the data were not as good from New York, where the virus first hit, LaDeau said.

Chickadees, Eastern bluebirds and robins in Maryland were 68 percent, 52 percent, and 32 percent below expected levels in 2005. Tufted titmouse populations in Illinois were one-third of what they were expected to be.

''It tends to be more suburban areas. Some of the common backyard species including the blue jays, the robins, the chickadees have suffered significant declines,'' LaDeau said. ''That heavily packed urban corridor is a bad place to be a bird. The reason for that is that the mosquito prefers human landscape. They do very well in suburbia.''

The birds act as an early warning system for humans, said Wesley Hochachka, assistant director of bird population studies at Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

''If you start seeing crows dying and dying in numbers, that means there could be a human outbreak,'' said Hochachka, who was not involved with the study.

The researchers looked at 20 species that were regularly counted each breeding season and found that populations of 13 species were not down because of West Nile. Biologists say they have seen other species with many deaths, including owls, hawks, sage grouse and yellow-billed magpies, but there are no breeding surveys to quantify how bad the problem has been.

Although entire small clusters of crows were ''wiped out by West Nile virus in a single season,'' Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation at the National Audubon Society, remained hopeful.

''All of those (bird populations) have the capacity to rebound,'' he said.

------

On the Net:

Nature: http://www.nature.com

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maps and figures on human cases of West Nile virus:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/westnile/surv&control.htm surveillance

    West Nile Virus Decimates Suburban Birds, NYT, 16.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Dying-Birds.html

On the Snake River, Dam’s Natural Allies Seem to Have a Change of Heart

May 13, 2007
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

LOWER GRANITE DAM, Wash. — The wheat Bryan Jones grows in Eastern Washington begins its journey to Asia on barges along the lower Snake River. The river, once a wild, muscular torrent, was made barge friendly a quarter-century ago by four of the nation’s most controversial hydropower dams.

A tame river keeps Mr. Jones’s business viable. So why is he is spending time with the guides and fishermen who want to remove the dams? In part, because he feels the tug of environmentalist arguments that the dams will endanger wild salmon that, even more than wheat, are the region’s natural bounty.

“I always believed dams were economically too big of a hurdle to attack,” said Mr. Jones, who is 52. “But I began to realize that we are potentially losing runs of salmon” along this tributary of the Columbia River.

It is still a relatively rare phenomenon, but one becoming more noticeable: some members of the dams’ natural constituency, like farmers, are talking to their downriver antagonists about a future that might not include the four lower Snake River dams. There is talk of reconstituting a regional rail system to deliver Mr. Jones’s wheat to Portland, Ore. There is talk of a wind farm to replace the electricity — enough to power most of Manhattan — generated by the four dams.

The conversations are still in their early stages, and political support for the dams remains strong. Congressional ties to the Bonneville Power Administration, which provides electricity from the dams to regional utilities and businesses, are many, and few politicians want to back an action that could raise electricity bills and cost jobs. At best, wind power is intermittent and expensive; in 2005, regional electricity costs were more than 25 percent less than the national average.

But the pressures on the hydrosystem’s traditional operations are accumulating, and conversions like Mr. Jones’s have taken on an enhanced significance. As former Gov. John A. Kitzhaber of Oregon said in an interview, “by not talking to each other, not trying to figure out the real economic issues, we’re setting up a situation where someone else is going to figure out our future for us.”

His allusion was clear: he fears that the operations of the Columbia River dams could be determined by a federal judge if federal and local agencies here cannot come up with a plan to successfully protect salmon.

Indeed, Judge James A. Redden of the Federal District Court in Portland, who has presided over the central Endangered Species Act challenge to dam operations and whom the Vancouver Columbian called “the best friend of endangered fish in the Northwest,” has been acerbic in his dismissal of the most recent Bush Administration plan. Among other things, the administration argued that the Columbia River dams could not be removed because they were an immutable part of the landscape, having been built before the Endangered Species Act went into effect. It suggested habitat restoration would save the fish population.

The Bush administration appealed Judge Redden’s 2005 ruling, and last month the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco, forcefully backed him. Under the federal government’s theory, the appeals court held, “a listed species could be gradually destroyed, so long as each step on the path to destruction is sufficiently modest. This type of slow slide into oblivion is one of the very ills the Endangered Species Act seeks to prevent.”

On the lower Snake River, four runs of wild fish are threatened and one of these, sockeye salmon, may be irretrievable. Of the others, the spring and summer Chinook salmon, which have been going upriver for the past few weeks, are of most concern.

A new fish-protection plan, called a biological opinion, is due from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration later this year. Judge Redden has warned that if it fails to meet his viability test, he may have to take drastic action — presumably, taking the running of the Columbia River hydropower system into his own hands, as another federal judge, W. Arthur Garrity, did in the 1970s with Boston’s schools after the local community could not find a way to desegregate.

The Bonneville Power Administration, also known as the B.P.A., is not a named defendant in the endangered-species lawsuit, but because the dams’ operators at the Army Corps of Engineers work closely with Bonneville’s engineers, B.P.A. officials are often called on by the courts to help explain corps actions.

The Bonneville administrator, Stephen J. Wright, said in an interview in his Portland office that the potential loss of 5 percent of the electricity generated regionally each year would “magnify substantially” the current challenge of feeding the region’s growing hunger for power without raising costs.

Mr. Wright and Bob Lohn, who heads the regional office of the National Marine Fisheries Service, argue that dams are hardly the only environmental disturbance harming the salmon runs, and that the bumper salmon year of 2001 demonstrates that salmon and dams can coexist. Judge Redden has deemed their plans for accomplishing the goal of salmon recovery inadequate. Environmentalists say their optimism about coexistence is belied by the steady decline in fish runs.

Out here at the Lower Granite Dam, Witt Anderson, the chief of the Columbia River fish management office at the Army Corps of Engineers, said, “We’re mining the last few improvements we can get out of the hydrosystem.”

But Mr. Anderson argues that dam removal alone would not be a quick fix to what ails the fish. Given the impact of factors including agricultural runoff, culverts, cyclical changes in ocean temperature and the amount and location of ocean-borne food available to salmon, “We would say the solution is a comprehensive plan that addresses the life-cycle of fish, gravel to gravel.”

Smaller private dams have been breached around the country, and there are plans to do so at dams on the Elwha and White Salmon Rivers in Washington. The idea of breaching the Klamath River dams in Oregon and California is getting new and serious scrutiny. But the Lower Snake River dams are significantly bigger, in economic terms, than any of these.

There is, first of all, the electricity they generate. And the transportation. And the creation of inland ports, like Lewiston. Given these significant economic interests, the rethinking being done by a farmer like Brian Jones or a Lewiston city councilman like Jim Klauss is startling.

“When they created these dams in the 60s and 70s they said we’d have a lot of economic development,” a promise that never materialized, said Mr. Klauss, who is 47. Now the sediment trapped behind the Lower Granite dam requires constant dredging just to make a small passage for boats and the levees may need to rise higher to keep the city safe in storms.

So, although the City Council is pro-dam, Mr. Klauss said he was dubious.

“We’re kind of on a yo-yo,” he said. “We built these dams and changed everyone’s lifestyle, and we can’t say we have a lot to show for it. If you take them out you yo-yo back and change everyone’s lives again.” But, he said, it may be worth it.

To the north, in Spokane, Wash., the president of the local chapter of Trout Unlimited sees these small cracks in the dams’ natural constituencies as the beginning of a bigger political shift. “This new generation,” said Harvey Morrison, who is 64, “has been willing to ask the hard questions.”

    On the Snake River, Dam’s Natural Allies Seem to Have a Change of Heart, NYT, 13.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/us/13dam.html?hp

NASA Study: Eastern U.S. to Get Hotter

May 11, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:53 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Future eastern United States summers look much hotter than originally predicted with daily highs about 10 degrees warmer than in recent years by the mid-2080s, a new NASA study says.

Previous and widely used global warming computer estimates predict too many rainy days, the study says. Because drier weather is hotter, they underestimate how warm it will be east of the Mississippi River, said atmospheric scientists Barry Lynn and Leonard Druyan of Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

''Unless we take some strong action to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, it's going to get a lot hotter,'' said Lynn, now a scientist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. ''It's going to be a lot more dangerous for people who are not in the best of health.''

The study got mixed reviews from other climate scientists, in part because the eastern United States has recently been wetter and cooler than forecast.

Instead of daily summer highs in the 1990s that averaged in the low to mid 80s Fahrenheit, the eastern United States is in for daily summer highs regularly in the low to mid 90s, the study found. The study only looked at the eastern United States because that was the focus of the funding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lynn said.

And that's just the eastern United States as a whole. For individual cities, the future looks even hotter.

In the 2080s, the average summer high will probably be 102 degrees in Jacksonville, 100 degrees in Memphis, 96 degrees in Atlanta, and 91 degrees in Chicago and Washington, according to the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Climate.

But every now and then a summer will be drier than normal and that means even hotter days, Lynn said. So when Lynn's computer models spit out simulated results for July 2085 the forecasted temperatures sizzled past uncomfortable into painful. The study showed a map where the average high in the southeast neared 115 and pushed 100 in the northeast. Even Canada flirted with the low to mid 90s.

Many politicians and climate skeptics have criticized computer models as erring on the side of predicting temperatures that are too hot and outcomes that are too apocalyptic with global warming. But Druyan said the problem is most computer models, especially when compared to their predictions of past observations, underestimate how bad global warming is. That's because they see too many rainy days, which tends to cool temperatures off, he said.

There is an established link between rainy and cooler weather and hot and drier weather, said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Rainy days means more clouds blocking the sun and more solar heat used to evaporate water, Druyan said.

''I'm sorry for the bad news,'' Druyan said. ''It gets worse everywhere.''

Trenberth said the link between dryness and heat works, but he is a little troubled by the computer modeling done by Lynn and Druyan and points out that recently the eastern United States has been wetter and cooler than expected.

A top U.S. climate modeler, Jerry Mahlman, criticized the study as not matching models up correctly and ''just sort of whistling in the dark a little bit.''

But Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, editor of the journal Climate but not of this study, praised the paper, saying ''it makes perfect sense.''

He said it shows yet another ''positive feedback'' in global warming, where one aspect of climate change makes something else worse and it works like a loop.

''The more we start to understand of the science, the more positive feedbacks we start to find,'' Weaver said.

Weaver said looking at the map of a hotter eastern United States he can think of one thing: ''I like living in Canada.''

------

On the Net:

The NASA paper: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2007/Lynn--etal.html

    NASA Study: Eastern U.S. to Get Hotter, NYT, 11.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Hot-Future.html

Wildfire Threatens a California Resort Island

May 11, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:31 a.m. ET
The New York Times

AVALON, Calif. (AP) -- Firefighters struggled early Friday to prevent a wildfire from reaching homes on the edge of Santa Catalina Island's main city as residents and visitors fled the resort isle off the Southern California coast.

People lined up at the harbor Thursday night to board ferries back to the mainland. Many covered their faces with towels and bandanas as ashes fell.

A few homes burned but firefighters were protecting other properties late into the night, Avalon Fire Chief Steven Hoefs said. About 1,200 homes were under voluntary or mandatory evacuation orders.

''We're hanging in for now,'' Hoefs said.

The blaze that began five miles east of the island's airport grew to 4,000 acres, feeding on dry brush as winds steadily blew throughout the day and into the night. Winds later calmed and the air grew moist, although the threat remained.

An orange inferno loomed behind the quaint crescent harbor, landmark 1929 Catalina Casino and homes, restaurants and tiny hotels clinging to slopes above the waterfront.

A commercial building and several warehouse structures burned, and 175 utility customers lost electricity when power poles caught on fire.

Overnight, Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters were ferrying in firefighters -- 32 at a time. Hand crews were being positioned at the city's edge to protect homes.

''We're on defense mode for now,'' Hoefs said.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department and the state shipped in firefighters and equipment. Dozens of fire engines arrived aboard giant military hovercraft from the Marine Corps' Camp Pendleton.

At least 160 firefighters, aided by four water-dropping helicopters and three retardant-dropping air tankers, battled flames through most of Thursday. One county firefighter, overcome by smoke, was hospitalized in stable condition.

In Avalon, authorities used a bullhorn to urge people to evacuate and head to the beach. Visitors were directed to the historic art deco Casino until it lost power, while residents were sent to another harbor site.

The Catalina Express ferry service added several night departures of 400-passenger vessels from Avalon. Hundreds of residents and visitors boarded the ferries to reach the mainland.

A family of eight said they had just enough time to pack some clothes and personal papers before fleeing.

''I'm scared,'' said Angelica Romero, 30, holding her 7-month-old daughter. ''But what's important is I have my children. The rest doesn't matter.''

At the mainland port of Long Beach, island resident Kathy Troeger arrived on a ferry with her three children and a friend's daughter. Her husband, a captain in county fire's Baywatch division, stayed behind to help fight the fire.

''It was like a nightmare when we left,'' she said. ''You couldn't breathe and ash was falling like snow.''

An evacuation center was set up at Cabrillo High School, where about 85 people had checked in, according to the Red Cross.

Despite being well offshore, Catalina has been left parched by the lack of rainfall that has made the rest of Southern California particularly susceptible to wildfires like the one in Los Angeles' Griffith Park this week.

Only 2 inches of rain have fallen on Catalina since January.

A long, narrow island, Catalina covers 76 square miles and is served by helicopters and ferry boats from Los Angeles, Long Beach and other mainland harbors.

Avalon has a population of 3,200 that swells to more than 10,000 on weekends and in summer, according to the Catalina Island Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau.

Most the island is owned by the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy and is home to a various wildlife.

Associated Press writers Daisy Nguyen and Christina Almeida in Los Angeles and Gillian Flaccus in Long Beach contributed to this report.

    Wildfire Threatens a California Resort Island, NYT, 11.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-SoCal-Fire.html?hp

Bush Tours Town Wiped Away by Tornado

May 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:44 p.m. ET
The New York Times

GREENSBURG, Kan. (AP) -- Stepping through the rubble, President Bush got his first look Wednesday at what little is left of this farming town of 1,600 people after last week's killer tornado.

Starting a day's tour of the wreckage, Bush hovered in a helicopter over the town in southwest Kansas. He saw the flattened ruins from Friday night's storm that killed at least 11 people. It was the most punishing tornado to hit the United States in years.

On a short ride into town, Bush got a rundown of the damage and the recovery from city administrator Steve Hewitt and Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. She and the White House had a spat a day ago -- later settled -- over whether National Guard deployments to Iraq had hampered the government's ability to respond.

The president then took to the city's streets on foot to comfort a community now little more than a snarled mess of mud, wood, glass and wires. Roaring at up to 205 mph and spanning 1.7 miles, the twister destroyed an estimated 95 percent of the town, with almost every building gone, including churches, the city hall and the hospital.

Bush had already ordered emergency aid for the people, business and governments in the Greensburg area. His trip was about delivering something else -- presidential empathy.

The White House has sought a much more aggressive and engaged reaction to disasters since Hurricane Katrina, when a bungled response became a turning point in Bush's presidency.

''The response to this particular case was absolutely phenomenal,'' declared R. David Paulison, the Federal Emergency Management Agency director, en route to Kansas with Bush.

Bush stopped at a tractor dealership, where the building was gutted and the plows were mangled. It had been a major employer in town. He freely dished out hugs.

The surrounding neighborhood revealed a car stuck tail-first out of the top of a house. Trees were ripped of all limbs, looking like mere stakes in the ground. A spray-painted sign said politely: ''Please pardon our mess.''

The president ambled down the road to a house with no roof, almost slipping as he picked his way across a chunk of metal on the lawn. He briefly grabbed a chain saw, ripping it into action for the cameras and other media that accompanied him.

''How are you all?'' Bush said as he moved among residents.

Greensburg has been known for its friendly charm, right down to the old-fashioned soda fountain at the drug store. The town's proud claim to fame is the Big Well, considered the largest in the world to be dug by hand. Now the fountain is gone, the well buried in debris.

Despite the tragedy, emergency officials know the death toll could have been much worse. An emergency warning about 20 minutes before the tornado hit helped people scramble to safety.

This is the third time in three months that Bush has played the role of national healer.

He comforted survivors of tornadoes that ripped through Alabama and Georgia in March, and offered words of hope at Virginia Tech after a gunman killed 32 people and himself in April.

    Bush Tours Town Wiped Away by Tornado, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

Wildfire Rages in Los Angeles

May 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:39 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A wildfire roared across brush-covered hills in the city's sprawling Griffith Park on Tuesday, triggering evacuations of homes and some of the city's most famous landmarks.

A wall of flames raced across ridges and jumped fire lines late in the evening as the fire drew closer to homes and the Griffith Observatory.

Hundreds of firefighters and five water-dropping helicopters rushed to Los Angeles' landmark park -- a mix of wilderness, cultural venues, horse and hiking trails and recreational facilities set on more than 4,000 acres on the hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

Late Tuesday, authorities called for a mandatory evacuation of homes that sit along the park's southern edge as the fire burned out of control after dusk.

Steve Yoo, who lives in the evacuation area, said he was able to pack his passport, wallet and some clothes into a duffel bag before leaving home.

''You need to evacuate, you need to evacuate your houses immediately,'' a police officer said over a loudspeaker. ''The fire is coming toward the neighborhood.

Rangers evacuated the park's Vermont Canyon area, which includes the Los Angeles Zoo, two golf facilities, a merry-go-round and school, said Jane Kolb, a city Department of Recreation and Parks spokeswoman.

Fire Capt. Rex Vilaubi said the evacuations were voluntary and the areas were not in imminent danger of being overrun.

Authorities were investigating whether the fire broke out after a person discarded a cigarette at one of the park's golf courses, a law enforcement official familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

The person tried to put out the fire but was badly burned and was taken to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, the official said.

Nearly 2,000 customers were without power in the area around the mandatory evacuations, although Department of Water and Power officials said it was not immediately known whether the outage was related to the fire.

The blaze erupted on the second day of a heat spell. The National Weather Service said downtown hit 97 degrees, 23 degrees above normal, tying the record for the date.

    Wildfire Rages in Los Angeles, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-SoCal-Fire.html?hp

American elm makes slow return

7.5.2007
USA Today
By Dennis Cauchon

For the first time in more than 40 years, the American elm tree is being sold in large numbers to homeowners and other retail customers.

Home Depot, the giant retailer, is trying to sell 12,000 disease-resistant elm trees in 400 stores in the eastern USA.

The American elm's return to the mass market is a watershed event in the comeback of a tree that once dominated the nation's landscape, only to be wiped out by Dutch elm disease. Elm trees once lined the streets of nearly every American town. The sturdy, fast-growing Y-shaped tree was exceptionally tolerant of city life, but it was felled by a deadly fungus.

Dutch elm disease arrived, probably on wood imported from China, in 1930. It spread from Ohio, where it was first reported, to the rest of the nation over 50 years. The disease, spread by beetles, killed an estimated 100 million elm trees. The fungus is called Dutch elm disease because it was identified by Dutch researchers.

Federal, state and local governments spent a fortune trying to stop the disease from spreading. Nothing worked. By the 1960s, the American elm had largely vanished from the nation's nurseries and garden stores.

In the 1990s, researchers at the Department of Agriculture's National Arboretum research station in Beltsville, Md., identified several types of elm trees that were genetically resistant to Dutch elm disease. In 1996, veteran Georgia nurseryman Roger Holloway started growing the disease-resistant trees, a job that proved more difficult than expected.

After a decade of work, Holloway's elm tree entered the mass market this spring when Home Depot decided to take a chance on 12,000 of the beloved but stigmatized trees.

"This is a big deal to me," says Mike DuVal, Home Depot horticulturalist and tree buyer. "I got into this business because I love trees. It would be very cool to see the elm tree become popular once again."

Home Depot is selling the trees for $110 to $275, depending on the size of the tree and how far it was shipped. The price puts it in the mid-range of shade trees, DuVal says.

Each tree has a special tag — labeled "Return of the American Elm" — that tells the story of the disease-resistant tree. "Plant this tree and help restore a lost piece of American history," the tag says.

The American elm won't challenge the popularity of other shade trees this year. Home Depot will sell 100,000 to 150,000 red maples and pin oaks.

Holloway's Riveredge Farms is growing 34,000 elm trees that will be ready in 2008 and 70,000 in 2009. He's growing the trees on about 100 acres near Cartersville, Ga., about 45 miles north of Atlanta.

"People tell me I'm crazy, that I want elm trees on every street in America," Holloway says. "I tell them I'll settle for every other street."

Holloway and smaller tree growers elsewhere are trying to increase production of other disease-resistant varieties — the Valley Forge, New Harmony and Jefferson elms — to add genetic diversity and make elms less vulnerable to disease.

Many trees planted to replace the elm tree are now suffering their own disease calamities, a fact that may help restore the elm tree to the American landscape. For example, the emerald ash borer, an insect, has started to ravage ash trees.

"It's come full circle over the last 50 years. Elm trees are being planted to replace ash trees that were planted to replace the elm trees," says Marc Teffeau, research director at the American Landscape and Nursery Association.

Bruce Carley, whose website (www.elmpost.org) tracks where elm trees can be purchased on-line, says the public remains enchanted with elms, but nurseries are prejudiced against the tree because of its history of disease.

The availability of elm trees hasn't increased much in recent years despite the discovery of disease-resistant varieties, he says.

The big exception is Home Depot's gamble. DuVal says spring sales, especially in the Northeast, will reveal whether people are ready for the return of the American elm.

    American elm makes slow return, UT, 7.5.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2007-05-07-american-elm_N.htm

Kansas Families Return to Town in Ruins

May 7, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:24 p.m. ET
The New York Times

GREENSBURG, Kan. (AP) -- Searchers found a person alive in the rubble that was once Greensburg two days after a powerful tornado largely obliterated the town. Officials announced the rescue Monday as residents began the grim return to their splintered homes.

The survivor was found late Sunday, providing hope for other discoveries, said Kansas Highway Patrol spokesman Ron Knoefel. He did not provide other details.

The tornado, part of a weekend of violent storms across the Plains, claimed at least eight lives in the town of 1,500, putting the statewide death toll from the storms at 10.

Little remained standing in Greensburg, but the grain elevator. The F-5 tornado demolished every business on the main street. Churches lost their steeples, trees were stripped of their branches and neighborhoods were flattened. Officials estimate as much as 95 percent of the town was destroyed.

The tornado's wind was estimated to have reached 205 mph as it carved a track 1.7 miles wide and 22 miles long.

The search for survivors or victims had been complicated by the extent of the damage.

''Some of this rubble is 20, 30 feet deep,'' Maj. Gen. Todd Bunting, the state's adjutant general, told CNN on Monday morning.

R. David Paulison, the Federal Emergency Management Agency director, planned to tour the devastation later Monday for the first time since the tornado hit Friday night. President Bush had already declared parts of Kansas a disaster area, freeing up federal money to aid the recovery.

Evacuated residents waiting to get back into Greensburg waited in a line of vehicles nearly 2 miles long outside city limits Monday as police checked identification. Utility repair crews arriving from other cities added to the traffic jam. Police reminded residents they would have to leave again by 6 p.m.

Near downtown, insurance agent Scott Spark, a 13-year resident of Greensburg, hauled papers out of his wrecked office. He had already been to his destroyed home.

''I could probably have salvaged some more stuff if I had been able to get back, but I understand how it is,'' he said of the restrictions. ''I mean, they were still having tornadoes last night. I understand they want everybody to be safe.''

The storm system that swept south-central Kansas also spawned tornadoes in Illinois, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Nebraska.

    Kansas Families Return to Town in Ruins, NYT, 7.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Severe-Weather.html

After 9 Die in Kansas, a New Wave of Tornadoes

May 6, 2007
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

GREENSBURG, Kan., May 5 (AP) — A fresh wave of tornadoes ripped through southwest Kansas on Saturday evening, a day after a tornado all but destroyed this town, killing nine and injuring dozens more.

The Kansas Adjutant General’s Department said it had confirmed reports of eight tornadoes touching down, including one that injured 11 people when it hit two restaurants in the central Kansas town of Osborne.

Vienna Janis, spokeswoman for Osborne County Emergency Management, said that twister hit around 6 p.m., ripping the roof off the Circle N restaurant and smashing windows in a Pizza Hut.

Among the twisters were a series of half-mile wide “wedge” tornadoes — similar to the one that devastated Greensburg on Friday night, a meteorologist, Mike Umscheid, said.

In the far western Oklahoma town of Sweetwater, late Saturday, a twister hit a high school and storm spotters reported damage to nearby residences. There were injuries, though the number and severity were not clear.

Earlier, emergency crews called off the search in Greensburg for victims as the weather deteriorated.

Rescuers had spent the day hurrying through the wreckage from Friday night’s giant tornado, which left little standing beyond the local pub.

Friday’s weather was blamed for nine deaths in the region.

The city administrator, Steve Hewitt, estimated 95 percent of the town of 1,500 was destroyed and predicted rescue efforts could take days.

Among the only structures that +survived was the Bar H Tavern, the town’s lone bar. It was briefly converted into a morgue.

Survivors picked over the remnants of their homes and possessions, still dazed.

Residents said they heard the tornado warning sirens about 20 minutes before Friday’s storm hit.

Even with that heads-up, Frank Gallant said he had no place to go. Mr. Gallant, who uses a wheelchair, moved to the center of his house with his miniature pinscher, No. 5.

“You just hope you’ve lived up to the Lord’s expectations, and you’re going to the good place and not the bad,” said Mr. Gallant, 47.

Terry Gaul, a salesman on his way back from a business trip, pulled into a John Deere dealership with his partner to wait out what they thought was a hailstorm.

“The next thing we heard was this loud rumble,” said Mr. Gaul, his red polo shirt stained with blood and his face crosshatched with cuts. “There were these two John Deere combines sitting there, and the next thing I know, they started rocking. Then we started spinning like a windmill, and I said, ‘Oh, boy, it’s all over with now.’ ”

The tornado rolled Mr. Gaul’s van, throwing him into the back seat. When he came out, he noticed something missing. “I never seen where those two combines went,” he said.

The dead included eight in Kiowa County, where Greensburg is, and one in Pratt County, said Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Adjutant General’s Department.

    After 9 Die in Kansas, a New Wave of Tornadoes, NYT, 6.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/us/06tornado.html?hp

Editorial

The Warming Challenge

May 5, 2007
The New York Times

Yesterday’s report on global warming from the world’s most authoritative voice on climate change asserts that significant progress toward stabilizing and reducing global warming emissions can be achieved at a relatively low cost using known technologies. This is a hugely important message to policy makers everywhere, not least those in the United States Congress. Many of them have been paralyzed by fears — assiduously cultivated by the Bush administration — that a full-scale attack on climate change could cripple the economy.

The report was the third this year from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The first report, in February, blamed humans for rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. A second report last month warned of famine, floods and other ecological disasters unless emissions were brought under control.

The new report deals with remedies. It warns that over the course of this century, major investments in new and essentially carbon-free energy sources will be required. But it stresses that we can and must begin to address the problem now, using off-the-shelf technologies to make our cars, buildings and appliances far more efficient, while investing in alternative fuels, like cellulosic ethanol, that show near-term promise.

The report also made clear the risks of delay, noting that emissions of greenhouse gases have risen 70 percent since 1970 and could nearly double from current levels by 2030 if nothing is done. For that reason, it said, it is vital for policy makers to discourage older technologies — coal-fired power plants with no capacity to store carbon emissions, for instance — so as not to lock in further increases in emissions, which would make the task much harder and more expensive down the road.

From a political and legislative perspective, the report could not have been more timely. A run of fortuitous events — including the panel’s first two reports, increased agitation at the state and local level, and the recent Supreme Court decision authorizing the government regulation of carbon dioxide — has elevated the warming issue in the public consciousness and on Congress’s list of priorities.

Moreover, many of the report’s proposals have already found a home in pending legislation. Bills to increase fuel efficiency in cars and trucks have been introduced in both houses; Jeff Bingaman, the Democrats’ Senate spokesman on energy matters, is drafting a measure that would require utilities to generate 15 percent of their electricity from wind and other renewable sources; Barbara Boxer, head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has offered an ambitious bill to greatly increase investments in alternative fuels.

None of these bills are surefire winners. But by showing that the costs of acting now will be trivial compared with the price to be paid if we do nothing, the report can only improve their chances.

    The Warming Challenge, NYT, 5.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/05/opinion/05sat1.html

Feeling Warmth,

Subtropical Plants Move North

May 3, 2007
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, May 2 — Like a true belle, this city flounces into bloom when the weather turns, its redbuds, azaleas and forsythia emerging like so much lace on a bodice.

But in recent years, plants that thrive in even warmer weather have begun crashing the ball. At the Habersham Gardens nursery, where well-heeled homeowners choose their spring seedlings, a spiky-leafed, sultry coastal oleander has been thriving in a giant urn.

“We never expected it to come back every year,” said Cheryl Aldrich, the assistant manager, guiding a visitor on a tour of plants that would once have needed coddling to survive here: eucalyptus, angel trumpets, the Froot Loop-hued Miss Huff lantana. “We’ve been able to overwinter plants you didn’t have a prayer with before.”

Forget the jokes about beachfront property. If global warming has any upside, it would seem to be for gardeners, who make up three-quarters of the population and spend $34 billion a year, according to the National Gardening Association. Many experts agree that climate change, which by some estimates has already nudged up large swaths of the country by one or more plant-hardiness zones, has meant a longer growing season and a more robust selection. There are palm trees in Knoxville and subtropical camellias in Pennsylvania.

But horticulturists warn that it is shortsighted to view this as good news. Warmer temperatures help pests as well as plants, and studies have shown that weeds and invasive species receive a greater boost from higher levels of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, than desirable plants do. Poison ivy becomes more toxic, ragweed dumps more pollen, and kudzu, the fast-growing vine that has swallowed whole woodlands in the South, is creeping northward.

Already, some states are facing the possibility that the cherished local flora that has helped define their identities — the Ohio buckeye, the Kansas sunflower or the Mississippi magnolia — may begin to disappear within their borders and move north.

By the end of the century, the climate will no longer be favorable for the official state tree or flower in 28 states, according to “The Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming,” a report released last month by the National Wildlife Federation.

By the time of the annual Atlanta Dogwood Festival last month, the pale dogwood blooms had come and gone. Tara Dillard, a landscape designer and garden writer, said she now steers clients away from longtime favorites. “I’m writing a column about rhododendrons right now,” Ms. Dillard said. “And I think my conclusion is going to have to be not to plant rhododendrons. We have heated out of the rhododendron zone.”

In this warmer age, she said, “You might be planting some stuff you don’t like, like hollies.” But she brooks no objections from her clients. “I don’t care if you don’t like them,” she tells them. “I used to not like them either.”

David W. Wolfe, a professor of plant ecology at Cornell University, who spoke at a recent symposium at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden called “Gardening in a Changing Climate,” confirmed that in many places bellwether plants and animals were beginning to disappear. “There is clear evidence that the living world is responding to this change already,” Dr. Wolfe said.

Groups that cater to gardeners have hastened to keep up. In December, the National Arbor Day Foundation released an updated version of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Hardiness Zone Map, which shows the lowest winter temperatures in different parts of the country and is used by gardeners to determine which plants can survive in their yards.

Using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Arbor Day map indicates that many bands of the country are a full zone warmer, and a few spots are two zones warmer, than they were in 1990, when the map was last updated.

Atlanta, which was in Zone 7 in 1990, is now in Zone 8, along with the rest of northern Georgia. That means that areas in the northern half of the state where the average low temperature was zero to 10 degrees Fahrenheit are now in a zone where the average low is 10 to 20 degrees. A scientific consensus has concluded that this warming trend has largely been caused by the human production of heat-trapping gases.

The Agriculture Department is in the process of redoing the map itself. But critics have taken issue with the department’s decision to use 30 years of temperature data, saying it will result in cooler averages and fail to reflect the warming climate. The 1990 U.S.D.A. map used 13 years of data; the Arbor Day map used 15 years ending in 2004.

Cameron P. Wake, a climatologist at the Climate Change Research Center of the University of New Hampshire, said a 30-year period would include several cycles of multiyear effects like El Niño, with an underlying assumption that climate is stable and varies around a mean. Warming, on the other hand, “is not variability, it’s a long term trend,” Dr. Wake said. “I would say the U.S.D.A. doesn’t want to acknowledge there’s been change.”

Kim Kaplan, a spokeswoman for the department’s Agricultural Research Service, defended the decision to use 30 years, saying the longer time period would strike a balance between weather, which can vary greatly from year to year, and climate. The new map, which Ms. Kaplan said would be released in “the near future,” will also account for elevation, slope and wind exposure for the first time.

“It will be more precise and more reflective of real-world conditions than we’ve ever been able to do before,” she said.

But frustration from tree planters who needed an accurate guide immediately prompted the Arbor Day Foundation not to wait on the Agriculture Department, said Woodrow L. Nelson, the chief spokesman for the foundation.

Still, landscapers did not respond to the warming trend with alarm, Mr. Nelson said. “It was actually much more of a positive thing,” he said. “It’s kind of like a tree planter in Pennsylvania having some success with flowering dogwoods, where that hadn’t been a possibility 20 years ago.”

Gardeners have always had a penchant for pushing the limits, and some are banking on a combination of their own expertise and climate change to keep their plants alive. John Denti, the greenhouse manager at the University of North Carolina Botanical Gardens in Charlotte, is tending 50 varieties of palm trees in his yard. Some grow easily in the region; others are responding well to Mr. Denti’s special techniques, like wrapping them in strands of Christmas tree lights to keep them warm; and still others are gambles.

“I surely believe in global warming, so I’m planting a lot of marginal stuff and hoping it gets warm enough,” Mr. Denti said.

Some experts said global warming was affecting gardeners in another way, by raising awareness. In the Atlanta area, where in recent years watering has been restricted, nurseries and landscapers note a growing interest in drought-resistant plants and xeriscaping — landscaping that requires minimal water.

Nationally, the use of products like organic fertilizer, which requires less energy to produce than conventional fertilizer — and thus results in fewer emissions of heat-trapping gases — is ballooning, with some manufacturers reporting a doubling in demand each year.

Gardening and do-it-yourself magazines have begun to popularize rain gardens, which collect rainwater in barrels or shallow basins that are part of the landscaping. And mainstream publications like Martha Stewart Living and Better Homes and Gardens have advocated cutting back on gasoline-powered lawnmowers and blowers in favor of greener machines like rechargeable or push mowers, which come in sleek new lightweight designs.

Environmentally gentle gardening choices go hand in hand with hybrid cars, compact fluorescent bulbs and “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Oscar-winning documentary with Al Gore, said Mary Pat Matheson, the executive director of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. “Only in the last year has it even been accepted that it’s really happening,” Ms. Matheson said. “Awareness is starting to turn into action.”

In many instances, consumers are a step ahead of the market. Elaine Morgan, 64, said she was researching drought-resistant plants and “steppables,” low ground cover which requires less maintenance and water than grass but can stand to be trod upon, for her home in Duluth, an Atlanta suburb. Ms. Morgan said she was using more organic products and fewer pesticides.

But she was having trouble finding a lawn care company that would meet her environmental standards. Picking her way through the lavender varieties at Habersham with a critical eye, she said, “I’ve gone through six landscapers.”

Feeling Warmth, Subtropical Plants Move North, NYT, 3.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/science/03flowers.html

Scientists Protest New Reading of ESA

May 2, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:37 a.m. ET
The New York Times

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) -- More than three dozen scientists have signed a letter to protest a new Bush administration interpretation of the Endangered Species Act, saying it jeopardizes animals such as wolves and grizzly bears.

The new reading of the law proposed by Interior Department Solicitor David Bernhardt would enable the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect animals and plants only where they are battling for survival. The agency wouldn't have to protect them where they're in good shape.

The proposed changes would ''have real and profoundly detrimental impacts on the conservation of many species and the habitat upon which they depend,'' said the letter, signed by 38 prominent wildlife biologists and environmental ethics specialists.

It was being sent this week to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and leaders of congressional committees that oversee the department.

The scientists wrote that the proposal would have allowed the bald eagle to become extinct in the lower 48 states.

The new policy would give the department an excuse to avoid adding new species to the list, increasing the likelihood of extinctions, said Michael Nelson, an environmental ethicist at Michigan State University.

Nelson and John Vucetich, a wildlife biologist at Michigan Technological University, circulated the letter.

Interior spokesman Hugh Vickery said senior career biologists who run the program are supportive of the proposal and believe it will enable them to ''focus their limited resources on areas where species are truly threatened or endangered.''

Vickery said it was unclear how the revised policy would affect particular species but accused the critics of exaggerating. He dismissed as ''complete nonsense'' the suggestion it would have doomed the bald eagle everywhere but Alaska if it had been in effect decades ago.

Bernhardt's legal analysis was released in mid-March. He said the department needed to reconsider its definition of ''endangered'' because federal judges had rejected its previous reading of the law in eight of 10 cases since 2000.

Those rulings came after environmentalist groups sued the wildlife service for refusing to add species such as the flat-tailed horned lizard and Florida black bear to the endangered list.

The debate centers on a provision in the Endangered Species Act of 1973 requiring the government to list any plant or animal ''in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range.''

Bernhardt disagreed with court rulings that ''range'' includes areas where species lived previously but are gone because of habitat loss or other reasons. What matters, he said, is whether they're declining in areas they now occupy.

Bernhardt's definition of ''range'' would allow the department to settle for keeping remnants of a species intact somewhere, but wouldn't have to return them where people drove them out, Vucetich said.

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On the Net:

Federal endangered species program: http://www.fws.gov/endangered/