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Nature, Wildlife, Climate, Weather (V)

At Climate Meeting,

Bush Does Not Specify Goals

September 29, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — President Bush said Friday that the nations that contribute most to global warming should all set goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. But he did not specify what those goals should be and repeated his stand that nations should not be held to mandatory targets for capping carbon dioxide emissions.

At the close of a two-day meeting here of 16 major carbon-emitting nations, Mr. Bush also proposed an international fund to help developing nations benefit from clean energy technology. He instructed the Treasury Department to begin work on the proposal, but the administration offered no details.

“We will set a long-term goal for reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions,” the president said in a morning speech at the State Department. “Each nation must decide for itself the right mix of tools and technologies to achieve results that are measurable and environmentally effective.”

He added, “No one country has all the answers, including mine.”

The delegates to the conference listened impassively to Mr. Bush’s 20-minute address, interrupting him with applause only once, when he pledged that the United States would participate in global warming negotiations overseen by the United Nations. The Bush administration has been a less-than-enthusiastic partner in United Nations-sponsored climate change talks and has not joined the Kyoto Protocol, intended to halt and then reverse the spread of climate-altering carbon emissions.

Mr. Bush quickly left the auditorium after delivering his remarks, which ended 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Some of the delegates, representing the major industrialized nations plus Brazil, China, India and South Africa, said they were less than impressed.

“The president made his speech,” said the chief Brazilian delegate to the talks, Everton Vargas. “We took note of his speech.”

Mr. Vargas, a senior official in Brazil’s ministry of external relations, seemed puzzled by the purpose of the Washington meeting, which came at the end of a week when the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, pledged the organization’s full efforts toward negotiating a new agreement to take the place of the Kyoto Protocol after most of its provisions expire in 2012.

“The whole agenda was set by the American government,” Ambassador Vargas said. “The American government didn’t bring any new ideas, any new proposals in terms of the American position.”

The ambassador did, however, speak approvingly of the still-vague proposal for a clean technology fund, but said he was unsure about how it would be structured and financed.

The president’s calls for each country to decide for itself how to rein in pollution, and his refusal to embrace mandatory measures, have set the United States apart from other countries, and his appearance at the State Department conference probably did not do much to lessen that isolation.

“Smart technology does not just materialize by itself,” John Ashton, a special adviser on climate change to the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, said afterward. Mr. Ashton, who has said that voluntary measures are ineffective, said “smart technology” requires government commitment and investment.

Mr. Ashton also questioned the purpose of the Washington meeting, saying it had produced nothing of substance.

“We could have another 20 years of talking about talking,” Mr. Ashton said. “We need to start deciding about doing.”

Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense, one of the nation’s largest and most influential environmental groups, addressed the meeting on Thursday and came away discouraged by the lack of tangible progress.

“It was a lost opportunity,” he said. “America needs to lead, and we can lead, but now the spotlight shifts to the Congress because the president has refused to accept the only path that’s ever solved an air pollution problem — and that’s mandatory legal limits.”

There are at least a half-dozen bills before Congress that would set such mandatory caps, as well as energy legislation passed by the House and Senate that would help curb greenhouse gases, which President Bush has threatened to veto.

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, attended Friday’s speech.

“My fear is that the president has set aspirational goals that are really procrastinational,” he said.

At Climate Meeting, Bush Does Not Specify Goals, NYT, 29.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/washington/29climate.html

Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History

September 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:14 a.m. ET
The New York Times

Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

Global warming -- through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding -- is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians -- the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.

That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea level rise is ''the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist,'' says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

''We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it,'' said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. ''It's going to happen no matter what -- the question is when.''

Sea level rise ''has consequences about where people live and what they care about,'' said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. ''We're going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost.''

This week, beginning with a meeting at the United Nations on Monday, world leaders will convene to talk about fighting global warming. At week's end, leaders will gather in Washington with President Bush.

Experts say that protecting America's coastlines would run well into the billions and not all spots could be saved.

And it's not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes an even greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms and regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher and more frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.

All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the lower 48 states would put about 25,000 square miles under water, according to Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. That's an area the size of West Virginia.

The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said.

The Environmental Protection Agency's calculation projects a land loss of about 22,000 square miles. The EPA, which studied only the Eastern and Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina would lose the most land. But even inland areas like Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also have slivers of at-risk land, according to the EPA.

This past summer's flooding of subways in New York could become far more regular, even an everyday occurrence, with the projected sea rise, other scientists said. And New Orleans' Katrina experience and the daily loss of Louisiana wetlands -- which serve as a barrier that weakens hurricanes -- are previews of what's to come there.

Florida faces a serious public health risk from rising salt water tainting drinking water wells, said Joel Scheraga, the EPA's director of global change research. And the farm-rich San Joaquin Delta in California faces serious salt water flooding problems, other experts said.

''Sea level rise is going to have more general impact to the population and the infrastructure than almost anything else that I can think of,'' said S. Jeffress Williams, a U.S. Geological Survey coastal geologist in Woods Hole, Mass.

Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century. But he tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.

Williams says it's ''not unreasonable at all'' to expect that much in 100 years. ''We've had a third of a meter in the last century.''

The change will be a gradual process, one that is so slow it will be easy to ignore for a while.

''It's like sticking your finger in a pot of water on a burner and you turn the heat on, Williams said. ''You kind of get used to it.''

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On the Net:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on sea level:

http://tinyurl.com/2df72n

The U.S. Geological Survey on sea level rise and global warming:

http://woodshole.er.usgs.gov/project-pages/cvi/

University of Arizona's interactive maps on sea level rise:

http://tinyurl.com/ca73h

Architecture 2030 study on one-meter sea level rise and cities:

http://www.architecture2030.org/current--situation/coastal--impact.htm

    Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History, NYT, 23.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Rising-Seas.html

U.S. Report Shows Decline in Loggerhead Sea Turtles

September 23, 2007
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 (AP) — After encouraging gains in the 1990s, a federal report now shows populations of loggerhead sea turtles dropping, possibly as a result of commercial fishing.

The report, a five-year status update required under the Endangered Species Act, did not change the turtles’ status to endangered from threatened, but scientists and environmentalists said it was a cause for concern.

“As a biologist you’re always trying to find that point at which we really have to start doing something drastic if we want to maintain loggerhead populations on our beaches,” said Mark Dodd, a state biologist in Georgia, where the loggerhead nesting count in 2006 was the third lowest since daily monitoring began in 1989.

The Southeast, particularly Florida, is one of the two largest loggerhead nesting areas in the world — with eggs laid and hatched along beaches from Texas to North Carolina. Oman is the other major nesting area.

The report showed nestings in the United States dropping about 7 percent a year on the Gulf of Mexico. In southern Florida, nestings were down about 4 percent a year, and populations in the Carolinas and Georgia have dropped about 2 percent a year.

The decline among the loggerheads was a turnaround from the 1990s. In South Florida, nesting studies had shown gains of about 4 percent per year from 1989 to 1998.

Researchers were puzzled by the change, but some said it might be a result of expanded commercial fishing operations. The federal report called fisheries the “most significant man-made factor affecting the conservation and recovery of the loggerhead.”

The loggerhead, believed to be one of the world’s oldest species, can grow to more than 300 pounds and lives most of its life in the sea, migrating vast distances.

Females leave the water only to dig nests on the beach, lay their small white, leathery eggs, and cover them with sand. Then they return to the sea. In nesting season, they can lay hundreds of eggs.

The eggs hatch after about two months, and the young turtles crawl to the ocean.

Environmental groups and government agencies have worked to raise awareness of the nests, opposing the construction of sea walls and other beachfront obstructions and urging property owners during nesting season to reduce or eliminate beachfront lights, which can disorient the hatchlings.

The report was compiled from various sources by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which jointly have jurisdiction over protecting the turtles. The agencies also issued updates on five other sea turtles from around the world, with mixed results.

    U.S. Report Shows Decline in Loggerhead Sea Turtles, NYT, 23.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/us/23turtle.html

Scientists Say Velociraptor Had Feathers

September 20, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:46 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Velociraptor, the terrifying predator made famous in the movie ''Jurassic Park,'' appears to have had feathers in real life.

A close study of a velociraptor forearm found in Mongolia shows the presence of quill knobs, bumps on the bone where the feathers anchor, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Dinosaurs are believed to be ancestors to modern birds. Evidence of feathered dinosaurs has been found in recent years, and now velociraptor can be added to that list.

''Finding quill knobs on velociraptor ... means that it definitely had feathers. This is something we'd long suspected, but no one had been able to prove,'' Alan Turner, lead author on the study and a graduate student of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and at Columbia University in New York, said in a statement.

The velociraptor the researchers studied was about three feet tall and weighed about 30 pounds. The size of these animals was exaggerated in the movie.

It had short forelimbs, compared to a modern bird, the researchers said, indicating it would not have been able to fly, even though it had feathers.

The feathers may have been useful for display, to shield nests, for temperature control or to help it maneuver while running, they said.

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On the Net:

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

American Museum of Natural History: http://www.amnh.org

    Scientists Say Velociraptor Had Feathers, NYT, 20.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Feathered-Raptor.html

5, 000 Evacuated As Calif. Forest Burns

September 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:31 a.m. ET
The New York Times

FAWNSKIN, Calif. (AP) -- An out-of-control wildfire raged through the San Bernardino National Forest on Sunday, keeping about 5,000 people from their homes in two mountain communities.

Firefighters struggled to contain the 18,000-acre blaze, which began Friday and was pushed by 20-mph winds through dense, dry brush.

By Saturday, the fire was only 5 percent contained. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for San Bernardino County, clearing the way for state government assistance with costs related to the fire.

The flames had burned several outbuildings at a campground and crept within a half-mile of homes, said Jim Wilkins of the San Bernardino County Fire Department.

''It's a very aggressive fire burning through fuels that haven't been burned in 50 to 75 years,'' Wilkins said.

About 1,080 firefighters were aided by helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and a DC-10 capable of dropping 24,000 gallons of water at a time.

Officials evacuated the resort community of Green Valley Lake and the Fawnskin area near Big Bear Dam. Several campgrounds were also evacuated, and voluntary evacuations were called for part of Lucerne Valley.

The cause of the fire remained under investigation.

In San Diego County, a 500-acre wildfire erupted Saturday northeast of Julian, forcing about 400 people to leave the nearby subdivision of Whispering Pines.

By nightfall, the flames had completely run through the subdivision. An empty vacation home was destroyed, said Jan Caldwell of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department.

About 500 firefighters battled the blaze, which was 10 percent contained.

    5, 000 Evacuated As Calif. Forest Burns, NYT, 16.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Wildfires.html

Cleanup Begins After Hurricane Humberto

September 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:29 a.m. ET
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- Utility crews restored electricity Friday to half of the homes and businesses left without power after Hurricane Humberto, while experts estimated total damages from the storm would cost less than $500 million.

Humberto, the first hurricane to hit the U.S. in two years, continued to lose strength Friday as its remnants moved through Mississippi to the East Coast. The storm made landfall Thursday in Texas and then pushed across Louisiana.

The storm left as many as 120,000 Texas and Louisiana homes and businesses without power. While many would be restored by the weekend, some could be without power until Tuesday, said Joe Domino, Entergy Texas president and chief executive officer.

At High Island, the coastal town of 500 where the center of Humberto made landfall, many customers, including the local water utility, had generators for essential needs and kept fresh water flowing from taps.

''I think we can do better without lights than we can without water,'' resident George Leger said.

The remnants of Humberto were located in northwestern Georgia Friday afternoon and moving northeast, according to the National Weather Service. Maximum sustained winds were only 15 mph and an inch or two of rain was likely.

In the Carolinas, the remnants of the storm collided with a cold front, leading to wind and heavy rain and even sightings of funnel clouds. There were dozens of power outages and traffic accidents, and a nursing home in Fuquay-Varina, near Raleigh, N.C., was being evacuated because a tree fell on the building.

''It's just terrible,'' said Mildred Wheeler, whose husband lives in the home. ''Water's flooding the building, and you have people here on oxygen machines.''

Humberto's path into Texas was close to the one taken two years ago by Hurricane Rita. Damages, however, were expected to be considerably less because Humberto was relatively small and made landfall in a sparsely populated area.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared three counties -- Orange, Jefferson and Galveston -- disaster areas, making them eligible for financial assistance. State military forces were brought in to help provide water, ice and equipment to aid in the cleanup.

On the Bolivar Peninsula, opposite and east of Galveston, officials estimated debris, most from High Island, amounted to about 1,500 cubic yards of structural material and 3,000 cubic yards of tree limbs and brush. That comes out to about 1 1/2 football fields three feet deep.

Damage from the storm was likely to cost less than $500 million, Risk Management Solutions, a California-based firm that quantifies catastrophe risks for insurance companies, said. The dollar figure included physical damages to homes and businesses, and business losses due to interruptions because of power outages and damages.

The one death attributed to the storm occurred early Thursday in Bridge City, when 80-year-old John Simon was killed as his backyard patio collapsed on him in the high winds, Maj. Joey Hargrave of the Bridge City police said.

In Port Arthur, two of three major crude oil and liquid hydrocarbons plants idled because of power problems had power restored. Refineries for Valero Energy Corp. and Total Petrochemicals USA Inc. were in the process of being restarted, company spokesmen said. Shell Oil Co. said its Motiva Port Arthur Refinery had some power restored but remained down as assessments continued.

Humberto developed into a hurricane with 85 mph winds in just 18 hours. Only three other storms have pulled off a similar feat, growing from depression to hurricane in 18 hours -- Blanche in 1969, Harvey in 1981 and Alberto in 1982 -- but none of them were about to make landfall.

Far off in the open ocean, Tropical Storm Ingrid, which Thursday became the ninth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, was about 655 miles east of the Lesser Antilles and moving toward the west-northwest near 9 mph. The National Hurricane Center was expecting it to continue at that pace for the next 24 hours and then turn slightly to the northwest and possibly decrease in strength. Maximum sustained winds were near 40 mph with higher gusts.

------

On the Net:

National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov 

    Cleanup Begins After Hurricane Humberto, NYT, 15.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Hurricane-Humberto.html

Alex, a Parrot Who Had a Way With Words, Dies

September 10, 2007
The New York Times
By BENEDICT CAREY

He knew his colors and shapes, he learned more than 100 English words, and with his own brand of one-liners he established himself in TV shows, scientific reports, and news articles as perhaps the world’s most famous talking bird.

But last week Alex, an African Grey parrot, died, apparently of natural causes, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who studied and worked with the parrot for most of its life and published reports of his progress in scientific journals. The parrot was 31.

Scientists have long debated whether any other species can develop the ability to learn human language. Alex’s language facility was, in some ways, more surprising than the feats of primates that have been taught American Sign Language, like Koko the gorilla, trained by Penny Patterson at the Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org in Woodside, Calif., or Washoe the chimpanzee, studied by R. Allen and Beatrice Gardner at the University of Nevada in the 1960s and 1970s. When, in 1977, Dr. Pepperberg, then a doctoral student in chemistry at Harvard, bought Alex from a pet store, scientists had little expectation that any bird could learn to communicate with humans. Most of the research had been done in pigeons, and was not promising.

But by using novel methods of teaching, Dr. Pepperberg prompted Alex to learn about 150 words, which he could put into categories, and to recognize small numbers, as well as colors and shapes. “The work revolutionized the way we think of bird brains,” said Diana Reiss, a psychologist at Hunter College who works with dolphins and elephants. “That used to be a pejorative, but now we look at those brains — at least Alex’s — with some awe.”

Other scientists, while praising the research, cautioned against characterizing Alex’s abilities as human. The parrot learned to communicate in basic expressions — but it did not show the sort of logic and ability to generalize that children acquire at an early age, they said. “There’s no evidence of recursive logic, and without that you can’t work with digital numbers or more complex human grammar,” said David Premack, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Pepperberg used an innovative approach to teach Alex. African Greys are social birds, and pick up some group dynamics very quickly. In experiments, Dr. Pepperberg would employ one trainer to, in effect, compete with Alex for a small reward, like a grape. Alex learned to ask for the grape by observing what the trainer was doing to get it; the researchers then worked with the bird to help shape the pronunciation of the words.

Alex showed surprising facility. For example, when shown a blue paper triangle, he could tell an experimenter what color the paper was, what shape it was, and — after touching it — what it was made of. He demonstrated off some of his skills on nature shows, including programs on the BBC and PBS. He famously shared scenes with the actor Alan Alda on the PBS series, “Look Who’s Talking.”

Like parrots can, he also picked up one-liners from hanging around the lab, like “calm down,” and “good morning.” He could express frustration, or apparent boredom, and his cognitive and language skills appeared to be about as competent as those in trained primates. His accomplishments have also inspired further work with African Grey parrots; two others, named Griffin and Arthur, are a part of Dr. Pepperberg’s continuing research program.

Even up through last week, Alex was working with Dr. Pepperberg on compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, Alex looked at her and said: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”

He was found dead in his cage the next morning, and was determined to have died late Thursday night.

    Alex, a Parrot Who Had a Way With Words, Dies, NYT, 10.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/science/10cnd-parrot.html?hp

Virus May Be Cause of Honeybees' Deaths

September 7, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:06 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Scientific sleuths have a new suspect for a mysterious affliction that has killed off honeybees by the billions: a virus previously unknown in the United States.

The scientists report using a novel genetic technique and old-fashioned statistics to identify Israeli acute paralysis virus as the latest potential culprit in the widespread deaths of worker bees, a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

Next up are attempts to infect honeybees with the virus to see if it indeed is a killer.

''At least we have a lead now we can begin to follow. We can use it as a marker and we can use it to investigate whether it does in fact cause disease,'' said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist and co-author of the study. Details appear this week in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

Experts stressed that parasitic mites, pesticides and poor nutrition all remain suspects, as does the stress of travel. Beekeepers shuffle bees around the nation throughout the year so the bees can pollinate crops as they come into bloom, contributing about $15 billion a year to U.S. agriculture.

The newfound virus may prove to have added nothing more than insult to the injuries bees already suffer, said several experts unconnected to the study.

''This may be a piece or a couple of pieces of the puzzle, but I certainly don't think it is the whole thing,'' said Jerry Hayes, chief of the apiary section of Florida's Agriculture Department.

Still, surveys of honey bees from decimated colonies turned up traces of the virus nearly every time. Bees untouched by the phenomenon were virtually free of it. That means finding the virus should be a red flag that a hive is at risk and merits a quarantine, scientists said.

''The authors themselves recognize it's not a slam dunk, it's correlative. But it's certainly more than a smoking gun -- more like a smoking arsenal. It's very compelling,'' said May Berenbaum, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entomologist who headed a recent examination of the decline in honeybee and other pollinator populations across North America.

For Berenbaum and others, colony collapse disorder is only the latest devastating problem to beset bees.

''Even if we were to solve this CCD thing tomorrow -- a magic pill came out and your bees were cured forever -- we would still be in a crisis situation because we have these other problems,'' said Nicholas Calderone, an entomologist at Cornell University. His lab's roughly 200 hives have so far escaped the disorder.

Colony collapse disorder has struck between 50 percent and 90 percent of commercial honeybee hives in the U.S. That has raised fears about the effect on the more than 90 crops that rely on bees to pollinate them.

Scientists previously have found that blasting emptied hives with radiation apparently kills whatever infectious agent that causes the disorder. That has focused their attention on viruses, bacteria and the like, to the exclusion of other noninfectious phenomena, such as cell phone interference, that also are proposed as culprits.

The earliest reports of colony collapse disorder date to 2004, the same year the virus was first described by Israeli virologist Ilan Sela. That also was the year U.S. beekeepers began importing bees from Australia -- a practice that had been banned by the Honeybee Act of 1922.

Now, Australia is being eyed as a potential source of the virus. That could turn out to be an ironic twist because the Australian imports were meant to bolster U.S. bee populations devastated by another scourge, the varroa mite.

Officials are discussing reinstating the ban, said the Agriculture Department's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis.

In the new study, a team of nearly two dozen scientists used the genetic sequencing equivalent of a dragnet to round up suspects. The technique, called pyrosequencing, generates a list of the full repertoire of genes in bees they examined from U.S. hives and directly imported from Australia.

By separating out the bee genes and then comparing the leftover genetic sequences with others detailed in public databases, the scientists could pick out every fungus, bacterium, parasite and virus harbored by the bees.

The scientists then looked for each pathogen in bees collected from normal hives and others affected by colony collapse disorder. That statistical comparison showed Israeli acute paralysis virus was strongly associated with the disorder.

Sela, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said he will collaborate with U.S. scientists on studying how and why the bee virus may be fatal. Preliminary research shows some bees can integrate genetic information from the virus into their own genomes, apparently giving them resistance, Sela said in a telephone interview. Sela added that about 30 percent of the bees he has examined had done so.

Those naturally ''transgenic'' honeybees theoretically could be propagated to create stocks of virus-resistant insects, Lipkin said.

    Virus May Be Cause of Honeybees' Deaths, NYT, 7.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Honeybee-Virus.html

California Heat Wave Ends With a Death Toll Near 25

September 7, 2007
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 6 — A week of excessively high temperatures has ended in Southern California after causing more than 20 deaths and sporadic power failures.

State officials confirmed on Thursday that five people had died statewide from heat-related causes. Coroners’ reports placed the death toll closer to 25.

Last year, the state experienced one of its deadliest heat waves, with at least 140 deaths, the highest since 1955.

In the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles, temperatures hit 112 on Sept. 1 and 2, far above the normal high of 94, the National Weather Service said. In the Simi Valley, northwest of here, residents endured 111 degrees.

In Los Angeles County, 18 fatalities were suspected to be heat related, including a 26-year-old who was found dead in a canyon after becoming separated from friends while riding a dirt bike.

In Imperial County, near the Mexican border, the authorities investigated at least 10 deaths.

Although many of the deaths occurred among the elderly, who tend to be the most vulnerable in a heat wave, some victims here were in their 40s and 50s, the authorities said.

“People have a tendency to take the heat lightly,” Capt. Ed Winter of the Los Angeles coroner’s office said. “They want to go about their own business, and next thing you know, the temperature goes up.”

A surge in power use caused blackouts across the southwestern region of the state, enraging residents and leaving many to sleep alfresco.

By the afternoon, as temperatures fell, 1,000 Southern California Edison customers remained without power, the utility said. The company, which was unable to tell customers when power would be restored, has 4.8 million accounts.

The death toll was lower than last summer, some officials suggested, because the high temperatures lasted just one week compared with two weeks in 2006, along with a new state emergency plan.

Under the plan, state officials, responding to National Weather Service warnings, immediately opened cooling centers, began communicating daily with health care and emergency agencies and set up call centers to give out information on dealing with the heat.

    California Heat Wave Ends With a Death Toll Near 25, NYT, 7.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/us/07heat.html

Calif. Heat Wave Blamed for 14 Deaths

September 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:26 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Scorching heat that has gripped Southern California for more than a week is responsible for at least 14 deaths, authorities said Tuesday.

Temperatures were down slightly Tuesday as the heat wave entered its eighth day, with a high of 101 degrees reported in Los Angeles.

Authorities reported finding bodies in vehicles and apartments. Twelve of the deaths occurred in Los Angeles County and two in San Bernardino County, authorities said. With the death toll climbing, officials urged caution.

''If you have elderly relatives or neighbors, do everything you can to check in on them as often as possible, make sure that they're OK during this heat wave,'' Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said.

In Los Angeles, an elderly couple were found dead in their San Fernando Valley apartment Monday, authorities said. Temperatures of 106 degrees were reported in the area in recent days.

Apartment manager Sheila Friedman said that paramedics told her it was 110 degrees inside the third-floor unit, and that she believed the couple kept their air conditioner off to cut costs.

Meanwhile, San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies found a man's body on the Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms on Sunday. His dehydrated and sunburned friend reported the man, identified as of Michael Cuhna of Hesperia, as missing a day earlier, the Sheriff's Department said.

The friend told police the two were separated while illegally gathering scrap metal from the base. A preliminary coroner's report found Cuhna died of exposure and dehydration.

Elsewhere in San Bernardino County, a 47-year-old woman whose vehicle got stuck in the sand in a desert area was found dead Saturday, according to county deputy coroner Chalone Rhea.

Throughout Southern California, utility crews struggled to restore electricity as increased air conditioner use strained power grids.

About 29,000 homes were without power in 15 counties, including Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, said Paul Klein, spokesman for Southern California Edison.

The outages were caused by equipment failures rather than power shortages, Klein added, meaning rolling blackouts were not expected.

Another 18,000 homes in the Los Angeles area were dark Tuesday night, said MaryAnne Pierson, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Water and Power.

Near-record demand was causing transformers to pop and other electrical equipment to fail. People returning from vacations and businesses starting up after Labor Day put additional pressure on the grid, officials said.

    Calif. Heat Wave Blamed for 14 Deaths, NYT, 5.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Heat-Wave.html

Has a Mythical Beast Turned Up in Texas?

September 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:27 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CUERO, Texas (AP) -- Phylis Canion lived in Africa for four years. She's been a hunter all her life and has the mounted heads of a zebra and other exotic animals in her house to prove it.

But the roadkill she found last month outside her ranch was a new one even for her, worth putting in a freezer hidden from curious onlookers: Canion believes she may have the head of the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra.

''It is one ugly creature,'' Canion said, holding the head of the mammal, which has big ears, large fanged teeth and grayish-blue, mostly hairless skin.

Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 80 miles southeast of San Antonio. Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she can get to get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

She suspects, as have many rural denizens over the years, that a chupacabra may have killed as many as 26 of her chickens in the past couple of years.

''I've seen a lot of nasty stuff. I've never seen anything like this,'' she said.

What tipped Canion to the possibility that this was no ugly coyote, but perhaps the vampire-like beast, is that the chickens weren't eaten or carried off -- all the blood was drained from them, she said.

Chupacabra means ''goat sucker'' in Spanish, and it is said to have originated in Latin America, specifically Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Canion thinks recent heavy rains ran them right out of their dens.

''I think it could have wolf in it,'' Canion said. ''It has to be a cross between two or three different things.''

She said the finding has captured the imagination of locals, just like purported sightings of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster have elsewhere.

But what folks are calling a chupacabra is probably just a strange breed of dog, said veterinarian Travis Schaar of the Main Street Animal Hospital in nearby Victoria.

''I'm not going to tell you that's not a chupacabra. I just think in my opinion a chupacabra is a dog,'' said Schaar, who has seen Canion's find.

The ''chupacabras'' could have all been part of a mutated litter of dogs, or they may be a new kind of mutt, he said.

As for the bloodsucking, Schaar said that this particular canine may simply have a preference for blood, letting its prey bleed out and licking it up.

Chupacabra or not, the discovery has spawned a local and international craze. Canion has started selling T-shirts that read: ''2007, The Summer of the Chupacabra, Cuero, Texas,'' accompanied by a caricature of the creature. The $5 shirts have gone all over the world, including Japan, Australia and Brunei. Schaar also said he has one.

''If everyone has a fun time with it, we'll keep doing it,'' she said. ''It's good for Cuero.''

    Has a Mythical Beast Turned Up in Texas?, NYT, 1.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mythical-Chupacabra.html

Calif. Water Limits Imposed to Save Fish

September 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:10 a.m. ET
The New York Times

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) -- A federal judge on Friday imposed limits on water flows caused by huge pumps sending water from the San Joaquin-Sacramento River delta to users around the state, saying the pumps were drawing in and destroying a threatened fish.

U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger said pressure from the pumps helped reverse the natural direction of water within the estuary, damaging habitat and killing delta smelt, a fish experts say might be on the brink of extinction.

''The evidence is uncontradicted that these project operations move the fish,'' Wanger said after hearing objections from defendants, who had argued that other factors led to the fish's decline. ''It happens, and the law says something has to be done about it.''

Under the ruling, limits would be put in place from the end of December, when the fish are about to spawn, until June, when young fish can move into areas with better habitat and more food.

Wanger also prescribed other measures, such as increased monitoring of the fish's presence in its adult and juvenile stages at several points in the delta.

State water managers said after Friday's ruling that they were still reviewing it to determine what it would mean for California's water supply.

Pumps operated by the Central Valley Project -- operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation -- send water to farmers in the agricultural valley south of the delta. The State Water Project -- operated by the California Department of Water Resources -- delivers the water to urban and rural water users as far south as Los Angeles.

The water serves more than 25 million Californians and thousands of acres of crops.

In a year with an average amount of precipitation, about 6 million acre feet of water is pumped from the delta, and up to one-third of that could be lost under Wanger's order, said Jerry Johns, DWR's deputy director. An acre foot is enough to put one acre under one foot of water.

Tim Quinn, who heads the Association of California Water Agencies, said the ruling would have a serious impact in a state already coming off a dry winter and spring. Some districts have already ordered conservation measures and tapped into their water reserves, he said.

''A sober assessment of this says it's a very large deal,'' Quinn said. ''We are not only losing supply here; you are greatly compromising the tools we have developed to deal with water shortages.''

The Natural Resources Defense Council and four other environmental groups had asked Wanger to demand the state Department of Water Resources and the Bureau of Reclamation to immediately change the pumping rate to reduce harm to the smelt until a new set of pumping guidelines is expected next year.

Both sides agree the smelt population has declined precipitously. The fish are protected under the California Endangered Species Act, and their well-being is considered a measure of the environmental health of the fragile delta ecosystem.

The decision was complex, and both sides said they needed time to fully understand its impacts. But environmentalists largely welcomed it as an improvement over current conditions.

''It's better than what there was before,'' said Trent Orr, an attorney with the environmental group Earthjustice, which was party to the suit.

But they wanted more, said Orr, including measures that would have protected habitat from encroaching salt from the San Francisco Bay in the fall.

    Calif. Water Limits Imposed to Save Fish, NYT, 1.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Troubled-Delta.html

Heat Wave Increases Calif. Fire Threat

September 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:08 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Utilities urged customers to ease up on electricity use and officials opened cool shelters as California continued to swelter under a heat wave Friday. Meanwhile, cloudbursts laced with lightning unleashed downpours in the mountains and deserts, leading to flash flood watches and warnings. Firefighters also watched for lightning-sparked wildfires.

The steamy conditions were expected to continue into midweek.

''When I opened the door, the heat almost knocked me down,'' Joan Porter told KCAL-TV as she sat in an air-conditioned senior citizens' center in Altadena, a foothill community northeast of Los Angeles that topped 100 degrees.

A Los Angeles utility reported power outages to nearly 4,800 customers with high demand. Meanwhile, a regional utility said it supplied a record amount of electricity to some 13 million people in Southern California and attributed the power demand to increased use of air conditioners.

The hot weather began Wednesday and may have played a role in the death of an 81-year-old hiker who became exhausted and ran out of water in inland Riverside County.

The heat also may have played a role in the crash of two small planes taking off hours apart Thursday at an airfield east of Sacramento, officials said. Two people died and two critically injured in one crash, and two were injured in the other crash.

The thinner warm air may have provided less lift for the planes as they took off, suggested Bob Petersen, air squadron commander for the El Dorado County Sheriff's Department.

Meanwhile, the state entered the peak two months of its fire season, when historically the most devastating blazes have occurred, said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Aircraft patrolled the Sierra and other wilderness areas to spot remote wildfires. Visitors swarming into the backcountry over the Labor Day weekend increased the risk of fires from improper or illegal campfires, Berlant said.

Officials also announced charges against two men and a cattle ranch suspected of recklessly starting a fire that has burned for nearly two months in central California.

The heat was expected to strain the state's electricity generating capacity, although no shortages were predicted. The California Independent System Operator, which oversees the state's power grid, urged customers to continue conserving electricity.

Southern California Edison said its energy load peaked at an all-time high of 23,303 megawatts Friday afternoon, surpassing the previous record of 22,889 megawatts set on July 25, 2006.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said crews were working to restore power to 4,798 customers, said utility spokeswoman Kim Hughes.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation's largest public utility, said Friday that the recent heat wave in its seven-state region helped create record electricity demand.

The TVA set 13 peak power demand records -- more than one every three days -- during the month of August, TVA spokesman Gil Francis said Friday.

The federal utility set an all-time record of 33,499 megawatts on Aug. 16 when the average temperature in the valley hit 103.6 degrees -- the highest average for TVA's region in 55 years.

A thousand megawatts powers about 550,000 homes in the utility's coverage area, which includes most of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia.

Associated Press writer Duncan Mansfield in Knoxville, Tenn., contributed to this report.

    Heat Wave Increases Calif. Fire Threat, NYT, 1.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Heat-Wave.html

NOAA Blames Hot Year on Greenhouse Gases

August 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:36 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- ''We have met the enemy, and he is us,'' the comic-strip character Pogo said decades ago. A new analysis of last year's near-record temperatures in the United States suggests he was right.

Warming caused by human activity was the biggest factor in the high temperatures recorded in 2006, according to a report by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The analysis, released Tuesday, is being published in the September issue of Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union.

In January, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center reported that 2006 was the warmest year on record over the 48 contiguous states with an average temperature 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal and 0.07 degree warmer than 1998, the previous warmest year on record.

In May, however, NOAA revised the 2006 ranking to the second warmest year after updated statistics showed the year was actually .08 F cooler than 1998.

At the time the agency said it was not clear how much of the warming was a result of greenhouse-gas induced climate change and how much resulted from the El Nino warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that was under way.

''We wanted to find out whether it was pure coincidence that the two warmest years on record both coincided with El Nino events,'' Martin Hoerling of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., said in a statement.

His study looked at the effects of El Nino in the past as well as the effects of the release of gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by human industrial activities.

The analysis of past El Nino events in the 20th century found that the result was a slightly colder than normal annual average temperature over the 48 contiguous states.

To double check that, the researchers conducted two sets of 50-year computer simulations of U.S. climate, with and without the influence of El Nino. They again found a slight cooling across the nation when El Nino was present.

Then they looked at the effect of the increased greenhouse gases -- which are given that name because they can help trap heat from the sun somewhat like a greenhouse traps heat.

They ran 42 different tests using complex computer models to simulate changes in the atmosphere under various conditions and concluded that the ''2006 warmth was primarily due to human influences.''

While Hoerling's study focused on the United States, NOAA also tracks world climate. Worldwide, 2005 was the warmest year on record, topping 1998, according to the agency.

The research was supported by NOAA's office of Global Programs.

------

In the Net:

NOAA: http://www.noaa.gov

AGU: http://www.agu.org

    NOAA Blames Hot Year on Greenhouse Gases, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Greenhouse-Warming.html

Wildflowers Find Favor With Highway Gardeners

August 29, 2007
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

NEWARK, Del. — For Americans on the move, a rest stop on the East Coast’s main thoroughfare, Interstate 95, seems an unlikely setting for a revolution. But to a growing number of horticulturalists, the vegetation stretching beyond the gas pumps toward the highway median might as well be marching behind a fife and drum.

Dark green switchgrass stands four feet tall. Asters, amonsia with tiny blue flowers, and flowering white thoroughwort nestle there, in place of a simple lawn. Down the road, the cloverleaf for I-95 and Route 896 is filled with golden Indiangrass; its gossamer flowers riffle as trucks whiz by.

This is the meadow vista that stretched before the eye back when Delaware was a colony, and earlier. Now these regional plantings are increasingly favored by the country’s highway gardeners, who see themselves as heirs of an environmental Enlightenment. Their credo is, Get the mowers out of the 12 million acres of roadsides and median strips around the United States, and let the wildflowers and grasses grow.

Roadsides, they say, are the national front porch. Why, then, should they look like an English formal garden or a Scottish golf course? Why shouldn’t they mimic the land as it was before highways?

In part as a frugal move — not mowing can save states tens of thousands of dollars each year — at least a dozen states including Colorado, Delaware, Nebraska, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Washington, have increased their inventory of native plantings.

In the words of a University of Delaware horticulturist, Susan S. Barton, an adviser to the state’s Department of Transportation, “We’re doing it so when you’re driving around Delaware you know you’re in Delaware, not in the tropics.”

But the movement, which began before World War II in the Midwest, well before Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification project in the 1960s, has more heart than muscle. Roadsides fulfill a variety of engineering functions. They must provide clear lines of sight and easy drainage. As for aesthetics, a Delaware poll showed that the public prizes neatness more than nativeness.

And so the pushers of native plants must fight endless battles with their economic and aesthetic opponents: turf-grass vendors, lawn mower jockeys who make a living cutting 20-foot median swaths in the summer sun, or garden clubs that favor manicured beds of tulips, poppies and lilies over meadow grasses that can look downright blowsy.

Jeanette Carey, who with her husband, George, runs a farm in southern Delaware, said the native grasses “just look awful.”

Her husband, a state representative, said many neighbors complained after the median grasses grew tall. “There was nothing but weeds in the middle of the road,” Ms. Carey said. “It should look like a lawn, mowed.”

Thomas Yoakum, an environmental manager with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, wants to give native grasses a chance. But some experiments, like the switchgrass planted near Bedford, Pa., on Route 30, left the impression of a botched hair transplant.

Jon Johnson, a research support associate with the Roadside Vegetation Management Project of Pennsylvania State University, worries that because switchgrass is highly flammable during droughts a tossed cigarette butt could force a road to be closed.

Other states have joined the native plant revolution, at least in theory. More than 5,000 species of wildflowers and grasses flourish along Texas roadsides. Nebraska has limited mowing on its rights of way, a practice that provided some wildlife habitat; in years of drought, native grasses can be harvested to provide hay for the cattle industry.

As Jane Lareau of the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League put it, "I would love people to see things that are native, not a stupid poppy or canna lily."

But some states take more traditional tacks. North Carolina, for instance, plants acres of oxeye daisies every year, though they are considered a noxious weed in other states. Tennessee, a western neighbor, has oxeye daisies on its list of invasive plants and wants to be rid of them.

“Oxeye daisies are the bane of my existence,” said Bonnie L. Harper-Lore, a restoration ecologist for the Federal Highway Administration who is based in Minnesota.

Derek C. Smith, a roadside environmental engineer in North Carolina, happily pleads guilty to daisy-pushing. His state’s highway vegetation program, paid for in part by fees from vanity license plates, is a source of pride.

While native plants make up about one-third of the state’s inventory of roadside plants, compared with as little as 10 percent in the 1980s, Mr. Smith said, “our citizens like a lot of the nonnative plants, bright red poppies and the like.”

If the advocates of native plant gain more traction, they can thank champions like Calvin Ernst, 66, a successful seed seller from Meadville, Pa. His shyness belies a canny eye for what will grow and what will sell, and a passion for taking the landscapes of his region near Lake Erie back to their roots, literally.

Years ago, Mr. Ernst was a proponent of a creeping, bushy plant with small leaves called crownvetch, which is now a staple of Pennsylvania highways, particularly in the Alleghenies. Highway engineers prize its ability to grow fast and to thrive in poor soils and on steep hillsides. When the Interstate System was being built in the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Ernst found himself selling crownvetch around the country, and making a tidy profit doing so.

That was then. Now crownvetch is a villain of native-plant proponents, seen as an invasive bully whose presence discourages the growth of native flowers. (Nonnative, or exotic plants, often have a biological edge over natives — perhaps they have fewer natural enemies.)

Ernst Conservation Seeds, where Mr. Ernst is the general partner, still sells crownvetch seeds to the state, but about three-quarters of its wares are now seeds for native plants, collected by hand from Appalachian forests or Carolina marshlands. On the Delaware stretch of Route I-95, the seeds have blossomed into broom sedge, switchgrass and little bluestem grass.

Ms. Barton, the horticulturist in Delaware, said that of the 13,414 acres that the Department of Transportation has planted, about 3 percent, or 425 acres, have been with native plants.

Natives need to be left alone to grow to their full height. On the nonnative areas, mowing eight times annually costs $162.72 an acre using state workers, or $800 an acre using contractors. On the native plots, mowing once yearly costs $20.34 an acre with state personnel or $100 an acre with contractors, Ms. Barton said.

Joseph Wright, who runs the mowing program in southern Delaware, said mowers had trouble digesting tall stands of native plants and broke down.

Where Mr. Wright does not mow, local farmers, like Fred Bennett, 82, sometimes move in. “In front of my house I mow it every week,” Mr. Bennett said. “I like long hair on a woman but not on a man and not growing around my house.”

    Wildflowers Find Favor With Highway Gardeners, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/us/29highway.html?hp

Editorial

Ravaging Appalachia

August 27, 2007
The New York Times

Give the Bush administration credit for persistence. It just won’t let a bad idea die. On Friday, the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining proposed new regulations that it hopes will permanently legalize mountaintop mining — a cheap, ruthlessly efficient, environmentally destructive means of mining coal from the mountains of Appalachia.

By our count, this is the third attempt in the last six years to enshrine the practice by insulating it from legal challenge. But since the net result is likely to be more confusion and more courtroom wrestling, the situation cries out for Congressional intervention to define once and for all what mining companies can and cannot do.

Mountaintop mining is basically high-altitude strip mining. Enormous machines scrape away the ridges to get at the coal seams below. The residual rock and dirt are then dumped or carted down the mountainside into nearby valleys and streams. By one estimate, this serial decapitation of Appalachia’s coal-rich hills has already buried 1,200 miles of streams while damaging hundreds of square miles of forests.

No recent administration, Democratic or Republican, has made a serious effort to end the dumping, largely in deference to the financial influence of the coal industry and the political influence of Robert Byrd, West Virginia’s senior senator. But the Bush people have been particularly resourceful in perpetuating the practice.

In 2002, for instance, the Environmental Protection Agency rewrote clean water regulations in a way that magically added mine waste to the list of materials that can be used to fill in streams for development and other purposes. In 2004, confronted with yet another obstacle — the so-called stream buffer zone rule prohibiting any mining activity within 100 feet of a stream — the administration decided that the rule only required companies to respect the buffer zone “to the extent practicable,” in effect green-lighting further dumping. The new rule not only reaffirms the 2004 rule but also seems specifically to authorize the disposal of “excess spoil fills,” a k a mine waste, in hollows and streams.

Studies have identified more benign, though admittedly more costly, ways to dispose of the waste, while other studies have warned that unless alternatives are found, an area larger than the state of Delaware will be laid waste by dynamite and bulldozer by the end of this decade, poisoning water supplies and leading to continuous flooding.

With that in mind, two members of Congress — Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey and Christopher Shays of Connecticut — introduced a bill last spring that would reaffirm Clean Water Act protections prohibiting mining companies and other industries from dumping solid industrial wastes into the nation’s waters. The bill has already picked up 60 sponsors in its brief life, and the administration’s latest sleight of hand should add more converts to the cause.

    Ravaging Appalachia, NYT, 27.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/opinion/27mon1.html

Biologists Bring Puffins Back to Maine

August 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:26 p.m. ET
The New York Times

EASTERN EGG ROCK, Maine (AP) -- It doesn't seem to matter to one puffin waddling over to join another of the birds that his chosen companion is a one-legged, wooden decoy. Puffins love company.

The deception is one of the techniques that Stephen Kress has used to lure the colorful birds back to this rocky island.

''I used an old hunter's trick, something that hadn't been done with seabirds before,'' Kress, director of the National Audubon's Seabird Restoration Program, whispers as he watches from a blind about 20 yards away.

Puffins, which resemble half-pint penguins except that they can fly, were heavily hunted along the Maine coast for their meat and feathers, and by 1901 only one pair remained, researchers said.

They remained plentiful elsewhere, however, and Kress set out three decades ago to bring them back to Maine's islands, on the southern end of their range around the North Atlantic.

In 1973, with backing from the National Audubon Society and help from the Canadian Wildlife Service, Kress began transplanting 2-week-old puffin chicks from Great Island off Newfoundland, 1,000 miles to the northeast.

These days there are 90 nesting pairs on Eastern Egg, among more than 700 nesting pairs on four Maine islands, Kress said.

Eastern Egg Rock, a treeless, seven-acre island, is a breeding ground for 6,000 surface-nesting birds: puffins, guillemots, laughing gulls, eider ducks, Leach's storm petrels, and three species of terns.

Each summer, biologists move onto the island to oversee the project and to protect the seabirds. Two supervisors spend the whole summer on the rocky outpost, joined by rotating shifts of interns and volunteers.

A human presence is necessary to scare away predators such as great black-backed gulls and herring gulls. The large gulls -- black backs have a 5 1/2-foot wingspan -- rob nests and eat chicks. Earlier this summer, when five days of fog kept the volunteers away from Seal Island, another puffin nesting spot, the gulls destroyed eggs laid by 2,000 pairs of terns, Kress said.

The biologists are repaid for their protection by regular bird assaults.

Dive-bombing terns, screaming ''kik-kik-kik,'' swoop down to peck at their guardians' heads.

Even worse are laughing gulls that take to the air by the hundreds. ''Our hats, backpacks, shoes, shirts are pretty well covered in poop,'' said Jeff Kimmons, a co-supervisor.

The birds also keep up a 24-hour din of screeches and flapping wings, making it hard for newcomers to sleep in tents sheltered underneath poop-stained tarps.

Puffins are often confused with penguins. They have similar colors, and both swim under water using their wings as fins, but they are not related and live at opposite polar ends of the world. Each puffin pair raises one chick in a burrow under big boulders, taking turns feeding their offspring fish.

The breeding grounds are off limits to the public but several boat tours take nature lovers on cruises that circle the islands.

Last year, Audubon opened a Project Puffin visitor center in Rockland, drawing 10,000 people. Besides boat tours, Project Puffin operates Internet cams that show puffins inside and out of their burrows until the chicks leave by Labor Day.

The project is open ended. If the volunteers left, the puffins would be wiped out again by the gulls.

''Sometimes people say, 'How long are you going to have to do this?''' Kress said. ''... In this project, we don't see an end.''

------

On the Net:

Puffin Project: http://www.projectpuffin.org/

    Biologists Bring Puffins Back to Maine, NYT, 26.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Saving-Puffins.html

Thousands Ordered to Flee Idaho Wildfire

August 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:50 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BOISE, Idaho (AP) -- A mandatory evacuation was ordered Saturday for residents of more than 1,000 homes south of Ketchum, where a massive wildfire raged and high winds grounded firefighting air tankers.

After three days of relative calm, the 39-square-mile fire was 38 percent contained, but embers blew ahead of the blaze and increased the threat of spot fires, fire spokesman Bob Beanblossom said.

''At this point in the mandatory evacuation, we're giving people the opportunity to get out during the daylight and to keep the highways clear for emergency response vehicles,'' said Kim Rogers, public information officer with the city of Ketchum.

Another 100 homes remained under a mandatory evacuation order from last weekend, including some worth millions of dollars in the resort area of central Idaho. A shelter was set up at a former high school in the town of Hailey, said Dick Rush, CEO of the American Red Cross for Idaho.

No structures had been reported lost to the lightning-sparked blaze, although winds were gusting to 25 mph, Beanblossom said.

In California, a seven-week-old wildfire in the Santa Barbara County wilderness showed bursts of life Saturday despite firefighters' significant progress.

The blaze was 83 percent contained Saturday evening after burning 239,468 acres, or about 374 square miles, of steep backcountry.

A recommended evacuation was in effect for about nine square miles west of Highway 33, according to an update by fire officials issued Saturday.

The fire was about 15 miles away from the community of Ojai and did not threaten any other large communities, officials said. Despite its size, the fire has only destroyed one structure, an outbuilding.

    Thousands Ordered to Flee Idaho Wildfire, NYT, 26.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Wildfires.html

Ohio Storms Cut Power to 100,000-Plus

August 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:19 a.m. ET
The New York Times

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Hundreds of thousands of people were without power after their homes were battered by fierce winds and flooding rainstorms that slammed the rain-soaked Midwest.

Tornado warnings were issued Saturday afternoon for parts of central and southeast Ohio. Downed trees and power lines were reported in the southern part of the state, said National Weather Service meteorologist Andy Hatzos.

Flooding this week spread across an 80-mile swath through the northwest and north central parts of the state. Gov. Ted Strickland toured some of the damaged areas Saturday.

''What I've tried to do and what we've all tried to do is let these folks know ... that we are working to get assistance to them as rapidly as possible,'' Strickland said.

Powerful storms rolling through the Upper Midwest during most of the past week caused disastrous floods from southeastern Minnesota to Ohio that were blamed for at least 18 deaths.

In southern Michigan, the skies were clearing but more than 100,000 customers were without power, utilities said. The National Weather Service confirmed multiple tornadoes touched down Friday in a 12-mile area in Livingston, Genesee and Oakland counties.

Damage in Fenton was extensive, Mayor Sue Osborn said Saturday. ''I have seen houses that have trees go right through them,'' she said. Only residents were being allowed into the city, she said.

Matt McClanahan's Cohoctah Township home was among at least 17 destroyed by a twister.

''I've seen devastation and I've helped clean up, but I've never seen it be me,'' he said. ''I bought a bottle of Jim Beam and it's in the house. I could really use a sip of that right now.''

About 73,000 ComEd customers in northern Illinois remained without power Saturday, ComEd spokeswoman Judy Rader said. Power to nearly 600,000 customers had been restored since Thursday's storm, but it could take days to restore power to all customers, officials said.

The storms in Illinois were responsible for at least one death, a man struck by a wind-toppled tree, officials said. In addition, an autopsy was planned on a man found lying in more than 2 feet of water in his basement in suburban Inverness, officials said.

Rain had mostly stopped falling Saturday in northern Illinois as a line of storms moved eastward and southward, and the flood waters that had risen steadily slowed to a creep or began to drop in some areas. Flood warnings remained in effect in 14 counties.

''There's so much flooding continuing from the rain and runoff from two days ago,'' said Mark Ratzer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. ''That's going to take a while to recede.''

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator R. David Paulison surveyed damage Friday in Rushford, Minn., which was especially hard hit by this week's flooding. Mayor Les Ladewig said about half of Rushford's 760 homes were damaged, including 248 that were destroyed and 91 with serious damage.

About 1,500 homes were damaged around Minnesota. Paulison said FEMA recovery centers should be running early next week in the three counties where President Bush declared disasters Thursday.

Paulison also visited Wisconsin, where flooding destroyed 44 homes and damaged more than 1,400, most of them in the southwestern part of the state.

Officials in Wisconsin's Vernon County lifted evacuation orders Saturday evening, allowing 140 residents to return home. They had been displaced after torrential rainfall strained a number of nearby dams.

Associated Press writers Dan Strumpf in Chicago; John Seewer in Ottawa, Ohio; Joshua Freed in Rushford, Minn.; Mike Wilson in Des Moines, Iowa; Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis.; Jim Irwin in Detroit; and Jim Salter in St. Louis contributed to this report.

    Ohio Storms Cut Power to 100,000-Plus, NYT, 26.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Flooding.html

More Flooding Possible in Soaked Midwest

August 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:22 p.m. ET
The New York Times

CHICAGO (AP) -- Barbara Campagna and three colleagues paddled to the Farnsworth House in Plano, built by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1951.

There, they piled furniture into their borrowed rowboat as rising water threatened the building in the aftermath of torrential storms.

''We've been calling it 'Lake Farnsworth' all day because (the house) is floating on the water,'' Campagna, the architecture director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said late Friday of the glass-walled house, which rests on four-foot stilts.

''Every piece is worth tens of thousands of dollars. They're all replaceable, but very expensive,'' she said.

About 120,000 ComEd customers in northern Illinois remained without power Saturday, said ComEd spokesman Joe Trost. Power to more than half a million customers had been restored since Thursday's storm, but it could take days to restore power to all customers, officials said.

The storms in Illinois were responsible for at least one death, a man struck by a wind-toppled tree, officials said. In addition, an autopsy was planned on a man found lying in more than 2 feet of water in his basement in suburban Inverness, officials said.

Powerful storms rolling through the Upper Midwest over most of the past week caused disastrous floods from southeastern Minnesota to Ohio that were blamed for at least 17 other deaths.

Rain had most stopped falling Saturday in northern Illinois as a line of storms moved eastward and southward, but flooding was still a danger for hundreds of thousands of people who live near swollen creeks and rivers.

''There's still a chance of rainfall, but we're not expecting as much and the potential for flash flooding is going away,'' said Casey Sullivan, meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

The flood alert level for northern Lake County was raised to red, the highest, as the Fox River approached 50-year levels, with flooding possible this weekend when water from rain-drenched Wisconsin arrives downstream.

In Dyer, Ind., southeast of Chicago, authorities evacuated St. Margaret Mercy Hospital as water seeped into the building from a nearby creek. About 70 patients were being moved out, spokeswoman Maria Ramos said.

Police and firefighters went door to door in Dyer telling people to leave.

In southern Michigan, more than 100,000 customers were without power Saturday, utilities said. Powerful storms a day earlier spawned at least one tornado that destroyed several homes and barns in Fenton, and minor injuries were reported. Most of the city's 10,000 residents lost power Friday.

Damage in Fenton was extensive, Mayor Sue Osborn said Saturday. ''I have seen houses that have trees go right through them,'' she said. Only residents were being allowed into the city, she said.

As many as three to five tornadoes may have hit southeastern Michigan, the weather service said. The region also had flooded highways and fallen power lines and trees.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator R. David Paulison surveyed damage Friday in Rushford, Minn., especially hard hit by this week's flooding. Mayor Les Ladewig said about half of Rushford's 760 homes were damaged, including 248 that were destroyed and 91 with serious damage.

About 1,500 homes were damaged around Minnesota. Paulison said FEMA recovery centers should be running early next week in the three counties where President Bush declared disasters Thursday.

Paulison also visited Wisconsin, where flooding destroyed 44 homes and damaged more than 1,400, most of them in the southwestern part of the state.

In DeKalb, Ill., 50 miles west of Chicago, the Kishwaukee River reached near-record levels, spilling over its 15-foot levees, flooding residential areas and blocking roads.

About 600 residents of DeKalb and nearby Sycamore were displaced, said DeKalb City Manager Mark Biernacki. Northern Illinois University's flooded DeKalb campus was closed.

Some flooding occurred in the area around Prospect Heights, six miles north of O'Hare.

''The river is so quiet for so many years,'' Mark Bednarowicz, 57, said as he filled sandbags for his home. ''For everybody it's a shock it (flooding) happens. ... Everybody's scared.''

Associated Press writers John Seewer in Ottawa, Ohio; Joshua Freed in Rushford, Minn.; Mike Wilson in Des Moines, Iowa; Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis.; and Jim Salter in St. Louis contributed to this report.

    More Flooding Possible in Soaked Midwest, NYT, 25.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Flooding.html

Atlantic Bird Makes Slow Resurgence

August 3, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:12 p.m. ET
The New York Times

CHARLESTOWN, R.I. (AP) -- The tiny Atlantic piping plover, a federally protected bird, has given beachgoers headaches for decades.

The species breeds on East Coast beaches during warm weather, which means entire stretches of shoreline can be put off limits just as people want to enjoy the coast.

But today, two decades after the plover was declared a threatened species, biologists are crediting the beach closures, twine barriers and other buffers between birds and humans for a 141 percent increase in the Atlantic piping plover population.

''Those birds have been earned the hard way,'' said Anne Hecht, who supervises the recovery effort for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The brown-and-white birds breed in tenuous dents of sand just above the high tide line, where their nests can be flooded by storms, targeted by predators and easily damaged by humans.

Once a fixture on the East Coast, the fist-sized piping plovers lingered as human development pushed them from their beachfront breeding grounds, especially after the seaside building frenzy following World War II.

Manmade threats were just half the problem. Susi von Oettingen, a federal endangered species biologist in Concord, N.H., paused for breath while reciting a long list of plover predators as large as coyotes and small as ants.

Sometimes drawn to the beach by human trash, those predators will find and eat plover nests and chicks. Ants swarm the eggs and eat them.

The birds' numbers dropped to just 722 mating pairs in 1985, prompting federal officials to require that property owners protect the birds. They also began issuing recommendations that interfered with humans' beach life.

At a minimum, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted property owners to put up signs and fences marking a 50-foot barrier between people and plovers. Since dogs chase plovers, they had to be kept on a leash or kept off the beach altogether.

Beach buggy enthusiasts were probably hit the hardest. Their off-road vehicles are banned from many plover beaches during nesting season because one stray tire can smoosh an entire brood.

The bans outraged beachgoers.

''It was awful,'' said von Oettingen, who remembers when the National Park Service closed its Cape Cod beaches to off-road vehicles. ''They had death threats. ... They had parades of vehicles in the streets shouting it was not going to happen.''

The backlash united unlikely groups of beachgoers. While anglers protested the beach buggy restrictions, nudists in Rhode Island sued the federal government for severely curtailing access to their favorite beach.

In the end, a federal judge decided that nude sunbathing was not a constitutionally protected right.

Federal officials have since warned cat shelters not to release neutered felines near plover beaches, and the nests forced the cancellation of a fireworks display in Ogunquit, Maine. Even now, federal agents investigate cases of suspected vandalism against plovers.

Partisans on both sides say tempers have cooled since the battles of the 1980s and 1990s.

George Cairns, president of the Massachusetts Beach Buggy Association, said the era of protest is over. He now describes his organization as a conservation group that wants the piping plovers to recover.

Since the population is growing, Cairns said it is time to rebalance the rules.

Rather than banning buggies, he proposes using a volunteer warden to wave buggies away from plover nests and sand-colored chicks. He's looking for a town willing to give the idea a trial run.

''People are part of the environment, too,'' he said.

Atlantic Bird Makes Slow Resurgence, NYT, 3.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Piping-Plover.html

Lake Superior Changes Mystify Scientists

August 3, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:00 a.m. ET
The New York Times

MARQUETTE, Mich. (AP) -- Deep enough to hold the combined water in all the other Great Lakes and with a surface area as large as South Carolina, Lake Superior's size has lent it an aura of invulnerability. But the mighty Superior is losing water and getting warmer, worrying those who live near its shores, scientists and companies that rely on the lake for business.

The changes to the lake could be signs of climate change, although scientists aren't sure.

Superior's level is at its lowest point in eight decades and will set a record this fall if, as expected, it dips three more inches. Meanwhile, the average water temperature has surged 4.5 degrees since 1979, significantly above the 2.7-degree rise in the region's air temperature during the same period.

That's no small deal for a freshwater sea that was created from glacial melt as the Ice Age ended and remains chilly in all seasons.

A weather buoy on the western side recently recorded an ''amazing'' 75 degrees, ''as warm a surface temperature as we've ever seen in this lake,'' said Jay Austin, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota at Duluth's Large Lakes Observatory.

Water levels also have receded on the other Great Lakes since the late 1990s. But the suddenness and severity of Superior's changes worry many in the region. Shorelines are dozens of yards wider than usual, giving sunbathers wider beaches but also exposing mucky bottomlands and rotting vegetation.

On a recent day, Dan Arsenault, a 32-year-old lifelong resident of Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, watched his two young daughters play in mud on the southeastern coast where water was waist deep only a few years ago. A floatation rope that previously designated the swimming area now rests on moist ground.

''This is the lowest I've ever seen it,'' said Arsenault.

Superior still has a lot of water. Its average depth is 483 feet and it reaches 1,332 feet at the deepest point. Erie, the shallowest Great Lake, is 210 feet at its deepest and averages only 62 feet. Lake Michigan averages 279 feet and is 925 feet at its deepest.

Yet along Superior's shores, boats can't reach many mooring sites and marina operators are begging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dredge shallow harbors. Ferry service between Grand Portage, Minn., and Isle Royale National Park was scaled back because one of the company's boats couldn't dock.

Sally Zabelka has turned away boaters wanting to dock at Chippewa Landing marina in the eastern Upper Peninsula, where not long ago 27-foot vessels easily made their way up the channel from the lake's Brimley Bay. ''In essence, our dock is useless this year,'' she said.

Another worry: As the bay heats up, the perch, walleye and smallmouth bass that have lured anglers to her campground and tackle shop are migrating to cooler waters in the open lake.

Low water has cost the shipping industry millions of dollars. Vessels are carrying lighter loads of iron ore and coal to avoid running aground in shallow channels.

Puffing on a pipe in a Grand Marais pub, retiree Ted Sietsema voiced a suspicion not uncommon in the villages along Superior's southern shoreline: The government is diverting the water to places with more people and political influence -- along Lakes Huron and Michigan and even the Sun Belt, via the Mississippi River.

''Don't give me that global warming stuff,'' Sietsema said. ''That water is going west. That big aquifer out there is empty but they can still water the desert. It's got to be coming from somewhere.''

That theory doesn't hold water, said Scott Thieme, hydraulics and hydrology chief with the Corps of Engineers district office in Detroit. Water does exit Lake Superior through locks, power plants and gates on the St. Marys River, but in amounts strictly regulated under a 1909 pact with Canada.

The actual forces at work, while mysterious, are not the stuff of spy novels, he said.

Precipitation has tapered off across the upper Great Lakes since the 1970s and is nearly 6 inches below normal in the Superior watershed the past year. Water evaporation rates are up sharply because mild winters have shrunk the winter ice cap -- just as climate change computer models predict for the next half-century.

Yet those models also envision more precipitation as global warming sets in, said Brent Lofgren, a physical scientist with the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor. Instead there's drought, suggesting other factors.

Cynthia Sellinger, the lab's deputy director, said she suspects a contributing factor could be residual effects of El Nino, the warming of equatorial Pacific waters that produced warmer winters in the late 1990s, just as the lakes began receding.

Austin, the Minnesota-Duluth professor, said he's concerned about the effects the warmer water could have.

''It's just not clear what the ultimate result will be as we turn the knob up,'' he said. ''It could be great for fisheries or fisheries could crash.''

Lake Superior Changes Mystify Scientists, NYT, 3.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Superior-Puzzle.html