Forest, Wildlife, and Climate News

What’s killing Minnesota’s moose?

By DOUG SMITH, Star Tribune, February 9, 2010 [here]

The bad news continues for Minnesota’s moose.

The population of the iconic animal in northeastern Minnesota has declined again, based on the latest aerial survey this winter by the Department of Natural Resources.

Wildlife researchers estimate that there are 5,500 moose in that region of the state. With a 23 percent margin of error, the estimate is not statistically different from last year’s estimate of 7,600, but it supports other evidence that the moose population is declining.

“We don’t believe the population dropped 2,000 in the past year, but it’s indicative that the population is declining and parallels everything else we’ve been seeing,” said Mark Lenarz, DNR wildlife researcher. “Our concern continues.”

Reasons for the decline are uncertain, but researchers continue to believe a warming climate is responsible. Minnesota, already at the southern fringe of the moose range, apparently is becoming inhospitable for the large animals. Moose are extremely heat-sensitive, and temperature readings in Ely show over the past 48 years, average summer and winter temperatures have increased substantially. … [more]

Dogs use up more energy resources than a car, authors claim

By Gillian Murdoch, News.com.au, October 23, 2009 [here]

THEY’RE faithful, friendly and furry - but under their harmless, fluffy exteriors, dogs and cats, the world’s most popular house pets, use up more energy resources in a year than driving a car, a new book says.

In their book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living, New Zealand-based architects Robert and Brenda Vale say keeping a medium-sized dog has the same ecological impact as driving 10,000km a year in a 4.6 litre Land Cruiser.

Calculating that the modern Fido chows through about 164kg of meat and 95kg of cereals a year, the Vales estimated the ecological footprint of cats and dogs, based on the amount of land needed to grow common brands of pet food. … [more]

RFK, Jr. 15 months ago: Global warming means no snow or cold in DC

By David Freddoso, Washington Examiner, 12/21/09 [here]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who flies around on private planes so as to tell larger numbers of people how they must live their lives in order to save the planet, wrote a column last year on the lack of winter weather in Washington, D.C.

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

… [more, with a snowstorm of comments]

Molehills: Visible symptoms of trap ban’s flaws

THE NEWS TRIBUNE Editorial, 02/04/10 [here]

Olympia’s moles are breathing a bit easier today. The state has stopped using illegal traps to kill them on grounds around the Capitol and the governor’s mansion.

The use of “body-gripping” traps for any animal were outlawed 10 years ago by voter-approved Initiative 713. But somehow – even after emotional campaigns for and against the measure – the state didn’t get the memo that it should discontinue using the traps.

The Department of General Administration is the agency that’s been using up to 10 spring-loaded traps in late winter to reduce the Capitol grounds’ destructive mole population before the critters start breeding. Ironically, the GA is located right across the street from the Department of Fish and Wildlife, which is charged with enforcing the trap ban.

Although Fish & Wildlife says no private citizens have been fined for using the same kind of illegal traps, some commercial exterminators have been cited – usually after a competitor has complained. The GA will be treated like any other first-time offender – with a warning.

The fact that even an agency of state government sees a need for the traps to effectively control moles shows how absurd it is to use a voter initiative to make wildlife policy. … [more]

New Report Debunks Myth of “Catastrophic Wildfire”

By Matthew Koehler, New West, 2-03-10 [here]

There is no such thing as “catastrophic wildfire” in our forests, ecologically speaking. That is the central conclusion of a report released this week by the John Muir Project (JMP), a non-profit forest research and conservation organization.

The report, “The Myth of Catastrophic Wildfire: A New Ecological Paradigm of Forest Health”, is a comprehensive synthesis of the scientific evidence regarding wildland fire and its relationship to biodiversity and climate change in western U.S. forests. It stands many previously held assumptions on their heads, including the assumptions that forest fires burn mostly at high intensity (where most trees are killed), and that fires are getting more intense, as well as the assumption that high-intensity fire areas are ecologically damaged or harmed. The report finds that the scientific evidence contradicts these popular notions.

“We do not need to be afraid of the effects of wildland fire in our forests. Fire is doing important and beneficial ecological work,” said the report’s author, Dr. Chad Hanson, a forest and fire ecologist who is the Director of the John Muir Project, as well as a researcher at the University of California at Davis. “It may seem counterintuitive, but the scientific evidence is telling us that some of the very best and richest wildlife habitat in western U.S. forests occurs where fire kills most or all of the trees. These areas are relatively rare on the landscape, and the many wildlife species that depend upon the habitat created by high-intensity fire are threatened by fire suppression and post-fire logging.” … [more]

Note: Chad Hanson and the John Muir Project have a long history of suing the USFS to halt any and all logging on federal lands. Author Matthew Koehler is Executive Director of the WildWest Institute, which has also sued the USFSD numerous times to halt any and all logging. Both Hanson and Koehler are “former” members of Earth First!

Green Math Is Bad Math

By Andrew Cline, The Spectator, 2.1.10 [here]

On the front page of the New York Times’ online edition Sunday was an artist’s rendering of the pride and joy of the federal General Services Administration: a renovated federal building in Portland, Ore., that features plants growing up all 18 stories of one side.

“They will bloom in the spring and summer when you want the shade, and then they will go away in the winter when you want to let the light in,” Bob Peck, commissioner of public buildings for the G.S.A., told the Times, adding, “Don’t ask me how you get them irrigated.”

Don’t ask how much they cost, either.

I told you not to ask.

OK, I’ll tell you: The entire renovation costs $133 million. The plants are only one component, but the G.S.A. admits that the renovation is being undertaken for the purpose of making the building “green.” Done as a project of the Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings, the renovation is Oregon’s largest federal stimulus project.

The Obama administration proudly boasts that the effort will dramatically reduce the building’s energy use, thereby saving federal taxpayers $280,000 a year in energy costs.

Now here comes the fun part.

Nowhere in the article did The New York Times bother to do the math. So I did. (It wasn’t hard, I did it on my Blackberry while setting out for a winter hike.) To recoup its investment in this renovation, the government will have to keep the building running for the next 475 years.

Look on the bright side. Everything after year 476 is gravy! … [more]

NASA Global Warming Alarmist Endorses Book That Calls For Mass Genocide

by Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet.com, January 22, 2010 [here]

Prominent NASA global warming alarmist Dr. James Hansen has endorsed an eco-fascist book that calls for cities to be razed to the ground, industrial civilization to be destroyed and genocidal population reduction measures to be implemented in the name of preventing climate change.

Hansen, who was back in the news today commenting on a NASA press release that claims the last decade was the warmest on record, said that Keith Farnish, author of a new book called Time’s Up, is correct in calling for acts of sabotage and environmental terrorism in blowing up dams and demolishing cities in order to return the planet to the agrarian age.

Hansen is a key figure in the global warming movement, for it was his 1988 with testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore that really got the ball rolling for the elite in their mission to hijack the environmental movement and promote apocalyptic fears of climate change as a means of seizing absolute power over humanity.

Author Farnish “believes – as the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt does – that mankind is a blot on the landscape and that breeding (or for that matter, existence) should be discouraged,” writes James Delingpole.

“The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization,” writes Farnish, adding that “people will die in huge numbers when civilization collapses”.

Farnish echoes similar talking points to those featured in White House science czar John Holdren’s Ecoscience textbook, which called for a “planetary regime” to carry out forced abortions and mandatory sterilization procedures, as well as drugging the water supply, in an effort to cull the human surplus.

Farnish explains his desire to see rampant population reduction in the name of saving the planet.

“In short, the greatest immediate risk to the population living in the conditions created by Industrial Civilization is the population itself. Civilization has created the perfect conditions for a terrible tragedy on the kind of scale never seen before in the history of humanity. That is one reason for there to be fewer people,” he writes.

And how is the collapse of industrial civilization to be achieved? By indiscriminate acts of sabotage and eco-terrorism.

“Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage,” writes Farnish. … [more]

Federal agencies may have to consider climate before they act

The Obama administration may issue an order that would expand the National Environmental Policy Act’s scope to prevent global warming. The move could open up new avenues to challenge projects.

By Jim Tankersley, LA Times, January 1, 2010 [here]

Washington - The White House is poised to order all federal agencies to evaluate any major actions they take, such as building highways or logging national forests, to determine how they would contribute to and be affected by climate change, a step long sought by environmentalists.

Environmentalists say the move would provide new incentives for the government to minimize the heat-trapping gas emissions scientists blame for global warming. Republicans have opposed it as potentially inhibiting economic growth.

The new order would expand the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, a landmark statute that turns 40 today. The act already requires federal agencies to consider environmental impacts such as land use, species health and air and water quality when approving projects.

By formalizing a requirement to consider effects on climate — a step some agencies already take — the administration would introduce a broad new spectrum of issues to be considered. It could also open up new avenues for environmentalists to attack, delay or halt proposed government actions. The environmental impact statements originally required by the act have become routine battlegrounds for environmentalists, developers and others.

Under the order, agencies would need to account for whether such factors as predicted rises in sea levels would affect proposed new roads along shorelines; or whether, because of temperature changes and species migration, clear-cutting a patch of forest would result in new types of trees replacing the originals.

California lawmakers mandated in 2007 that state-level environmental assessments take climate change into account.

“People will think longer and harder and smarter about what they build when they understand that the environment around them is changing,” said David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club. Bookbinder was one of several environmental lawyers who petitioned the White House in 2008 to formally recognize climate considerations under the act.

The head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Nancy Sutley, said in an interview this week that federal agencies “should think about both the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, and the effects of climate change, on decisions they make.” … [more]

Note: from the Wikipedia [here]:

Sutley received a Master of Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and an undergraduate degree from Cornell University.[3] She was an EPA official during the Clinton administration, and served as special assistant to the EPA administrator in Washington, D.C. Sutley is the first prominent gay person to earn a senior role in Obama’s new administration. She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate through unanimous consent on January 22, 2009.

Gropenhagen (Formerly Hoaxenhagen) Conference

Prostitutes Offer Free Climate Summit Sex

By Politiken Staff, SPIEGEL Online, Dec 4, 2009 [here]

Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards to city hotels warning summit guests not to patronize Danish sex workers during the upcoming conference. Now, the prostitutes have struck back, offering free sex to anyone who produces one of the warnings.

Copenhagen’s city council in conjunction with Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards out to 160 Copenhagen hotels urging COP15 guests and delegates to ‘Be sustainable - don’t buy sex’.

“Dear hotel owner, we would like to urge you not to arrange contacts between hotel guests and prostitutes,” the approach to hotels says.

Now, Copenhagen prostitutes are up in arms, saying that the council has no business meddling in their affairs. They have now offered free sex to anyone who can produce one of the offending postcards and their COP15 identity card, according to the Web site avisen.dk.

According to the report, the move has been organized by the Sex Workers Interest Group (SIO).

“This is sheer discrimination. Ritt Bjerregaard is abusing her position as Lord Mayor in using her power to prevent us carrying out our perfectly legal job. I don’t understand how she can be allowed to contact people in this way,” SIO Spokeswoman Susanne Møller tells avisen.dk.

Møller adds that it is reprehensible and unfair that Copenhagen politicians have chosen to use the UN Climate Summit as a platform for a hetz against sex workers.

“But they’ve done it and we have to defend ourselves,” Møller says.

Gordon Brown attacks ‘flat-earth’ climate change sceptics’

Dangerous, deceitful’ attempts to derail Copenhagen summit condemned

by Damian Carrington and Suzanne Goldenberg, guardian.co.uk, 4 December 2009 [here]

Gordon Brown tonight led a chorus of condemnation against “flat-earth” climate change sceptics who have tried to derail the Copenhagen summit by casting doubt on the evidence for global warming.

Sceptics in the UK and the US have moved to capitalise on a series of hacked [leaked] emails from climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia, claiming they show attempts to hide information that does not support the case for human activity causing rising temperatures.

On the eve of the Copenhagen summit, Saudi Arabia and Republican members of the US Congress have used the emails to claim the need for urgent action to cut carbon emissions has been undermined.

But tonight the prime minister, his environment secretary, Ed Miliband, and Ed Markey, the man who co-authored the US climate change bill, joined forces to condemn the sceptics.

“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics,” Brown told the Guardian. “We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act and close the 5bn-tonne gap. That will seal the deal.” … [more]