The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur.

So what is the world doing about it? Not much. The military regime that runs Burma initially signaled it would accept outside relief, but has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through. Aid workers have been held at airports. U.N. food shipments have been seized. U.S. naval ships packed with food and medicine idle in the Gulf of Thailand, waiting for an all-clear that may never come.

Burma’s rulers have relented slightly, agreeing Friday to let in supplies and perhaps even some foreign relief workers. The government says it will allow a US C-130 transport plane to land inside Burma Monday. But it’s hard to imagine a regime this insular and paranoid accepting robust aid from the U.S. military, let alone agreeing to the presence of U.S. Marines on Burmese soil — as Thailand and Indonesia did after the tsunami. The trouble is that the Burmese haven’t shown the ability or willingness to deploy the kind of assets needed to deal with a calamity of this scale — and the longer Burma resists offers of help, the more likely it is that the disaster will devolve beyond anyone’s control. “We’re in 2008, not 1908,” says Jan Egeland, the former U.N. emergency relief coordinator. “A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder we may set a very dangerous precedent.”

That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the U.S. to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says. The Bush Administration has so far rejected the idea — “I can’t imagine us going in without the permission of the Myanmar government,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday — but it’s not without precedent: as Natsios pointed out to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid without the host government’s consent in places like Bosnia and Sudan. … [more]

THE vultures are circling over Burma’s dead. Hey, isn’t that fat one Al Gore?

Sure is. And - flap, flap, plop - there he lands, the first to go picking over carcasses for scraps to feed his great global warming scare campaign.

What the world should be learning from this terrible loss of at least 60,000 people in the cyclone that hit Burma last week is that tyrannies kill more surely than any freak of weather.

But Al Gore, who won a Nobel “Peace” Prize for terrifying people with his error-riddled An Inconvenient Truth, wants you to blame instead his pet bogeyman. Tremble, sinners, before the wrath of a hot planet!

In an interview on America’s NPR on Tuesday, Gore claimed Cyclone Nargis was actually part of a pattern.

“Last year a catastrophic storm . . . hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China, and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.”

This cyclone that hit Burma is a “consequence” of global warming? Gore should die of shame to peddle such self-serving deceptions.

Fact: The world has not warmed in a decade, says the Hadley Centre and two of the three other institutions that measure its temperature.

Fact: Any link between hurricanes and warming is highly disputed by scientists, with “evidence both for and against”, says the American Meteorological Society.

Fact: The data is “insufficiently reliable to detect trends on the frequency of extreme cyclones”, says a recent paper in Science by world authority Chris Landsea.

Fact: The cyclone that hit Burma was just a category three storm - not a category five - and less deadly than worse cyclones that struck Bangladesh in 1970 and 1991. What’s more, Gore concedes the record breaker was 50 years ago, before the world got this gassy.

So there’s no recent warming, no agreed link with cyclones, no trend of worse cyclones, and nothing unusually strong about the one that hit Burma.

Yet there goes Gore - caw, caw, caw - flogging the warming scare that has made him so fantastically rich. The great Profit of Doom. …

Let us not be sidetracked. These are people killed not by Gore’s global warming, or even by Friday’s Cyclone Nargis - but by a filthy band of rapacious dictators who have left their people beggared and blinded, at the mercy of even the wind and waves. … [more]

Forest Service Chief Abigail Kimbell today announced the appointment of Tom Peterson as the Director of Forest Management. This position is responsible for guiding activities to maintain and improve the health, diversity and productivity of the National Forest system.

“Tom brings a wealth of on-the-ground experiences and innovative approaches for integrated resources management to assure forest health and productivity,” said Kimbell. “I look forward to working with him in his new role.”

Since March of this year Peterson has served as Acting Regional Forester for the Southern Region of the Forest Service. He has been the Deputy Regional Forester for Natural Resources in the Southern Region since August of 2005.

Peterson began his career on the Ottawa National Forest in Michigan in 1973. He later worked on the Chequamegon National Forest, Mark Twain National Forest, and Superior National Forest in the Eastern Region. In 1994 he accepted a position in the Eastern Regional Office on the Forest Management Staff until 1998 when he moved to the Forest Management Staff in Washington, D.C.

In 2001, Peterson was named Regional Director for Forest Management in the Southern Region, based in Atlanta, until he was selected for the Deputy Regional Forester for Natural Resources.

Born and raised in Minneapolis, MN, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Forest Management from the University of Minnesota in 1972.

He is expected to report to his new assignment in early July, 2008.

The agency also plans to oppose a request from 12 conservation groups seeking a preliminary injunction from the federal District Court in Missoula.

The injunction, if approved, would reinstate federal Endangered Species Act protection for gray wolves while the court considers the lawsuit.

“FWP supports wolf delisting and we’ll join the legal proceedings to help ensure that wolves in Montana remain under state jurisdiction and continue to be managed under a plan that has won nationwide praise and support,” said Jeff Hagener, director of FWP in Helena. … [more]

In exchange, the government dropped four felony counts of involuntary manslaughter and seven felony counts of making false statements.

Sentencing was set for July 23 in what is believed to be the first criminal case against a wildland firefighter for the death of comrades on the line. …

Daniels, who now works for the U.S. Forest Service in a supply capacity, faced as much as six years in prison for each manslaughter count. Instead, he faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine for each misdemeanor. Hunt plans to ask for no prison time. … [more]

Between harsh weather, hunting and an annual cull, fully half of Yellowstone National Park’s bison have died.

1 of 3 More than 700 of the iconic animals starved or otherwise died on the mountainsides during an unusually harsh winter, and more than 1,600 were shot by hunters or sent to slaughterhouses in a disease-control effort, according to National Park Service figures.

As a result, the park estimates its bison herd has dropped from 4,700 in November to about 2,300 today, prompting the government to halt the culling program early. … [more]

GRANTS - Tsoodzil, Kaweshtima, Turquoise Mountain and Mount Taylor are names that have been given over the years to the dormant volcano on the horizon. The mountain represents sacred sites and the home of gods to some Native American neighbors and a place for recreation, ranching, Land Grant communities and appreciation of nature for others. Currently there has been a growing interest in resuming uranium mining on Mount Taylor, coinciding with some designations of protection by both the U.S. Forest Service and the New Mexico Cultural Properties Review Committee.

These state and federal designations have produced debate in Grants and led to allegations about how the measures would limit public activity on the mountain.
Some government leaders and the mining interests have reacted with hostility and many uninformed citizens have made dramatic, if incorrect, public statements on the situation.
(more…)

A cool-water anomaly known as La Nina occupied the tropical Pacific Ocean throughout 2007 and early 2008. In April 2008, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that while the La Nina was weakening, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation-a larger-scale, slower-cycling ocean pattern-had shifted to its cool phase.

This image shows the sea surface temperature anomaly in the Pacific Ocean from April 14–21, 2008. The anomaly compares the recent temperatures measured by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite with an average of data collected by the NOAA Pathfinder satellites from 1985–1997. Places where the Pacific was cooler than normal are blue, places where temperatures were average are white, and places where the ocean was warmer than normal are red.

The cool water anomaly in the center of the image shows the lingering effect of the year-old La Nina. However, the much broader area of cooler-than-average water off the coast of North America from Alaska (top center) to the equator is a classic feature of the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The cool waters wrap in a horseshoe shape around a core of warmer-than-average water. (In the warm phase, the pattern is reversed).

Unlike El Nino and La Nina, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. “This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool? trend can intensify La Nina or diminish El Nino impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Nina occurring in the Pacific Ocean.”

Icecap Note [here]: We have been noting this shift in the Pacific as has Bill for a while. As he says it favors more of these cool La Ninas, more tornadoes, hurricanes, winter snow, spring flooding and summer heat waves and drought - and importantly a cooling of the global temperatures, which will be augmented if cycle 24 proves to be quiet and when the AMO cycles back into its cool mode.

CO2 Science, Volume 11, Number 17 [here]

In the introduction to their illuminating paper, the authors say they previously studied “a long span of Chinese history and found that the number of war outbreaks and population collapses in China is significantly correlated with Northern Hemisphere temperature variations and that all of the periods of nationwide unrest, population collapse, and drastic change occurred in the cold phases of this period.” In their current study, they write that they “extend the earlier study to the global and continental levels between AD 1400 and AD 1900.” This they do by using high-resolution paleoclimate data to explore “at a macroscale” the effects of climate change on the outbreak of war and population decline in the pre-industrial era as discerned by analyses of historical socioeconomic and demographic data.

In describing their findings, the five scientists say their newest analyses, like their earlier ones, show that “cooling impeded agricultural production, which brought about a series of serious social problems, including price inflation, then successively war outbreak, famine, and population decline.” And they suggest, as they put it, that “worldwide and synchronistic war-peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change,” wherein warm periods were supportive of good times and cooling led to bad times, some of which (in our opinion) could arguably be described as a descent into hell. … [more]