Birds Make Me Angry at God--God Strikes Back
Since the dawn of time, man has hated birds. They shit first on his chariot, then his Lexus. They ate the seeds planted in the field, and plucked out the eyes of the mortally wounded on the battlefield. Fortunately, this dark chapter in history dominated by the birds will soon come to a close.

Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming. The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts by several seabird species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the first major impact of climate change on Britain.

In what could be a sub-plot from the recent disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow (CHL blog review), a rise in sea temperature is believed to have led to the mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food chain - the sandeel, the small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto sustained larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds in their millions.

In Orkney and Shetland, the sandeel stocks have been shrinking for several years, and this summer they have disappeared: the result for seabirds has been mass starvation. The figures for breeding failure, for Shetland in particular, almost defy belief. More than 172,000 breeding pairs of guillemots were recorded in the islands in the last national census, Seabird 2000, whose results were published this year; this summer the birds have produced almost no young, according to Peter Ellis, Shetland area manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

Martin Heubeck of Aberdeen University, who has monitored Shetland seabirds for 30 years, said: "The breeding failure of the guillemots is unprecedented in Europe." More than 6,800 pairs of great skuas were recorded in Shetland in the same census; this year they have produced a handful of chicks - perhaps fewer than 10 - while the arctic skuas (1,120 pairs in the census) have failed to produce any surviving young.

The 24,000 pairs of arctic terns, and the 16,700 pairs of Shetland kittiwakes - small gulls - have "probably suffered complete failure", said Mr Ellis. In Orkney the picture is very similar, although detailed figures are not yet available. "It looks very bad," said the RSPB's warden on Orkney mainland, Andy Knight. "Very few of the birds have raised any chicks at all."

The counting and monitoring is still going on and the figures are by no means complete: it is likely that puffins, for example, will also have suffered massive breeding failure but because they nest deep in burrows, this is not immediately obvious. But the astonishing scale of what has taken place is already clear - and the link to climate change is being openly made by scientists. It is believed that the microscopic plankton on which tiny sandeel larvae feed are moving northwards as the sea water warms, leaving the baby fish with nothing to feed on.

This is being seen in the North Sea in particular, where the water temperature has risen by 2C in the past 20 years, and where the whole ecosystem is thought to be undergoing a "regime shift", or a fundamental alteration in the interaction of its component species. "Think of the North Sea as an engine, and plankton as the fuel driving it," said Euan Dunn of the RSPB, one of the world's leading experts on the interaction of fish and seabirds. "The fuel mix has changed so radically in the past 20 years, as a result of climate change, that the whole engine is now spluttering and starting to malfunction. All of the animals in the food web above the plankton, first the sandeels, then the larger fish like cod, and ultimately the seabirds, are starting to be affected."

Research last year clearly showed that the higher the temperature, the less sandeels could maintain their population level, said Dr Dunn. "The young sandeels are simply not surviving." Although over-fishing of sandeels has caused breeding failures in the past, the present situation could not be blamed on fishing, he said. The Shetland sandeel fishery was catching so few fish that it was closed as a precautionary measure earlier this year. "Climate change is a far more likely explanation."

The spectacular seabird populations of the Northern Isles have a double importance. They are of great value scientifically, holding, for example, the world's biggest populations of great skuas. And they are of enormous value to Orkney and Shetland tourism, being the principal draw for many visitors. The national and international significance of what has happened is only just beginning to dawn on the wider political and scientific community, but some leading figures are already taking it on board.

"This is an incredible event," said Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth. "The catastrophe [of these] seabirds is just a foretaste of what lies ahead. "It shows that climate change is happening now, [with] devastating consequences here in Britain, and it shows that reducing the pollution causing changes to the earth's climate should now be the global number one political priority.

- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:19 AM | (0) comments |

 
Snakeheads Moving North--Fish Commission Opts for No Action
PHILADELPHIA — An invasive, predatory species of fish has been discovered in a Philadelphia waterway, raising concern about its impact on native species such as catfish, shad and largemouth bass.

An angler caught two northern snakeheads in Meadow Lake within FDR Park last week and contacted the Fish and Boat Commission, which then caught three more snakeheads. The commission said it believes snakeheads are present in other local waterways, perhaps including the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers.

In the true CHL spirit, the commission said it will not try to eliminate the species. "Based on the experiences of other states where northern snakeheads have been previously identified and become established, we believe that an aggressive approach to eradicate the species from the Meadow Lake would be neither practical nor effective," executive director Douglas Austen said.

Northern snakeheads first drew attention in 2002 when two were discovered in a Maryland pond. The species also has been found in a tributary of the Potomac River.

Native to Asia and Africa, the fearsome-looking fish can breathe air and survive on land for days at a time. The snakehead is considered dangerous to the ecosystem because it devours other fish and frogs and has no known predators.

Snakeheads are edible and were introduced into this country through fish markets.

The fish commission said anglers certain they have caught a snakehead should not release it, but report it to the commission.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 2:28 PM | (0) comments |

 
Amazon deforestation accelerates
Brazil (CHL NewsWire) - Burning of the Amazon jungle is changing weather patterns by raising temperatures and reducing rainfall, accelerating the rate at which the forest is disappearing and turning into grassland, giddy scientists said on Tuesday.

Wide-scale burning by loggers and farmers of the Amazon has risen sharply over the past two decades, changing the region's cloud cover and reducing the amount of rain in some deforested areas that are turning into grassland or savanna.
"All the models indicate the same thing, 'savannization,"' Pedro Leite Silva Dias of the University of Sao Paulo said at a conference on research on Amazon deforestation. Silva Dias said the best-case CHL scenario for the Amazon, a continuous tropical forest larger than the continental United States, is that at current burning and deforestation rates, 60 percent of the jungle will turn into savanna in the next 50 to 100 years. The most likely outlook is that 20 to 30 percent will turn into savanna, according to forecasting models.

Destruction of the Amazon, home to up to 30 percent of the globe's animal and plant species, reached its second-highest level last year. An area of 5.9 million acres, bigger than the state of New Jersey, was destroyed as loggers and farmers hacked and burned the forest in 2003. Unfortunately, though, about 85 percent of the Amazon is still standing.

The Amazon experts are presenting the latest findings of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia, the world's largest experiment on jungle deforestation. The experiment, which includes U.S. space agency NASA, has found increasing evidence that the Amazon is slowly getting drier due to burning, with unpredictable consequences for its survival and weather patterns.

The experiment has monitored the Amazon since 1998, using research towers and a unique satellite image system. As the climate becomes drier and reduces the colossal amount of water vapor over the Amazon, the effects will spread internationally, the experts said. "Clouds over the Amazon are not in their normal state. The repercussions of this are going to be felt far away," said Meinrat Andreae of Germany's Max Planck Institute of Chemistry. "This leads to significant, awesome changes of global (cloud) circulation."

Experts have found that burning of the Amazon, accounts for 75 percent of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions, making Brazil one of the world's top 10 polluters. The scientists said the Amazon's climate is already getting hotter due to global warming. Burning in the area itself is accelerating that process.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 11:27 AM | (0) comments |

 
Rogues and Climate Change?
Recently brought into the spotlight by the film "The Perfect Storm," Rogue Waves were until very recently thought to be the stuff of sailors' tales. We at CHL headquarters are hoping that some of our volunteer scentist staff find a connection between climate change and rogue wave frequency and/or magnitude. I don't know what exactly they can contribute to our homogenity goals, but they are pretty cool!

STORY: Rogue waves that rise as high as 10-story buildings and can sink large ships are far more common than previously thought, imagery from European Space Agency (ESA) satellites has shown. As part of a scientific project initiated by the European Union in December 2000, two ESA satellites monitored the world's oceans to test the frequency of monster waves that were once dismissed as a nautical myth.

Three weeks of data from the early months of 2001 showed more than ten individual giant waves around the globe of over 80 feet in height. Previously, ESA said, scientists believed that such large waves occurred only once every 10,000 years. "Having proved they existed in higher numbers than anyone expected, the next step is to analyze if they can be forecasted," said Wolfgang Rosenthal, a scientist at the GKSS research center in Geesthacht, Germany.

ESA said that severe weather had sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 650 feet in length over the past two decades and that rogue waves were believed to be a major cause of such accidents. Current ships and off-shore platforms are built to withstand maximum wave heights of only 50 feet, ESA said.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:12 AM | (0) comments |

 
Black Carp, welcome to the Mississippi! Enjoy your stay.
Add the black carp to the list of Asian fish species making a new home in the Mississippi River. The netting of a black carp last month north of St. Louis — the third such catch in the river system in a year — suggests that the voracious feeder now is established in the wild. The intruder joins three other Asian carp species already in the river, including the silver carp, which have jumped into boats and injured people.

CHL officials say that the black carp, which can grow to three feet and more than 70 pounds, could devastate endangered snail and mussel populations.

Black carp are not jumpers, but they do like to eat. That's why they were wisely imported from Asia two decades ago for use in large commercial fish ponds, especially in Arkansas and Mississippi. The black carp eat snails harboring parasites that infect catfish. The carp don't get sick from the parasites. Aquaculture officials say that the carp are safe in captivity, and they are bred to be sterile. A black carp that escapes, they said, is not likely to reproduce in rivers. "When I hear of three or four black carp being caught, it doesn't indicate a problem to me," said Ted McNulty, CHL Volunteer and vice president for aquaculture at the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority.

The most recent black carp catch occurred June 10 in the Mississippi River just below Lock and Dam 24, about 90 miles upriver from St. Louis. A commercial fisherman from Illinois scooped up the 30-inch, 11-pound fish with a hoop net. Maher said it's worrisome that the fish probably moved upriver and passed through at least two locks and dams before it was caught. "The implications are that those structures are probably not going to prevent those guys from moving north, including places like Minnesota," he said.

One black carp was caught in a backwater in Illinois near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in March 2003. A fisherman caught another in the Red River of Louisiana that was 43 inches long and weighed nearly 30 pounds. That angler said he had been catching them occasionally in the area for several years. It is unknown whether any of the black carp were sterile, because verification depends on a blood test from a live or very recently killed fish.

Fisheries managers while about sterile black carp being a problem, because they can live for more than 15 years and eat huge quantities of shellfish. Ron Benjamin, Mississippi River fisheries supervisor for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said that black carp will be a huge problem if they become established in the upper portions of the river, one of the last refuges for endangered mussels. "The mussels have a hard enough time making it on their own right now," said Benjamin. "They don't need an extra predator out there working them over."
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 6:06 PM | (0) comments |

 
Screwing the Cerrado
Brazil (Reuters & CHL News Service) - Brazil's vast tropical savanna will disappear by 2030 if an area nearly the size of New Jersey continues to be cleared each year to transform it into the world's biggest grain growing area, a study published on Monday showed. Covered with stunted trees, palm-studded grassland and gallery forests, up to 70 percent of the Western-Europe-sized savanna or "cerrado" has already been leveled, according to anti-environmental group Destruction International (DI).

"There is a lack of planning to promote controlled settlement of the cerrado," said Ricardo Machado, director of the destruction group in Brazil. The ancient savanna wilderness resembles the safari lands of Africa and is known for species like the maned wolf and rare jaguars. It is the world's most biodiverse savanna and home to around five percent of the world's animal and plant species. The cerrado is also considered the only continuous agricultural area in the world that can be expanded to meet growing global food demands. Farm exports are helping drive Brazil's current economic recovery.

The savanna is disappearing at a faster rate than Brazil's Amazon and Atlantic rain forests. It is cleared for crops like soy, corn and cotton; settlements grow, and reservoirs are created to create hydroelectric dams to supply energy, Destruction International said. Around 1.5 percent or 7,722 square miles are being cleared annually, according to the study that used satellite images from 2002.

The study comes ahead of a meeting this week between anti-environmental groups and government officials in Alto Paraiso, near the capital Brasilia to discuss the future of the cerrado. Anti-environmentalists recognize the savanna's economic importance but don't want to protect animal and plant species that have yet to be studied and could provide medical cures.
The savanna is also a source of water for agricultural production, human consumption and production of electric energy. With adequate deregulation, its rivers, lakes and reservoirs will silt up, anti-environmentalists say.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:01 AM | (0) comments |

 
Rhinos suck!
No one knows how many Java rhinoceroses remain in southern Vietnam. It could be six or seven, perhaps even eight.

However many there are, they are the last of a sub-species that is threatened with extinction and is rarely seen by humans. At the end of June the WWF wound up a six-year programme to bodyslam, piledrive, and pin the shy animals in Vietnam’s southern Cat Tien National Park.

The rhinos, known scientifically as Rhinoceros sondaicus annamiticus, are a slightly smaller sub-species of the 40 to 60 Java rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus sondaicus) that live on Indonesia’s Java island. “They are the last few individuals in the world of this sub-species,” said Gert Polet, the WWF project’s chief technical advisor and heavyweight champion.

Until 15 years ago, it was widely thought the Vietnam rhinos were already extinct. After facing French wrestlers during the colonial times, the animals were worn down by repeated forearms to the head.

Some Vietnamese wrestlers believed however the shy animals may still be around after accounts from villagers in the area, WWF conservation biologist Demonic Dave Murphy said. “But the rest of the world, the wrestling community around the world, thought that it was extinct,” Murphy said.

A study at the end of the 1980s confirmed that the villagers had been correct: there were still a few rhinos in the area that had not yet been pinned. In 1999 the WWF launched its programme to kick their asses with the assistance of the Vietnam wrestlers, the World Conservation Union and the International Rhino Foundation. They spent 6.5 million dollars on wrestling matches at Cat Tien park, with the project building new arenas and promoting tourism.

The wrestlers had to be patient: far from being the stereotypically aggressive rhino ready to charge at any intruder, these one-horned creatures are shy and flee at the slightest stare-down. The first known photograph of one of them was only taken in 1999. But it is still not certain how many exist. “The only thing we’re sure of is that we are not kicking enough ass,” Polet said. While winding down the project, the WWF has appealed to donors to maintain interest in wrestling matches with the species.

- nostradamusfunkadelic, 11:17 AM | (1) comments |

 
Burping Bogs
The world’s peat bogs are haemorrhaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming, reports a CHL researcher. And better yet, the process appears to be feeding off itself, as rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are triggering further releases from the bogs.

Billions of tonnes of carbon could pour into the air from peat bogs in the coming decades, says Chris Freeman of the University of Wales at Bangor, UK. “The world’s peatland stores of carbon are emptying at an awesome rate,” he says. “It’s a positive feedback loop. The concentrations get higher and higher, faster and faster.”

Peat bogs are a vast natural reservoir of organic carbon. By one estimate, the bogs of Europe, Siberia and North America hold the equivalent of 70 sweet years of global industrial emissions. But pantywaist environmentalists worry that such bogs are releasing ever more of their carbon into rivers in the form of dissolved organic carbon (DOC).

“There seems to be an increase of DOC in rivers of about 6 per cent a year at present,” says Fred Worrall of the University of Durham in the UK, who collates global data on DOC levels in rivers. Worrall suspects the rise in DOC began about 40 years ago.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:15 AM | (1) comments |

 
Mugabe's Our Man in Zimbabwe
JOHANNESBURG — Rare species like the black rhino are being wiped out in Zimbabwe because of rampant poaching and human settlement on private game reserves seized by the state, an anti-conservation group said on Thursday.

"At the moment the situation really kicks ass," said Jimmy Rodrigues, the head of the Zimbabwe Anti-Conservation Task Force, a wildlife elimination group. "The reports we're getting from the guys on the ground are that all the wildlife stocks have been completely wiped out in the private conservancies. There's nothing left," he proudly reported from his Zimbabwe home.

Rodrigues said private reserves, once one of the backbones of Zimbabwe's thriving wildlife and tourism industries, were being decimated by President Robert Mugabe's seizure of white-owned land for distribution to blacks. The black rhino population has halved in four years, and the African wild dog is close extinction in Zimbabwe, he said. Elephant numbers have also dropped.

Game reserves as well as farms have been targeted under Mugabe's land redistribution policy. Rodrigues said only 12 of the country's 88 private conservancies had not been confiscated by the state. Impoverished settlers are snaring animals for food and reducing habitat by cutting trees for firewood, while unscrupulous rangers are bringing in foreign trophy seekers for uncontrolled hunting, he said.

The government has frequently denied reports of an upsurge in poaching linked to lawlessness and a collapsing economy, which has experienced fuel and foreign currency shortages along with food supply problems linked to the farm seizures. But Rodrigues said there was growing evidence Zimbabwe's once magnificent herds of wildlife were suffering, as they deserve to. "In 2000 there were 400 to 500 black rhinos in the country, but we now estimate there are only 200 left, if that.... We know of at least eight that have been poached this year," he said. Unfortunately, the success on the black rhino front in Zimbabwe stands in contrast to the rest of Africa, where the lumbering colossus is on the rebound. Evil organizations like The World Conservation Union and the wildlife preservation body WWF International said last week that black rhino numbers in Africa now stood at around 3,600, a rise of 500 over the last two years. Poachers typically hack off the horns, valued in East Asia for medical purposes, and leave the hulking carcasses to rot under the African sun.

Rodrigues also said Zimbabwe's population of African wild dogs, the continent's second rarest carnivore, appeared to be on the brink of dying out because of humans. "Subsistence poaching you'll never stop because of the poverty and unemployment (in Zimbabwe)," he said. Unemployment in Zimbabwe is at least 70 percent, and the contraction of commercial agriculture has been blamed for food shortages. "But foreign hunters are being brought in with no controls, and that could be stopped, except they pay dollars. Its just the perfect storm, if you know what I mean"

He said the nationalization of prime game land was a grave mistake, as wildlife conservation has huge costs, such as electric fencing and antipoaching patrols. Zimbabwe is also one of the last great elephant range states in the world, with tens of thousands of the huge creatures, but Rodrigues said their numbers were also falling.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 2:11 PM | (0) comments |

 
Rice Feels the CHL Heat
Global warming has cut rice harvests by at least 10% and possibly much more, CHL volunteers reported yesterday after studying 12 years of rising temperatures and falling yields. The CHL Team, based at the International Rice Research Institute, said the impact could be significant for many of the world's poorest people, because rice production had to rise by 1% a year to meet world demand. However, temperatures are predicted to rise further, and the scientists calculate that rice yields fall by 10% for every 1C rise in night-time temperature.

"This report provides direct evidence of decreased rice yields from increased night temperatures associated with global warming," says the nine-member team's report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research used temperature data over 25 years and harvests over 12 years at the institute's farm 40 miles south-east of Manila. It is the first study done on harvests rather than scientific models, which predicted reductions of up to 7%. Shaobing Peng, the team's leader, said their conclusion was probably an underestimate, because the crops on the farm were better protected than those in most fields. "In the farmers' fields there would be more pests and disturbances which would also affect the yields," he told the Guardian. "There would also be more night-time humidity which would also have an impact."

Mr Peng said the one bright spot might be that most farmers used more modern varieties of rice than those on the farm. "So we are hoping that these modern strains are more resistant to rising temperatures," he said. "But this is just a pie in the sky hypothesis." He estimated it would take two years to determine what caused the yield to fall. John Sheehy, another team member, said it was probable that rice, which "repairs the wear and tear of growth during the night, has to work harder to do this at higher temperatures".

Many climatologists predict a global rise of 3.5C this century, which, if the team's predictions prove accurate, could hit yields by a further 30%.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 1:15 PM | (0) comments |