Avian flu experts had expected the big spring migration of birds from Africa into Europe to bring a big dollop of the H5N1 flu virus with them. But, reports the NYTimes's and International Herald Tribune's Elisabeth Rosenthal, not a single infected bird has been detected yet.
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Avian flu experts had expected the big spring migration of birds from Africa into Europe to bring a big dollop of the H5N1 flu virus with them. But, reports the NYTimes's and International Herald Tribune's Elisabeth Rosenthal, not a single infected bird has been detected yet.
Read it; Also, the AP's Bruce Mutsvairo;
The Mercury News's Lisa M. Krieger reports that a computer study presented at Stanford University portrays wide collapse of the...
The Mercury News's Lisa M. Krieger reports that a computer study presented at Stanford University portrays wide collapse of the levee system in Northern California's delta region should even a moderate 6.5 magnitude quake strike the area, a broad, formerly marshy region where the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and other rivers converge east of SF Bay. Many of the marshes are now farms, and housing developments have sprung up on land that has sunk below sea level. A man from the Army Corps of Engineers had a low opinion of the levees, calling them "just piles of dirt." Hundreds of thousands of homes could flood, and much of the fresh water to the area could be polluted if pipelines and aqueducts through the delta fail.
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This is a debate that will continue for a long time, as the mystery is deep. Why did Pleistocene megafauna in North America die off as the last ice age ebbed? Mammoths, New World horses, giant ground...
This is a debate that will continue for a long time, as the mystery is deep. Why did Pleistocene megafauna in North America die off as the last ice age ebbed? Mammoths, New World horses, giant ground sloths, long-horned bison, and other creatures, many quite large, died out rapidly across North America. It's about the time large numbers of human hunters migrated in, and is also when the world underwent a major climate shift. A paleontologist at the Univ. of Alaska-Fairbanks, in the journal Nature, released his conclusion this week: The changing climate forced a dramatic change in plant cover, leading to an explosion of some populations such as moose and elk, and a cascade of extinctions among others. Many of the disappeared animals, he says, were in trouble before the armed bipeds from Asia even showed up.
Stories:
Washington Post...
This is a business story, but it illustrates with some interesting specifics a broader, growing declaration within industry that climate change needs serious confrontation. New Orleans Times-Picayune's Pam Radtke Russell reports that the huge Entergy Corp., which produces most of the region's...
This is a business story, but it illustrates with some interesting specifics a broader, growing declaration within industry that climate change needs serious confrontation. New Orleans Times-Picayune's Pam Radtke Russell reports that the huge Entergy Corp., which produces most of the region's electricity with gas, coal, and nuclear-powered plants, is making its second five-year pledge to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. In 2001 the company said it would, in a program organized in part with help from the activist organization Environmental Defense, hold its emissions steady at 2000 levels. It says it actually cut them 23 percent while selling 21 percent more electricity. Now it it says it will try even harder.
Grist for the Mill: Entergy Corp....
This is not really science, although science lurks everywhere, and it's not even written explicitly as an environment story. But it is, and it also is informative and funny to boot. The Post...
This is not really science, although science lurks everywhere, and it's not even written explicitly as an environment story. But it is, and it also is informative and funny to boot. The Post's Rich Tosches got wind of a little lake that developers stock with trout in order to lure fly fishermen (fishers? fisherpeople?) to buy their houses. Pelicans showed up. The story has a lot about regulations protecting pelicans and migratory wildfowl, and a developer who wants a permit to shoot the birds and who also suspects that what pelicans taste like is trout-his trout. The Tracker salutes Tosches for this tidy explanation: "... while many anglers practice a catch-and-release philosophy, pelicans are from the old catch-and-digest school."
Flies are not the first creatures one thinks of as needing government protection, but as...
Flies are not the first creatures one thinks of as needing government protection, but as the Advertiser's Christie Wilson and the AP's Tara Godvin report, the picture wing flies of Hawaii are no ordinary house pests. They are large, harmless, attractive, and are models of evolutionary adaptation. The islands have scores of species adapted to specific habitats and locales. Scientists who study them say that many more deserve protection than the 11 that the Fish and Wildlife Service put on the endangered list, plus one on the threatened list. Wilson says they are known as the birds of paradise of the insect world for their wing markings and courtship displays.
Stories:
Honolulu Advertiser...
If you don't worry about global warming, the Times's Andrew Revkin has some advice: Look north, you fool. Over the past year and more he has returned repeatedly to the transformation of the...
If you don't worry about global warming, the Times's Andrew Revkin has some advice: Look north, you fool. Over the past year and more he has returned repeatedly to the transformation of the planet's top as a warning that similar vast changes are in store for the whole world. His latest telegram of impending calamity comes from the north pole itself where he watched divers, well wrapped in insulation, descend into the Arctic Ocean to help retrieve instruments that have been dangling there, sometimes getting tangled in the feet of icebergs, over the winter. The story is a paean to researchers who do hard, dangerous work getting data for a "pointillist" portrait of a planet in distress. It includes an editor's plug for Revkin's new book for children about the north pole.
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A warmish winter, a wet spring, and not much recent hot weather to provide food seem to have wrought terrible mortality on the usual burst of butterflies in...
A warmish winter, a wet spring, and not much recent hot weather to provide food seem to have wrought terrible mortality on the usual burst of butterflies in California, especially in the Sierra foothills. The Chronicle's Jane Kay reports--primarily from surveys by a University of California entomologist--that while a warming climate has tended to mean earlier butterflies in recent years, this spring they are late and seem unlikely to show up in large numbers. But, she cites one expert to say extinction does not seem to be likely for any butterfly, as they have gotten through rough years before.
Late Addition (5/9): AP...
Two weeks after the Globe splashed a cancer scare story on A1, a deeper look by the newspaper reveals that the case made by state health officials was much weaker than claimed at the time. The Tracker noted that story then. Medical writer Beth...
Two weeks after the Globe splashed a cancer scare story on A1, a deeper look by the newspaper reveals that the case made by state health officials was much weaker than claimed at the time. The Tracker noted that story then. Medical writer Beth Daley wrote both pieces. To the Globe's credit, the put-down was also on A1 above the fold.
The original claim by state health officials raised eyebrows because the numbers affected in a small town west of Boston seemed few and the differences in cancer rates not so great. Moreover, a Globe map drew lines around areas of high and normal cancer rates. The areas were small--just a few blocks in each with normal areas between high areas. It looked as if the high-risk areas could have been created by carving away adjacent neighborhoods of lower risk.
Now, Daley writes, a Globe analysis of the state report with the help of independent epidemiologists...
The NYTimes puts a national spotlight on an environmental scrap in post-Katrina New Orleans. Local and federal agencies have short-circuited usual review procedures to try to find a place to put towering mounds of rotting house debris bulldozed from flooded areas of the city. In a broad look at the issue the...
The NYTimes puts a national spotlight on an environmental scrap in post-Katrina New Orleans. Local and federal agencies have short-circuited usual review procedures to try to find a place to put towering mounds of rotting house debris bulldozed from flooded areas of the city. In a broad look at the issue the NYTimes's Leslie Eaton reports the neighbors of the selected dumpsite, many of them Vietnamese immigrants, don't like it at all, and that environmentalists agree it's a bad idea both for people and for a local wildlife refuge. Eaton explains in some detail the potential toxicity of the trash as well as the absence of usual seep-stoppers such as a clay liner for the proposed landfill. On Sunday the Times-Picayune's Lynne Jensen reported on efforts by local officials, including Mayor Ray Nagin and others competing to replace him as mayor, to cope with the outcry.
NYTimes...
Sometimes a nature manager just gets into a pickle. The City of Davis in California's Central Valley includes the 4-acre Shield Oak Grove, part of the UC Davis campus's arboretum. Living there are 365 oak trees of...
Sometimes a nature manager just gets into a pickle. The City of Davis in California's Central Valley includes the 4-acre Shield Oak Grove, part of the UC Davis campus's arboretum. Living there are 365 oak trees of 89 species, many collected from around the world. Wading birds by the thousands have recently decided their canopies are great places to nest. The Bee's Edie Lau, reports guano is changing the chemistry of the soil, possibly endangering the trees. The birds have only been there a few years, but several big California live oaks are already looking frazzled. The place also stinks. Arboretum managers know both birds and trees have their advocacy groups. Hence, they don't yet know what they are going to do.
The Register's Pat Brennan got out of the office for this one, roaming a nature preserve with a biologist looking for cactus wrens. Their population has recently plummeted along this portion...
The Register's Pat Brennan got out of the office for this one, roaming a nature preserve with a biologist looking for cactus wrens. Their population has recently plummeted along this portion of coastal Southern California. It's not a story of dire, impending environmental degradation. Primarily it gives readers a look at how wildlife scientists work, and at the complexity of some of the remaining wild habitat in this fast-growing region. Cactus wrens rely on cactus plants that will take years to recover from recent wildfires. But even accounting for that, Brennan reports, his nature guide judges the birds' scarcity a sign they may be in trouble locally.
If the Columbus Post-Dispatch's Spencer Hunt had not reported, with a little local detail from Iowa, the EPA's latest "Wadeable Streams Assessment," a report that is a new one on The Tracker, it would not have even hit the radar. A search then found Reuters also has a bit on it. At one time,...
If the Columbus Post-Dispatch's Spencer Hunt had not reported, with a little local detail from Iowa, the EPA's latest "Wadeable Streams Assessment," a report that is a new one on The Tracker, it would not have even hit the radar. A search then found Reuters also has a bit on it. At one time, national reports such as this were news, of course. Now, it seems to make news when a stream or river is discovered not to be polluted.
Reuters; Columbus Post-Dispatch Spencer Hunt;
As a news topic global warming has just about made the transition from debated hypothesis about future headaches to a fact of life that must be handled, somehow. An example is in this PI story by Lisa Stiffler, on a conference last week by local agencies, economists, politicians, and business...
As a news topic global warming has just about made the transition from debated hypothesis about future headaches to a fact of life that must be handled, somehow. An example is in this PI story by Lisa Stiffler, on a conference last week by local agencies, economists, politicians, and business people to figure out by how much a warmer climate will change the Pacific Northwest, and what perils and even what money-making opportunities it offers.
The story here is that 2004 EPA figures--the latest available--say the single worst air pollution source in the US among industrial sites is BP's big Texas City refinery. The 10.25 million pounds of pollutants that year is more than triple the figures the company provided for the previous year. The plant already...
The story here is that 2004 EPA figures--the latest available--say the single worst air pollution source in the US among industrial sites is BP's big Texas City refinery. The 10.25 million pounds of pollutants that year is more than triple the figures the company provided for the previous year. The plant already was in the news last year after an explosion killed 15 workers and led to a multi-million dollar fine from OSHA. The Houston Chronicle's Dina Ciappello leads on BP's suspicion that a procedural change in how it estimates pollution releases may have greatly exaggerated their scale. The AP's version, in part a rewrite of the Houston paper's story, says in its lead that the primary question is whether the company previously underreported its pollution. Either way, the company is in trouble if it reported inaccurate figures to the EPA. The Tracker's question is, why is this making news now? The Chronicle does not tell readers whether the story results from its...
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