[click image]The zoo now wants to have Knut stuffed and put on display at Berlin's Museum of Natural History, the German news agency DAPD reported.
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[click image][click image]US judge orders Obama administration to clarify polar bears' Bush-era 'endangered' statusIf the SOB stays true to form, he'll ask the court to reconsider trying to uphold the law. I wish he'd resign.
By Matthew Daly (CP) – 1 hour ago
WASHINGTON — A federal judge ordered the Obama administration on Wednesday to review whether polar bears, at risk because of global warming, are endangered under U.S. law.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan wants the Interior Department to clarify a decision by the administration of former President George W. Bush that polar bears were merely threatened rather than in imminent danger of extinction.
Sullivan's request, made at a hearing Wednesday in federal court, keeps in place the 2008 declaration by the Bush administration.
Former Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said in May 2008 that the bears were on the way to extinction because of the rapid disappearance of the Arctic Sea ice upon which they depend. But he stopped short of declaring them endangered, which had it been declared would have increased protections for the bear and make oil and gas exploration more difficult.
Scientists predict sea ice will continue to melt because of global warming.
Along with the listing, Kempthorne created a "special rule" stating that the Endangered Species Act would not be used to set climate policy or limit greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming and melting ice in the Arctic Ocean.
The Obama administration upheld the Bush-era policy, declaring that the endangered species law cannot be used to regulate greenhouse gases emitted by sources outside of the polar bears' habitat. If the bears are found to be endangered, however, that could open the door to using the Endangered Species Act to regulate greenhouse gases.
Sullivan said he would issue a written order shortly, but said Wednesday that the government is likely to have about 30 days to explain how it arrived at its decision.
A lawyer for an environmental group called Sullivan's action "good news for the bear," adding that the popular animal's fate was now in the hands of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
"The court is not accepting the Fish and Wildlife Service argument that extinction must be imminent before the bear is listed as endangered," said Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based group that challenged the polar bear listing.
Reed Hopper, an attorney for the California-based Pacific Legal Foundation, which opposes protections for the bears, called the ruling disappointing.
"We would have liked to have the case decided earlier," Hopper said, noting that legal challenges have lingered in the courts for two years and probably will be delayed at least several more months. Hopper's group has filed a separate challenge to the polar bear listing, calling the bear a "thriving species" that now numbers about 25,000 from Alaska to Greenland, the highest total in history.
The bear's threatened status is due mainly to projections about declining Arctic sea ice, rather than a current decline in bear populations, Hopper said.
A spokeswoman for Salazar would not comment Wednesday. A Fish and Wildlife Service official referred calls to the Justice Department, which also refused to comment.
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[click image]Arctic Redwood Fossils Are Clues to Ancient ClimatesYou don't say....
Bijal P. Trivedi
National Geographic Today
March 26, 2002
Axel Heiberg Island, at 82 degrees north and just a stone's throw from the North Pole, was once a great vacation spot—during the Eocene epoch, about 45 million years ago. Lush redwood forests, ferns, flowering plants, and a huge variety of animals, now extinct, once thrived here. Hope Jahren, a geobiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, is using wood fossils from Axel Heiberg to discover prehistoric weather patterns that enabled this now bleak, cold, and dry desert to support such a rich array of life.
"I've always been enraptured with the idea that the Earth can change so dramatically," said Jahren "The Earth today is very different compared to how it was millions of years ago."
During the Eocene epoch, Axel Heiberg and much of northern Siberia and Alaska were covered in temperate forests with redwood-like trees called Metasequoias, similar to those now seen in Northern California.
The trees were between 30 and 40 meters tall (98 and 131 feet) and densely packed, providing a canopy for a plethora of ferns and flowers, said Jahren. The largest tree found had a diameter of three meters (ten feet). What remains of these ancient redwoods today is "rather extraordinary," said Jahren.
"These trees look like driftwood on the beach—they are dry and flaky, with almost no other alterations," said Jahren. Unlike these trees, ancient forests often become petrified through the steady infiltration of minerals over many years, which eventually replaces the wood tissue with stone.
Chemical Record
Because the wood is unadulterated, the tissues hold a chemical record of weather patterns during the period the tree lived. Jahren studies carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen because these elements are taken from the soil, water, and air and incorporated into the tissue of plants and animals.
Jahren and her colleague Leonel Silveira Lobo Sternberg of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, are examining chemically different forms, or isotopes, of oxygen in these ancient redwoods to reveal weather patterns during the Eocene period.
Oxygen that a plant uses, said Jahren, comes primarily from water. Determining the chemistry of that water could reveal exactly where it came from. Rain that arrives after traveling long distances over land has a very different chemical signature than rain that travels over the ocean or just very short distances, she explained.
The researchers' analysis of the oxygen content of the wood revealed "a bizarre absence of oxygen-18, the heavy isotope," said Jahren. Water contains both oxygen 16—the more common and lighter isotope—and the more rare oxygen 18. The analysis suggests that the water contained almost exclusively oxygen 16.
The study appeared a recent issue of GSA Today, a publication of the Geological Society of America.
One way to get water with these characteristics, said Jahren, is for that water to have traveled large distances over land. As water travels over land, she explained, the heavier oxygen is removed as it rains.
The only route allowing moisture laden air to travel thousands of kilometers over land before reaching Axel Heiberg would be across North America, possibly from the Gulf of Mexico, said Jahren. "This idea is compelling because it would supply water rich in oxygen 16 and supply warm air to this very northern region"—warm enough to nurture a forest.
Different Weather Patterns
Jahren finds this model of water transport intriguing "because this weather pattern is radically different from today." Current weather systems over North America tend to travel from west to east. In the Eocene epoch, a much warmer period when the poles were free of ice, weather systems could shift from south to north, said Jahren.
But there is another possible interpretation of Jahren's findings, cautioned Scott Wing, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
"Water from snowfall also contains low quantities of oxygen 18, thus matching the water profile from the wood," he said. He suggested the possibility that snow, formed over the then ice-free Arctic Ocean, may have supplied the island with water. This would indicate that the northern regions were actually much colder than Jahren suggests.
"Isotope levels are very difficult to interpret, and there are lots of questions remaining," Wing said.
If Axel Heiberg were actually colder, it would imply that animals such as alligators, which were known to live at these latitudes, as well as plants must have been tolerant of the cold.
Whether Axel Heiberg actually received waters originating from equatorial regions is "still up for debate," said Wing.
But there are other questions left to answer. "These forests had four months of daylight and four months of complete darkness. Finding trees that could survive under these conditions is as flabbergasting as finding humans that live underwater," said Jahren.
Uncovering ancient weather patterns provides greater understanding of how ecosystems work, opening a window into the Earth's capabilities. It also offers new ideas about the kind of conditions that plants and animals might be able to survive in.
[click image]Polar bear scientist Scott Schliebe of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says that baseline data on the Chukchi Sea polar bear population—which is shared by the U.S. and Russia—is urgently needed. "The increased harvesting of polar bears in Chukotka, Russia, raises serious concerns about the status of this population," he says. "We've had persistent reports of high harvests over the past few years. Some estimates place the harvest as high as 200-400 bears per year."Of course, doing the polar bear studies WHILE Shell is drilling will be a bit more cumbersome, but hell, no biggie.... I just grabbed a slab from the Polar Bears International site and threw some other pertinent links into it... so... consider yourself informed that we're drillin', baby, drillin'....
The scientist says that basic information on the size, status, and trend of the population is necessary to make sure the population is sustainable and to avoid situations resulting in depletion. "The old adage is appropriate, 'An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,'" Schliebe says.
Data on the population's size, reproduction, survival, condition, and habitat associations will also provide a backdrop for understanding or evaluating the effects of climate change, Schliebe says.
"This region is experiencing some of the most dramatic seasonal movements and reductions in summer ice of any area in the circumpolar Arctic," he explains. "Yet we have only a vague notion, nothing in a quantitative sense, of what the effect of these environmental changes may be having on polar bears: that is, their distribution, fall access to denning areas, the survival of various age classes (with dependent and older bears being the most vulnerable), their physical condition, and corresponding changes in their recruitment and survival."
Finally, Schliebe notes, accurate and up-to-date quantitative life history information on the Chukchi bears could be useful in assessing the effects of a proposed trans-arctic shipping lane, offshore oil and gas development (leasing is set to occur next year in the Alaska sector), and other human activities.
Because the Chukchi population straddles the U.S. and Russia, a baseline study wasn't possible before. However, a new polar bear treaty signed by the two nations will allow scientists from both countries to work together.
PBI has funded a scientific presence on the region's Wrangel Island for the past 10 years. We plan to increase our support now that new studies are possible involving the two nations.
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No one has to "marry" anyone else politically; no one has to embrace every tenet or belief that an anti-imperialist ally might hold. You simply have to say: "All of us, regardless of our other views, believe this truth to be self-evident: dismantling the empire will bring immediate and enormous benefits to our nation and to the world."
If in your travels you meet the Buddha, throw him through your tv set.
—Davis Fleetwood
I've found that culture, however useful and important, is neither the foundation nor the ceiling of human experience, even if it is commonly used for walls.
I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States. —Hillary Clinton
