ScienceDaily: Origins of human culture linked to rapid climate change.
Yes; it doesn’t take much imagination to consider that when humans transitioned from hunting-gathering to farming, such landscape alterations might cause climate pattern disturbances.
Later: My above comment is nonsensical when cast against the information in the article - apologies. Thinking about too many things at once. Fingers got ahead of my brain. Thanks MGR for pointing it out.
Yahoo Finance: New Mexico setting new records with drought.
Guardian.UK: Record Burmese python caught in Florida.
Guardian.UK: Oklahoma tornado – in pictures.
Reports say they had 15 minutes’ warning.
NY Times: High Plains Aquifer Dwindles, Hurting Farmers.
“And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.” The American frontier was built on the model of using up resources and moving on to new pastures. Where will the Kansas farmers go? To the breadbasket of Russia?
SpaceWeather.com.
If you didn’t know, this is the site to watch as we approach solar maximum.
Youtube: A grizzly Ate My GoPro!!!
Colgate and Listerine, dude. Get on it.
Guardian.UK: Marines shield Obama from the Washington rain – but not from criticism.
Just out of curiousity, I’m going to have to see how long I could hold up an umbrella in that position. Looks like a deltoid/bicep burner. Props to the Marines. Ignore the catcalls.
SciAm: 400 PPM— Can Artificial Trees Help Pull CO2 from the Air?
LRB: Climate Change Book Reviews, by Thomas Jones.
GreatFallsTribune: Feds—Budget cuts to make wildfire season tougher.
“Jewell spent the past two days touring the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, the government’s national wildfire nerve center. She was joined by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who said the U.S. Forest Service alone will hire 500 fewer firefighters and deploy 50 fewer engines this season.” This sequester fallout will cost more money than it saves. Plain and simple.
NY Times: From Isabella Rossellini, Creature Moms.
What’s “natural” for a mother? Seems a whole lotta cannibalism goin’ on.
BBC: ‘Dramatic decline’ warning for plants and animals.
SF New Mexican: Utility to test plan to pump water underground for use in dry times.
“If we’re able to store the water when we have it, then we’ll be able to use it when we don’t.”
SF New Mexican: Drought worsens in New Mexico; no relief in sight.
What alarms me most is, when I drove up to the Ski Basin the other day location scouting for a friend’s project … the snow-fed freshets were nonexistent. All the usual gushing creeks are trickling. The only one showing some life is the one that cuts through the center of the Ski Basin parking lot! This is terrible news. The Forest Service will have to shut the forests down before July 4, latest. Can’t take a chance on careless picnickers with fireworks and barbecue grills.
I keep saying to everyone in the area - if you want to hike our mountains, do it now. Don’t wait for warmer weather.
SciAm: Forest Service Adds 7 Air Tankers ahead of Fire Season.
Good, but they need more. If I had cash backers, I’d start a company and purchase those outstanding Russian tankers.
Guardian.UK: US rejects EU claim of insecticide as sole reason for bee colony collapse.
Well, now time will tell if they’re right.
Phys.org: High-fructose corn syrup may be tied to worldwide collapse of bee colonies.
Not in the way you might think: “The researchers aren’t suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup is itself toxic to bees, instead, they say their findings indicate that by eating the replacement food instead of honey, the bees are not being exposed to other chemicals that help the bees fight off toxins, such as those found in pesticides.”
Guardian.UK: Grand Canyon uranium mining set to go ahead despite ban from Obama.
“On the Navajo Indian reservation alone there are over 500 abandoned mines, the focus of a five-year clean-up effort by the federal government that ended last year and which many complain was flawed and ineffective.” It is not clean, it has not been remediated. Just … don’t.
Seen on the way home from a business meeting.
Middle of the street, a rattlesnake. Pissed off, scared out of its wits. A *spring* rattlesnake … as in early-season-lots-o-venom. Dude in a pickup truck pulls a U-turn, parks on the side, and grabs his windshield scraper (about six inches long) and starts to run across the road to do … exactly what, I don’t know. I slow down, roll down my window and yell “I wouldn’t do that if I were you!” I get the finger. Thanks, buddy. Senior in car behind me proceeds to try to ‘dodge’ the snake, and flattens it. End of story.
SciAm: Air Gun Blasts Shatter Undersea Tranquility.
9,000 250dB bursts a day? Good grief.
TheMag: Miniature Art by Hasan Kale.
OK, impressive.
EnviroNews: A Bull Elk With a Sense of Humor in Yellowstone National Park.
Lighten things up around here.
BBC: Earth’s core far hotter than thought.
“New measurements suggest the Earth’s inner core is far hotter than prior experiments suggested, putting it at 6,000C - as hot as the Sun’s surface.” Bah, you’ll see this everywhere, but it’s still worthy of note here.
Pacific Standard: Don’t Bring a Gun to a Bear Fight ...
“Last year, Brigham Young biologists analyzed 269 incidents of aggressive encounters between humans and bears in Alaska and found no statistical difference in injury or fatality rates between incidents where guns were used and incidents where they weren’t.” Whereas pepper spray was 92% effective. The rest of this article underlines something I mentioned previously, the fetishization of guns in this country. I don’t name my power sander.
