A Change in the Wind

Sierra Water: It's Cleaner Than You Think

That's according to an ER doc and professor at UC Davis named Robert Derlet, who has been testing water at the most popular Sierra wilderness sites for years for the Wilderness Medicine Society.

Here's a study on the subject he authored a few years ago for the WMS, and here's a terrific story about his work from The Los Angeles Times, back in the good old days when they had an outdoors section.

Three take-away points: chances are good that you can drink water straight from Sierra streams and lakes without any filtration and stay healthy. The parasite giardia is not likely to harm you:

The threat is comparable to the chances of beachgoers being attacked by a shark, according to University of Cincinnati researchers who studied the danger giardia poses to backpackers, namely "an extraordinarily rare event to which the public and the press have seemingly devoted inappropriate attention."

(Derlet agrees, and in the aforementioned study points out that tests in the last few years on backpackers who did develop diarrhea in the backcountry found that giardia was not the cause. He's also skeptical that water filters, which easily clog, would successful remove giardia cysts.)

Second, the most likely risk is the familiar bug e. coli, which can be spread, for instance, by cattle manure falling in water, but even in heavily traveled backcountry sites the numbers are reassuring. Backpackers can safely drink water straight from backcountry lakes. Derlet told the Times reporter:

Most people think the water is better from a nice, running stream because it's so fresh and churned up. But the top few inches of lake water are zapped with ultraviolet rays from the sun, which are a very powerful disinfectant.

Third, the most likely pathway to infection is by poor hygiene, and according to experts, washing your hands with alcohol hand gels after a visit to the wilderness privy is "incredibly effective" at preventing you from infecting others.

To yours truly, this fear of wild water is part of a larger fear of nature itself, and an absolute plague on American society... to help us overcome it, let me repost some beauty at Pioneer Basin from the astounding (and generous) wilderness photographer Buck Forester, a hero I have yet to meet...

Obama Frames Climate Change

The Obama administration is coming back from the G-8 meetings with no agreement from other nations -- both European and developing -- on reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases such as CO2.

This has not been clearly reported; as so often seems to happen these days, the clearest statement on a murky news situation comes not from the news pages, but from the editorial, as in this from the NYTimes:

Before the leaders gathered, their negotiators had already settled on a draft communiqué, committing to a 50 percent cut in worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The industrial countries would cut theirs by 80 percent, and the developing countries would make “significant” if unquantified cuts. But on Wednesday, things fell apart. The developing nations flatly refused to commit to the 50 percent goal by 2050.

It was not immediately clear why they balked. (My emphasis.) Some repeated an old demand: that the United States and the other industrialized nations — which bear responsibility for the buildup of greenhouse gases since the beginning of the industrial revolution — should do more and do it faster. Otherwise, the developing nations would be left with an unfair share of the burden while their economies were expanding rapidly.

What is clear is that Mr. Obama and the other leaders of the developed world have yet to come up with the right mixture of pressure and incentives to get the developing countries to commit.

The administration's cap-and-trade plan can be criticized, but I don't see how anyone who wants to see the world act to reduce the risks of climate change could argue with Obama's closing statement:

Ultimately we have a choice. We can either shape our future or we can let events shape it for us. We can fall back on the stale debates and old divisions, or we can move forward and decide to meet this challenge together. I think it's clear from our progress today which path is preferable.

Of course, that's not to say that some (such as Ted Rall) won't snipe...and memorably so:

Larry King Turns Out to be a Very Likable Guy

Had a chance to interview Larry King last week. He's doing a book tour, and so took questions for fifteen minutes from me at CNN, followed no doubt by fifteen minutes with another reporter from some other part of the country, and so on. Still, I found myself liking the guy, despite his hunger for fame and fortune. He's a good listener, and takes questions seriously, and he's funny. Here's my favorite Q&A:

When asked what people get wrong about him, the famous interviewer for a moment was stumped.

“They think I must be a pretty cool guy, but I’m not,” he said. “Food falls on me. I’m not hip. I couldn’t tell you one song on the Billboard 500. I like young people and they usually like me, but sometimes they think I’m with it. I’m not with it, I’m around it. I’m just about ready to accept the fax machine.”

Fish and Sheep Know Globe is Warming: Why Don't We?

Talk to climate change skeptics, and they will take you into the weeds of global temperature measurement, the supposedly overlooked importance of the sun, and so on. They will invariably cite the obvious fact that global temps have risen and fallen over the eons.

But they will not mention that the glaciers and plants and animals, with whom we share the planet, are responding to the rise in global temps in predictable and difficult to deny ways. In the 19th century, there were 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park; by 2030 they will be gone, according to the crazy wild-haired radicals at the Parks Service. Sheep, which have been weighed for other reasons for decades on a remote Scottish island, are shrinking due to global warming, according to a new study reported in Science. Dozens of other natural examples have been cited and photographed.

Many are in a new presentation for the US Fish and Wildlife Service by Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech (who has also written a book for Christians on the subject). She cites a study of fish habitat off Alaska by F.J. Mueter and M.A. Litzow, from 2007, which includes an excellent graph:

All this raises an inevitable question: When will those of us in Southern California be smart enough to shift our habitat?

After all if we continue down the path of uncontrolled emissions, drought in our region will look something like this:

 

Anyone else thinking we may have to move north someday before it's too late?

Arctic Ice Trends Sharply Downward: Few Notice or Care

It's frankly shocking to me how many people I encounter who still cling to the idea that the globe is not warming, despite vast scientific libraries of evidence to the contrary.

Here's the latest example, from data compiled by NASA and ICESAT:

For more, see NASA's story New NASA Satellite Survey Reveals Dramatic Arctic Sea Ice Thinning

Two take-away points from the chart above. One, the red indicates multi-year ice; two, the blue reveals thin seasonal ice, which will return in the winters...but has little of the density or the staying power of what has been lost. In the words of Ron Kwok, writing for the GRL:

The total area covered by the thicker, older "multi-year" ice that
has survived one or more summers shrank by 42 percent.

Which raises the question: What will it take to convince doubters? The loss of Miami?

(Sorry.)

Palin to Run on Oil Development Platform in 2012

Really. Outside of her flaming display of hurt feelings, it's about the only thing that makes any kind of sense in her resignation "statement" (if we are so generous as to characterize it in that way).

(You'll have to ignore the eccentric capitalization and odd verb choices; clearly, Palin without a speechwriter is like Bush on steroids -- all the malapropisms, but none of the focus.)

We aggressively and responsibly develop our resources because they were created to be used to better our world... to HELP people... and we protect the environment and Alaskans (the resource owners) foremost with our policies.

Here's some of the things we've done:

We created a petroleum integrity office to oversee safe development. We held the line FOR Alaskans on Point Thomson - and finally for the first time in decades - they're drilling for oil and gas.

We have AGIA, the gasline project - a massive bi-partisan victory (the vote was 58 to 1!) - also succeeding as intended - protecting Alaskans as our clean natural gas will flow to energize us, and America, through a competitive, pro-private sector project. This is the largest private sector energy project, ever. THIS is energy independence.

And ACES - another bipartisan effort - is working as intended and industry is publicly acknowledging its success. Our new oil and gas "clear and equitable formula" is so Alaskans will no longer be taken advantage of. ACES incentivizes NEW exploration and development and JOBS that were previously not going to happen with a monopolized North Slope oil basin.

In other words, Palin's most noteworthy accomplishments as a governor, according to Palin herself,  all relate to oil and natural gas development.

Logically, one can only conclude that this will be her platform for a national run. "Drill, Baby, Drill II."

And then she concludes:

In the words of General MacArthur said, "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction."

Wow. Steve Brodner takes a look at this craziness and makes the suddenly obvious connection to another flaming narcissist:

Karl Malden: The Greatest Mitch Ever Rests in Peace

News just in that Karl Malden, who is apparently remembered by most people for some dumb TV show and advertisement, has died.

For yours truly he will always be Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire, perhaps the best work of fiction ever produced by an American. He won an Academy Award for the movie role, and deservedly so. One does wonder in retrospect how Marlo Brando didn't win for the same movie, but such is the Academy.

The hokey-sounding but still striking-looking trailer from l951 plays below...

DDT: The Chemical Disaster That Won't Go Away

Not all herbicides and pesticides concentrate in the ecosystem, but some do, and among the prime offenders is DDT, which (contrary to right-wing propaganda) is still a problem in the United States today, decades after the corporation that made it in Southern California stopped manufacturing it.

In a first-rate story from a week ago in the Ventura County Star, Zeke Barlow explains:

Although the company that made DDT stopped dumping it into the Pacific Ocean off the Palos Verdes peninsula more than 38 years ago, the chemical is still damaging the ecosystem today and will continue to do so for decades.

The DDT dumping grounds is more than 70 miles south of Ventura County, but the long hand of the chemical is still felt in birds swimming off our shores. DDT exposure causes egg shells to become so thin that they crack during incubation.

The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a series of remediations off the Palos Verdes peninsula that could help reduce the amount of DDT in the ecosystem by dumping thousands of tons of sand on top of the contaminated area. It could reduce the amount of DDT that creeps into the food chain.

But even if the $36.6 million project is approved and deemed a success, it doesn’t mean DDT will be out of the ecosystem.

“We are hoping to see an acceleration in recovery, but we are still talking decades,” said Carmen White, project manager with the EPA. “The idea that it could take a long time is disheartening, but it’s a reality.”

Need more evidence of DDT's harm? Here's a study compiling evidence gathered by researchers around the world. The bottom line?

The recent literature shows a growing body of evidence that exposure to DDT and its breakdown product DDE may be associated with adverse health outcomes such as breast cancer, diabetes, decreased semen quality, spontaneous abortion, and impaired neurodevelopment in children.

Yikes.

Sarah Palin Makes Fun of an Old Man

From an interview with Sarah Palin in Runner's World:

"I used to joke around with John McCain during the campaign about coming jogging with me. And once I asked him what his favorite exercise was, and he said, 'I go wading.' Wading. He lives on a creek in Arizona, so he goes wading. That cracked me up."

No wonder the McCain campaign is still pissed.

"She Smoked Like a Coal-Fired Power Plant..."

For the last couple of weeks, I've been mentioning the newly-released report on global warming in our country from the US Global Change Research Program. I've been reading reports from various scientific agencies, including the IPCC, for some time now, and I have never read one this dire.

But even among my tough-minded readers, this raises hackles. How can we talk casually about a future climate so much worse than today's?

On the other hand, how can we not talk about it?

If this future were a human being, we would want to lock him up and try him -- or worse.

So let's give some credit to the imagination of Miriam Goldstein, who turns the science into a film noir -- and a few other genres. Anything to get folks to pay attention. Way to go, Miriam!

Climate change prediction: The U.S. will be seven degrees hotter.

The moment she walked into my office, the temperature got two degrees hotter. She smoked like a coal-fired power plant and had a carbon footprint that went all the way to 850 molecules of CO2 for every million molecules of atmosphere. That was more than double the carbon in the atmosphere now, and more carbon than I really wanted to handle. This dame was hot—and I mean seven degrees of global temperature increase hot. And she wasn’t even the worse-case scenario. Even her smart cousin, who stabilized climate change at a mere four degrees of global temperature rise, looked like she could kill some penguins before breakfast and wash them down with torrential flooding. I poured myself a shot of ice water. I was going to need it.

Politics as Usual Betrays the Planet

Paul Krugman, throwing down the gauntlet. Seems unfair that this guy writes better on climate than nearly any other lefty commentator around -- and it's not even his field.

Is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

On Hypocritical Philandering Right-Wing Politicians

Such as Nevada senator John Ensign; well, I'm with Matt Taibbi.

 [pic of the Senator with Miss Nevada USA for 2006, Tiffany, from 2006 Nevada Queens]

He had an affair with a campaign aide, not Tiffany, but as Taibbi said:

I am going to really enjoy the inevitable media fragging Senator John Ensign is going to take because of his holier-than-thou attitude during the Lewinsky scandal, when he called on Clinton to resign for having an affair. What’s especially delicious about this is that Ensign back then and during the Larry Craig scandal played the “Because of these bad apples, even God-fearing, recreational-sex-disdaining politicians like me are now going to be called sexual deviants” card. He’s sold that angle hard on a number of occasions (”There’s too many people that paint with a broad brush that we’re all corrupt, all amoral,” he once said).  He said a lot of stuff, and it’s all going to be dragged back out now and shoved in his defeated, suddenly elderly face.

Or as my old pal Jack Vacek used to say: "These Republicans, they like to pretend they don't have dicks."

Okay, time to draw the curtains...yours truly is off to Big Sur for an anniversary with the missus. Back Monday. See you then (virtually)...

Wilco (the show) (at the Wiltern)(on Tuesday 6/23)

Wilco has a new record out at the end of this month, called Wilco (the album) which includes Wilco (the song). In their show at the Wiltern Theater last night in Los Angeles, lead singer Jeff Tweedy aggressively hawked "the merch booth," and especially the "awesome program."

Couldn't tell if he was being ironic or had totally sold himself out.

But this much is for sure -- the show was loud, and the set-list was almost completely different from the night before, albeit with a few classic hits ("Jesus, Etc.", "California Stars," "Heavy Metal Drummer") mixed in with some familiar white-noise guitar freak-outs "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" "Bull Black Nova" to knock the crowd a step back.

Impressive show, if not especially emotional, with the exception of a heartfelt "Reservations," which was enough to make yours truly cry a little. Band played only two or three songs from the new record, but "One Wing" proved to be very effective live -- another heartbreaker.

Tweedy bantered with the crowd as I never have seen do before, and even brought his guitar down to the pit so a fan could strum out a song as he (Tweedy) played the chords. Maybe that's an old showbiz stunt, but I've never that one, either. He genuinely seemed to like the crowd, which he got clapping and singing with ease. He told us:

You can't stereotype people in L.A. Yeah, some of them are uptight, but some of them are really really laid back.

Appreciate that, Jeff. Thank You. Here's a fuller review, and right on the mark, from Darryl Morden. Here's a pic from fanpop:

An Army of Clouds -- Janisse Ray on Global Warming in Georgia

Janisse Ray, a wonderful writer from the South, has a story about an experience she had with climate change in a gorgeous new interactive book just released by the Union of Concerned Scientists, called Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming. Well worth a look...

I never saw a spring so stormy. Spring is supposed to be a time of fragrant wisteria and five blue-green eggs the size of jellybeans in a nest box. Spring is mild, emergent, translucent.
    It's March. I wake to rain, an army of clouds that darken and lower by the hour. By midmorning the weather radio pops on with an alert: Tornado watch in surrounding counties. Outside there's lightning, long and brilliant and vicious, accompanied by its sidekick, thunder, rolling in great booms—bowling balls across an alley. I call my mother, who tells me that she and Daddy will get under the stairs if there's a tornado.
    "I have never seen daylight this dark," I say. "This is like night."
    Rain is falling so hard the ground has long since given up absorbing it. The water is two inches deep in places. The alert radio alarms: a tornado has touched down in Dublin. Prepare to take shelter immediately.
    I live in a tinderbox. The house, about eighty years old, is made of heart pine, which is very flammable. Some of the windows come out in your hands when you raise them. In the yard, thirty feet from the back door, an old-growth longleaf pine leans toward the house.
    My dad calls back. He wants me to get into the ditch out by the road.
    "What if I get sucked up?"
"Get in the culvert," he says.
    "And if it floods?"
    We hang up because I want to listen for a roar like a train. It's hailing, ice chunks so big you could bag and sell them. The weather radio is calling out all the places where tornadoes have been spotted. Take cover! Should a tornado touch down you will not have time.
    I put blankets on the floor of the small hallway, next to the freezer. I close all the doors leading to the hall.
    Growing up in south Georgia, I never heard of tornadoes in spring. They came in summer and fall. Scientists say that warmer temperatures will favor the severe thunderstorms that give birth to tornadoes, and it's possible that the tornado season could shift to what used to be the colder months. This looks like the climate crisis to me.
    I wait a long time, thinking: We are being taken by storm. But after a while the sky lightens, and finally the weather robot says that the storms are beyond us, farther east and our county is no longer under a warning. I can come out.

Here's a TV graphic of a tornado that hit Georgia this year. According to the info posted with the picture, an F2 tornado hit Atlanta for the first time this year.