CRITTERS AND THE GREAT OUTDOORS

Red-Breasted Mergansers seem to have found the styling mousse.

OceanDiver writes—Dawn Chorus - windows to the soul: “Recently I came across a flock of Cedar Waxwings feeding in some roadside Soopolalie bushes and stopped to watch. Waxwings are uncommon and unpredictable in my area so it was a treat to see these handsome expressive birds. As I sifted through my photos later, deciding which to delete as no good, it struck me how important it is to see the eyes of a bird. Take a look for yourself. [...]Perhaps it’s because we rely on our own eyes for so much information about the world that we pay so much attention to the eyes of other creatures. In human psychology there is a wealth of evidence about the importance of eyes in how we relate to others. Even tiny babies show preference for the faces of adults who are looking at them ( www.researchgate.net/… ). Folks with autism have great difficulty with social relationships and communication; and a defining characteristic for them is the inability to make eye contact with others. (www.autismspeaks.org/) Without eye contact they miss social cues, can’t pick up or share emotional states, and their averted gaze conveys disinterest to others. As a social species, making connections is so critical to us it actually diverts brain power from cognitive tasks (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/… ) — and must be worth it even so. Operationally speaking, we remember others more intensely we’ve shared eye contact (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/…. ). Those of us who love nature feel a connection with wildlife, and it’s not unreasonable to feel that seeing their eyes communicates what’s going on in their minds. As much as we can, they being different species.”

OceanDiver writes—The Daily Bucket - wood rose: “We have two kinds of wild roses in my neighborhood. The vigorous Nootka roses revel in full light, and hence are abundant on roadsides, in fields, by the beach, encroach onto lawns, and will form thickets unless actively chopped back. The other rose prefers shady woods with filtered sunlight and intertwines its spindly prickly canes with other understory shrubs like salal, snowberry, oceanspray, twinberry and vines of dewberry or honeysuckle. Its small pink flowers smell as sweet as the Nootka’s but there are so many fewer you have to get quite close to catch their fragrance.”

Maximum extent of last ice sheet, yellow arrow=here

OceanDiver writes—The Daily Bucket - rock bounty (thanks Ice Age): “With the summer solstice imminent we’re getting some extreme low tides these days. This day I went down to check out a bouldery beach nearby. Where did this bounty of variously colored and patterned boulders come from? Over the past 2 million years, during a series of Ice Ages, glacial sheets rolled over vast areas of territory as they spread south, picking up rocks along the way. When the glaciers melted, the rocks fell out, sometimes many hundreds of miles from their source. The most recent glaciation had its maximum extent about 12,000 years ago. It reached about 150 miles south of this beach, so when it began to retreat, a whole lot of rocky material, from sand grains to giant erratics, were deposited in the Salish Sea area. Differential wave action along the shore sorted sediment in such a way as to leave each beach with its own set of loose rocks. This particular beach is mostly composed of boulders baseball to basketball size with a few bigger ones (unlike the last beach rock Bucket I did at a different beach which has mostly ping pong ball size cobbles).”

owktree writes—Daily Bucket: Sunday Pot-au-Feu - Working towards the Solstice. A collection of late May and early June pictures. Photo diary.

Dan Bacher writes—Yurok Tribe’s Salmon Protection Effort Highlighted In CA Academy of Sciences’ Exhibit: “The Yurok Tribe’s salmon protection effort on the Klamath River is highlighted at the California Academy of Sciences’ ‘Giants of Land and Sea’ exhibit in San Francisco that will premiere on Friday, June 15. The Yurok Tribe’s portion of the California Academy of Sciences exhibit, titled Yurok Voices, is comprised of a series of three videos, in which Yurok political leaders and fisheries biologists detail the Tribe’s enduring effort to revitalize the Klamath’s once substantial salmon runs. The salmon and steelhead of the Klamath and Trinity rivers are currently threatened by the most environmentally destructive public works project in California history, Governor Jerry Brown’s Delta Tunnels project, also known as the California WaterFix, as well as Trump administration and Congressional efforts to gut environmental protections for fish, rivers and the oceans.”

Waterfall at Hetch Hetchie, California.

Passionfruit Flower writes—The Daily Bucket: What I Did For My Spring Vacation: “I am very lucky to live in the great state of California with so many opportunities to enjoy diverse nature settings. This is a mainly pictorial bucket featuring my favorite pictures during my spring vacation in to Santa Barbara, Yosemite National Park and Jalama Beach in Lompoc, CA. I trailer camped with two friends and our 3 dogs and had an amazing time.”

SemperEducandis writes—Monarch Butterflies.... R.I.P.: “Millions of kilos of glyphosate being dumped into the world ecology without any real restrictions…. This Spring we planted fifty sprouted milkweed plants in our back yard, and several hundred seeds around the “waste spaces” in our neighbourhood. (Many are growing well, both from sprouts and seeds.) I have seen exactly ONE Monarch this entire year so far. There was ONE small clutch of eggs on ONE of the milkweed plants, and I have since counted only five caterpillars on them.”

Walter Einenkel writes—New study shows that human activities are turning mammals into nocturnal animals: “A new study of 62 species of mammal from around the world has shown that not since the dinosaurs roamed the earth have mammals been so nocturnal. Researchers out of Boise State and UC Berkeley analyzed dozens of studies from around the globe, almost all from this century, and discovered that humans are clearly driving mammals into the shadows. They found that mammal nocturnality increased by a factor of 1.36 in areas or periods with high human disturbance. This means that if an animal normally split its activity evenly between day and night, human activity is associated with an increase in the animals' proportion of nighttime activity to 68 percent. This was true across the board, for small mammals like opossums and large ones like African elephants; for apex carnivores as well as their prey; in Argentina and California and Zimbabwe and Nepal and Poland and everywhere else they looked.”

annieli writes—#MPRaccoon reaches summit, gets captured and released... she persisted:

MTmofo writes—A raccoon has scaled 23 floors of the UBS building in St. Paul UPDATE: HE MADE IT TO THE ROOF! Tweets galore.

Besame writes—Daily Bucket: Sign of summer - convergent ladybug swarms in the Sierra foothills: “Convergent ladybugs (beetles) are altitudinal migrants. They spent spring in the valley, summer in the foothills, and winter at higher elevation. When temperatures reach 65oF (18oC), the mountain ladybugs emerge from hibernation, mate, and fly downslope to the Central Valley floor to lay eggs. The new generation hatches and eat aphids. In June, more new generations of ladybugs might hang out longer in the valley if the aphids are abundant. But when the aphid supply decreases, the ladybugs get hungry and go up to the Sierra Nevada foothills. Colder temperatures in late fall signal the ladybugs to move further upslope from the foothills into the higher mountains. They gorge on pollen and nectar to store fat in their bodies. During winter they form large clusters and hibernate in protected canyons. The clusters help the ladybugs store heat and also maybe reduce predation.”

CLIMATE CHAOS

ian douglas rushlau writes—Carbon Brief: Sea level rise from Antarctic ice melting has tripled in past five years: “Carbon combustion is causing our planet to heat up. A lot. If you’re not a Republican, you know this. The effects of carbon combustion induced climate change are not off in the future, they’re right now, and they’re intensifying. Terrifyingly so. Daisy Dunne, writing today for Carbon Brief, provides the details of new research that examined sea level data over the past quarter century: The study, published in Nature, finds that ice loss from Antarctica has caused sea levels to rise by 7.6mm from 1992-2017, with two fifths of this increase occurring since 2012. Forty percent of sea level rise attributable to Antarctic ice melt in the last twenty-five years, has occurred in just the last six: … the new analysis finds that Antarctic ice melt is now driving sea level rise of 0.6mm a year – suggesting that the rate of melting has increased three-fold in just five years.”

tampaedski writes—What if the Arctic had a couple extra months of peak melting season? ”The general consensus is that it is too early for a major cyclone to do much damage to the ice. But the penultimate paragraph hold a bit of warning: Storm or no, it’s been a weird, bad year for Arctic sea ice so far. After limping along all winter, Bering sea ice was basically gone by May, months ahead of schedule. Even before this storm, sea ice around Svalbard was looking more like it should in September. Overall, Arctic sea ice extent for May was at its second-lowest on record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s latest monthly sea ice report released on June 6.In some ways the weather patterns in the arctic seem to have had the same advance for some of the things I even see shifting here in Florida. I have two non-native trees in the back yard that used to take until mid May to have leaves; one of them starts to leave in early March now. The Arctic has warmed up twice as fast as the rest of the globe.”

Xaxnar writes—Ancient Trees Die in Africa: Climate Change Named as Suspect in Deaths: “Via the BBC: International scientists have discovered that most of the oldest and largest African baobab trees have died over the past 12 years. They suspect the demise may be linked to climate change, although they have no direct evidence of this. [...] The exact cause of death is yet to be determined, but climate change is cited as a suspect; the trees are found in a region with harsh climate under normal conditions. Climate change may have stressed them beyond their limits. Disease does not seem to be implicated. The age and size of the trees may have been a contributing factor. If younger/smaller specimens have more resilience, the species may not be in trouble yet, but that remains to be seen.”

ClimateDenierRoundup writes—Model Citizens: Improvements to Climate Models Needed to Address Uncertainty and Technology: “One of the oldest denier refrains is that climate models overestimate both warming from CO2, and the economic impacts the world will endure from climate change. One of the more sophisticated (as in sophistry) denier refrains is that because we’re uncertain about the impacts of climate pollution, we should take a wait-and-see approach to climate policy. Two new papers, covered by David Roberts at Vox , provide some reason to agree that models aren’t handling uncertainty well, and aren’t properly accounting for climate costs. What’s this? Has Roberts gone to the dark side ? Have denier arguments finally been validated by real media? Is our understanding of the climate coming crashing down around us? No. As Roberts explains, it turns out models are likely underestimating the cost of climate change and overestimating the price tag to fight it. And a more rigorous incorporation of uncertainty actually makes climate action an even smarter decision than we already know it to be.”

ClimateDenierRoundup writes—Former Trump Advisor Now Fighting Against Investor Engagement Campaigns: ”Remember George David Banks? He’s the guy who led Trump’s pro-coal event at COP 23 . He’s also the energy advisor who had to resign because past pot use supposedly prevented him from getting security clearance (though he apparently never got high… ) Prior Banks’s stint in the administration, he worked for Senator Inhofe and lobbied for Kochy orgs , so it was no surprise that after his less-than-gracious exit from the White House, Banks landed on his feet at a new industry group dedicated to fighting the movement of investors trying to use their financial stake in corporations to address climate change (and lumping this suit-and-tie crowd together with the more fiery divestment movement). The campaign, Main Street Investors Coalition , is a product of some decidedly non-Main Street institutions: the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Council for Capital Formation and Savings & Retirement Foundation. NAM is one of the most effective anti-climate lobbying organizations , while the other is also a Koch-funded big business lobby . An op-ed by Banks in The Hill last month gives a glossy overview of the project, but yesterday the Washington Examiner ran a new piece by Banks that makes it clear exactly what the new group is trying to do: pretend to argue in good faith that the divestment movement is counter-productive.”

Extreme Weather & Natural Phenomena

Pakalolo writes—Increasing Heat Is Driving Off Clouds That Dampen California Wildfires: “Recently an article in the State of the Planet, a publication of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, caught my eye. The article noted that urbanization and climate change are combining to make wildfires in Southern California’s coastal cities more intense because it is ‘driving off low-lying clouds,’ aka Stratus clouds as well as fog, increasing the risk of forest fires along with the ability of nature to fight them. Kevin Krajik writes: ‘Cloud cover is plummeting in southern coastal California,’ said Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the research. ‘And as clouds decrease, that increases the chance of bigger and more intense fires.; Williams said the decrease is driven mainly by urban sprawl, which increases near-surface temperatures, but that overall warming climate is contributing, too. Increasing heat drives away clouds, which admits more sunlight, which heats the ground further, leading to dryer vegetation, and higher fire risk, said Williams. The study appears this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The research follows a 2015 study in which Williams first documented a decrease in cloud cover around the sprawling Los Angeles and San Diego areas.”

OCEANS, WATER, DROUGHT

Dan Bacher writes—New California WaterFix environmental document featuring 'design changes' posted online: “The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) on June 12 posted online a new document that details the environmental impact of proposed design changes purporting to minimize impacts felt by Delta communities and the ecosystem if Governor Jerry Brown’s Delta Tunnels project is built. The project consists of two giant 35 mile long underground tunnels that would divert Sacramento River away from the San Francisco Bay Delta directly to South Delta state and federal pumping facilities in the South Delta. The construction of the tunnels would facilitate the export of massive quantities of Northern California water to Southern California water agencies and San Joaquin Valley agribusiness interests.”

Dan Bacher writes—SoCal water agency (MWDOC) will vote on resolution backing rider to ban Delta Tunnels lawsuits: “The Metropolitan Water District (MWDOC) of Orange County staff has recommended that its board of directors support a rider to a federal spending bill introduced by Representative Ken Calvert that would ban lawsuits against Governor Jerry Brown’s Delta Tunnels plan. The MWDOC board of directors will vote on a resolution supporting the controversial rider at the water agency’s board meeting on Monday, June 18 The rider would set a dangerous legal precedent if approved by Congress. ‘The elimination of judicial review foreshadows a regressive slide from a government controlled by laws to a government controlled by rulers,’ summed up Bob Wright, Senior Attorney at Friends of the River. MWDOC is a wholesale water supplier and resource planning agency serving the Orange County area — and a vocal proponent of the California WaterFix.”

Dan Bacher writes—Who Owns California 2018: Big Oil and the Western States Petroleum Association: “The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) is not a household name in California, but it should be. It’s the trade association for the oil industry and the largest and most powerful corporate lobbying organization in the state. if you want to know the industries, organizations and people that control California, WSPA and Big Oil are right at the top of the list. WSPA represents a who’s who of oil companies including oil giants Chevron, Exxon, Occidental Petroleum and many others. The companies that WSPA represents account for the bulk of petroleum exploration, production, refining, transportation and marketing in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, according to the WSPA website, www.wspa.org. WSPA and Big Oil wield their power in 6 major ways: through (1) lobbying; (2) campaign spending; (3) serving on and putting shills on regulatory panels; (4) creating Astroturf groups: (5) working in collaboration with media; and (6) contributing to non profit organizations.”

ENERGY

Fossil Fuels

Meteor Blades writes—Report confirms that fossil-fuel tools at Interior Dept. nixed coal health study for no good reason: “The inspector general’s office of the Department of the Interior stated in a report issued Tuesday that the agency had failed to offer an adequate rationale for canceling an independent study of the health effects of mountaintop coal mining. There was no evidence that a formal review was undertaken before the study was ended, the IG report said. But there was a clear reason for the move: DOI chief Ryan Zinke and a number of his top minions, like Douglas Domenech and Vincent DeVito, are tools of the fossil-fuel industry. They are doing all in their power to shelter the oil, gas, and coal business from both old and new regulations—even if this means damage to people’s health and the environment. It was 10 months ago that the Trump regime put a stop to the $1 million National Academy of Sciences mountaintop mining study. The research had been initiated after the Department of Environmental Protection and Bureau for Public Health of West Virginia sought help in scrutinizing evidence of added illnesses and premature deaths in parts of Appalachia where surface mining is prevalent. Previous studies—like this one—had shown a higher mortality rate in such areas.”

best coast writes—A Real Difference: DNC Bans Fossil Fuel Company Donations: “No institution is perfect, but while the RNC and the NRA collude with Russians, our DNC just banned donations from fossil fuel companies and plans to propose a ban on donations over $200 for fossil fuel company employees. We. Are. Different. We. Offer. A. Real. Alternative. We’re. Real. ‘This is going to be the way that we ask people to make some clear choices, so voters know what they’re getting,’ Pelosi said. ‘When you talk the talk and walk the walk, that’s how you’re going to inspire people’.”

Noodles writes—Revisited: DNC Bans Fossil Fuel Company Donations: “A couple of days ago a story on this site story rolled past which did not get much notice. I have been busy and wanted to dig deeper into the entire thing about a unanimous decision by the DNC ruling that it will not accept donations from fossil fuel companies but my time has been limited. In a way it was sort of like the party rejecting a corporate PAC. Furthermore and perhaps more importantly the author of story that brought this to my attention, best coast, wrote: … and plans to propose a ban on donations over $200 for fossil fuel company employees. Now some of the comments were dismissive of the decision. The dissenters wrote that the amount of money that it amounts to is only a tiny fraction of the DNC’s income. And while on the one hand I think that is important to point out if that is the case, that it should be clear. But while I might be one who may find myself sometimes more on the side of the dissenters, but not so much this time. For one, this proposal which was submitted by Christine Pelosi, daughter of the minority speaker, which offers to begin a process whereupon the party begins to divest itself from the fossil fuel industry does appear to be a important stand to make in itself. It is a clear stand about the need for addressing climate change.”

Renewables, Efficiency & Conservation

Crashing Vor writes—Software-Determined Electricity Could Save the World: “I don’t see another post here about software-defined electricity and the “company” 3DFS, so I’ll toss this out. The technology involved and its implications are, potentially, a very big deal. David Roberts, in a very comprehensive piece for Vox, lays out the basic problem: electricity, as we currently make, store, measure and use it, is chaotic, dumb and so poorly managed that it’s nearly two-thirds waste. And, by ‘poorly managed,’ I’m not talking about power companies, but the electricity itself. We sort the movement of electrons neatly by voltage, current and power, but pay little attention to other attributes which determine its efficiency for use, because we’re used to analog metrics that function reasonably well measuring voltage, current, power, phase, etc. down to about 60 times a second. Even the ‘smart grid’ and ‘smart panel’ tech with which we’re getting familiar is still largely monitored and controlled in analog. But hardware and software can now monitor waveforms of moving electrons digitally to much higher resolutions and adjust the power and the devices using it for maximum efficiency.”