the Jersey Shore (sigh)

I said goodbye to what I expect to be the last lotus in the pond - their leaves and those of the waterlilies are badly chlorotic, and burnt.

Once again, I find myself transported to Spring Lakes for a week. At first light in the morning, there was a racket across the street. The twin to this sickly maple was swiftly removed, before breakfast.

A stump grinder did its work rapidly and noisily...and now all that remains is this circle of chips. I couldn't make this stuff up!

Adjacent to the house, a branch has fallen onto a dead, brown lawn.

Next door, a tall cedar has a transparent crown,

bark splits from the trunk in shreds, and tufts of foliage are fried.

Entire trees are spangled with clumps of dead leaves, indicative of terminal, irreversible decline.

This is true for every specimen, in every yard. Nothing looks healthy and normal.

Pines are thin, and they have burnt needle tips.

What's most important is that it isn't just long-lived trees, which have suffered decades of cumulative exposure to toxic ozone, that are damaged. The foliage of annuals such as these canna lilies have identical stippling and singeing. It cannot be heat - these flowering tubers love really hot weather. It cannot be drought - these have received plenty of water. Nothing else explains why these plants would have the same sort of damage as trees, other than the composition of the atmosphere. Furthermore, something has changed recently because annual ornamentals and crops didn't have such obvious and universal impacts until last summer. What is different? Either we crossed a tipping point of background tropospheric ozone concentration, or ethanol emissions are worse than gasoline, or the chemical soup, especially the nitrogen cycle, has become intolerably caustic.

Here is a link to teleconference with Lester Brown, discussing the threat of climate change to world food security. According to this ClimateProgress post, he is "one of the world's foremost authorities on the connection between climate and agriculture." Did he mention ozone? No. But he did say growing corn for ethanol is a mistake...although not because of emissions. Nobody really knows what the effects of peroxyacetyl nitrate and acetaldehyde emissions might be, because nobody has bothered to study the issue!

Apparently, in a former life Mr. Brown was quite a successful tomato grower, right here in New Jersey. Mr. Brown, we aren't going to be growing tomatoes much longer if we don't stop burning fuel and pouring poison into the atmosphere. You mentioned during your teleconference that it might be prudent to develop plants suited to higher temperatures with smaller stomata, to prevent them from losing so much water - with the caveat that this would impede their ability to absorb CO2, photosynthesize, and grow.

But that is exactly what ozone causes plants to do - close their stomata.

Please, Mr. Brown! Maybe you can find out what is killing all the vegetation so it can be stopped before there aren't any seeds and nuts left!

"The Fallacy of Climate Activism" by Adam Sacks

According to an article from BBC News, rice yields have been steadily decreasing. This is blamed on warmer nights. Frankly, that sounds highly unlikely to me. Have they checked the ozone levels in the atmosphere? Have they looked for symptoms on the plants? Not according to the article! The hypothesizing that temperature rise is responsible sounds garbled and doesn't appear to have any factual support:

"The mechanism involved is not clear but may involve rice plants having to respire more during warm nights, so expending more energy, without being able to photosynthesise.

By contrast, higher temperatures during the day were related to higher yields; but the effect was less than the yield-reducing impact of warmer nights."

But what do I know?!

Meanwhile parts of the world continue to drown while others are being incinerated. Here are pictures found at Survival Acres, interspersed with passages of an essay by Adam Sacks, "The Fallacy of Climate Activism" that expresses sentiments with which I heartily concur (click the link above for the original and his endnotes):

"In the 20 years since we climate activists began our work in earnest, the state of the climate has become dramatically worse, and the change is accelerating—this despite all of our best efforts. Clearly something is deeply wrong with this picture. What is it that we do not yet know? What do we have to think and do differently to arrive at urgently different outcomes?[1]

The answers lie not with science, but with culture.

Climate activists are obsessed with greenhouse-gas emissions and concentrations. Since global climate disruption is an effect of greenhouse gases, and a disastrous one, this is understandable. But it is also a mistake.

Such is the fallacy of climate activism[2]: We insist that global warming is merely a consequence of greenhouse-gas emissions. Since it is not, we fail to tell the truth to the public.

I think that there are two serious errors in our perspectives on greenhouse gases:"

"Global Warming as Symptom

The first error is our failure to understand that greenhouse gases are not a cause but a symptom, and addressing the symptom will do little but leave us with a devil’s sack full of many other symptoms, possibly somewhat less rapidly lethal but lethal nonetheless.

The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations.[3] This should be no news flash, but the seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.

To be sure, global climate disruption is the No. 1 symptom. But if planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry—to name just a few. (While these symptoms exist independently, many are intensified by global warming.)

We will not change course by addressing each of these as separate issues; we have to address root cultural cause."

"Beyond Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The second error is our stubborn unwillingness to understand that the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions, as we have currently framed it, is over.

It is absolutely over and we have lost.

We have to say so.

There are three primary components of escalating greenhouse-gas concentrations that are out of our control:

Thirty-Year Lag

The first is that generally speaking the effects we are seeing today, as dire as they are, are the result of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in the range of only 330 parts per million (ppm), not the result of today’s concentrations of almost 390 ppm. This is primarily a consequence of the vast inertial mass of the oceans, which absorb temperature and carbon dioxide and create a roughly 30-year lag between greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects. We are currently seeing the effects of greenhouse gases emitted before 1980.

Just as the scientific community hadn’t realized how rapidly and extensively geophysical and biological systems would respond to increases in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, we currently have only a rough idea of what that 60 ppm already emitted will mean, even if we stopped our emissions today. But we do know, with virtual certainty, that it will be full of unpleasant surprises.

Positive Feedback Loops

The second out-of-control component is positive (amplifying) feedback loops. The odd thing about positive feedbacks is that they are often ignored in assessing the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions. Our understanding of them is limited and our ability to insert them into an equation is rudimentary. Our inability to grasp them, however, in no way mitigates their effects, which are as real as worldwide violent weather.

It is now clear that several phenomena are self-sustaining, amplifying cycles; for example, melting ice and glaciers, melting tundra and other methane sources, and increasing ocean saturation with carbon dioxide, which leads to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These feedbacks will continue even if we reduce our human emissions to zero—and all of our squiggly lightbulbs, Priuses, wind turbines, Waxman-Markeys, and Copenhagens won’t make one bit of difference. Not that we shouldn’t stop all greenhouse-gas emissions immediately—of course we should—but that’s only a necessity, not nearly a sufficient response.

We need to find the courage to say so."

"Non-Linearity

The third component is non-linearity, which means that the effects of rising temperature and atmospheric carbon concentrations may change suddenly and unpredictably. While we may assume linearity for natural phenomena because linearity is much easier to assess and to predict, many changes in nature are non-linear, often abruptly so. A common example is the behavior of water. The changes of state of water—solid, liquid, gas—happen abruptly. It freezes suddenly at 0°C, not at 1°, and it turns to steam at 100°, not at 99°. If we were to limit our experience of water to the range of 1° to 99°, we would never know of the existence of ice or steam.

This is where we stand in relationship to many aspects of the global climate. We don’t know where the tipping points—effectively the changes of state—are for such events as the irreversible melting of glaciers, release of trapped methane from tundras and seabeds, carbon saturation of the oceans. Difficult to pin down, tipping points may be long past, or just around the corner. As leading climatologist Jim Hansen has written, “Present knowledge does not permit accurate specification of the dangerous level of human-made GHGs. However, it is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades.”[4]

Evidence of non-linearity is strong, not only from the stunning acceleration of climate change in just the past couple of years, but from the wild behavior of the climate over millions of years, which sometimes changed dramatically within periods as short as a decade.

The most expert scientific investigators have been blindsided by the velocity and extent of recent developments, and the climate models have likewise proved far more conservative than nature itself. Given that scientists have underestimated impacts of even small changes in global temperature, it is understandably difficult to elicit an appropriate public and governmental response."

"Beyond the Box

We climate activists have to tread on uncertain ground and rapidly move beyond our current unpleasant but comfortable parts-per-million box. Here are some things we need to say, over and over again, everywhere, in a thousand different ways:

Bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths. Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always—but always—ending in overshot and collapse. Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both. We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end.

Moreover, there are no “free market” or “economic” solutions. And since corporations must have physically impossible endless growth in order to survive, corporate social responsibility is a myth. The only socially responsible act that corporations can take is to dissolve.

We can’t bargain with the forces of nature, trading slightly less harmful trinkets for a fantasied reprieve. Geophysical processes care not one whit for our politics, our economics, our evening meals, our theologies, our love for our children, our plaintive cries of innocence and error.

We can either try to plan the transition, even at this late hour, or the physical forces of the world will do it for us—indeed, they already are. As Alfred Crosby stated in his remarkable book, Ecological Imperialism, mother nature’s ministrations are never gentle.[5]"

"Telling the Truth

If we climate activists don’t tell the truth as well as we know it—which we have been loathe to do because we ourselves are frightened to speak the words—the public will not respond, notwithstanding all our protestations of urgency.

And contrary to current mainstream climate-activist opinion, contrary to all the pointless “focus groups,” contrary to the endless speculation on “correct framing,” the only way to tell the truth is to tell it. All of it, no matter how terrifying it may be.[6]

It is offensive and condescending for activists to assume that people can’t handle the truth without environmentalists finding a way to make it more palatable. The public is concerned, we vaguely know that something is desperately wrong, and we want to know more so we can try to figure out what to do. The response to An Inconvenient Truth, as tame as that film was in retrospect, should have made it clear that we want to know the truth.

And finally, denial requires a great deal of energy, is emotionally exhausting, fraught with conflict and confusion. Pretending we can save our current way of life derails us and sends us in directions that lead us astray. The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

Let’s just tell it."

"Stating the Problem

After we tell the truth, then what can we do? Is it hopeless? Perhaps. But before we can have the slightest chance of meaningful action, having told the truth, we have to face the climate reality, fully and unflinchingly. If we base our planning on false premises—such as the oft-stated stutter that reducing our greenhouse-gas emissions will forestall “the worst effects of global warming”—we can only come up with false solutions. “Solutions” that will make us feel better as we tumble toward the end, but will make no ultimate difference whatsoever.

Furthermore, we can and must pose the problem without necessarily providing the “solutions.”[7] I can’t tell you how many climate activists have scolded me, “You can’t state a problem like that without providing some solutions.” If we accept that premise, all of scientific inquiry as well as many other kinds of problem-solving would come to a screeching halt. The whole point of stating a problem is to clarify questions, confusions, and unknowns, so that the problem statement can be mulled, chewed, and clarified to lead to some meaningful answers, even though the answers may seem to be out of reach.

Some of our most important thinking happens while developing the problem statement, and the better the problem statement the richer our responses. That’s why framing the global warming problem as greenhouse-gas concentrations has proved to be such a dead end.

Here is the problem statement as it is beginning to unfold for me. We are all a part of struggling to develop this thinking together:

We must leave behind 10,000 years of civilization; this may be the hardest collective task we’ve ever faced. It has given us the intoxicating power to create planetary changes in 200 years that under natural cycles require hundreds of thousands or millions of years—but none of the wisdom necessary to keep this Pandora’s Box tightly shut. We have to discover and re-discover other ways of living on earth."

"We love our cars, our electricity, our iPods, our theme parks, our bananas, our Nikes, and our nukes, but we behave as if we understand nothing of the land and water and air that gives us life. It is past time to think and act differently.

If we live at all, we will have to figure out how to live locally and sustainably. Living locally means we are able get everything we need within walking (or animal riding) distance. We may eventually figure out sustainable ways of moving beyond those small circles to bring things home, but our track record isn’t good and we’d better think it through very carefully.

Likewise, any technology has to be locally based, using local resources and accessible tools, renewable and non-toxic. We have much re-thinking to do, and re-learning from our hunter-gatherer forebears who managed to survive for a couple of hundred thousand years in ways that we with our civilized blinders we can barely imagine or understand.[8]

Living sustainably means, in Derrick Jensen’s elegantly simple definition, that whatever we do, we can do it indefinitely.[9] We cannot use up anything more or faster than nature provides, we don’t poison the air, water, or soil, and we respect the web of life of which we are an intricate part. We are not separate from nature, or above it, or in any way qualified to supervise it.[10] The evidence is ample and overwhelming; all we have to do is be brave enough to look."

"How do we survive in a world that will probably turn—is already turning, for many humans and non-humans alike—into a living hell? How do we even grow or gather food or find clean water or stay warm or cool while assaulted by biblical floods, storms, rising seas, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, snow, and hail?

It is crystal clear that we cannot leave it to the technophiliacs. It is human technology coupled with our inability to comprehend, predict, and prevent unintended consequences that have brought us global catastrophe, culminating in climate disruption, in the first place. Desperate hopes notwithstanding, there are no high-tech solutions here, only wishful thinking—the tools that got us into this mess are incapable of getting us out.[11]

All that being said, we needn’t discard all that we’ve learned, far from it.[12] But we must use our knowledge with great discretion, and lock much of it away as so much nuclear weaponry and waste.

Time is running very short, but the forgiveness of this little blue orb in a vast lonely universe will continue to astonish and nourish us—if we only give it the chance.

Our obligation as activists, the first step, the essence, is to part the cultural veil at long last, and to tell the truth."

"Blind Spot"

It's Over

First I got worried about trees. They all looked sickly, or even dead - and that's what led me, much to my detriment, to learn more about climate change than I had dreamed in my worst nightmares could possibly be happening, in my backyard, in the lifetime of myself and my children...and extreme weather, and peak oil, and collapse of the ocean food chain from acidification, and mass extinction, and everything happening much faster than predicted, and, and...

BUT, my torment is over at last, thanks to the eminent Baron von Monckhofen, who has convincingly refuted all of the above, in one sweeping, restorative blogpost, "Decline of Terrible Phytoplankton" - and don't miss his inimitable riposte to a misguided warmalarmist comment!

Thank you Baron, I can stop fretting about the apocalypse now...and so can the US Army, Soldier & Biological Chemical Command!

"Technological Progress is Like an Axe in the Hands of a Pathological Criminal"

So said Albert Einstein.

But, this is mostly a blog about trees - so here is one, in front of my local grocery store.

It's a fairly typical example of a tree damaged by ozone, where the leaves have all shriveled up and fallen off, and in desperation, the pathetically incipient corpse is producing flowers in August, in a frantic, final attempt to reproduce.

Listen to an amazing voice, and then scroll down, we will check on the tree again...

That picture accompanies a fascinating article in Conservation Magazine about how animals respond to the noises of our industrial society - a little bit of it, such as blackbirds learning to replicate the sounds of cell phones ringing - is funny. But most, not surprisingly, is intrinsically tragic. It's interesting of course that people have spent their careers actually researching such things - but they have! In the sense that Barack Obama meant when he said, "This shit would be really interesting - if we weren't in the middle of it."

If you're looking, it's possible to uncover everywhere, the notion that America is a failed state, that collapse is imminent...that humans have really been hellbent for decades if not centuries on destroying the ecosystem. Here are the flowers of our abysmal tree.

Just today I came across a hitherto unknown (to moi) giant among doomsters, Dr. Guy McPherson, who writes the brilliant blog, Nature Bats Last, as well as having authored innumerable published articles and books. Finding his contribution so late - after two years of incessant searching for information! - raises a question that haunts me constantly: Why are there so many enlightened individuals laboring in (relative) obscurity - all cognizant of the same perils we face - but yet so incredibly, uselessly disorganized and disoriented?

Why are the forces of what is clearly morally right in such impotent disarray - while the forces of evil (corporations, the revolving door between profiteers and governments and co-opted "green" non-profits) so ruthlessly and fantastically, devotedly organized? (you know...the fanatics are full of confidence and good men are full of doubt...or whatever that quote is...)

Glenn Greenwald provides a collection of vignettes indicative of a civilization that is in eclipse - from closed libraries, reduced public school days, darkened street lights, a paranoid-inducing increase in personal surveillance by murky government agencies... in the context of pointless, incredibly expensive military interventions abroad - all of which constitute baby steps on the path to fascism.

Well. How can I end this ramble? Go back to Bjork...listen to the interview at NPR. She has something to say about trees.

What is it going to take?

In a reply to a comment on my last post, I wrote this:

There has been a strategic decision made by most prominent climate change activists to focus on CO2 and warming, and downplay other forms of pollution that are harmful to the ecosystem, based I guess on the unpopularity of dirty old boring pollution, the difficulty of proving causation (although it shouldn't be any more complicated than proving CO2 is a greenhouse gas) - and a prejudice towards physics. I think it's a really stupid decision, because it's not working.

Sure, it will really scare people if they understand the link between industrial society and cancer and crop loss. But nothing less is going to motivate them to change. Personally i don't see what we have to lose by pointing out the very real and current price we pay to leave the lights blazing and tootle around on snowmobiles.

Having said that, it seems as though events as described in this video should be enough to give even Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber pause - from the Gulf disaster to destructive hail storms and record-breaking floods and heat waves...there is no lack of evidence of extreme weather. Even better than the VOA clip, oddly enough, is this ABC broadcast which dares to ask the rarely posed question, "Is Extreme Heat Evidence of Global Warming?", and actually reports the brave, unequivocal, and resounding YES from Dr. Somerville, professer emeritus of Scripps! Bravo Professor! and thank you for being a rare candid and honest academic. (Yes, these bastards know far more than they will reveal!...too often).

Then again, today I saw this survey at Apocadocs, which only reinforces my dismal opinion. The emphasis placed on distant melting ice, and faraway water wars and even the above-described Hell and High Water due around 2100 that Joe Romm warns about on his blog and in his book of that title, won't be convincing enough to motivate people to make the transition to clean energy a priority - until it's disaster has reached their own back yard - if then. (Blame it on teh gehs getting married...because, why not?)

Scientists need to help people make the connection between the trees dying in their back yard, their parks, along their roads, and in the schoolyard...with toxic greenhouse gas emissions that kill vegetation.

Oh, that and the minor and forgotten problem of not having any more food.

Fossil-fueled lights...food?

Fossil-fueled travel...food?

Fossil-fueled entertainment...food?

Fossil-fueled convenience...food?:

The survey's conclusions?

"The tipping point that turns skeptics into believers seems nearly impossible to reach when it comes to climate change"..."it's hard to change people's minds about the environment unless something horrifying is actually occurring."

Minute Quantities of Imidacloprid

A new study strongly indicates, after much frantic speculation, that the most widely used pesticides in the world are to blame for Bee Colony Collapse.

"It says even low concentrations of the pesticides may be more deadly then previously thought due to their high persistence in soil and water, supporting claims for the role that pesticides may play in bee deaths. 'The acceptable limits are based mainly on short-term tests. If long-term studies were to be carried out, far lower concentrations may turn out to be hazardous. This explains why minute quantities of imidacloprid may induce bee decline in the long run,' says study author Dr. Henk Tennekes."

Contrast the sense of dire urgency expressed in this prediction:

"If the honeybee disappeared off the surface of the globe forever we'd be facing up to an unimaginable food crisis,' said a spokesperson. 'This latest research only adds to the evidence that is already strong enough to justify an immediate ban on neonicotinoids today.'"

With this inanity from the UK government! The usual, "more studies are needed!" garbage:

"Government disregards warning

Responding to the new study, Defra said the UK would not be following some other EU countries in restricting the use of neonicotinoids.

'This research highlights a need for more data on long-term risks to bee health. We have already been considering this and pesticide companies will soon need to provide this data under new EU rules.

'We will keep this area under review and will not hesitate to act if there is any evidence of an unacceptable risk to bees,' said a spokesperson."

Teabaggers

Three Supremes - Love You, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Ginsburg!

This is worth watching through to the end. The hair! The poses! The weird white people dancing in the background! It's priceless...
ROCK LADIES.

Russia Burning

It is astonishing that on the cusp of a major mass extinction such odd and fascinating images can still be found.

I'm not sure what that cultivar is - but it is beautifully saturated with color.

The Cold Brook is very low...and burning bush is already turning autumn color (a symptom of exposure to toxic greenhouse gases)...

in the first days of August!

Here is a bizarre story about Russian attempts to control the weather. Apparently they have been meddling in it for quite some time, for utterly frivolous purposes that range from producing clear skies for parades to producing rainfall to decrease insect invasions to reducing snowfall in their capital city to save the expenses of clearing it...

Talk about hubris!

Now of course, they are having little success fighting the wildfires that are raging, and bearing down on Moscow, where the air is dangerously unbreathable.

I happened upon the aforementioned article about weather control because I was googling, trying to find out if the searing heat of late, and the concurrent drought, are from just this year - or were preceded by earlier seasons.

I couldn't.

But, I'm going to go out on a limb (once again, as it were!) and say that trees don't explode into wildfires from a few weeks of heat and drought, however severe. No...if Russia has had impacts from ozone anything like what I have personally seen, from Massachusetts to Seattle to Costa Rica - then their trees are simply dead torches waiting to be ignited. And so are ours. Here is a photo of how bare the treeline is in my New Jersey town, right now, above the park and orchards:

When the wildfires start closing in on London, Paris, New York, Boston and Washington DC, maybe somebody besides me and a few others will make the connection.

Ozone doesn't just damage foliage on an annual basis - which in and of itself causes long-term decline. It causes harm to vegetation at the cellular level. The leaves of the lotus were damaged last year. But this year, count the petals.

Last year's flowers had 15 - 17 petals - this year there are only 12. (note the loss of pigmentation, and the chlorosis of the leaf). I could show many more examples of deformed leaves and flowers...and I will. But that's it for now. I'm quite discouraged, to tell the truth.

On the other hand, I actually have reached one person! As of today I received a message from someone I knew long ago, via Facebook. She asked me about the trees, because she had noticed first hand on a trip through New England that many are dying. I'm going to intersperse my reply to her with the following terrific pictures which were taken by a visiting blogger from Canada, Milan. He and his friend Cai joined my family and friends on a sailing trip around Manhattan.

His blog can be found at A Sibilant Intake of Breath - and even more pictures from our excursion can be seen here.

This is how I replied to my long-lost friend:

To answer your question - ozone is toxic to vegetation. The same volatile organic compounds from gasoline and coal emissions create acid rain and acid fog, which leach essential nutrients from the soil.

After decades of cumulative exposure trees are dying at a rapidly accelerating rate. Why the rate has increased I am not sure, but it's pretty obvious no matter where you look. It could be simply that we have passed a "tipping point" or it could be massive disruption of the nitrogen cycle from the relatively recent production and burning of ethanol.

With the ozone level (tropospheric, not stratospheric, they are different) inexorably rising in the atmosphere as more and more people burn more and more fuel, annual crops are being damaged as well. Ozone creates visible stippling, singeing, bronzing, reddening and browning of foliage and pine needles - it's easy to spot once you know what to look for. It also enters the plant through the stomata, and causes damage at the cellular level, leading to bizarre leaf shapes, cracking, peeling bark, and stunting overall growth, as well as leading to much greater vulnerability to insects, disease and fungus.

Most foresters and other professionals prefer to blame dying trees on causes they can control - aphids or beetles or bacteria. They would rather ignore the underlying problem, which is the way we create and use energy, although it's well established in multiple studies that ozone increases the harm done by naturally occurring pathogens.

you can see pictures here:http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2010/07/evidence-that-toxic-emissions-in.htmland at just about every other post on my blog. At the top is a page "basic premise and research" that gives links to real scientific research, of which there is quite a bit.

Good luck and let me know if you have any more questions. It's a daunting topic most people won't even consider, because the implications are enormous and, ultimately, life-threatening.

Wit's End: Evidence that toxic emissions in the atmosphere are destroying the World

witsendnj.blogspot.com

Seasonal mean of ambient ozone concentrations between 09:00 and 16:00 h over the continental United States from 1 July to 31 September 2005 (Tong et al. 2007. Atmos. Environ. 41:8772). Areas shown in brown, orange and red can experience significant crop yield loss and damage to ecosystem function f...

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I took this picture of Ruby, who stubbornly slept, despite our attempts to awaken her.

"Marlin Goes Berserk"

This article about the attempt to catch a marlin in a Hawaii tournament is stomach turning. What is the point of "sport fishing?" Surely it is nothing more than fish torture. Also of interest is that the fish fought heroically and ultimately, in an unprecedented surge of bravado, charged the boat. Add this incident to the growing list of endangered wild animals (coyotes, tigers, bears, and elephants) that are fighting back - whether from fury, starvation, or both, it isn't yet clear.

This photo was taken an instant before the 550 lb fish hit the boat and then disappeared - no doubt horribly injured. Onlookers, however, were more worried about the guys on the boat.

Note: click on the story for credit to the photographer - his own website link has crashed.

"Runaway"