Sarah Palin

I have been convinced that Sarah Palin faked her "pregnancy" with Trig ever since I first heard of the "wild ride" and saw some photographs and video in which she was purportedly pregnant but obviously wasn't. Keeping up with several of the bloggers who have been assiduously chronicling her ever-widening scandals and sociopathic lies has been providing reliable comic relief ever since.

Now, one Alaskan blogger has revealed evidence that can't be disputed and so I am linking to this ongoing saga for pure fun.

This post has a terrific assortment of photos.

And here is Gryphen's original stunning revelation!

Cosmopolitan...NOT the magazine!

Here is a truly humbling slide show of tiny creatures that are identical and exist in both the Arctic and Antarctic seas.

Nobody knows how this could be possible.

It hasn't got much to do with the topic of tree decline but is so fascinating anyway.

And another thing!

I made a comment at ClimateProgress.org and apparently really annoyed some guy, which ultimately led to where he is banging his head on the wall (found on this link) and he hasn't been heard from since - but for brevity here is my original post:

I do not understand why people who decry any cost involved in averting climate change through regulation ignore the cost of doing nothing. CO2 is only one greenhouse gas. The others - nitrous oxides, sulphur dioxides, aldehydes from ethanol - create ozone.

Ozone gives people cancer, emphysema, and asthma. Not to mention toxic heavy metal deposition, such as mercury.

Who should pay for the costs associated with that? They are very real costs.

Vegetation is even more sensitive to poisonous greenhouse gases than humans. Right now, across the US, every species of tree is rapidly dying from exposure to ozone and associated emissions from burning fossil and biofuels. What is the cost of that? No more wood for paper or lumber, no more nuts, apples, peaches, cherries, maple syrup? No more shade to cool houses and streams for fish that need cold water, no more habitat for wildlife like birds, squirrels, and opossums, and no more sink for CO2 leading to accelerating warming.

What is the cost of that? What is the cost of cutting down those dead trees before they fall on your house, car, or head?

What is the cost of fighting fires that start in tinder-dry wilderness and threaten structures as they spread? What is the cost of crop failure and famine? Already, the losses from ozone are measured in the millions of dollars, and it's only getting worse and worse and we burn more and more fuel and it accumulates in the environment.

Personally, I would rather pay a tax on carbon emissions, and have my government promote conservation and subsidize clean energy (solar and wind) and electric cars instead of ethanol and coal. Otherwise we are going to bring upon the extinction not just of trees but humankind.

Here is a link to information from the park service about air quality and its impact on trees, by the way. Here's an exerpt:

Ozone levels are injuring trees and other plants. Thirty species of plants showed leaf damage after being exposed to controlled ozone levels identical to those that occur in the park. To further quantify ozone injury to plants, permanent monitoring plots were set up in the park. In general, researchers have found that ozone exposure and damage to plants are worse at the higher elevations. They have also documented that up to 90% of black cherry trees and milkweed plants in numerous park locations show symptoms of ozone damage. Some of the other plants that show ozone damage symptoms include tuliptree, sassafras, winged sumac, blackberry, and cutleaf coneflower.

Acid Rain, Acid Clouds, and Nitrogen Overload
Plants and animals in Great Smoky Mountains National Park are also threatened by airborne sulfur and nitrogen pollution. The park receives the highest sulfur and nitrogen deposits of any monitored national park. These pollutants fall to the ground not only as acid rain, but also as dry particles and cloud water. The average acidity (pH) of rainfall in the park is 4.5, 5-10 times more acidic than normal rainfall (5.0-5.6). Clouds with acidity as low as 2.0 pH bathe the high elevation forests during part of the growing season.

Research shows that certain high elevation soils in the park are receiving so much airborne nitrogen that they are suffering from advanced nitrogen saturation. This condition limits the availability of forest nutrients, especially calcium, to plants and causes the release of toxic aluminum that can hurt vegetation and streamlife. Mountain streams and forest soils are being acidified to the point that the health of the park’s high elevation ecosystems is in jeopardy. Nitrate levels in some streams are approaching the public health standard for drinking water.

Emaciated Corpses

This home video from last May is astonishing for the sheer blindness of the narrater. He says, look at all the spruce trees! with apparent delight - when well over 50% of them are completely denuded of needles.

Watching how oblivious he is to the carnage in front of his own eyes has convinced me that Significant Other is correct - people will refuse to recognize that we are killing the trees with toxic fuel emissions until one falls over and hits them on the head...if then!

I told him, this is the arboreal equivalent of someone walking into Auschwitz, chatting about the lovely brick architecture, and not mentioning or even noticing the emaciated corpses stacked like so many denuded logs alongside the crematoria. Because that is exactly what is on that video - emaciated corpses, lots of them! Millions!

Is it so hard to connect the dots from this carnage to crop failure to famine?

Here is a shocking report from none other than the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has a very reassuring moniker, and here promotes the substitution of biofuels for fossil fuels. The section about the impacts of ethanol on air pollution begins on page 48. This morning I wrote to a couple of scientists who have knowledge about this, and my question to them was...have the assumptions made in the rosy NRDC recommendation to pursue substituting ethanol for fossil fuels been realized?

Have any of the regulations that formed the basis of the recommendation actually passed, as anticipated in this report - and if so, what are they, and are they being enforced? Has the auto industry made the costly improvements to engines to reduce the projected increase in pollutants from ethanol, and has the national fleet of old cars turned over to new cleaner vehicles, as speculated?

Or are we just merrily burning along in the same old cars, and/or similar new cars - whilst adding significant percentages of extra nitrous oxides and aldehydes into the ozone mix? And is anyone, anywhere, researching the empirical results of this insane, uncontrolled experiment?

If either of them get back to me with answers, I will post them here. I would very much like to get answers, but the biofuel industry is heavily subsidized, with financial links that are daunting to most researchers dependent on big oil for funding. It's kind of funny to think that deniers constantly accuse Al Gore and Pachauri and climate scientists of being corrupt, when actually all the big money is there for scientific whores promoting business as usual!

Curiouser and Curiouser

There has been enough research to prove that ozone damages vegetation, and reduces tree growth. Here is a report sponsored by our very own Department of Energy that says so. But it's from 1995! Where have the alarm bells been for the past fifteen years? I will write them to ask, but in the meanwhile, I have other questions.

Since ozone has been around for decades, what is causing so much curious new phenomena? Like this absolutely amazing white streaking, on this tree - and there are others developing the same markings - which looks as repugnant and nasty as Cruella deVille!

This bizarre contrast on bark is unprecedented.

What can explain it? Is it biofuel emissions? Mercury or nitrogen deposition?

I don't know!

All I know is, something is terribly, lethally, awry.

Add to this strangeness the lichens that are spreading like wildfire; the rapid appearance and growth of cankers; bark splitting and falling off, and turning all sorts of weird colors from pitch black to lurid bright green to red, holes, and weeping, bleeding sap - all of which is photographed on this blog - and one has to conclude, something new and hazardous is lurking invisibly in our atmosphere.

Here's another inexplicable and new occurrence: After the very heavy snow, many evergreen shrubs had their branches bent by the weight. They went from looking uniformly brown or yellow, to revealing the inner layers, which are still bright green! This is noticeable on cedars, yews, and here, as pictured on some arborvitae.

Why should the outer tips be singed and the inside remain green?

I don't know, and can only hazard some wild guesses. Is there too much UV radiation filtering in, burning the exposed layers? Is it the crazy fluctuation of temperatures? Is all the toxic soup of volatile organic compounds reacting to the proliferation of cell phone radiation?

Emily Dickinson said:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it on the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

Is it too late - have we unleashed enough amplifying feedbacks to destroy any hope for the continuation of human civilization? That was more or less my question in this post, and my answer then was: Probably! So should we give up in despair?

Absolutely Not!

RPauli sent me a link that led to this article called Abandon Hope, which states (assuming I am interpreting correctly) that efforts to live sustainably cannot be based on hope for avoiding the worst consequences of climate change, because those are already inevitable - but rather, if we are not to despair, we need to develop and nourish a culture of living sustainably for its own sake...as the moral way to live, regardless of the ultimate fate of our culture.

That is similar to my own thoughts ever since I learned that catastrophic climate chaos is looming in our future, and has been for decades, if not centuries. It took 65 million years for the world to achieve, through generations of evolution, the height of biodiversity that humans have enjoyed, and exploited. Everywhere on earth throughout our history, we have driven species to extinction - and in the past century, we have polluted to the point where the ecosystem as it has existed for millennia is now irretrievable. Check out this story about the collapsing food chain in Antarctica, for just one example, and for another, evidence that pesticides used in salmon aquaculture are killing off the lobsters (sob!). Those are just two tiny anecdotes in a deluge of planet-wide disasters.

If I didn't have children, it would be much simpler to just chalk it all up to physics. We are all particles of energy - and so what if our civilization ceases to exist!

But, as a mother, I grieve and agonize over the pain my children will suffer, as will all the children who are going to inherit a hideous future of danger, violence, deprivation, and conflict, with little amelioration. It's quite a task to find any happiness, let alone hope, when contemplating such prospects. Every now and then I feel a faint remembrance of an inkling of happiness, and I'm grateful when that happens!

Those who die before the full brunt of collapse occurs can consider themselves lucky to have the luxury of a hospital with medicines and pain relief. It's going to be quite interesting to see how those witnesses that remain will react to the cataclysm. Here is a poem, via Des:

There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pool singing at night,

And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,

If mankind perished utterly;

And spring herself when she woke at dawn

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

I fear this poem, which describes the resurgence of nature after a war destroys humanity, is wildly optimistic. All signs in the scientific literature, if taken objectively, point towards surpassed tipping points and positive feedbacks that eventually will lead to runaway global heating, and it will take until the next orbital wobble towards a new ice age to revert and stabilize a climate to the point where it is habitable - if then.

Back on the narrower topic of trees, I have personally received reports of similar vegetative decline from people in California, Colorado, Oregon, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine.

slanted tom says, in a comment at ClimateProgress.org:
February 17, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Witsend: I looked at all of your New Jersey photos and see the same sorts of damage here in NE Georgia. Where I live backs up to about 3000 acres of what was farmland before 1950 and is now woods where only deer hunters go in the fall (without vehicles). During the past 15 years I’ve noticed that what had been dense undergrowth and towering pines with many vines is now clear and open. Twenty years ago it would take a machete to hack through these place and now it’s just a casual walk. I put it off to the pine bark beetles and fungus killing the pines and deer eating the lower understory and the severe drought of a few years ago. But there’s more to it. Atmospheric mercury, ozone and other pollution seem to be the culprit. I have 3 very old large white oaks which could easily be more than 200 years old in the yard. They show the kinds of damage that you have photographed.

I hope some researchers get grants to find out why so much vegetation is dying back. I was hoping that our formerly human friendly environment could be saved by the massive planting of billions of mixed species trees. This won’t work if they can’t grow because of what our civilization has put in the air.

The significance of complex ecosystems was framed rather well in this comment at RealClimate.org, by one Tim Jones:

RE: 5 elliot says: 16 February 2010 at 11:47 PM
“Dont make cataclysmic predictions the world will not end because of AGW and life (including human life) will go on. It just might be a bit warmer and for where I live that would be a good thing!”

Elliot should try to think outside the box he lives in.

Where we own property in Central Texas I’ve lived through three summers and more of “exceptional drought,” the worst it gets, and whole summer months of temperatures over 100º and almost no rain at all. I’ve very well seen that just the beginning of a barely discernable warming trend has had cataclysmic effects, whether the drought is merely coincident or not.

By effects I mean the base of the food chain being wiped out.

Flowering plants wilt and die. Thereby insects that depend on host plants don’t survive. Thereby birds and mammals depending on seeds and insects migrate away or die off.
Hummingbirds become totally dependent on their human feeders then only to migrate on. Old oak and cedar elm trees dependent on certain levels of rainfall suddenly wilt and die. Creeks and rivers dry up so aquatic life dies out. The aquifers aren’t recharged so springs and seeps dry up and wells silt up and then go dry as well.

With the grass short and sparse and brown the cattle industry goes belly up. With no rain the corn and cotton fields wilt away if they get started at all. In the cities, as the reservoirs dry up drought stage alerts make for water rationing. The heat makes summertime electric bills skyrocket and the poor suffer even more for that.

Since the movement of the subtropical zone northward is forecast to be a consequence of global warming these tastes of drought are indicators of what’s to come, if it hasn’t already started. The whole American Southwest is subject to this, and it’s not just there.

Believe me, desertification is a serious matter. The predictions of impending catastrophe need to be made loud and clear.

Comment by Tim Jones — 17 February 2010 @ 10:33 AM

That RealClimate post was about media attacking the credibility of scientists, and distorting their results, to which I commented:

I blame John Edwards. The tabloids exposed his tawdry affair, thus, junk news sources gained credibility. That, and the fact that scientists are too timid about publicizing and linking current effects of AGW.

Scientists should be on the teevee news every night with pictures of cow carcasses from the drought in Argentina, bleached coral reefs and dead sea beds, wildfires in Australia and California, collapsing ice shelves, melting ice caps with stranded walruses and penguins, shrinking glaciers and pictures of the people that need them for water, record breaking precipitation events like blizzards, droughts, and tornadoes in cities. Throw in some footage of scalped mountain tops in Appalachia.

THAT should be the news, not made-up controversies. Forget your rectitude, scientists, step up to the plate! A habitable climate for YOUR children is at stake!

Comment by Gail — 17 February 2010 @ 7:24 AM

To which some actual scientist replied - and I do not know whether he meant to convey exasperation towards me or towards the constraint upon scientific speech, with his sigh:

> Forget your rectitude, scientists, step up to the plate!

Gail, that works only once. Our rectitude is our only weapon. Sigh.

Comment by Martin Vermeer — 17 February 2010 @ 10:53 AM

First Guest Post!

I first met Susan and her husband Roger from comments at ClimateProgress.org, virtually, in cyberspace - and then was lucky enough to meet them for real, in Boston, as recorded at this post from last summer. Susan and Roger live in Massachusetts and have recorded with uncanny familiarity damage to trees which closely resembles what I have been recording in New Jersey. Thank you Susan, for sharing these photographs! What follows are her pictures and my comments.

Apparently the trees in Massachusetts are faring no better than those in New Jersey.

They are falling over from the roots.

Their bark is peeling from the trunks.

The identical lichen seems to colonize amid the decay.

Susan and Roger live adjacent to a large nature preserve, but nature is not being preserved there.

The hollow trunks recorded here are to be found up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and beyond.

Most people don't pay much attention to trees, but for those who do, the symptoms of terminal decline are alarming.

As the bark splits it becomes open to attacks by insects, which are followed by woodpeckers.

Just plain rot sets in, exacerbated by fungi.

Here is a grand example of the parasitic growth of canker.

Trunks that have no bark are simply harbingers of wholesale tree extinction.

In Susan's woods, the path is impeded by tangled, falling branches.

They tumble from on high even in the absence of significant winds.

The ground below is thick with cones, after a season when the conifers exude all their energy into reproduction.

Susan and other have noted that the crazy warmth has led to abnormal upheaval of soils freezing and thawing, making everything from telephone poles to graveyard markers tip and fall.

Another very interesting and unprecedented symptom of atmospheric poisoning are shrubs that have burnt, damaged exteriors. Susan noticed this here and after the blizzard in New Jersey, I have seen the same peculiar pigmentation (next post!)

These cankers on trees are indications that they will soon die.

Just as this lichen accompanies dead trees. I guess, most people don't think or care about trees. They take them for granted - they take nuts, and fruit, and maple syrup, for granted. I don't though - and neither does Susan. We want to know, what sort of world will our children and grandchildren inherit, if there are no trees?

Susan said about this photo: This "deer leg in a tree" must be the action of a fisher cat. Nature can be beautiful but it can also be cruel. We humans think that we are above nature, but we're really just a small part. If we don't pay attention to the physics, chemistry and biology of nature, it will continue to show its wrath, and we humans will witness our own demise. But in our case, unlike this poor deer, we will have deserved our fate for failing to heed the warning signs.

Shakespeare and Noam Chomsky

Both of these gentlemen explore language, and what it means to name something. To progress from just seeing something to actually naming it is a breathtaking leap.

Well, there is no name that I can find for "falling off bark" but I did finally locate the proper term for one of the other things I see happening, on trees, which is the proliferating growths.

It is a canker. This defining has horrible and important implications, but more on that later - first, at the behest of my new-found French friend, I have a photograph of one of his Arbres Venerables. It is in Basking Ridge, in front of the church in the center of town.

Of course, I don't want to find forebodings of demise...but I inevitably do. To the right of this tree, in the back of the annex, resides a rather substantial cryptomeria.

And it is slowly frying in a bath of toxic greenhouse gases. But hey! Some nice fellow saw me taking pictures, shivering in a howling wind, and invited me inside.

Anyone who knows me would expect me to be gasping like a fish out of water in the interior of a church, because I am a life-long, unabashed atheist. But, I also love tradition, and revere classical architecture, and quality of craft. This church is suffused in light and quiet dignity.

The windows on the opposite side of our tree are sublime with conifers. I grew up in a house built in 1720, in a town with more 17th century homes still intact than anywhere else in the US, and so I love old multi-paned windows, with wavy, bubbly glass.

Here is a view of The Tree.

This is through just one pane. The wiggly lines that define the edges of tombstones are because the hand-blown glass is distorted. It actually gets wider at the bottom over time, sinking from gravity.

Back outside, the trunk has a reddish hue in places, a rather new phenomena I have observed that is becoming more common.

In this instance it looks like it is from exposure,

But on this tree it looks more like a growth on the surface.

Next door to it, is a tree losing bark,

which also has the spreading red pigment.

Many trees are sprouting cankers up and down their trunks.

and everywhere, branches are breaking off.

A bit further on is the entrance to an historic estate.

This yew in front of the gate has been fascinating me for some time.

The trunk is getting more and more colorful.

Even the bricks have strange growths.

One of the first things I learned when I started searching the intertubes for information about tree troubles - such as drooping, singed, scorched, or discolored leaves, thin crowns, and broken branches - is that once such symptoms of decline are visible, the tree is going to die. The only question is will it be completely dead in one season, or three, or a decade.

So I have known since the summer of 2008 when I found this webpage that all the trees are dying, and have been struggling with that information and all the terrible implications that follow from the wholesale death of trees. I have been trying to inform people in the hopes that we can slow down or reverse the damage. It would be nice if trees didn't go completely extinct.

Nevertheless, the last week or so have been, let's say, a challenge to equanimity. It's becoming glaringly obvious that every tree still standing is going to die very soon, whether we figure out what's causing damage to them and change it, or not. There are several things that lead inexorably to this very perturbing conclusion.

One is, the incredibly rapid and universal death of conifers. You can drive along the freeway for miles and not see a single healthy conifer. For the most part, there is no green in the landscape at all, because they have dropped their needles entirely and blend in with the leafless deciduous trees. Of those who retain needles, they are very thin, and the colors are unnaturally yellow, purplish, or red. Stands of cedars look like they are blistering, on fire.

Last fall, green ivy started turning red, and florists were all excited to include it in holiday arrangements. Now the ivy on the column has turned black, with prominent veins. This inability to produce chlorophyll is fundamentally what is killing vegetation.

Another portent is the proliferation of weird growths on trunks and branches. These cankers, according to wikipedia, are usually lethal:

Some cankers are treatable with fungicides or bactericides, but many are not; often the only treatment available is to destroy the infected plant to prevent the disease from spreading to other plants.

If you take a look at the article, you'll find that cankers are the result of various fungi; that's why it's important to note that according to the study in Wisconsin linked to here, trees exposed to ozone are more vulnerable to all sorts of pests and disease and opportunistic parasites.

Perhaps the most disturbing sign that trees are doomed is the splitting and falling of bark from trunks and branches, and the gaping holes that are multiplying in number and growing in size.

This is occurring on trees of all ages.

Just in time to cheer me up, it turns out that the Forest Ecology Network, which I had thought was moribund because their last newsletter was from Fall 2008, published a newsletter in January. Check out the titles in the table of contents:

Have We Passed the Tipping Point - page 2

For Obama, No Opportunity Too Big to Blow - page 4

The Truths Copenhagen Ignored - page 5

Too Late? Why Scientists Say We Should Expect the Worse - page 8

The Methane Time Bomb - page 9

Why Politicians Will Not Save Us - page 10

Why the Congress’ Climate Bills Will Not Work - page 11

War and Pipelines - page 12

North American Trees Dying Twice as Fast- page 18

Canada’s Boreal Forest Top-Rated Carbon Warehouse -page 19

The Most Important Number on Earth - page 20

Think Again: Climate Change - page 22

Mountaintop Industrial Wind Power Is Not “Green” - page 28

This collaboration represents a rather rare conjunction of ecology and climate change science. To an unfortunate degree, people concerned with the environment and pollution and those concerned about climate change from CO2 work in tandem but are not integrated. Then there are the Peak Oil types who are mainly concerned about the breakdown of our civilization, which is totally and fatally dependent on cheap fuel. On occasion members of these groups are actually antagonistic towards each other, which is insane.

It's pure speculation on my part but since I am concerned about all three and follow their debates, I have posited that the climate change types are mostly scientific (although this will change as the effects become more obvious); the Peak Oil people are techy, or financial types, and are terrified of losing their ipods and other gadgets; while the environmental types are leftist hippies concerned about world justice and scrambling to obtain funding for their "save the whale/polar bear/rainforest" not-for-profit charity - not necessarily in that order.

In other news...

Oh Goody, we live in the most amazing times! The oceans haven't been acidifying this rapidly for 65 MILLION YEARS! The predictable outcome of this is explained comprehensively in this Yale 360 article.

Click here for nature photo contest entries - they are all beautiful!