Earth ChangesS


Footprints

Siberians complain about Bigfoot raiding the onion patch

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© Photo: www.kozelskie-zaseki.narod.ruwild leek
The local Shor people in Kemerovo Region, Siberia, are reporting that something is snatching up the wild leek crop that is a staple of their diet, Itar-Tass Siberia reports. The onion-lovers leave behind abundant large footprints with clearly defined toes, similar to the prints found in the area earlier this year, the news service continues.

Bigfoot sightings are common in this remote section of the taiga and they have received attention worldwide. An expedition headed by director of the International Center for Hominology Igor Burtsev visited the area at the end of March to study footprints found in Azasskaya Cave, but the effort resulted in little new information.

Bizarro Earth

Bury it? Wells would lock away CO² gas in Western Kentucky

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© Charles BertramAbout 50 state and energy-industry officials toured an area Thursday where an 8,300-foot-deep well is being drilled near Hawesville. The experimental well will be used to store carbon dioxide.
Beside a cow pasture in Hancock County, scientists are drilling through 8,000 feet of rock, hoping to learn how to lock away forever an invisible gas that threatens Earth's climate and our way of life.

Science fiction? No, but it's a science experiment that, if it works, would be carried out on a scale never before seen.

The idea is to capture the carbon dioxide, or CO², that spews into the air when coal is burned to produce electricity. The gas, which also occurs naturally, is one of the causes of global warming.

Better Earth

Jealous female gorillas solicit unproductive sex

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© Cate Gillon/GettyA female gorilla (left) sends a "come hither" look to the silverback male
Female gorillas get friskier when their silverback has sex with another female, even when they themselves cannot conceive. The finding suggests they use sex to gain an advantage over competing females.

Tara Stoinski and colleagues at Zoo Atlanta in Georgia totted up how often four captive female gorillas invited sex or copulated over two years. They found that even pregnant or lactating females solicited more sex on days when other females were sexually active.

With only one male around, females could not have been trying to confuse him about his paternity, one commonly offered explanation for non-reproductive sex.

Better Earth

David Attenborough: Our planet is overcrowded

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© Richard Boll Photography / National Portrait Gallery CommissionDavid Attenborough
Veteran TV naturalist David Attenborough loves humans as much as other wildlife. But not when global populations are out of control, he tells Alison George

"I'm not doing anything exciting right now, like wrestling with gorillas. I'm working on radio scripts," says David Attenborough, a bit apologetically. Yet while his home in the leafy London suburb of Richmond is no longer full of the woolly monkeys, bushbabies or other exotic creatures his autobiography had living there, it's still a rich habitat. His collection of tribal art dominates the walls, a tribute to human inventiveness.

He has stopped keeping pets since his wife died, more than 10 years ago. "You can't, when you go away filming for weeks," he says. But his home is not entirely devoid of animal life. "I have great crested newts in the pond, and a darling robin that comes in the kitchen."

The latest venture for this veteran of wildlife documentaries is as controversial as anything he has done in his long career. He has become a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, a think tank on population growth and environment with a scary website showing the global population as it grows. "For the past 20 years I've never had any doubt that the source of the Earth's ills is overpopulation. I can't go on saying this sort of thing and then fail to put my head above the parapet."

Better Earth

Bizarre Bird Gets Private Beach in Indonesia

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© AP PhotoIn this undated photo released by the Wildlife Conservation Society, a close-up shot of a Maleo, that can only be found on Sulawesi island in eastern Indonesia, is seen.
A species of birds able to fly immediately after hatching from eggs buried beneath the tropical sand has just been given its own private beach in eastern Indonesia, a conservation group said Friday.

Maleos - chicken-sized birds with black helmet-like foreheads - number from 5,000 to 10,000 in the wild and can only be found on Sulawesi island. They rely on sun-baked sands or volcanically heated soil to incubate their eggs.

The U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society said it has teamed up with a local environmental group to purchase and protect a 36-acre (14-hectare) stretch of beach in northern Sulawesi that contains about 40 nests.

The environmental groups paid $12,500 for the beach-front property on remote Sulawesi, one of Indonesia's 17,000 islands, to help preserve the threatened species.

Bizarro Earth

6.7 Earthquake Shakes New Zealand

Authorities say a powerful 6.7 magnitude earthquake has hit in the South Pacific, about 625 miles northeast of New Zealand.

The quake hit the Kermadec Islands, and was felt there and along the east coast of New Zealand's North Island.

There are no immediate reports of injury or damage. And no tsunami warning is being issued.

Compass

Arctic Cooling Has Begun

Arctic
© USGSFear-mongering regarding Arctic sea ice is the most acute of all that brought forward by global warming doomsayers.

I hope to be around in 2020, when some have suggested those of us on the sceptics' side should have been vindicated, but I think we will prevail much sooner. The Arctic heat-wave of 1920-1940 is of course well-known to real Arctic climate scientists. I reviewed 32 temperature data sets for Arctic stations to 2004 some with very long records. In 2006 I could find only one with higher temperatures in 2004 than in the late 1930s or early 1940s - that was on the eastern coast of Greenland. Since then I have reviewed dozens of papers on surface air temperature, sea surface temperatures, ice-mass, glacier speeds and sea-ice, and all show a clear cyclic pattern of roughly 70 years. Some Greenland and Alaskan temperatures peaked in 2006-2008, but the pattern looks set to repeat.

Target

Sick! Billionaire's Boat Stuffed With Exotic Animals

One man's fetish for stuffed, dead animals and snake skinned clothes is U.S. Customs agents' worst nightmare

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Tamir Sapir's yacht was a vessel filled with trinkets made from the death of rare and exotic animals.
Tamir Sapir's yacht was a vessel filled with trinkets made from the death of rare and exotic animals.

Lions and tigers and bears and just about any other exotic animal you can think of were found on a mega yacht in Miami and caused quite an expensive problem for one of the wealthiest men in America.

The decorative animal hides, stuffed heads and ivory carvings are illegal to have in the U.S., an endangered species law lost on Tamir Sapir, the New York billionaire who owns the vessel.

Bizarro Earth

Vietnam: Strange creature in northern lake a bryozoan: scientists

Bryozoan Pectinatella magnifica
© UnknownThe bryozoan Pectinatella magnifica recently found at the Rung Lake in the northern province of Vinh Phuc.
Scientists are researching the origin of a type of bryozoan that has developed recently in a 70-hectare lake in the northern province of Vinh Phuc, killing the fish and leaving local residents very worried.

Bryozoan are invertebrate animals that reproduce by budding.

The creatures appeared in the Rung Lake in Tu Trung Commune in the province's Vinh Tuong District last May, but have proliferated on a large scale recently.

The provincial environmental research center, which is also tasked with preventing diseases at fisheries informed the Binh Minh Cooperative, which manages and exploits the lake, that the creatures are a fresh water bryozoan named Pectinatella magnifica.

Bizarro Earth

What if global-warming fears are overblown?

With Congress about to take up sweeping climate-change legislation, expect to hear more in coming weeks from John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at University of Alabama-Huntsville.

A veteran climatologist who refuses to accept any research funding from the oil or auto industries, Christy was a lead author of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report as well as one of the three authors of the American Geophysical Union's landmark 2003 statement on climate change.

Yet despite those green-sounding credentials, Christy is not calling for draconian cuts in carbon emissions. Quite the contrary. Christy is actually the environmental lobby's worst nightmare - an accomplished climate scientist with no ties to Big Oil who has produced reams and reams of data that undermine arguments that the earth's atmosphere is warming at an unusual rate and question whether the remedies being talked about in Congress will actually do any good.