18 Soon-to-Be Extinct Owls Worth 1.2 Million Acres?

Sun   15 Dec 2002   7:33 by Kevin McGehee 0 comments [Wackadoodle] [Nature] [blogoSFERICS]

The federal government wants to set aside 1.2 million acres of public and private Arizona land as critical habitat for 18 endangered pygmy owls, a move critics say threatens development of the land for private business and public recreation. Designating the Tucson land as a critical habitat for the tiny creatures, which span 6 inches and weigh 2 pounds, is necessary because they live in an area facing rapid growth and development, said Maeveen Behan, project director for Pima County. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s call for the land to be set aside is required by the endangered species act. Pygmy owls were added to the government’s list of protected species in 1997. Area residents, ranchers and home builders say it’s a government effort to stop development and recreation there. » Plan to Set Aside Land in Arizona for Owls Slammed Let’s do the math. 1.2 million acres for 18 owls equals 66,667 acres per owl. Doesn’t that seem like a lot to invest in a population that common sense says is too small to recover? Of course, if there are other pygmy owls elsewhere that could come in and help rebuild this population, wouldn’t it make more sense to capture these 18 and move them to where the others are? Besides, under the current eco-wacko application of the Endangered Species Act, the other owls are supposedly so different from these that intermingling them would destroy the uniqueness of the Pima County population. Which goes back to the fact the population is too small to ever recover. But of course, logic is a crime against Mother Gaia.

More ‘Big Ones’ to Come in Alaska?

Thu   21 Nov 2002   6:08 by Kevin McGehee 0 comments [Alaska] [Nature] [blogoSFERICS]

PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - A 7.9 magnitude earthquake in Alaska earlier this month was triggered by one of the largest fault ruptures in at least 150 years, rivaling the one that caused the great 1906 San Francisco quake, geologists said on Wednesday. The Nov. 3 quake struck a remote and sparsely populated area near Denali National Park and caused only minor injuries, though it damaged three major highways and forced officials to temporarily shut down the Trans-Alaska pipeline. A team of geologists who spent a week studying the temblor determined that it was largely caused by a rupture of a 130-mile section of the Denali fault, with horizontal shifts of up to nearly 26 feet. Kerry Sieh a geology professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said that rupture ranks in size alongside those that caused two great earthquakes along California’s San Andreas Fault, including the 1906 San Francisco quake and another major quake in 1857. Sieh said the Denali and San Andreas are both “strike-slip” faults, meaning that blocks on either side of the fracture move sideways relative to one another. Over millions of years, he said, the shifts have moved southern Alaska miles westward relative to the rest of the state. He said the shifts have produced a set of large aligned valleys through the middle of the snowy Alaska range, from the Canadian border in the east to Mount McKinley in the west. Along much of its length, Sieh said, the Denali fault crosses large glaciers and during the quake broke up through the glaciers, offsetting large crevasses and rocky ridges within the ice. The earthquake also shook loose thousands of snow avalanches and rock falls. He said that in some places enormous blocks of rock and ice fell onto glaciers and valley floors, skidding a kilometer or more out over ice, stream, and tundra. [...] The scientists were surprised to discover that the fault rupture moved only east from the epicenter and left the western half of the great fault unbroken, Sieh said, prompting them to speculate that the quake could have been the first in a series of large events that will eventually include breaks farther west toward Mount McKinley and Denali National Park. » More ‘Big Ones’ to Come in Alaska? According to a Paul Harvey item, a visiting couple were in a museum in Anchorage recently, a museum devoted to the 1964 Good Friday quake, in a theater that shows footage of that quake and has seats that move as though a quake were happening right there and then. So guess what happened during that portion of the program? Harvey said when they emerged from the theater they were raving at how lifelike the special effects were.

Tornadoes in Three States Kill 31

Mon   11 Nov 2002   7:53 by Kevin McGehee 0 comments [Nature] [blogoSFERICS]

WARTBURG, Tenn.—Tornadoes were threatening the Washington, D.C., area Monday morning after killing at least 31 and injuring more than 100 in Alabama, Tennessee and Ohio. A wide band of storms stretched from Louisiana to Ohio, with Tennessee and Alabama the hardest hit. The death toll included 12 in Tennessee, 10 in Alabama and five in Ohio, while 45 people were unaccounted for in the rural town of Mossy Grove, officials said. A tornado cut a swath five to six miles long just before 9 p.m. Sunday, killing seven people in the town about 40 miles west of Knoxville. Emergency crews relied on ham radio operators for communication since phone lines were knocked out by the storm. Authorities were kept away from assessing much of the damage because toppled trees and power lines were blocking roadways, and they feared the death toll would rise as daybreak revealed the extent of the devastation. “It’s mass destruction, death,“ said Ken Morgan, an officer in nearby Oliver Springs. “Mossy Grove is destroyed.“ » Tornadoes in Three States Kill 31

Air Ball

Mon   14 Oct 2002   10:40 by Kevin McGehee 0 comments [Nature] [blogoSFERICS]

The Environmental Protection Agency’s recently released Latest Findings on National Air Quality confirms the good news that America’s air quality is improving. Unfortunately, many involved in environmental issues insist on telling the public otherwise. The report details the positive trends for virtually every major pollutant covered by the Clean Air Act (CAA). It states that “since 1970, aggregate emissions of the six principal pollutants tracked nationally have been cut 25 percent.“ Consequently, air quality has “shown improvements over the past 20 years for all six principal pollutants.“ Other CAA programs, such as the one designed to fight acid rain, have also yielded emissions reductions. The report acknowledges that there are still many parts of the country not yet in compliance with all of the CAA’s targets. Nonetheless, the air pollution problems the CAA was enacted to address appear well on their way towards resolution. However, good news is no news, especially on the environment, and the media largely ignored this report. » Air Ball

The Bear’s Cage

Mon   27 May 2002   15:20 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [AK4MC] [Nature] [blogoSFERICS]

Yesterday after seeing on the Weather Channel radar that some garden-variety air-mass thunderstorms were starting to pop up in our area, I went storm-chasing. Given that I like to participate in the local ham radio storm nets when we have severe weather warnings, I've since decided that I'd like to be mobile rather than homebound when one of these nets convenes, so I've reinstalled my handheld 2-meter two-way in my car with a cigarette-lighter plug for power and a mag-mount antenna on the roof, and so when we had some thunder happening in the general vicinity I took an afternoon drive and went looking for storms to get close to. At first when I went out, the atmosphere was so thick I really couldn't see anything very well in the sky -- none of the normal visual cues I've been used to in other places I've lived for locating different kinds of weather. Finally, though, I decided that the sky to the southwest, down I-85, had a kind of "backlit" look that I thought might indicate weather. So I got on the interstate and headed down that way, finally getting a good view of a thunderstorm about 27 miles from home near Hogansville, a town in northeastern Troup County. I left the freeway and bypassed downtown Hogansville, aiming for a spot on U.S. 29 a few miles south of town. Before I reached the highway I began seeing lightning strikes from the storm, and was hearing sferics not only on my AM radio (tuned to 1610 KHz), but also on my two-way which was tuned to the Newnan repeater at 145.13 MHz. Lightning noise in that band indicates some fairly strong discharges, not very far away. When I reached 29 I had to decide whether to head south on that highway or find a road that would take me west to where the core of the storm seemed to be. Since I didn't know much about the roads south of Hogansville I chose to go north instead, to Mobley Bridge Road which would take me in a northwest direction and from which I knew I could turn off if necessary to more closely approach the storm. I got a little bit of rain on Mobley Bridge Road, large raindrops that sounded almost like small hail on the roof of my car, but when I reached the intersection with Youngs Mill Road I knew I had to turn southwest to get closer to the storm, so that's what I did. What I didn't realize at that time was that the storm was straddling Youngs Mill Road and headed straight for me -- and that I was headed right into the "bear's cage," the area of most intense weather. Within minutes I was getting dense, heavy rain and lightning strokes so close I couldn't even finish saying "A thou---" before the thunder reached my ears. The rain became so heavy that I could barely make out a general idea where the road was. Then the rain started letting up, just in time for me to reach a thick ground fog that made visibility even worse. By the time I made it through that I was out from under the worst of the storm, but I couldn't turn off before reaching LaGrange. Once there, there was only one way I could turn toward home without going through downtown LaGrange, and that was by turning on Hammett Road -- which would take me right back toward the thunderstorm I had just come through. Fortunately I was able to turn off Hammett onto Tin Bridge just before getting too deep into the storm again, and that took me to U.S. 29 maybe a mile or two farther south than I had been while first scouting the storm. I considered re-engaging the storm but decided instead to get closer to home and see if anything had cooked up in Coweta County. As I scouted along between Hogansville and Newnan, I could still hear sferics on the radio, so I knew there was activity in the county. Then as I reached southern Newnan I got a chance to see a larger view of the sky and saw that there seemed to be something off toward Senoia. I headed out of southern Newnan on Georgia 16, watching the dark clouds as I approached Sharpsburg and the junction with Georgia 54, and decided that to avoid punching the core again I should turn south on 54 and maybe go behind the storm via Gordon Road. As I set out on 54 I began seeing lightning strokes, and again I got rained on as I passed the outer edges of the storm. I passed well west of the core and turned on Gordon Road toward Haralson, which is a few miles south of Senoia. It didn't take long before I began to see that I was well behind the storm, so rather than go all the way to Haralson I cut off toward Senoia via Luther Bailey Road. The drive to Senoia was more or less uneventful, but when I got there and could see the storm clearly again I realized it lay pretty squarely between me and Thomas Crossroads, the area of Coweta County that is home. I didn't want to retrace my steps to circumvent the storm again, so I decided I had to take the highway (Georgia 16) west back toward Sharpsburg and hope for the best. By the time I reached Turin I had again encountered poor visibility due to rain and ground fog. When I got back to the 16/54 junction at Sharpsburg I found that the core was just moving into town. I turned north on 54 and did the best I could to outrun the storm. At one point some miles north of Sharpsburg there was another "One thou---" lightning-thunder interval. But by the time I reached the main east-west route that went through Thomas Crossroads I was well out of the weather. And my fuel gauge light was on. I stopped at a gas station at Thomas Crossroads to fill up, and as I stood pumping gas the storm was coming on, making a heck of a racket. Shortly thereafter, as I arrived home to the sound of loud thunder, I came in the door and said to my wife, "It followed me home, can I keep it?" The heavy rain was pretty spectacular at home too, and in one instance a flash of lightning was followed at a barely perceptible interval by a loud BOOM of thunder. After the storm I went into the backyard and studied the trees just beyond the property line trying to determine which had been struck. Finally I spotted a pine, the uppermost branches of which had no needles, but plenty of pine cones. In the event of severe storm warnings, I think I'll stay behind the storm, looking for damage. Let somebody else report the golf-ball-sized hail as it's falling.

Wildfire Season
Sun   12 May 2002   9:49 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Nature] [Flyover Blogdom]	It’s wildfire season again in southern California. Expect Gray Davis to try to blame this on Bush, Enron, and Bill Simon.

Claim It Quick and Start Your Own Country
Thu   9 May 2002   15:12 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Nature] [Flyover Blogdom]	An iceberg 47 miles long broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf. The Bush Administration is denying reports that the iceberg has agreed to accept the Bethlehem 13.

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