"A scheme to take invasive lionfish out of the sea and put them on dinner plates is to expand.
The number of hunters is to double and permits will run for a year instead of six months."
"Led by teacher David Camperman, the students have been working on improving and testing their traps, originally developed by lionfish expert NOAA Chief Scientist Steve Gittings. Nicknamed the “taco trap,” the trap features a piece of lattice acting as an artificial reef to attract lionfish. The lattice is surrounded by cast net, and when the trap is pulled to the surface, the cast net folds up and over the lattice so it looks like a taco shell. Though the process is relatively slow, with no known predators, lionfish are notoriously hard to startle and the lack of bait in the trap will eliminate bycatch."Keep on working, kids.
"During the previous season — from July 2016 to June 2017 — Japan exceeded its quota of 4,007 tons by more than 300 tons, which was then subtracted from the quota for the current season.
The Pacific bluefin tuna stock was 160,000 tons in 1961, but overfishing by Japan and others drastically reduced this to 17,000 tons in 2014. [Yikes.]
Therefore, Japan, the world’s largest catcher and consumer of bluefin tuna, led an effort to introduce international catch limits, which were imposed on immature small tuna in 2015 and on adult fish in 2017."
"The Federation practices catch and release, with special materials to prevent the fish from being injured in the process. The Federation hopes to help with the collection of data on the bluefin tuna population in the Mediterranean with this technique. It’s a project supported by the WWF and the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.
David Gamba, President of the Sea Fishing Federation, said that the Mediterranean has a nursery zone, or a reproduction zone for the bluefin tuna, which has sparked questions like: What are the Bluefin’s population numbers? What is its seasonality, is the species present all year round, or does it migrate? According to the Federation’s recent studies, it seems as though there is one population which is internal and remains in the Mediterranean and another one which is very migratory."Maybe with more people like the Monaco Sea Fishing Federation, bluefin tuna still have a chance.
Taylor Kitsch (2015 - 2016), Patrick Sambrook (2013 - 2014), Michael Sheen (2010 - 2013), Ben Jackson (2009 - 2010) and Josh Lucas (2009).I've written previously about Rachel here,
"1972. Active; focal plane 57 m (187 ft); white flash every 15 s. 36 m (118 ft) round stone tower with lantern and gallery, painted with red and white horizontal bands; lantern dome painted red."Click on the first and third pics for a larger version.
"No one wants our political system to fail more than Russian President Vladimir Putin does, and our powerlessness on guns hardly enhances our democracy’s image to the world. It is worth revisiting reports last spring in Time magazine and The Post about the relationships that Russians close to their government are cultivating with the U.S. gun lobby as part of the outreach by pro-Putin forces to the far right."From:
"1977 (station established 1796). Active; focal plane 57 m (187 ft); two white flashes every 10 s. 46 m (151 ft) pentagonal cylindrical concrete tower with lantern and double gallery, attached to a 3-story circular harbor control building. The two seaward sides of the lighthouse are painted with horizontal red and white bands."And a bit of recent history: it was damaged by the great tsunami on December 26, 2004. But it survived and has reopened to visitors.
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| Walking to Hilbre Island at low tide |
"Skeptics like to point out that the warming at the Earth's surface hasn't been uniform, there have been cooling periods and flat periods (maybe), none of which I will give a name to, ever since the effects of increasing CO2 began to kick in. So, they ask, how can that happen if there is evermore heat being trapped.That last part is based on the observation of the warming of the 20th century, that every time there was a big El Niño there was a jump up in global temperature, and it didn't come back down all the way, leading to a steplike appearance of the temperature vs. time plot. And several readings indicated that this was a likely mechanism by which the oceans vented the excess GHG heat that they store.
The simple answer to that is: most of the heat is going into the ocean. It's been measured, documented, and quantified. Yet still, the ocean's uptake of the heat can vary, depending on a few factors, and just a slight variation can have a big effect on the atmospheric temperature. That might be part of the explanation for what happened in the early years of the 21st century (if in fact it happened). But more heat kept going into the oceans -- until it came back out decisively, in a massive El Niño event that drove atmospheric temperatures to all time highs, and also lower tropospheric temperatures measured by satellites."
"By analyzing records of global temperature, sea level rise, ocean heat content and other climate data, the study authors find the 2015-2016 El Niño released excess heat from the Pacific Ocean that had accumulated over the past two decades because of global warming.It feels so good to read that. Because it's true and it's what I thought was true.
They conclude this heat transfer from the ocean is largely responsible for the sharp spike in temperatures."
“The result indicates the fundamental cause of the large record-breaking events of global temperature was greenhouse-gas forcing rather than internal climate variability alone,” Yin said.
"The roots of the fiasco are not hard to determine. As in Oklahoma’s northern neighbour, Kansas, deep tax cuts have wrecked the state’s finances.
Mary Fallin, the Republican governor, came to office pledging to eliminate the income tax altogether. Since 2008 general state funds for K-12 education in Oklahoma have been slashed by 28.2%—the biggest cut in the country. Property taxes, which might have made up the difference, are constitutionally limited.
No fact embarrasses Oklahomans more, or repels prospective businesses more, than the number of cash-strapped [school] districts that have gone to four-day weeks.
A recently hired special-education teacher worries that she will not be able to afford a flat for herself and her two children without a housing voucher and food stamps, says Julie Phillips, a speech pathologist with Tulsa Public Schools. After a school drive to raise food for poor families unexpectedly had some left over, needy teachers divided the remaining bags of apples and potatoes among themselves."
"House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) pitched the plan to his GOP colleagues in a closed-door meeting Monday. The bill, set for a vote on Tuesday, would increase Pentagon funding by about $30 billion, to $584 billion, breaking existing spending caps as well as making funding available through September. The rest of the government would continue to be funded at 2017 levels through March 23."So that's what they want - and have wanted for a couple of years now - to slip out of the binds of sequestration that they CAUSED to be imposed in the first place, increasing funding for the military*, but avoiding raising spending on domestic programs.
“This is a bad, bad, bad, bad — you could say ‘bad’ a hundred times — deal,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus. “When you put it all together, a quarter-of-a-trillion-dollar increase in discretionary spending — not what we’re supposed to be doing.”Hey, Lil' JJ - maybe that $1.5. trillion dollar unnecessary tax cut wasn't such a great idea, eh?
"Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the Freedom Caucus chairman, said a broad deal encompassing a debt-limit increase and a huge disaster package would be “considered a lead balloon” among hard-line conservatives. “It’d get zero support” from the caucus, he said, aside from a member or two representing states affected by the disasters."These numb-nuts simply make me SICK. Maybe they think it's possible to repeal Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, and devastating deadly wildfires in California and the Pacific Northwest, followed by mudslides closing down major highways.
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| Looks chilly |
"The authors of the paper wrote that for the past 4.5bn years astronomical and geophysical factors have been the dominating influences on the Earth system. The Earth system is defined by the researchers as the biosphere, including interactions and feedbacks with the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere and upper lithosphere.This is something that I frequently tell the denierati in our discussions, now primarily taking place on Twitter. Which is, yes, Earth's climate is always changing, but except under very unusual natural conditions (like the end of the Younger Dryas), those changes are slow and gradual, and caused by factors that can be identified. Now, the dominant change factor that can be identified is humanity, and we are causing climate to change much faster than any natural factors.
But over the past six decades human forces “have driven exceptionally rapid rates of change in the Earth system,” the authors wrote, giving rise to a period known as the Anthropocene."
"According to Steffen these [astronomical and geophysical] forces have driven a rate of change of 0.01 degrees Celsius per century.
Greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans over the past 45 years, on the other hand, “have increased the rate of temperature rise to 1.7 degrees Celsius per century, dwarfing the natural background rate,” he said.
This represented a change to the climate that was 170 times faster than natural forces."
