History > 2006 > USA > Nature, Environnement (I)

Alaska the 'poster state'

for climate concerns

Updated 5/30/2006 1:46 AM ET
USA Today
By Elizabeth Weise

FAIRBANKS, Alaska — To the untrained eye, Bonanza Creek forest is breathtaking, a vibrant place alive with butterflies and birds, with evidence of moose and bear at every turn.

But look through forest ecologist Glenn Juday's eyes, and you see a dying landscape.

Since the 1970s, climate change has doubled the growing season in some places and raised state temperatures 6 degrees in the winter and 3.5 on average annually since 1950, says Juday, a professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Drought is stressing and killing spruce, aspen and birch trees.

Alaska has emerged as the poster state for global warming, the climate effect attributed to higher concentrations of "greenhouse" gases — mostly carbon dioxide created by burning fossil fuels — that capture the sun's heat in the atmosphere.

Global warming is a hot topic, especially now. Hurricane season begins Thursday, and climate researchers warn that rising ocean temperatures may bring more intense storms.

Former vice president Al Gore is back in the news with the release of his acclaimed documentary on warming, An Inconvenient Truth. And President Bush — who has been criticized by environmental groups that say he has been slow to acknowledge the dangers posed by warming — said last week that "people in our country are rightly concerned about greenhouse gases and the environment."

Alaska is important in measuring the effect of global warming on the USA because what happens here soon will be felt in the Lower 48 states, say experts such as Robert Corell, a senior fellow at the American Meteorological Society.

The spruce budworm, aspen leaf miner and the spruce bark beetle, pests once kept in check by winter cold, are flourishing here. Statewide, insect outbreaks have killed more than 4 million acres of forest in a decade and a half, says John Morton, a biologist at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Soldotna.

Fires, long an integral part of the forest ecology here, are burning millions of acres as summers get longer and hotter, says Scott Rupp, a University of Alaska-Fairbanks professor of forestry. And with each wave of fires, trees have a harder time coming back in the increasingly warm and dry landscape.

This great northern forest may end up a grassland. "Soon, people will be coming to the great plains of Alaska," Juday says.

Alaska is ahead of the climate-change curve because polar regions warm the fastest. They had long been kept frigid by vast regions of snow and ice that reflect 70% of the sun's energy back out to space.

But higher temperatures are shrinking that snow and ice cover. In the Arctic, summer sea ice has shrunk 15% to 20% in the past 30 years, according to 2005's Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report.

And as the snow and ice recede, the sun's rays are hitting more dark ground and water, which absorb most of the heat, reflecting just 20% of the energy away, says Matthew Sturm, a research scientist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Fairbanks.

Lakes and ponds are disappearing as the permafrost, permanently frozen ground that underlies much of Alaska north of Fairbanks, melts.

"It's like pulling the plug in a bathtub," says Peter Schweitzer, an anthropologist who works with the Arctic peoples in Alaska and Russia.

In some areas, as much as 40% of surface water has disappeared, taking with it vital habitat for ducks and other waterfowl, says Juday.

The permafrost that underlies much of the central and north of the state is a relic of the last Ice Age. Some of the frozen ground under Fairbanks is 100,000 years old, says Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at Fairbanks. And it's now starting to get "slushy."

For Ruth Macchione, that meant a more expensive design to her new home after the cabin her husband built in the 1950s sank into the ground. The permafrost under the cabin thawed because the structure wasn't built to keep the ground cold — a key trick in building in cold regions.

Her new home incorporates piers to allow cold air to circulate underneath it.

"Local engineers are getting worried about higher ground temperatures, so they're specifying more pilings to combat that," says Billy Connor, director of the Alaska University Transportation Center. That will mean higher construction costs across the state, Sturm says.

Long summers, early spring

More heat means longer summers. The growing season in Fairbanks has gone from 80 to 120 days since records were first kept in the 1900s, says John Walsh, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

But those summer days haven't come with any more rain, so plants and trees adapted to short, cool summers grow quickly but then dry out while it's still warm. That's one reason forest fires have become such a problem, he says.

Hotter summers aren't just a problem here. In the Midwest and East, a few extra degrees can bring on higher milk prices. That's because cows don't like it hot. When the mercury gets over 80°F, milk production drops.

"Last year, we had herds that were down 5 to 15 pounds of milk per cow, and they'll usually be making 65 to 75 pounds" a day, says Larry Chase, a professor of animal science at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

In the Midwest, the corn belt is shrinking, says S. Elwynn Taylor, a professor of agricultural meteorology at Iowa State University in Ames. Especially at the western edges in Nebraska and the Dakotas, areas that were marginal for corn and soybeans are now unable to economically grow them.

David Lobell, an environmental scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., says that for every 2°F increase in growing-season temperature, farmers can expect a 17% decline in yield for both corn and soybeans.

Taylor isn't convinced that the warming isn't simply part of a larger climate pattern that has been seen in the Midwest since about 1850. He is not alone. Other scientists see warming as part of a cyclical climate change, but they are outnumbered by colleagues who say the planet is warming steadily because human activity is adding to the greenhouse gases.

A landmark 2001 report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast that the average global surface temperature will increase 2.5 to 10°F above 1990 levels by 2100.

In White Mountain, a village of 200 on the western coast of Alaska near Nome, stocking up the larder is harder now for Rita Buck, a native Alaska Inupiaq and health practitioner at the town clinic.

Buck's year used to be a steady flow of work. First came salmon fishing, then harvesting berries. Salmonberries, a type of raspberry, would arrive first, then blueberries, blackberries and finally cranberries. Berries make up an important part of the subsistence diet.

But now, she says, the berries are blooming too early, when frost is still a danger. "It freezes all the berry blossoms and stops them growing," she says.

Cherry growers in Michigan, the nation's primary grower of tart cherries for pies, are having much the same problem. Spring now arrives seven to 10 days earlier there than in the 1970s, but cold snaps still come when they always have.

The commonly grown cherry variety isn't cold-hardy, so once it comes out of dormancy, it has no resistance to freezing, says Jeffrey Andresen, an agricultural meteorologist with Michigan State University in East Lansing.

"In 2002, early warming brought the tart cherry crop out of dormancy, and then a two-day freeze in April resulted in an almost complete loss for the year," he says.

Growers may have to plant new, more cold-hardy varieties, which won't be cheap, Andresen says. "You can't just pick up the trees and move them somewhere else."

Milder winters a problem

In Alaska, the sea ice that armors the coastline against winter storms is forming a week later than it used to, says David Atkinson, a Fairbanks professor of atmospheric science.

The state accounting office, worried about the cost of moving at-risk communities, estimates that more than 100 coastal villages potentially face danger as winter storms erode their once-protected shorelines. The open water makes for stronger storms. Some areas have lost 30 to 40 feet of beach in a single storm, Atkinson says.

Warmer winters also are creating problems for California farmers of high-value crops such as peaches, plums, nectarines, almonds, pistachios and walnuts, which need a period of cold in the winter to bloom properly.

A series of warm winters has played havoc with fruit production, says Theodore DeJong, a professor of plant science at the University of California-Davis. Farmers may have to switch out their current trees with low-chill varieties, expensive but at least a solution.

But for the trees that grow plums for prunes, that's simply not an option. It would take 10 to 20 years to develop low-chill varieties of these trees, DeJong says.

Packers already are moving some production to Chile. There could soon come a day when California, which grows 95% to 98% of all plums in the USA, is out of the business entirely.

The health element

The huge fires that have hit Alaska in the past few summers filled the air with so much smoke and ash that people in Fairbanks at times wore dust masks and doctors told asthmatic patients to leave town until the fires were out.

But it doesn't take a fire to make air unhealthy, says Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

U.S. asthma and allergy rates are increasing in part because more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is supercharging the production of pollen that can trigger them, he says. When carbon dioxide is doubled, ragweed stems grow 10% more but pollen increases by 60%.

"Pollen counts of 120 used to be cause for alert. We're seeing counts like 6,000 now," Epstein says.

Warmer winters also mean insects can survive and thrive in places where the cold used to keep them in check. Lyme disease is spreading beyond the former winter confines of the tick that carries it. And West Nile virus is spreading farther because spring drought amplifies the bird-biting mosquito cycle, Epstein says.

Looking forward

Ten years of change in the Arctic region is a preview of 25 years of change in the rest of the world, says Corell of the American Meteorological Society.

But that's not to say that path is cast in stone. Even researchers such as University of New Hampshire earth science professor Cameron Wake, who tracks such phenomena as the earlier arrival of spring, see a silver lining in this cloud.

"This country is at its best when it has a grand challenge, whether it's World War II or going to the moon," Wake says. "This is the next grand challenge."

    Alaska the 'poster state' for climate concerns, UT, 30.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2006-05-29-alaska-globalwarming_x.htm

Sea change coming for the Everglades

Updated 5/30/2006 11:19 PM ET
USA Today
By Dan Vergano

FLAMINGO, Fla. — The road to Paradise Prairie, site of a grand plan to develop cheap land in a drained Everglades, was supposed to go through this former fishing village. That plan went bust decades ago, and the future here looks very, very soggy.

Now, Flamingo stands as the gateway to a more likely destiny: the coming century of global warming, one that climate researchers warn will bring higher temperatures, extreme weather and sea levels rising high enough to doom this toehold on the tip of South Florida.

To experts studying such rising water levels, "Flamingo is kind of a canary in the coal mine," says Fred Herling, National Park Service planner for the Everglades and Dry Tortugas parks.

Still covered in a gray mud from last year's hurricanes, Wilma and Katrina, condemned cottages and decrepit motel rooms await the wrecking ball at Flamingo, which now is primarily the site of an Everglades National Park recreation center.

In an effort to reverse damage, the park service is embarking on a $7.9 billion, 35-year plan to restore the park's 1.4 million acres of federally protected wetlands and 10 million acres of the surrounding Everglades.

Man-made levees interrupt the natural, freshwater flow that defines the dry and wet seasons, and efforts to drain the wetlands by cutting canals to the coast have opened the door to the rising sea, says geologist Harold Wanless of the University of Miami.

The sea level has risen 9 inches in the past century on Florida's southern coast, a rate six times faster than the per-century rate over the previous 2,400 years, Wanless says.

The trend is expected to accelerate because of warming, which would expose the coast to even worse storm effects.

"It is not unreasonable to conclude from what we know now that a 3- or 4- or 5-foot sea level rise in this century is more than likely" for Flamingo and Cape Sable, Wanless says. Cape Sable, a curved shield of sand and prairie that comprises Florida's southwest corner, is the southernmost point of the U.S. mainland. No part of Everglades National Park is higher than 8 feet.

Nationwide, other coastal locales face similar changes. "We could see the total devastation of our coastal system" of barrier islands and overdeveloped seaside communities, Wanless says.

Temperatures on the way up

The levels of so-called greenhouse gases, which are the naturally occurring and man-made gases that capture heat in the atmosphere, are at their highest in at least 650,000 years, according to a study published last year in Nature magazine that examined Antarctic ice cores.

"Right now, given our accumulation of greenhouse gases, we are inevitably committed to a certain amount of climate change, even if we stabilized emissions today," says climate scientist Gerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

And if the world keeps on burning fossil fuels at its current rate, which is the "business as usual" scenario used by those studying climate changes, atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations will double by 2100, according to the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland in College Park.

In April, an analysis led by Duke University climate researcher Gabriele Hegerl examined climate sensitivity, an indicator of how temperatures will respond to this doubling of greenhouse gases. Based on reconstructions of climate over the past 700 years, the analysis downplayed some disturbing possibilities, finding it unlikely that temperatures would rise more than 12 degrees.

"But we are still pointing towards a substantial change," Hegerl says. Her analysis suggests the average temperature is more likely to increase about 5 degrees worldwide.

Today, hundreds of research groups are studying the global effects of temperature increase in coming decades and centuries.

A group led by Meehl and colleague Claudia Tebaldi has published comparisons of global climate models that look at the difference between conditions from 1960 to 1990 and projections for 2080 to 2099.

So under these projections, what does the USA of 2100 look like compared with recent decades?

•Temperatures. As one might expect, temperatures are warmer, but some regions are hotter than others. Overall, average temperatures nationwide could jump 4 degrees or more, a bit below the global average. In the high plains and mountain west, average temperatures may jump 7 degrees. The smallest jump, around 3 degrees average increase, comes in tropical parts of Florida such as Flamingo.

Hundreds of climate scientists and representatives of nations, including the USA, signed off on a 2001 report by the United Nations that said temperatures would increase, most likely driven by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.

Some scientists disagree. In a speech last year at the University of Michigan, Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson called predictions "grossly exaggerated."

On the other hand, at least as many scientists, including Tim Flannery, author of this year's The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, argue that mainstream models more likely underestimate changes, saying temperatures probably will get much hotter.

•Frost days. The Pacific Northwest in particular will see fewer days when the thermometer falls below freezing. Seattle may see as many as 50 fewer days. In the Midwest and Southeast, the number of frost days drops by 10 to 20 days a year, driven in part by a shift of high-pressure air on Canada's western edge, which acts to funnel relatively cooler air across the Great Lakes.

•Heat waves. They will be "more intense, more frequent and more long-lasting," Meehl says. Models show Southern and Western states will have more intense heat waves than the rest of the country. Parts of those regions may experience three or more heat waves in a typical year, compared with one now.

•Rain and snow. New England may get 5 inches more of rain and snow in a year than it does now, and parts of the Southwest could see a decrease by the same amount. "The intensity increases everywhere," Meehl says. "You can have fewer events in an area, but when it does rain, it rains hard."

One concern is that arid places may have a higher risk of flash flooding.

•Sea level. The Environmental Protection Agency projects an average increase of sea levels by 2 feet nationwide by 2100. An analysis by climate researcher Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona-Tucson suggests a 3-foot increase is more likely. That's bad news for low-lying New Orleans and southern Florida, including Flamingo and Miami.

Worse, unless global warming is stabilized, increased temperatures will have locked in enough heat by 2100 to inevitably raise sea levels 20 feet by 2600, Overpeck says.

"Climate affects everything, so there will be tremendous dislocations," says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Growing seasons and everyday life, from house design to water quality, will be affected.

"It is important to put these shifts in the context of the past," Schmidt says. "The last time temperature shifted globally (9 degrees during the last Ice Age), New York was under a mile of ice. In the next hundred years, we'll see maybe half that shift in temperature, and maybe that and more.

"Think how much change we'll see," he says.

Where to start

The biggest unknown in looking ahead to 2100, Meehl says, is how much carbon dioxide humankind will pour into the atmosphere. "Every day that goes by without stabilizing concentrations of greenhouse gases means we have a bigger commitment to more climate change in the future," he says.

And despite increased interest in recent years in hydrogen-fueled cars, windmills and biofuels made from plants, it's very unlikely people won't be burning coal, oil and natural gas in coming decades, says Jae Edmonds of the Joint Global Change Research Institute. There's just too much of the stuff, especially coal, too easily extracted from the ground to expect humanity to stop burning fossil fuels, he says.

"High oil prices alone won't solve the problem," Edmonds says. "Society will choose one way or the other how to deal with climate change. We may back into it. Or it may be a conscious choice."

Princeton's Robert Socolow promotes a "wedge strategy," calling for society to concentrate on the most promising technologies to cut carbon emissions. Options include wind power, nuclear energy, biotech fuels, storing carbon dioxide underground, even turning a biofuel-producing USA into the "Saudi Arabia of sawgrass," Edmonds says.

"But the point is there is no obvious silver bullet, a single technology that is going to solve every problem," Edmonds adds. "So, we need to look at all of them."

Some experts, such as James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, foresee political breakdown and chaos.

But most, including Edmonds, think of climate change as an uncertainty-plagued risk-management problem. People didn't deal with acid rain, remove lead from gasoline or start protecting the ozone layer until the benefits of doing so were understood.

Everglades project

Until a 1920s land bust in southern Florida, Flamingo was poised for prosperity as it waited for the Everglades to be drained and a highway to be built to connect Miami to Cape Sable.

Would-be land barons envisioned building a city named Chevalier, sugar cane plantations on the cleared land called Paradise Prairie and a railroad that would bring cargo from ships that passed through the new Panama Canal, says Seth Bramson, official historian of the Florida East Coast Railway.

Now the chief concerns for the area are to restore boating and lodging facilities for national park visitors and to make the facilities more able to withstand hurricanes, Herling says.

Debate over whether global warming is creating more intense tropical storms worldwide has little bearing on Flamingo's revival. "We can't tell visitors we're not going to restore the park because of concerns decades away," Herling says.

The plan to restore the Everglades rests on the assumption of a 1-foot rise in sea level by 2100, says Everglades National Park chief Dan Kimball. Monitoring of the restoration will allow adjustments in how the work proceeds.

But some everyday adaptations already are taking place. Docks no longer will be nailed into place but will be yoked to pilings, allowing them to float freely during storms. Guest cottages wrecked by 9-foot waves from last year's hurricanes may be replaced by semi-permanent "yurts," Herling says, tented structures with parts that can be taken apart and stored as storms approach.

By 2100, Cape Sable and Flamingo, onetime aspiring gateways to paradise, probably will be under water, Wanless says. The rise in sea level means Cape Sable probably will be broken up into spits of land and open water, he says.

"Once climate change gets moving, there's always a lag. It's like leaving the fridge door open — things don't melt right away. But we're doing things right now that will affect us the rest of the century and beyond."

    Sea change coming for the Everglades, UT, 30.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2006-05-30-everglades-globalwarming_x.htm

Unto the City the Wildlife Did Journey

May 29, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN

And the great beasts came down from the mountains and crossed the seas and descended upon the cities — the hind and her fawn, leaping fences in the southeast Bronx; the black bear, stout but fleet of foot, stealing through the streets of Newark; the seals of the harbor sunning themselves by the score upon the hospital ruins of Staten Island.

And the coyote prowled the West Side and took up quarters in Central Park. And the dolphin beached itself on the Turuks' sandy yard in Throgs Neck. And the she-moose, 21 hands high, strayed within 30 miles of the city gates.

And the wise men stroked their beards and scratched their heads, and they finally declared, "This is not normal."

Bill Weber, a senior conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that the other day. He was talking about the bears that have lately taken to wandering New Jersey's urban core.

But bears are just the beginning. In recent weeks, the three largest land mammals native to the Eastern United States, along with numerous runners-up, have visited New York City and its environs. A fair degree of chaos has ensued.

Big-city police officers idled by falling crime rates spend their days pursuing four-legged fugitives. The pit bulls and tomcats in the city pound in East Harlem have been forced to make room for white-tailed deer. This spring, the New York metropolitan area depicted on the evening news has come to resemble an episode of "Animal Precinct" filmed at a big-game preserve.

What in the world is going on?

There is no simple answer, the wise men say.

"You have this really neat pulse of things happening within a relatively short period," Dr. Weber said from his office at the Bronx Zoo, "and as humans we like to make some sense of that and give some justification. But they all have their anomalous reasons."

The factors include both environmental triumphs and travesties. Once-threatened species continue to recover because of conservation measures. Waterways are cleaner. Greenways are being built in and around cities. At the same time, development in the farthest exurbs chews up land and flushes animals from their usual homes. Mild winters, possibly man-made, are easier for many species to survive.

All of it adds up to a new definition of normal. (Or perhaps an old one. After all, the animals were here long before the people were.) Just as the suburbs have spent years negotiating conflicts with wild animals, it is now the cities' turn.

"I think we're just seeing the growing trend of population sizes with some of these animals, and the adaptation to survive and, or at least, venture into more progressively more urban areas," said Gerry Barnhart, the wildlife director at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The season of strangeness began on the first day of spring, when a coyote was spotted in Central Park for the first time since 1999. Four days later, biologists on a search expedition counted 20 harbor seals at the edge of Swinburne Island, off the east coast of Staten Island. Seals have been observed there since 2001, but never in such numbers. In April, a wild turkey nicknamed Hedda Gobbler was apprehended on the grounds of the Riverton Houses in Harlem, just days after one — possibly the same one — was seen wandering the lawn of the American Museum of Natural History.

Then came the bears of May. A 225-pounder, perhaps on a misguided mission to lodge a complaint against New Jersey's new no-tolerance policy on urban bears, got within two blocks of Department of Environmental Protection headquarters in Trenton before he was treed, tranquilized and killed. Under state policy, bears that wander into heavily populated areas may be killed if the state determines that they pose a hazard.

The Newark bear — a phrase that had until recently meant only a minor-league baseball player — crossed into neighboring Irvington, where he, too, was shot dead. A juvenile weighing 153 pounds made it as far as Short Hills, seven miles from Newark, before being put to death, to a growing outcry from bear defenders.

In between bear sightings, the southeast Bronx, best known for tidy waterfront neighborhoods and convenient access to Queens, was the site of two more untimely mammal deaths.

A panicked mother deer fleeing would-be rescuers gored herself on a backyard fence, ran into Eastchester Bay and drowned. Then an offshore bottlenose dolphin, a hefty subspecies usually found at least 50 miles from the shore, washed up next to the Turuk family's dock. Stephen Turuk, 40, cried as he poured water on the sickly animal trying to save it. "It's a beautiful thing to see a dolphin," he said, "but it's terrible that it died."

In April, the moose, a 7-foot female estimated to weigh 700 pounds, surfaced in Somers in Westchester County, 27 miles from the New York City line, or slightly closer than Riverdale is to the Rockaways. Joan Ackerman, a manager at a county park, was dumbfounded when she locked eyes with it. "I went to Alaska and didn't see a moose," she said.

While the intensity of the current invasion may be a fluke, the guests seem to be here to stay. Wildlife officials released the Harlem turkey and the surviving Throgs Neck deer not in distant preserves but in the city parks where they were presumed to have been living before — Morningside and Pelham Bay, respectively.

So eventually, if not sooner, city folk will have some adapting to do. But what sort of adaptation? Should New Yorkers hang their trash from ropes rather than leaving it curbside for large clawed paws to tear through? Will the orange hunting vest replace the little black dress? Could Lyme disease become the new asthma?

Fortunately, the experts have much advice to offer. Do not add meat scraps, bones or melon rinds to your compost pile. Yell or bang pots when walking through wooded areas. Provide secure outdoor shelters for poultry. And do not, under any circumstances, feed bananas to visiting seals, as some people did at the Coney Island beach last summer. ("Don't even give them fish," said Martha Hiatt, the supervisor of behavioral husbandry at the New York Aquarium.)

And if a moose should wander into the Big Apple, an outcome that Al Hicks, a state wildlife biologist and its official moose expert, said was possible "if the moose made a number of mistakes," there is only one appropriate course of action beyond notifying the authorities.

"Enjoy it," Mr. Hicks said, "because it's probably going to get hit by a car in the very near future."

    Unto the City the Wildlife Did Journey, NYT, 29.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/nyregion/29animals.html?hp&ex=1148961600&en=4179f998eb1ee096&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A River Cuts a New Course, Leaving a New Hampshire Town High and Dry

May 29, 2006
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

EPSOM, N.H., May 25 — Nicholas Tilton and Jamie Lucier's wedding ceremony was supposed to be held outside an old lumber mill here on May 20, with a waterfall on the Suncook River serving as the perfect backdrop. The river, however, had other plans, and chose not to show up.

A week before the wedding, the Suncook River jumped its banks and cut a new course during torrential rains and flooding, leaving a 1.52-mile stretch of what was once river close to empty. Now, the patio of the restaurant that replaced the mill is overlooking two dams and some rocks, all bone-dry.

State officials are still trying to determine why the river moved. One theory is that a man-made gravel pit near the river removed sediment that would have created a natural dam. Another is that the area contains a natural depression. Or it could be a combination of the two.

"It flooded over, but when the water receded it took the path of least resistance," said David Wunsch, the New Hampshire state geologist. "It found a path where it could get out of its channel and make a shortcut. Why it did — that is a question."

Victor Baker, a professor of hydrology at the University of Arizona who is not familiar with the situation in Epsom, said that changing course was a natural process in the history of a river, and that it could occur more quickly because of construction or other human interference. The process is relatively common in large rivers with big flood plains, including the Mississippi, but is less common in New England.

"In New England, the flood plains are relatively narrow, maybe a few miles across," Professor Baker said. "The rivers can shift across those, and it may seem dramatic in a small town."

"It's not as common in New England" as in other places, he added.

No homes or businesses were destroyed along the Suncook River's new course. But what the river left behind is striking — moss-covered rocks, quicksand and a huge sandy pit that looks like a scene from the Southwest. Many residents now refer to it as the Grand Canyon.

The river's new path has caused a controversy in this town, 11 miles east of Concord. Should the river be allowed to stay where it is or be moved back to its old bed?

Owners of businesses and land along the river, as well as people downstream who now have sand and silt in their backyards, want it put back. Some other people would rather let nature take its course and leave the river where it is. Others don't want to foot a hefty bill to redirect it.

"We want them to reroute the river back because we don't want to lose the river," said Rich Paro, who works at the Lazy River Campground.

The river was once the campground's main attraction, drawing canoeists and kayakers. The campground was severely flooded, but is open and full for the holiday weekend, even though it is now by an almost dry riverbed.

"People like the river," Mr. Paro said.

Donna Mailhot-Dornhofer, who owns Center Epsom Antiques, thinks the river knows what is best.

"If we're not going to get the Old Man in the Mountain back, we're not going to get a river back," she said, referring to the state's iconic rock figure, which collapsed in 2003. "I don't want to be putting my tax money into that."

There are also environmental concerns. The river contains a rare mussel that is on the state's endangered list. The shift's effect on the mussel is unknown.

The town has asked the state to study putting the river back, and various agencies are scheduled to meet Tuesday to discuss the situation. A town meeting is planned for next Monday.

In town, many theories abound as to why the shift happened and how the river could be put back.

Al Bickford, 73, a lifelong resident whose father used to own the mill, is the town's resident river expert. Mr. Bickford thinks the breach happened in a place where officials removed a beaver dam about 10 years ago, weakening the bank. Robert Griggs, who owns the land the mill is on, suggested building a beaverlike dam with cut trees and sand, saying the river could be back to its old course in a week.

Julie Clermont, a town selectwoman who lives near the river, said she was not sure what the town would do. But she said that because of budgetary restrictions, any action would require a special vote.

"It's dividing the town," Ms. Clermont said.

She said she would side with the townspeople if it were put to a vote, but is not sure how she feels about the issue. Ms. Claremont enjoyed kayaking on the river when it flowed near her home, and she said she was uncertain whether moving it back was a good idea.

Nature decided to move the river on May 14 and 15. Town officials and volunteers sandbagged the dams near the mill and points along the river that were prone to flooding.

Suddenly, residents said, the high water at the dam by the mill started to recede and flow backward until it drained out like a bathtub, exposing the rocky bed.

Mr. Bickford worked with the Fire Department to pinpoint possible flooding spots, but missed the one where it breached.

"That old son of a gun blindsided me," Mr. Bickford said. "I've got to say, emotionally, it hurts. It's like losing an old friend. I've lived on the river, fished the river. The river has always been a part of my life."

As for Mr. Tilton and Ms. Lucier, their wedding in the old mill went on as planned. The couple was married outside in front of a large rock.

Mr. Tilton's mother, Leigh, said she had been extremely nervous about the rain and had prayed all week before the wedding for the water to go down, so the restaurant would not flood and the couple could marry near the waterfall.

"God must have misunderstood my prayer because the water did go down, all of it!" she said in an e-mail message. "There is no waterfall. There is no river! Just an empty riverbed. The reception hall was dry. Another example to be careful what you pray for!"

    A River Cuts a New Course, Leaving a New Hampshire Town High and Dry, NYT, 29.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/us/29river.html

The Energy Challenge

2 Industry Leaders Bet on Coal but Split on Cleaner Approach

May 28, 2006
the New York Times
By SIMON ROMERO

WRIGHT, Wyo. — More than a century ago a blustery Wyoming politician named Fenimore Chatterton boasted that his state alone had enough coal to "weld every tie that binds, drive every wheel, change the North Pole into a tropical region, or smelt all hell!"

His words seem prophetic.

The future for American energy users is playing out in coal-rich areas like northeastern Wyoming, where dump trucks and bulldozers swarm around 80-foot-thick seams at a Peabody Energy strip mine here, one of the largest in the world.

Coal, the nation's favorite fuel in much of the 19th century and early 20th century, could become so again in the 21st. The United States has enough to last at least two centuries at current use rates — reserves far greater than those of oil or natural gas. And for all the public interest in alternatives like wind and solar power, or ethanol from the heartland, coal will play a far bigger role.

But the conventional process for burning coal in power plants has one huge drawback: it is one of the largest manmade sources of the gases responsible for global warming.

Many scientists say that sharply reducing emissions of these gases could make more difference in slowing climate change than any other move worldwide. And they point out that American companies are best positioned to set an example for other nations in adopting a new technique that could limit the environmental impact of the more than 1,000 coal-fired power projects on drawing boards around the world.

It is on this issue, however, that executives of some of the most important companies in the coal business diverge. Their disagreement is crucial in the debate over how to satisfy Americans' energy appetite without accelerating climate change.

One of those executives, Michael G. Morris, runs American Electric Power, the nation's largest coal consumer and biggest producer of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions from its existing plants. He is spearheading a small movement within the industry to embrace the new technology. His company plans to build at least two 600-megawatt plants, in Ohio and West Virginia, at an estimated cost of as much as $1.3 billion each.

The company says these plants are not only better for the environment but also in the best interests of even its cost-conscious shareholders. While they would cost 15 to 20 percent more to build, Mr. Morris says they would be far less expensive to retrofit with the equipment needed to move carbon dioxide deep underground, instead of releasing it to the sky, if limits are placed on emissions of global warming gases.

"Leave the science alone for a minute," Mr. Morris said in an interview at the Columbus, Ohio, headquarters of his company. "The politics around climate issues are very real. That's why we need to move on this now."

But most in the industry are not making that bet. Among them is Gregory H. Boyce, chief executive of Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal producer in the world thanks in part to its growing operations here in Wyoming and with aspirations to operate coal-fired plants of its own. Mr. Boyce's company alone controls reserves with more energy potential than the oil and gas reserves of Exxon Mobil.

"We're still not convinced that the technology or cost structure is there to justify going down a path where we're not comfortable," Mr. Boyce said.

Mr. Boyce's view has prevailed. No more than a dozen of the 140 new coal-fired power plants planned in the United States expect to use the new approach.

The decisions being made right now in industry and government on how quickly to adopt any new but more costly technologies will be monumental.

"Coal isn't going away, so you have to think ahead," said Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of NASA. "Many of these power stations are built to last 50 years."

Promise and Perils

Michael Morris and Gregory Boyce, both kingpins in their industries, have a lot in common. They do a lot of business together — Mr. Morris is one of Mr. Boyce's largest customers. They are solid Republicans. And they serve together on various industry initiatives.

They agree that energy from coal — the nation's most important source of electricity — is cheaper than energy from oil and natural gas and is competitive with the uranium used in nuclear power plants. And coal could serve new uses: replacing petroleum in making chemicals, for example, or even fueling vehicles.

But while sooty smokestacks are no longer a big problem in modern coal-burning power plants, the increase in global warming gases is. A typical 500-megawatt coal-fired electricity plant, supplying enough power to run roughly 500,000 homes, alone produces as much in emissions annually as about 750,000 cars, according to estimates from Royal Dutch Shell.

Coal has no stronger evangelist than Mr. Boyce, who grew up on Long Island, the son of a mining executive, and studied engineering in Arizona. He argues that a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can be found without having to switch from the existing cheaper coal-burning technology.

Much in the way that Exxon Mobil influences discussion of climate issues in the oil industry, Peabody is a backer of industry-supported organizations that seek to prevent mandatory reductions in global warming emissions and promote demand for coal.

Peabody's executives are also by far the coal industry's largest political contributors to federal candidates and parties, giving $641,059 in the 2004 election cycle, with 93 percent of that amount going to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an independent research group in Washington that tracks money in politics. And while Peabody says it expects contributions to Democrats to increase, under Mr. Boyce the company has cultivated close contact with the Bush administration.

Mr. Boyce was chairman of an advisory panel for the Energy Department, organized by the National Coal Council, that produced a controversial report in March calling for exemptions to the Clean Air Act to encourage greater consumption of coal through 2025. The thrust of the report, which Mr. Boyce outlined in an interview, is that improvements in technology to limit carbon dioxide emissions should be left to the market instead of government regulation.

By contrast, the environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council, which has brought many lawsuits aimed at controlling pollution, described the report as an "energy fantasy" that would increase carbon dioxide emissions by more than 2 billion tons a year.

But it is Peabody's economic argument, not the environmental opposition's, that is resonating throughout the electricity industry and among energy regulators.

Led by Peabody, dozens of energy companies have embarked on the most ambitious construction of coal-fired electricity plants since the 1950's.

Coal, as Mr. Boyce notes, is a bargain. Despite a doubling in domestic prices in the last two years, a surge in prices for natural gas, the preferred fuel for new power plants in the 1990's, has made coal more attractive.

With coal so favorably priced, Peabody saw an opportunity to enter the power-plant business itself, setting out to build two of the largest in the world, the 1,500-megawatt Prairie State Energy Campus in southern Illinois and the 1,500-megawatt Thoroughbred Energy Campus in western Kentucky. Both are in areas where the St. Louis-based company has substantial coal reserves.

Despite concern among some large energy companies over the liabilities they face if global warming advances or legal limits on emissions become a reality, Peabody remains loyal to its technology choice. Vic Svec, Peabody's senior vice president for investor relations, said the possibility of near-term caps on carbon emissions was not viewed as a "material threat."

Mr. Morris, at American Electric Power, sees things differently. He cites cost concerns in arguing for its move to cleaner technology. At the request of environmental groups that hold shares in the company, A.E.P. agreed in 2004, shortly after Mr. Morris arrived, to report on the potential costs it would face if emissions rules were tightened. The company recognized that its growth beyond 2010 could be limited if it stuck with old technology.

The company has since won important allies in its push for cleaner coal, including General Electric, which is pinning much of its hopes for growth in the electricity industry on new technology and is working with A.E.P. on designing its plants.

One vital element of A.E.P.'s ambitions, and by extension those of other energy companies with similar projects, fell into place in April when the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio allowed the company to bill customers for a portion of the higher pre-construction costs for the plant it is planning in the state. The company hopes to complete construction of its first such plant by 2010.

Proponents of these plants, which turn coal into a gas that is burned to produce energy, say they would also emit much lower amounts of other pollutants that contribute to acid rain, smog and respiratory illness.

But for every small advance of the new technology, there are bigger setbacks. Many within the industry argue that it would be a waste of time and money to build such plants in the United States unless China, which passed the United States several years ago as the largest coal-consuming nation, also moves to limit carbon dioxide emissions from its rapidly growing array of coal-fired plants.

Will Government Act?

With widespread uncertainty in the state-regulated power industry, the debate has moved to the federal level, where testimony by senior energy executives before the Senate Energy Committee in April revealed a sharp fault line within the industry.

On one side, A.E.P., lined up with Peabody and other heavy coal users against mandatory limits on global warming gases if industrializing countries like China and India are not included. Others that have less to lose from carbon caps — like Exelon and Duke Energy, which rely much more on nuclear power — spoke in favor of national limits that would include coal consumers.

The Bush administration has rejected mandatory limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Michele St. Martin, a spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said, "such regulations would lead to higher energy prices, slower economic growth and fewer jobs for the U.S. as industries move overseas where greenhouse gas emissions are not similarly controlled."

But there is some support in Washington for such legislation. The two senators from New Mexico, Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat, and Pete V. Domenici, a Republican, are working on a bill that could require limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

Ahead of the 2008 presidential election, two senators often mentioned as candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, have endorsed mandatory cuts in emissions. Mr. Morris of A.E.P. said such support has persuaded him that limits might be imposed in coming years.

While Peabody supports some coal gasification projects, it remains skeptical about departing from traditional coal-burning methods to produce electricity.

The pulverized coal plants it wants to build, which grind coal into a dust before burning it to make electricity, currently cost about $2 billion each, or 15 percent to 20 percent less to build than the cleaner "integrated gasification combined cycle," or I.G.C.C., plants, which convert coal into a gas.

The hope among scientists is that I.G.C.C. plants could be relatively quickly fitted with systems to sequester deep underground the carbon dioxide created from making electricity. Without such controls, the new coal plants under development worldwide could pump as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over their lifetimes as all the coal burned in the last 250 years, according to Jeff Goodell, who has written on coal for several publications, including The New York Times, and is author of a new book on the coal industry.

But state and federal regulators have been hesitant to endorse the technology. Peabody and other companies remain skeptical that carbon-capture methods, whether for pulverized coal or combined cycle plants, will become commercially or technologically feasible until the next decade.

Legal battles over this reluctance have begun, with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Lung Association this year challenging the Environmental Protection Agency for allowing electric companies to move ahead with projects without evaluating the new technology.

In one key decision on the state level, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission rejected a proposal from WE Energies of Milwaukee in 2003 to build a plant with the new technology, saying it was too expensive and would result in higher electricity prices.

Capturing the Gas

Engineers have known how to make gas from coal for more than a century, using this method in the gaslights that first illuminated many American cities. A handful of coal gasification plants are already in operation in the United States, Spain and the Netherlands, built with generous government assistance.

Selling the captured carbon dioxide from coal gasification plants could make them more competitive with pulverized coal plants. One gasification plant in North Dakota, though different from an electric plant, already sends its carbon dioxide to Saskatchewan, where it is injected in aging oilfields to force more crude from the ground. And the oil giant BP announced a similar project in March for a refinery it owns near Los Angeles, using petroleum coke as a fuel there instead of coal.

Scientists have developed numerous other plans to pump away carbon dioxide, like shipping it to offshore platforms to inject it below the ocean floor. These plans are not without risk, with some officials concerned that carbon dioxide sequestration could trigger earthquakes. Yet, time and again, the most limiting factor remains economics.

As they proceed with plans to build pulverized coal plants, Peabody and other companies often point to their support of the alternative technology through their participation in Futuregen, a $1 billion project started three years ago by the Bush administration to build a showcase 275-megawatt power station that could sequester carbon dioxide and reduce other pollutants.

Futuregen's 10 members include some of the world's largest coal mining companies, among them Peabody and BHP Billiton of Australia, as well as large coal-burning utilities like A.E.P. and the Southern Company.

One Chinese company, the China Huaneng Group, is also a member of Futuregen, while India's government signed on in March. Washington is financing the bulk of the project, more than $600 million, with about $250 million coming from coal and electricity companies and the rest from foreign governments.

But Futuregen is already behind schedule, with planners now hoping to choose a site for the plant by the end of the year, with an eye on starting operation by 2012. Environmental groups have criticized the project as too little, too late.

"Futuregen is a smokescreen, since it's not intended to bring technology to the market at the pace required to deal with the problem," said Daniel Lashoff, science director at the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We don't have that kind of time."

    2 Industry Leaders Bet on Coal but Split on Cleaner Approach, NYT, 28.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/business/28coal.html?hp&ex=1148875200&en=2cffad8d8e32d294&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Plan for Sharpshooters to Thin Colorado Elk Herd Draws Critics

May 28, 2006
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

ESTES PARK, Colo., May 25 — The elk that roam Rocky Mountain National Park in their slow-moving majesty have become a signature attraction for tourists, and an economic driver of the economy in this town at the park's edge.

But the animals leave some mighty big hoof prints. The park's biology has been skewed by elk overpopulation, which biologists say is squeezing out even butterflies and beavers, both of which need the aspen groves that the elk herd of perhaps 3,000 animals decimates in its search for food.

The town itself has become an elk playground as well. The animals regularly stop traffic — a phenomenon beloved by visitors — but they are also becoming more and more of a nuisance, and occasionally even a threat. The chief of police, Lowell Richardson, said he had been chased around more than once on the golf course. A woman was seriously injured several years ago when she got between a mother elk and her calf.

But now the town-park-elk triangle, with elements of economics and elk biology in equal measure, is about to change profoundly, and few are happy. Park administrators have proposed a 20-year program of herd reduction and management that would involve shooting hundreds of elk, mostly at night in the park, using sharpshooters with silencers.

Critics of the plan advocate either bringing back wolves to control the population, or recreational hunters or contraception. Park officials say that they have studied every option and that "lethal reduction," as the plan is called, is the best way to bring the numbers of elk down to a sustainable 1,200 or so.

Estes Park itself, meanwhile, is bracing for the elk themselves to react and adapt by moving even more into the community than they are now. Town officials and residents say that when the park is no longer a safety zone for the animals, as it has been since the 1960's when the last herd-reduction program was abandoned, the town will become the inevitable refuge.

"There's a lot of concern," said Dave Shirk, a town planner who attended a public meeting on the herd-reduction plan here on Thursday night. Mr. Shirk said he believed that an elk exodus into the streets of Estes Park was inevitable. The question, he said, is whether the impact will be tempered by the park's proposed reduction in total elk numbers.

"That's our hope, that's our thought," he said.

What was equally clear at the sometimes raucous public meeting was that love of elk, love of the park and passionately defended positions about how to resolve the problem go hand in hand. Every idea posited from one side — allowing a hunt, allowing predation from wolves, allowing the elk population to grow and not worrying about the ecological consequences — was vehemently denounced by somebody else on the elk-opinion spectrum. Park officials say they plan to announce a decision on a plan late this year or early next.

"The park is in a no-win situation," said David Beldus, a retired teacher and former national park ranger, as he sat watching the fireworks at the meeting.

Value judgments about the relationships of humans and animals and the imagery of the national parks also color the debate, wildlife biologists and public policy experts say.

"The national parks are considered special by most Americans, the place where we should let natural processes work as much as possible," said Robert A. Garrott, a professor of ecology at Montana State University in Bozeman.

And in Rocky Mountain National Park, natural is a tough thing to pin down. The elk certainly do not qualify. Their tame behavior, with no predators to keep them wily, is utterly unelklike to a wildlife biologist. They are not native. Most of the herd is believed to be descended from elk brought to Colorado in 1913 and 1914 from Wyoming after the local herds were driven to near extinction. The park was established in 1915.

The aspen groves, by contrast, which propagate by cloning one individual through shoots, are thousands of years old, dating from the end of the last ice age, and are uniquely connected and adapted to the specific life history of the park's lands, said Therese Johnson, the park's lead biologist on the elk issue.

Deer culling at night, using night-vision goggles and silencers, is well established in many parts of the country. But park officials acknowledge that trying the practice with elk, which can weigh upward of 700 pounds for full-grown bull, two or three times the size of a common white-tail deer, is new territory.

Human population growth ultimately underscores all the considerations, epitomized by Estes Park and its shoulder-rubbing proximity to the herd. More people are living closer than ever, and in greater numbers, to places like Rocky Mountain National Park, which was set aside for a glimpse of the wild.

When gray wolves were introduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1995, by contrast, advocates for the experiment could argue that the buffer zones of national forests, and the park's huge size, made it big enough and isolated enough that nature could be natural in keeping down elk and deer populations.

Rocky Mountain National Park, at just over 400 square miles, is only about one-eighth as big as Yellowstone, and 2.4 million people in the Denver metropolitan area live within a two- or three-hour drive.

"The lesson is that the more we ring these parks with other activities and encroach on them, the more we're setting ourselves up for difficult issues," said David K. Skelly, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale.

Mr. Shirk, the town planner, said his professional concern about what might happen to his community as a result of elk reduction was balanced against the love he has for the animals.

"I live here; I want to see the elk in my backyard," he said.

    Plan for Sharpshooters to Thin Colorado Elk Herd Draws Critics, NYT, 28.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/us/28elk.html

Repeat hurricanes test coastal recovery

Posted 5/28/2006 12:53 AM ET
USA Today
By Brian Skoloff, Associated Press Writer

Pelican Shoal has never been much of an island — a quarter-acre patch of sand, bleached white coral and scrub seemingly adrift in crystal clear waters seven miles southeast of Key West.

But it was one of two places in Florida where the threatened roseate tern flew once a year from the Caribbean and South America to breed. Now, after two years of pounding hurricanes, it's under water.

Using decoys and recorded sounds, scientists are trying to lure the birds, which typically come in May, to an island in Dry Tortugas National Park. That's 70 miles away.

"The type of habitat they require for nesting is very limited in the state. Now they really don't have many places to nest, if any at all," said Ricardo Zambrano, a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

The tern's fate is one example of how repeated hurricanes not only displace people, but destroy wildlife habitat, kill plant life and rearrange coastal environments that have for centuries served as natural barriers.

Last year's Atlantic hurricane season was the busiest since record keeping began in 1851. The season included 27 named storms with 15 hurricanes, seven of which were Category 3 or higher. Category 4 Hurricane Katrina produced the worst devastation on record in Louisiana and Mississippi. Eight hurricanes have hit or impacted Florida since 2004.

With the six-month hurricane season starting June 1 and more severe storms predicted to come more often, nature is in for a series of debilitating blows the likes of which it hasn't endured in generations. Its ability to recover will be put to the test.

Throughout the Gulf Coast region from Texas to Florida, barrier islands were battered by wind and waves, leaving many fragmented and submerged.

The Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana's coast were stripped clean in Katrina, submerging much of the 40-mile long uninhabited chain and leaving the mainland more vulnerable in the coming hurricane season.

"It takes a long time for these dunes to re-establish naturally, so the next storm that comes along will have an easier job overtopping the islands and flooding inland areas," said oceanographer Abby Sallenger, of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Louisiana had already been losing coastal wetlands at a rate of about 25 square miles a year, scientists say. It's estimated that Katrina caused a loss of 118 square miles of wetland marshes.

"What potentially could happen if you take away the barrier islands, the wetlands could even disappear faster," Sallenger said. "The marsh itself will just disintegrate and it supports an incredibly rich ecosystem."

On Florida's Atlantic Coast, Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne delivered back-to-back blows in September 2004, eroding sand dunes and filling wetlands with sediment. In some places, mangrove roots are suffocating in silt as the repeated storms pile more sand and dirt around their bases.

"If you have a series of storms coming through and the return time becomes substantially less, you have all these cumulative impacts that affect the rate of recovery," said Ed Proffitt, a Florida Atlantic University biologist. "Whether the plants survive in the long run remains to be seen. It might take them a few years to die."

Thomas Doyle, a USGS environmental scientist, said it's too soon to tell how back-to-back hurricanes could begin affecting nature's ability to recover, adding that it "needs more scientific attention and scrutiny."

"Over the next hundred years, sea levels will rise, sea surface temperatures will rise, and it will potentially move more storms into hurricane status," Doyle said. "A lot of coastal forests, when they get knocked down, are being replaced by exotic species," reducing habitat for migratory birds.

"How it will impact them building energy for trans-Gulf flights, we just don't know yet," Doyle said. "We might see there's a significant pattern of decline in what comes back next season."

Coastal changes are inevitable in the coming years, but repeated blows could mean massive alterations.

"These hurricanes are just taking big chunks of our landscape," Doyle said.

"It could eventually be the threshold that tips the bucket and leads freshwater systems to become brackish ... and the whole system kind of collapses," Doyle added. "We now have this game board set with certain things in place and in combination with more frequent hurricanes, it can aggravate the situation in terms of sustainability in our social, agricultural and natural systems."

In Florida, where the Everglades has become a managed network of canals and levees, scientists are facing the daunting task of managing more water from frequent storms to keep developed areas from flooding and to cleanse agricultural runoff of fertilizers and pesticides before it bleeds into surrounding wetlands.

"Historically, the system expanded and contracted naturally," said Susan Sylvester, a director with the South Florida Water Management District.

Repeated storms batter the district's manmade marsh filter systems that cleanse pollutants before the water pushes south into the Everglades.

"I view the (marshes) as these really fragile kidneys," Sylvester said. "Those things are being taken off-line by having so much damage to vegetation ... You're overloading the system, and you've got to give it time to recover.

"Nobody anticipated the kind of damage we've seen from the hurricanes and the wind," she added.

    Repeat hurricanes test coastal recovery, UT, 28.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-28-coast-environment_x.htm

Rising Ocean Temperatures Threaten Florida's Coral Reef

May 22, 2006
The New York Times
By RICK LYMAN

KEY LARGO, Fla., May 21 — If global warming summons images of polar bears clinging to shrinking ice floes, this is its face in the Florida Keys: a sun-dappled stretch of shallows along the turquoise reef line, where scientists painstakingly attach russet polyps of regenerated coral to damaged reefs.

"When I first came here snorkeling, in 1985, it was amazing, the forest of coral was so thick," said Bill Goodwin, a resource manager for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. "Just look now," he said, gesturing to the few small brown patches amid an elephant's boneyard of skeletal remains at the foot of the Carysfort light tower in the roiling Atlantic waters seven miles off Key Largo.

On May 9, for the first time, two species of Caribbean coral — acropora palmata, or elkhorn, and acropora cervicornis, or staghorn — were added to the list of threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act. It was a needed step, say marine biologists and environmentalists who focus on coral, and probably overdue, but just one narrow glimpse at the universe of woes affecting the undersea invertebrates in the Keys, throughout the Caribbean and across the globe.

"Elkhorn and staghorn used to be the dominant species on the Caribbean reef as recently as the early 80's," said Jennifer Moore, a natural resource specialist for the protected resources division of the National Marine Fisheries Service, which placed coral on the threatened list after prompting from the Center for Biological Diversity, based in Arizona. "But the species has declined 97 percent since the late 70's."

There is no one answer to what is killing these coral. The greatest culprit seems to be disease, especially "white diseases," which fleck the coral with pox and bands of deathly white. But there are other stresses, including degraded water quality, nutrient runoff from agriculture, human poaching and boating accidents.

Of perhaps greater impact are instances of coral bleaching affecting these and other corals that have occurred with increasing frequency in recent years. In these outbreaks, which are directly tied to rising ocean temperatures and reach their height in the warmest months, vast fields of coral shed their gaudy colors, turn bone-white and die.

"Last year was a particularly bad outbreak," said Tyler Smith, a coral biologist at the University of the Virgin Islands. "We lost anywhere from 70 to 100 percent of our coral to bleaching."

Florida was somewhat spared in that outbreak, only because the mighty swirl of Hurricane Wilma dragged cooler, life-saving water into the region.

"Who would have thought that corals would make it onto a threatened species list, but here they are," said Andrew Baker, a marine biologist and coral specialist at the University of Miami.

While rising ocean temperatures are clearly behind coral bleaching, the link to the various diseases affecting the endangered coral is not so clear.

"We do not know the answer," Ms. Moore said. "Some say it might be linked to warmer temperatures, but the science isn't perfect yet."

And while water temperatures have gone up only a little in recent decades — just a degree or two — it is enough to affect these fragile organisms. "They were already living near their temperature maximum, so just a tiny rise can push them over the edge," Ms. Moore said.

Scott Donahue, associate science coordinator at the Keys marine sanctuary, snorkeled above one of the last thick stands of coral left at Carysfort, studying the spot where a severed arm of elkhorn had been reattached with concrete after a recent boating accident. With their thick flat ears, just like the elk horns for which they were named, the coral form a distinctive and imposing structure, covering pretty much the entire spectrum of browns from light tan to chocolate. Much harder hit in the Keys are the staghorns, which, like their namesake, are tall and finger-shaped, when you can find them.

"The importance of getting these coral on the threatened list is, most of all, that it raises awareness of the problem," Mr. Donahue said.

In four meetings with residents around southern Florida in recent weeks, and in three more planned for this week in St. Croix, St. Thomas and Puerto Rico, Ms. Moore and other federal officials will begin the process of putting together new regulations governing the use of coral and access to the reef.

That, she said, will take most of this year. At the same time, scientists will spend the next year or two putting together a recovery plan to help save the species. "It's a road map for what we should do," Ms. Moore said.

Richard Curry, science and research coordinator at Biscayne National Park, has been operating a team of volunteers since 1992 figuring out ways to grow coral polyps in the laboratory and even in the field, in underwater laboratories.

"Some of the bolder corals seem to be more amenable to a laboratory environment," Mr. Curry said. "The two that were listed, though, are the most resistant. We've been able to keep them alive in a laboratory, but not out in the field."

Others, convinced that ocean temperatures will inevitably rise, are trying to figure out which species will be hit hardest and what can be done to save them, which will flourish and what can be learned from them, and just what the reefs of the future will look like.

Not all the news is bad. Mr. Donahue said that, with rising temperatures, scientists have seen fresh stands of elkhorn and staghorn off Broward County, Fla., far north of the Keys, in waters where such coral would have never been seen two decades ago.

"Right now, we're trying to understand how corals are going to respond to sea waters' warming," said Mr. Smith of the University of the Virgin Islands. "We know it's coming. We know the oceans are going to get warmer."

At the oceanside facility of Mote Marine Laboratory in Summerland Key, David Lackland gingerly lowered a plastic syringe into one of his carefully tended tanks.

He sent out a smoky puff of particulates. Caught in the artificial current he has created, the puffs wrap around the coral polyps, some no bigger than a nailhead, others the size of a golf ball. "Ah, beautiful, they're getting a nice dinner," he said.

Mr. Lackland has 22 species in his handmade tanks, and is growing more at his home on a nearby key and on an underwater acre he cultivates offshore. It is painstaking work. His "poster boy" is a polyp of elkhorn that he has successfully cloned, though it has only grown a fraction of an inch in two years.

"I'm not going to claim to know all about global warming, but it seems clear that something is going on," Mr. Lackland said. "I am going to remain optimistic, no matter what. But I must say, the signs are all pointing to a conclusion that something must be done soon."

    Rising Ocean Temperatures Threaten Florida's Coral Reef, NYT, 22.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/us/22coral.html

10 States, in Challenge to U.S., Plan Suit to Force Better Mileage Rules for S.U.V.'s

May 2, 2006
The New York Times
By DANNY HAKIM

ALBANY, May 1 — Ten states, including California and New York, plan to file suit this week to force the Bush administration to toughen mileage regulations for sport utility vehicles and other trucks.

The suit, which the states are to announce on Tuesday, contends that the administration did not do a rigorous enough analysis of the environmental benefits of fuel economy regulations, as required by law, before issuing new rules for S.U.V.'s, pickup trucks and minivans last month. The suit will also claim that the government did not consider the impact of gasoline consumption on climate change when devising the new rules.

While the states have initiated a number of suits over Washington's environmental policies, the new suit is the first to take aim at federal fuel economy regulations. With gasoline reaching $3 a gallon in many parts of the country, there has been a broad outcry for action but little consensus on what to do.

Senate Republicans have proposed a $100 rebate to help taxpayers pay gas bills, a proposal that has been met with criticism even from the right, while President Bush has asked for Congressional authority to revise mileage regulations for passenger cars. He already has the authority to do so for S.U.V.'s and other trucks.

California will be lead plaintiff in the suit, which also includes Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont, as well as New York City and the District of Columbia. Many of the same states have teamed up in other environmental suits against the administration, though with mixed success; a recent suit against the Environmental Protection Agency over power plant emissions was dismissed.

"It's disappointing when you see power exercised to benefit the auto industry rather than consumers or environmental challenges," said Bill Lockyer, the attorney general of California, discussing the Bush administration's fuel economy rules.

The attorney general of Massachusetts, Thomas F. Reilly, said in a statement, "At a time when we are all facing a gas crisis, the Bush administration is pushing for fuel economy standards that appear to be authored by the oil and auto industries."

Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said he could not comment on the suit because he had not seen it. But Mr. Tyson defended the regulations and said, "There's no question the analysis was rigorous."

Several top Democrats, and also some Republicans, including Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, have called for tougher mileage requirements for S.U.V.'s, which must meet less stringent fuel economy guidelines because they are classified in the same category as light trucks, instead of with passenger cars .

Late last year, the Bush administration unveiled the first broad overhaul of mileage regulations for S.U.V.'s, pickup trucks and minivans since the rules were created in the 1970's. While new cars must average 27.5 miles a gallon, light trucks, including S.U.V.'s, must average 21.6 miles a gallon in 2006 models.

The administration's new system would take the single truck category and break it up into a number of smaller categories with varying requirements. Government officials predict that overall truck fuel economy will rise to 24 miles a gallon by 2011, though it will depend on the sales mix among S.U.V.'s and other trucks.

Automakers have said the new regulations are tough enough.

Jennifer Moore, a spokeswoman for the Ford Motor Company, referred to a previous company statement that commended the traffic safety agency for creating a new regulatory system that would "pose significant challenges" but also be "more equitable to every automaker."

An overdependence on sales of large S.U.V.'s like Hummers, Chevrolet Suburbans and Ford Explorers is seen as among the reasons General Motors and Ford, the last two American-owned automakers, are suffering steep losses and closing plants.

Environmentalists say the Bush administration's new truck fuel economy system will not do enough to curb oil consumption and adds uncertainty to a complex system already characterized by loopholes.

In setting the standards, the administration "looked high gas prices, oil addiction and global warming squarely in the eye and blinked," said Daniel Becker, the director of the global warming program at the Sierra Club.

The administration is, however, closing one loophole, an exemption that has left the largest S.U.V.'s, including the Hummer H2, outside the regulatory system.

But the administration's rules are considerably less daunting than new California global warming emissions regulations that would force steeper fuel economy increases on vehicles sold there. New York is planning to pass similar air-quality rules. The industry is challenging the state rules in court, and the administration has strongly opposed the movement by states to regulate global warming emissions.

Mr. Tyson, of the traffic safety agency, said many other factors were considered in addition to the price of gas, including "the ability of industry to be able to meet the standard."

"You can't propose something that's not technically feasible for them to achieve," he added.

    10 States, in Challenge to U.S., Plan Suit to Force Better Mileage Rules for S.U.V.'s, NYT, 2.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/washington/02suv.html

A Retirement Villa for Chattering Birds

April 29, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

CASCABEL, Ariz. — The Oasis Sanctuary is far from the largest retirement community in the Arizona desert, but it is certainly the noisiest.

Along with the morning sun each day, there climbs a riotous opera of screeches, shrieks and squawks along with the occasional wolf whistle, "What's up?" and "I love you."

Tucked in a remote river valley, separated from Tucson by an enormous mountain range, the sanctuary is a "life care facility" for some 450 parrots, cockatoos, macaws and other tropical birds.

With life spans that for some species can be 80 years or longer, many of the birds have outlived their human caretakers. Others reached the end of their productivity as commercial breeders. Most were deemed too ornery or skittish for adoption as pets and faced euthanasia.

"Nobody wants these older birds," said Sybil Erden, who founded the sanctuary in 1998, noting that a parrot can take months or years to recover from losing a companion. "People call and say, 'We've had a bird for two months, and it just doesn't like us.' "

Ms. Erden's goal is definitely not to socialize birds for another try with people. "We're helping them learn to have bird friends," she said. "Some of them have a hard time understanding that they are birds."

Still, the enduring imprint of owners past, of decades spent in someone's living room or kitchen, was abundantly audible on a walk through the sanctuary grounds.

Billy, a yellow-naped Amazon, delivered the extended monologue that staff members call a "one-sided phone conversation."

"Hello," he said as a visitor approached and then continued with considered pauses between phrases: "Uh huh" ... "Yeah" ... "O.K." ... "Then what happened?"

Ms. Erden, a onetime artist who has parrots tattooed across her back, opened the sanctuary in Phoenix but moved to this larger isolated location along the San Pedro River six years ago. It occupies an old pecan orchard, miles up a bumpy dirt road, through a rocky landscape of prickly pear cactus and thorny mesquites.

Wild javelinas wander onto the property in daylight, ignored by the resident menagerie of roosters, geese, goats, sheep and cows, each animal with a back story that bears out Ms. Erden's admitted soft spot for forlorn creatures.

Sharing one aviary are some racing pigeons that had faced doom because they could no longer find their way home. The cherry-headed conure named Mingus and two other refugees from the feral flock made famous by the 2003 documentary "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" are also here. Physically handicapped, the three needed a new home after the squatter who tended them in San Francisco was forced from his house.

Two well-trained dogs protect the birds from coyotes and bobcats.

The larger birds are usually paired in rows of large veranda-covered cages. Some, mainly smaller species, inhabit two larger aviaries where they flock and fly, getting closer to their natural state. Ms. Erden hopes to build 10 more aviaries.

Many parrots are monogamous, bonding for life with another bird or, in homes, with a human. A top priority is helping them find a new companion. Self-chosen, companions are not necessarily of the same sex or species.

Milo, a green-wing macaw measuring three feet from head to tail, arrived nearly six years ago after being rescued from an unstable person's fetid basement. Ms. Erden had already been looking to set up Rah Rah, a military macaw nearly as big, so she tried placing them by themselves in a large cage.

"The first thing Milo did was to say 'Hello' in a loud voice," she recalled. "Rah Rah literally fell off his perch."

Two days later, Ms. Erden said, the birds were perched side by side, and Milo actually had a wing over Rah Rah's shoulder. Neither is friendly toward humans. But Rah Rah, who had never uttered English words, started saying the occasional "Hello" and "How are you?" Of course, talking with Milo's accent.

Jasmine, a double-yellow-headed Amazon now around 10 years old, was given up by an owner who became infirm after a series of strokes. Here she bonded with Tabasco, same species, age unknown, and now the two preen and feed each other.

But beware to intruders. When Ms. Erden stopped to talk with Jasmine, Tabasco started biting Jasmine out of jealousy, a behavior these parrots exhibit in the wild to keep their mates from flirting with rivals.

Their mimicking skills are sometimes so acute that it is hard not to impute humanlike reasoning. As Ms. Erden neared Stinkerbelle, a small green and grey Quaker parrot, the bird cried out, "No, no, no!" pecked Ms. Erden's finger and mockingly screamed, "Ha, ha, ha, ha!"

The last thing the sanctuary wants is to produce offspring. Sometimes the birds are seen having sex. But without appropriate nesting sites, they seldom lay eggs, and when they do, ceramic eggs are substituted until the parents lose interest.

Even as she works to expand and improve the sanctuary, whose $250,000-a-year operating budget is financed by donations, Ms. Erden worries about a potential flood of unwanted parrots as pet-owning baby boomers become infirm.

"We're getting more calls from people in their 60's and 70's who need to give up their birds," she said. "We don't see an end to the problem."

    A Retirement Villa for Chattering Birds, NYT, 29.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/us/29parrot.html