Anna's Soapbox

had to post something today just to see the cool date... (yeah, I'm a geek -- I *still* get excited when I look at the clock and it says "12:34")... but I also had to post this... time to buy up cheap land in the northern territories. If I get a lot and get it now, I can start me up a nature preserve. Then if Dubya and his cronies decide they need to drill for more oil up north, I can Just Say No. Trade your damn Hummer in for a Honda FCX, I'll tell 'em, and donate the rest to Greenpeace, and kiss my environmentalist tree-hugging butt. In a perfect world, that's just how the conversation would go, I know it.

Minute Shift in Temperature Has Had a Major Effect on Earth, Studies Show
Species are migrating northward because of 1-degree increase in last 100 years, data reveal. It also has sped up spring flowering, egg hatching.
By Usha Lee McFarling, Los Angeles Times

Gradual warming over the last 100 years has forced a global movement of animals and plants northward, and it has sped up such perennial spring activities as flowering and egg hatching across the globe -- two signals that the Earth and its denizens are dramatically responding to a minute shift in temperature, according to two studies published today.

One study showed that animals have shifted north an average of nearly four miles per decade. Another study showed that animals are migrating, hatching eggs and bearing young an average of five days earlier than they did at the start of the 20th century, when the average global temperature was 1 degree cooler.

That 1 degree, according to the studies, has left "climatic fingerprints" -- pushing dozens of butterfly and songbird species into new territories, prompting birds and frogs to lay eggs earlier and causing tree lines to march up mountain slopes.

In some cases, the shifts have been dramatic. The common murre, an Arctic seabird, breeds 24 days earlier than it did decades ago. And some checker-spot butterflies shifted their range northward by nearly 60 miles in the last century.

Although many individual shifts in timing and range have been reported by field biologists, the studies published in today's issue of Nature are the first to establish that a variety of organisms in myriad habitats are responding in similar ways to climatic change.

"There is a consistent signal," said Terry L. Root, a biologist at Stanford University and lead author of one report. "Animals and plants are being strongly affected by the warming of the globe."

... for the full story, see the Los Angeles Times article here (registration required) or the Nature abstracts and article links here.

And the oil wars keep on burnin', and the big wheels of progress keep on turnin'.... Hey Dubya, don't forget that we're animals, too -- all part of this ecosystem you and your buddies are hell-bent on fucking up. "Animals" includes you... unless you and your cronies are pod people, which I guess would explain your complete disregard for environmental and other earth-bound issues.