This video from the USA is called Western Scrub Jay invades my apartment.
From ScienceDaily:
Sierra Nevada Birds Move In Response To Warmer, Wetter Climate
(Oct. 4, 2009) — If the climate is not quite right, birds will up and move rather than stick around and sweat it out, according to a new study led by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley.
The findings, to be published the week of Sept. 14 in an online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that 48 out of 53 bird species studied in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains have adjusted to climate change over the last century by moving to sites with the temperature and precipitation conditions they favored.
The few species, including the Anna’s Hummingbird and Western Scrub-Jay, that did not pack up and leave when the climate changed were generally better able to exploit human-altered habitats, such as urban or suburban areas, the researchers said.
Scientists hope weather data from 18th century ships’ logbooks will throw new light on how the climate has changed in the past 200 years: here.
Climate change deniers, conservative politicians and right-wing newspaper columnists were all but incontinent with delight. Flooding the internet in mid-November were thousands of documents and private emails that had been exchanged over more than a decade by prominent climate scientists: here.
Western scrub-jay photo: here,
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
12:23 October 14th, 2009
U.S. hunters, anglers weigh in on climate change
Posted by: Ed Stoddard
Tags: Environment, climate change, conservation, democratic Party, fishing, hunting, republican party
When people think of hunting and fishing politicians in America — at least prominent ones – two things spring to mind: 1. Republican and 2. Climate change skeptic. Former President George W. Bush, his vice president Dick Cheney and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin all fall into both categories.
But the hunting and fishing crowd — widely seen as reliably Republican because of that’s party’s successful portrayal of itself as the defender of God and guns — has also started to take note of climate change. After all, hunters and anglers are in the outdoors in pursuit of wildlife season after season, year after year.
But what may concern some Republican strategists is that many of them also accept the science of climate change, which overwhelmingly points to fossil fuel emissions as the main cause driving global warming.
This may help explain why Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina broke ranks with his party to outline a compromise to limit carbon emissions in a Sunday New York Times opinion piece he co-wrote with Democratic Senator John Kerry. Hunters and anglers in the U.S. South are widely seen as part of the Republican base and his call for action was saluted on Wednesday during a teleconference call hosted by the South Carolina Wildlife Federation (SCWF) and involved other outdoor groups.
“I have observed things in my life time that suggest that significant impacts have already been felt here in our state,” said Clinch Heyward, the 60-year-old chairman of the SCWF.
He noted that in a life time of duck hunting he had noticed a decline in the state’s duck population while Virginia, where one of his sons now lives, had more and more ducks.
“I was deer hunting last weekend and here it is October and it is 90 degrees (about 32 Celsius),” he said in his thick southern accent.
The SCWF said in a statement that: “Sportsmen are calling for passage of comprehensive climate and energy legislation“.
Such legislation is currently being considered in the U.S. Senate and is one of President Barack Obama’s top domestic priorities.
The shooting and fishing crowd is not always seen as a natural ally of the bunny and tree-hugging crowd. Do you see at least some of them uniting on this issue? And what might the political implications for the Republican Party be?
http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/2009/10/14/us-hunters-anglers-weigh-in-on-climate-change/
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Posted by: “bigraccoon” bigraccoon@earthlink.net redwoodsaurus
Fri Oct 23, 2009 1:50 am (PDT)
Bush-era EPA document on climate change released
The 2007 draft suppressed until now calls for regulation of greenhouse
gases, citing global warming as a serious risk to the U.S. A finding by the
Obama administration is nearly identical.
by Jim Tankersley and Alexander C. Hart
The Los Angeles Times
10/14/09
Reporting from Washington – The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday
released a long-suppressed report by George W. Bush administration officials
who had concluded — based on science — that the government should begin
regulating greenhouse gas emissions because global warming posed serious
risks to the country.
The report, known as an “endangerment finding,” was done in 2007. The Bush
White House refused to make it public because it opposed new government
efforts to regulate the gases most scientists see as the major cause of
global warming.
The existence of the finding — and the refusal of the Bush administration
to make it public — were already known. But no copy of the document had
been released until Tuesday.
The document “demonstrates that in 2007 the science was as clear as it is
today,” said Adora Andy, EPA spokeswoman. “The conclusions reached then by
EPA scientists should have been made public and should have been
considered.”
The Bush administration EPA draft was released in response to a public
records request under the Freedom of Information Act by the environmental
trade publication Greenwire.
A finding that greenhouse gases and global warming pose serious risks to the
nation is a necessary step in instituting government regulation. President
Obama and congressional Democrats are seeking major climate legislation, but
the administration has indicated that if Congress fails to act, it might use
an EPA finding to move toward regulation on its own.
In April, the administration released its proposal for an endangerment
finding. The newly released document from the Bush EPA shows that much of
the Obama document embraces the earlier, suppressed finding word for word.
“Both reach the same conclusion — that the public is endangered and
regulation is required,” said Jason Burnett, a former associate deputy
administrator who resigned from the EPA in June 2008 amid frustration over
the Bush administration’s inaction on climate change. “Science and the law
transcend politics.”
The 2007 draft offers an unequivocal endorsement of the prevailing views
among climate scientists. It includes a declaration that the “U.S. and the
rest of the world are experiencing the effects of climate change now” and
warns that in the U.S., those effects could lead to drought, more frequent
hurricanes and other extreme weather events, increased respiratory disease
and a rise in heat-related deaths.
The Obama version of the finding has gone through the necessary hearings and
public comments. A final EPA version is expected to be released soon.
Although the 2007 and 2009 findings are nearly identical in their
conclusions about climate change, the Bush version is far less detailed.
A current EPA official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was
not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said the sparse descriptions
in the 2007 version suggested that EPA officials were worried about how the
White House would respond.
“They honed it down to the essential language to explain an endangerment
finding,” the official said. “In 2009, those constraints are removed. . . .
You don’t see those same linguistic gymnastics.”
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When the climate change centre cannot hold
By Patrick Bond
October 26, 2009 — After the October 24-25 weekend in which 350.org and
thousands of allies around the world valiantly tried to raise global
consciousness about impending catastrophe (see slideshow below, photos
from 350.org), we can ask some tough questions about what to do after
people have departed and the props packed up. No matter the laudable
big-tent activism, let’s face it: global climate governance is
gridlocked and it seems clear that no meaningful deal can be sealed in
Copenhagen on December 18.
* Read more http://links.org.au/node/1317
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John Bellamy Foster: `The roots of the world ecological crisis’
October 29, 2009 — “We have no other word but crisis to describe it,
really. It’s very different than the economic crisis that we are now in,
in the sense that even a very, very severe economic crisis, such as the
one that has been present since late 2007 … still is, in many ways, a
cyclical event… These crises are periodic — it’s part of the nature
of capitalism… But what we are talking about as the world ecological
crisis is another kind of crisis.”
* Read more http://links.org.au/node/133
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Climate change: The carbon trading debacle
By Carter Burke
October 28, 2009 — The next major international summit on climate
change will be held in Copenhagen in early December, 2009. The position
of the United States in these talks remains ambiguous.
* Read more http://links.org.au/node/1330
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Audubon California expands habitat protection – As part of its ongoing effort to protect important bird habitat in Kern County, Audubon California (BirdLife in the US) has purchased 120 hectares of land along the Kelso Creek. This acquisition brings the total to more than 240 hectares that Audubon California has purchased in the last 12 months in the Kelso Creek drainage. The area is an important migratory route for raptors, vultures and songbirds moving from the Mojave Desert into the southern Sierra Nevada. The land is arid but includes streamside willow habitat, important for a number of species such as Nuttall’s Woodpecker Picoides nutallii and California Thrasher Toxostoma redivivum.
http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2010/01/news_in_brief_01.html
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