Lost whales might have returned to sea unseen

Since that last news I could find on the whales was two days ago when scientists and onlookers lost track of the whales, it looks like the two finally made it back to sea. After all the coverage of these lost whales it almost seems disappointing that there was no fanfare event of them crossing into the ocean.

Coyotes thriving in big cities, suburbs

Coyotes are such wildly adaptive creatures that it's not surprising that they're doing well in suburban and urban areas. This article gives examples of how suburban sprawl is actually causing an increase in the coyote population. Don't start freaking out about coyotes though, even if there have been some attacks in the news lately, such as in New Jersey.

Still, experts urge perspective: In Cook County, which includes Chicago, there are some 3,000 dog bites on average each year, with a few hundred serious enough to require hospital care, Gerht says. Yet he is unaware of any reported coyote attacks.

They're wild animals and they have a right to living space just as we do.

Rescuers open fire, with water, on lost whales

Does anyone else think that this situation with the whales in the Sacramento River is getting a little ridiculous? I find it hard to believe that there's nothing better that can be done than what's been tried already. Now they've found that using a fire hose seems to help drive them, but they're not going to try it again until Tuesday.

The rescuers decided to try the fire hose after the lost whales resisted attempts to move them down river through banging pipes, a flotilla of boats and the recordings of fellow humpbacks and killer orcas.

The two whales apparently took a wrong turn when they entered San Francisco Bay and traveled 90 miles inland up the Sacramento River. They turned around at the Port of Sacramento and were making progress Monday when they reached the Rio Vista Bridge and began swimming in circles.

I understand that they're wild animals so it's tough to figure out how much to interfere, but it's so sad to read about the whales' injuries and skin problems due to the fresh water.

Polar Bears at Risk as Warming Thaws Icy Home

After seeing the sad, tired (animated) polar bear in An Inconvenient Truth swim to a chunk of ice and have it fall apart under its feet (so sad!), I've been noticing that people are becoming more concerned about the polar bears. Even to the point where people are pushing to get them listed as endangered. And this all makes sense if scientists are right (and I think they are) about the melting ice caps.

Many scientific studies project that warming, widely blamed on emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, could melt the polar ice cap in summer, with estimates of the break-up ranging from decades to sometime beyond 2100.

Bears' favourite hunting ground is the edge of the ice where they use white fur as camouflage to catch seals.

"If there's no ice, there's no way they can catch the seal," said Sarah James of the Gwich'in Council International who lives in Alaska. "Gwich'in" means "people of the caribou", which is the main source of food for about 7,000 indigenous people in Alaska and Canada.

It just gets to me how people are so resistant to changing their lifestyle and don't care that the things we do have major effects on beings that have no control over what we do. We're so self-centered.

Sorry!

I've been bad about posting lately because of finals, graduating, and moving back home. But I'm back. I'm sure I've been missed. ;)

Little money to clean up polluting school buses

Ah, I remember the days of taking the bus to school when the driver pulled up in a "stinky" old bus because our regular bus was getting a tune-up.

An estimated 390,000 diesel school buses are on the road in the U.S., according to the EPA. Most newer buses were manufactured to meet stricter emissions guidelines and do not need filters. But about one-third of the nation’s diesel school-bus fleet, or more than 100,000 buses, were manufactured before 1990 and are big polluters, according to EPA.

If there's a more effective rally cry than "save the children," I've never heard it. If more news outlets start picking this up, I'm sure states will start seeing some money to put filters into the older buses. Check out the map in the article to see how your state fares on school bus emissions.

Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?

I'll be honest, I haven't been to up-to-date on what buying carbon credits meant and I'm not entirely sure what my stance on it is yet. I feel like Denis Hayes's comparison of this to the Catholic Church selling indulgences is a bit strong, but the article does have good points about how buying and selling carbon credits could actually be detrimental to the attempt to stop global warming.

Michael R. Solomon, the author of “Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having and Being” and a professor at St. Joseph's University, said he was not surprised by the allure of the carbon-offsetting market.

“Consumers are always going to gravitate toward a more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioral change,” he said. “We know that new products or ideas are more likely to be adopted if they don’t require us to alter our routines very much.”

But he said there was danger ahead, “if we become trained to substitute dollars for deeds — kind of an ‘I gave at the office’ prescription for the environment.”