Tuesday troubles

The world's smallest kingdom.

Tom Tomorrow's latest.

Congress, do your job!

Josh Marshall's unhappy prediction about the mobs at the Trump events: Someone will die.

Why Pluto looks the way it does.

Atlantic Salmon Is All But Extinct as a Genetically Eroded Version of Farmed Salmon Has Taken Over

California: once the bread basket of the world

Now a basket case.

The Los Angeles Times:

If San Joaquin Valley farmers such as Locke are fearful, so are the agricultural scientists who support California's $10-billion annual fruit and nut crop, the largest in the nation. A new study from UC Davis, to be published today, found that the number of winter chilling hours, essential to the flowering of orchards, has declined as much as 30% since 1950 in large swaths of the Central Valley, where most of the tree crops are grown.

Only 4% of the Central Valley is now suitable for apples, cherries and pears, all high-chill fruits that could once be grown in half the valley, according to the study. By the end of the century, it says, "areas where safe winter chill exists for growing walnuts, pistachios, peaches, apricots, plums and cherries are likely to almost completely disappear."

And:

Along California's central and northern coasts, salmon season has been closed for the second straight year because, in large part, water conditions have become so mucked up in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta that baby fish can't survive before heading to sea.

Commercial fishermen and their crews can't work. Recreational anglers can't fish, hurting charter boat owners.

"The delta is a black hole" for salmon, legislators were told by Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Assns.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin river system -- encompassing California's Central Valley -- historically has been the second-largest salmon producer on the West Coast, second only to the Columbia River. And Columbia salmon tend to migrate north to British Columbia and Alaska. Salmon that make it through the delta and out the Golden Gate have supplied 90% of the catch off California, and 50% off Oregon.

The delta also is the largest estuary on the West Coast of America, north and south, Grader said in an interview.

"Estuaries are places where salmon gain strength before going to sea," he continued. "We've been seeing salmon actually losing weight in the delta. They become weakened, get lost because of [reverse river] flows, become entrained in pumps or wind up in forebays where they're easy prey to predator fish."

What Grader describes is pretty much the fault of water management in the delta during the past half-century -- something all sides currently are trying to fix.

And here's this nice graphic that shows how the Central Valley will dry up.

Add in the economic collapse and budget disaster and California will be good and truly Californicated.

Get used to more articles like this

Salmon fishing was banned along the West Coast for the first time in 160 years Thursday, a decision that is expected to have a devastating economic impact on fishermen, dozens of businesses, tourism and boating.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez immediately declared a commercial fishery disaster, opening the door for Congress to appropriate money for anyone who will be economically harmed.

The closure of commercial and recreational fishing for chinook salmon in the ocean off California and most of Oregon was announced by the National Marine Fishery Service.

It followed the recommendation last month of the Pacific Fishery Management Council after the catastrophic disappearance of California's fabled fall run of the pink fish popularly known as king salmon.

It is the first total closure since commercial fishing started in the Bay Area in 1848.

Truly, it can't have taken people by surprise, right? You know... People fish something completely to extinction in one area and then are astonished the the natural fisheries collapse? What? The concept that you must leave some fish to make other fish is unknown?

Eaten into extinction

We should be so proud of ourselves:

Culver City, CA (AHN) - After much deliberation, federal officials have decided to cancel the salmon fishing season this Friday. Due to dwindling numbers of salmon in rivers, commercial and recreational fishing of salmon has been outlawed, and the governor has declared a state of emergency for fisherman.

Experts say the number of salmon has reached a critically low amount, with only 68,000 in the Sacramento river and its tributaries. This is down from 800,000, just six years before, a record low in the population.

The price of Salmon is expected skyrocket. Salmon is already going for $30-$40 dollars a pound in some markets, in anticipation of the shortage.

This could very well be the death of the industry in California. "We're looking at the end of it right now," Hedley Prince told the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the harbormaster at San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. He used to have hundreds of fishing boats based out of San Francisco - now, there is only a handful.

Some commercial fishermen are worried about their futures saying they have been fishing all their lives and have no other marketable skills.

[snip]

The salmon season was expected to start on May 1. At least 400 commercial fishermen could stand to lose 80 percent of their annual income, should the ban remain in force. In addition, California's economy stands to take about a $20 million dollar hit from this ban.

We're going to see more and more of this as we go. Our world is changing before our very eyes.

And so the fun begins

Birds not migrating:

But in a sign of the blurring of the seasons brought on by climate change, one of the birds has this year shunned migration to Africa and instead spent all winter in Britain.

In what experts say is the first documented evidence of the species "overwintering" here, a solitary swallow has been monitored from November to the end of February in a village near Truro, Cornwall.

Paul Stancliffe, a spokesman for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), called the discovery "incredible".

[snip]

In the BTO programme, a single wheatear was found to have overwintered in Burniston, near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, instead of in west Africa. Some 5,000 chiffchaffs, which normally migrate there or to Spain or Morocco, spent the winter in Britain. Mr Stancliffe said: "These are birds that would ordinarily migrate south of the Sahara. We believe it is because our winters are getting milder and birds are actually able to survive here through the winter."

The bird atlas programme will run until 2011, with 50,000 volunteers reporting sightings. The last time the exercise was carried out, in the 1980s, fewer than 1,000 chiffchaffs were found to be overwintering in Britain.

As further evidence of climate change, volunteers have also recorded "early returns" by many migrants this year, as well as unseasonably early nesting by birds that ordinarily remain here.

Salmon are dying via Kirk Murphy at Firedoglake:

The largest salmon run in the largest estuary on this hemisphere's Pacific Coast has collapsed. Why care about a bunch of fish and a big marsh? Well, healthy salmon runs require healthy water: fresh and salt. Crashing salmon runs tell us something in the water(s) has gone terrribly wrong. SF Bay fresh water is sucked up to supply central California crops and communities and Southern California taps. With over 17 million people in the LA area alone, and with California producing over half the nation's fruit, vegetables, and nuts, SF Bay water affects the price of your greens - and the health of your family, wherever they live. And the salmon tell us the Bay is very sick.

Polar ice is melting faster than expected (via Sorghum Crow):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The thickest, oldest and toughest sea ice around the North Pole is melting, a bad sign for the future of the Arctic ice cap, NASA satellite data showed on Tuesday.

But wait! We're saved! They've invented this:



Oddly it reminds me of the Mechanical Hound in Fahrenheit 451 .... which is why I want to beat it to death immediately.

Dirt and leaves salad, anyone?

Because there goes farmed fish:

WASHINGTON - Farmed fish have been fed meal spiked with the same chemical that has been linked to the pet food recall, but the contamination was probably too low to harm anyone who ate the fish, federal officials said Tuesday.

The Canadian-made meal included what was purported to be wheat gluten, a protein source, imported from China. The material was actually wheat flour spiked by the chemical melamine and related, nitrogen-rich compounds to make it appear more protein rich than it was, officials said.

After pigs and chickens, the farmed fish mark the third food animal given contaminated feed. The level of contamination is expected to be too low to pose any danger to human health, said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA’s assistant commissioner for food protection.

One more strike against farmed fish is the high level of PCBs found in the meat.