New West Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming
Extinction and danger to animals that rely on the existence of Glaciers in Glacier National Park could start with a tiny and rare insect, the western glacier stonefly, which is known to live only in five small streams west of the Continental Divide in the park.
Today, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation filed a petition with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to give Endangered Species Act protection to the aquatic insect facing extinction.
Accelerated glacial melt spurred by climate change endangers the meltwater the insect needs to survive and it’s predicted that when the 25 remaining glaciers in the park (down from 150 in 1850) disappear by 2030, so too will the stonefly.
“Without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, researchers predict that more than one third of all plants and animals will go extinct by 2050,” said Sarah Foltz Jordan, a conservation associate with The Xerces Society. “This species is just one more example of why we need to address climate change before it is too late.”
Since 1900, the mean annual temperature in Glacier National Park has increased by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit — nearly two times the global mean temperature increase.
“The loss of glaciers in Glacier National Park makes clear that climate change is happening now,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The impending loss of the western glacier stonefly is a harbinger of change that will result in the loss of millions of species, disruption of food production, loss of water storage in mountain glaciers, flooding of coastal areas and other impacts that threaten our very way of life.”
The western glacier stonefly is described as an indicator species of the health of its freshwater habitats. Stoneflies are extremely sensitive to changes in water quality and are among the first organisms to disappear from degraded rivers and streams. They play a significant role in many aquatic ecosystems, decomposing leaves and other organic material and forming the base of the aquatic food chain.
Fly fishers have long recognized the important role stoneflies play in providing nutrients for fish. Despite their importance, these insects are one of the most imperiled groups of animals in North America: More than 40 percent of all stoneflies are considered vulnerable to extinction.
The Montana Field Guide lists the western glacier stonefly among seven species of globally-rare insects within Glacier National Park that will be adversely affected when the glaciers have completely melted. It also lists the meltwater lednian and northern rocky mountains refugium stoneflies as “species of concern.”
What Idiots. According to the geologic record, during the last million years Glaciers have appeared and disappeared 6 times. Anthropogenic Global Warming caused by Anthropogenic CO2 is Anthropogenic Nonsense. The climate has been changing since the Earth began. That’s what the climate does. The climate changes and life adapts or becomes extinct. Both plant and animal life evolved in an atmosphere that had 5 or 6 times the CO2 that exists presently.
Since at least 2005, every summer we read about manatees in southern Florida being chopped into sushi by speed boats. Then winter comes, and the story is manatees dying of exposure due to some cold water anomaly in sub tropical southern Florida.
It turns out that manatees have a survival response to cold water: a fidelity to the warm water outflow of a coal fired power plant, of which there are a dozen in southern Florida. 60% of manatees will find a power plant, and 15% will find springs with warm water. Some genius declared those springs are far fewer due to water diversion and use. Like you really believe there is a census of warm water springs from 1850 that is used as a base to assess loss of the those springs??
Carol Browner (anti coal EPA head under Clinton and now Obamanation) is hard after all coal fired plants, intent on shutting them down to slow purported global warming. If the manatee is ESA listed, and cooling water warmed to where its outflows are critical to manatee survival in cold spells, you do have to wonder how EPA will replace that critical habitat. And if I ran a coal plant, I would have that outflow declared critical habitat and note that the water temps have to be maintained in winter. The two edged sword, you know.
So the literature indicates manatees have been undergoing cold stress in southern sub tropical Florida since at least 2005. That is a cycle of cold weather, and thus cold water, that has to have a very convoluted reason for being in times of global warming due to man made CO2. Carbon dioxide, the ONE carbon molecule that drives life on this earth. With CO2, and sunlight (solar energy source), a collection of living cells can use water with trace minerals to create life, and replicate themselves for infinity. Fossil fuels are no more than that sunlight, water, and CO2 sequestered for an untold number of years, and the elements chemically changed by fire to elemental gases, which plants will use to create plant life that will sequester those elemental gases once again. Declaring CO2 a pollutant is patently insane, but when did sanity ever enter the discussion?? The most intensely anit-life chemical is oxygen. Man, that stuff goes after other chemistries like a pit bull. Rapid oxidation. Fire. How harmful is oxygen, really? Or is it the life giving element? Sure, when it latches on to a carbon atom, or a hydrogen atom or two. Other than that, it is oxygen that flames the fire of chemical disintegration. Why is oxygen not a pollutant, also? Like too much of combined with hydrogen will drown you, cover your farmland.
On the margins of every environment there is life. There is the kind in the ocean that does not use light, but sulfur as the catalyst to create life. There are bacteria that eat crude oil and bacteria that live in ice and snow. A stonefly that lives marginally in glacier melt is living a tenacious life at best, for after all, the glacier does have to melt to provide the life giving water. And a melting glacier has a predictable end in which there is no glacier. Even a Federal Judge will ask that question: how can the insect live if the glacier does not melt? and then, to what degree does the stonefly need more melt than there is ice to sustain the glacier forever??
In the Never-Never Land of the likes of American environmental advocacy and a legal system that is tied to never finding final solutions, this legal action is the very poster child of why we fail to protect anything in these United States. The recent 9th Circuit Court decision that the joint USFWS wildlife refuge and Wilderness Area in Arizona has to tear out guzzlers installed to provide water to charismatic wildlife that is the raison d’etre for the reserve, due to the Wilderness Act of 1964 trumping the Endangered Species Act solves no problems, but soothes the souls of purists in pursuit of their zealot driven agendas. Better we preserve the integrity of Wilderness, free from the hand of man, which is the most egregious kind of historical racism and cultural genocide. That embodiment of thought denies the very existence of Native Americans on the land before the insult of European conquest and the rule of Middle Eastern religious based law. The denial of water collection to preserve wildlife is the mandate for having a Federal agency to protect and manage wildlife. So the True Believers litigate to keep genocide alive. There cannot be, now, even a trail sign in Wilderness, as many will find to be true in the near future. This issue, of course, is that there is not enough water on 650,000 acres of illegal alien and wildlife refuge to maintain the very species the refuge was created to protect. Not all the country can be put into Wilderness, in a practical sense, but the law does not understand that, nor do the zealots of purism. So the 9th Circuit is telling the USFWS to remove their water collectors. Wilderness wins!!! Wildlife loses!!! And the mountain biking crew think they will prevail to have mountain bikes allowed in Wilderness??? Hah! The Court has rendered a verdict via water guzzlers. They are not mechanical, but are permanent structures. And will be removed. The other solution is to keep the USFWS Refuge designation, and dump the Wilderness, by act of Congress. That can be done. And would send an interesting message.
Another 9th Circuit ruling, closely decided as the one aforementioned, says that lethal removal of sea lions camping out in the fish ladders of Bonneville Dam at the head of tide on the Columbia River cannot continue. The reasoning is that Indians kill salmon, as do sport and commercial fishers from the general populace. There are more than a dozen “distinct populations” of salmonids that are ESA listed using those fish ladders and living in the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean. Of course, that catch is tightly controlled and can be stopped before too many fish are consumed. The sea lions, however, are evidently protected by the Marine Mammals Act to the degree that they are permitted to kill salmon to extinction. SSS…..There are not enough cops to stop sea lion killing on the Columbia if push comes to shove. As an aside, I do wonder how come the Native American tribes have yet to establish their sovereignty over in river marine mammals, as they were part of the Native American food chain before Euro/Asian invasion by disease took 90% of the population. The journals of Lewis and Clark noted all the empty villages, and the pock marked faces. Diseases arrived before they did, in some sort of voodoo invisible invasion of bad spirits. But the seals and sea lions were there and hunted.
Read enough old journals and diaries, and you figure out fat was a much sought after element of food for people. Game was always referred to as “a brace of fat grouse”, or “a dozen fat trout”, or “we killed a fat cow buffalo” or “dinner was from a fat young buck.” Bears were killed almost to extinction not because they were fierce predators, but because they packed a whale of fat on their bodies in fall. The fat from a bear could maintain a family through a tough winter. So to think that fat laden marine mammals were not sought and killed by Indian hunters on the Columbia River is to be disingenuous at the least. But that was before the protections Congress created, with the special interest wording help of the NGOs of the Environment, the Marine Mammal Protection Act. And now God resides in the 9th Circuit, and it is HE or She who determines which species will live and which will die…mostly in pursuit of the goal of providing a few with solace in a Federally protected haven of Wilderness. How special.
I will hammer the Indians use all the land issue the rest of my life. The “untrammeld by the hand of man” issue with Wilderness is a bullshit story to force a philosophical Edenic vision on the world, a condition that never existed until European and Asian introduced diseases removed more than 90% of the Native Americans before either had seen each other. But since man is now second to all the other creatures of this Earth, by law and the rulings of the Courts, the day will come when your dog will be able to divorce you and receive support payments. Possession of fly paper will be a felony. Heinous mouse traps will be in museums of horror. You will have to register your fly swatter with the Treasury Department. Having noticed that homesteads bought by the USFS in a Depression “stimulus” deal called the Rural Relocation Act, are now inside the boundaries of Wilderness, is an indication of how much chicanery there is in the Wilderness designation. And, when land goes into Wilderness, evidently the Antiquities Act does not apply, and the USFS or BLM razes structures and improvements more than 50 years old in violation of that Act. Down the rabbit hole we went.
Or, in a moment of sanity, our legislative branch will change laws to make them more inclusive of the human existence. Failing to do that, the solution will rest with the people, and that usually has a rather gory process in which an end might, or might not, be reached. The one thing we know for sure, is that with an ever larger population, there will be an ever larger body of dissent no matter the decisions made. Maybe that is the larger fate of the human social evolution: Populations grow large, and with it the dissidents within the population. It is perhaps inevitable that a process of genocide will produce more and smaller social groups where once only one stood. We get too big and our nature is to re-order into smaller jurisdictions. Perhaps that was the genius of the Founding Fathers: States and State’s Rights are the smaller groups within the larger, and the only real problem is that we have allowed the Federal Government to assume a way too large influence and power over the States and the people in those States. The smaller social grouping provided by States has been lost to the Federal process, and that is our problem with preserving a nation with a solid economy and secure future. Having someone in New Hampshire decide what can or cannot happen in Wyoming due to a preponderance of Federal Lands, and Air and Water oversight, along with species issues, and you have some carpetbagger from afar trying to manage your own economic and political fate. It now appears that huge Federal oversight does not work and to depend on that is to die the death of a thousand cuts. I think of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the SEC, the Treasury, the land management agencies, default legislation by administrative sleight of hand, activist judges legislating from the bench. If you don’t like where we are, it is because the States have such a reduced role in this country. They are ruled by unfunded and matching fund federal mandates, but bound by laws to always have a balance budget they are now broke. Congress takes the Federal revenue and spends it willy nilly, and States come as an afterthought in the earmark process. Still the ominous Federal presence and impact drives the States further into the economic hole, and the Congress borrows another few Trillion. Ouch!
And that is exactly what this lawsuit over ESA listing of a stonefly subspecies, distinct population, is all about. Everyone else knows more about Montana than the people who live there, and the Federal Government needs another crack in the State’s Rights armor to force change on people in every State. Carol Browner is still pursuing the final solution for humankind. Government knows best. And Big Government knows bestest. First, send us all your money. We will then “take care” of you. The first to lose will be the stonefly, if northern spotted owl protections are any indication of Federal expertise and success. That rural economics were destroyed in the process is of no mind. The risk we run by having special interests from far away buying our toilet paper and toothpaste, tending to our every need.
Mr Garcia, please alert the scientific community who has studied this phenomenon for years of your findings. I’m sure no one has considered what you suggest. Always amusing to see the cicular tap dancing of the flat-earthers.
I just finished reading newspapers on the net. Interesting that southern Florida just experienced its coldest December on record. If that were hottest, it would be the holy grail of global warming. Coldest will only mean that it was a weather event not related to global warming. Or, proof positive that warming is happening. The Ed Albedo theory. Snow in Atlanta and points north. Northern Florida glaciers..nah…no mountains. Much ado about nothing, or the machinations of groveling for research money at the university.
Conflict drives the world of research science. Dueling PhDs. Our space program was not geared to controlling people. Climate can be. The space program has waned, and the climate scare has risen to take its place as the font of research money from Uncle Sugar. The lifeblood of university science is money, and private money is directed at economic gain. Pure science is driven by the innate curiosity of man, and may or may have practical implications. Global warming, climate change, is the vehicle to which the wagons of university science are being trailered to. Climate change is the moon landing of this generation. And some think the moon landing was all staged and never happened. I saw the movie trailer. I wonder when the space alien climate change movie will be made??
I get my information about CO2 and Climate Change from scientists who have published this information.
If they are declining the more likely cause is declining oxygen content and pollution. Now think of the very large fires on Glacier’s west side that have contributed to this. Occam’s Razor anyone?
Humans have been the primary life force on earth during the current interglacial period, and perhaps the one before it. Or not.
No matter, European and Asian diseases that seek out humans by transmission from human to human, worked way ahead of the conquest, and by the time Europeans got to the New West, the diseases had been here and done their dirty deed. The likes of Lewis and Clark, and the fur traders before and after found Indians mostly on the mend from myriad diseases that been on the continent for two hundred years or more. The early explorers were finding a mostly empty land. Wilderness came about as a byproduct of genocide. That fact will never change.
A book I read on Crow culture, myths, stories, beliefs, states that in that author’s opinion, the Crow got horses around 1734 somewhere south of the Great Salt Lake. One hundred years later they were premier horsemen and women of the Rockies and the western plains. Mobility brought about by the horse had changed the balances of power across the landscape, and the voids due to death from introduced disease created stress and conflict among the natives. The arrival of the white horde came before the natives could sort out their problems and who should live where. The invasion from the East made the issue moot.
I do wonder about the speed with which Native Americans accepted and adjusted to technology, and if that high tech stuff had come sooner if there would have been a much bloodier and longer lasting struggle in the West for dominion over the land and its peoples. Three or four million Afghanis is one thing, but 25 million or more is another. It does not take a lot of technology to defeat much greater technology if you outnumber the enemy. I would think that the Western invasion of America arrived just in time for the invaders, and about ten years too soon for the natives. The numbers game would have been different as native peoples recovered and developed resistance to the new diseases. Woulda, coulda, shoulda historical speculation.
If Bonnicksen’s forests can move north and uphill, surely stoneflies will move with the water in time. Man tries to wipe out species by intent and by accident, and fails. Drop a tanker load of Basimid in the Sacramento River, and all the fish, native and introduced, and the river bugs, native and introduced, are wiped out. The chemical is neutralized by air compressors on Shasta Lake where the river enters. Five years later, the fishing is better than it has been in decades. The fumigant could not go upstream in tiny tributaries, and they salted the river with native species, and the river is just fine.
In Oregon, years ago the State Dept of Fish and Wildlife used rotenone to poison Miller Lake, the farthest headwater of the Klamath River, north of Crater Lake. The objective was to rid Miller Lake of introduced scrap fish and the Miller Lake lamprey, a parasitic little eel less than a foot long. Extinction by government. They failed. A few years ago, the eel, which lives deep in the mud in its larval stage for as long as six or more years, was found in a couple of downstream tributaries. Now it is a listed threatened species, a species of concern. Not unlike the Red Lakes Basin sockeye the State of Idaho tried to poison out of the upper Salmon River lakes. Now the return of more than a thousand is celebrated. Back from the brink of extinction. Not by neglect, but by “good government.” Good government does what its minders want it to do. You do have to wonder who the non-governmental influences were who asked the State to try to poison the lamprey and the sockeye to extinction. The Sacramento deal was an accident on a railroad, which will happen. I imagine the BP accident in the Gulf will be a distant memory down the road as warm water and microbial action remove all traces of the oil. The Gulf is not Prince William Sound. Oil in 35-45 degree water is in an environment that will take many years to consume the oil. Too cold and too dark half the year.
I am inclined to believe the Glacier Park stoneflies will, as a species, outlive humans as a species. How is the fishing when the Glacier stonefly hatch is on??
Has anyone noticed the night climate is different than the day climate? Caused by more CO2 during the day? And if you live in the equatorial tropics, have you noticed that there are 2 seasons, the wet and the dry season? Caused by seasonal CO2 variations? And if you live somewhere in between the equator and one of the polar regions, have you noticed that the winter, summer and fall climate are all different climates? And has anyone noticed that sea level has risen about 400 feet since the depths of the last ice age without any human help? Caused by Anthropogenic CO2 increases? And speaking of CO2, there has only been one other time in the last 400 million years that atmospheric CO2 levels has been as low as they are now. In other words, presently the atmosphere is CO2 deficient. According to ice core samples at the poles CO2 levels during the last few thousand years track with temperature changes, leading some climate hysterics to claim that CO2 is “forcing” climate change. But when you take a closer look you find that atmospheric CO2 increases lag atmospheric temp. increases by a few hundred to 2 thousand years indicating that increasing CO2 is an effect of increasing atmospheric temperature and warming ocean surfaces releasing more CO2. The Oceans cover about 70% of the Earth’s surface and the amount of CO2 in the air is a measure of of global average ocean surface temperatures. And of course warming oceans are currently increasing precipitation, and melting sea ice at both poles. The present global warming is part of a natural ice age cycle. According to the geologic record, its what has happened at the beginning of the last 6 ice ages during the last million years.
Big sky, you would have to have been there to appreciate the enormity of those west slope fires. The ash and soot followed by muddied waters have a depressive effect on oxygen content in water and overall water quality. Linking the stoneflies to climate change misses the more likely cause. These stoneflies are also present in the Rockies north of the border and down in the Bob Marshall. No mention, is there, of their fate.
Mickey: Spot on!!! We go to school, some of us a long time ago, and learn about things like Boyle’s Law, and how warm air packs more water and cold air very little. (Or the tweet from Fairbanks a couple of weeks ago that said it had warmed up enough to snow.)
Cool that warm air and the water falls out. 6/7th of the Earth’s surface is water. Not hard to figure out how it gets in the air.
On the West Coast, after snow events, we often get flooding as the snow melts due to it now raining, and the warm marine air raises our temperatures that had temporarily been cooled by the cold Arctic air mass that had leaked between our Cascade mountain ranges. It appears flooding follows snow on the East coast, as well, which gets those Northeasters by having an Arctic high cooling the land and a tropical low come north up the coast, gaining moisture, and the counter clockwise air pattern putting water heavy air over the land mass, the water turning to snow as it falls from winds off the Atlantic. But in Denver, and much of the mountainous New West, a foot of snow will sublimate and be gone in a day or so, and you will not have seen running water. The snow goes to water vapor without ever becoming liquid. Cold, dry air and sunlight whisking the water away without ever a drop for the creek or the soil.
If Boyle had it right, and who would doubt it, then global warming is about more water vapor and more precipitation, and over northern land masses, that means more snow and snow cover, and more solar energy reflected to the universe, and that deal appears to be able to be non-corrective, and the snow areas grow in days and area over each year, and in time another ice age appears. As for a cause, it is not human. The earth was in the alternating ice age and interglacial rhythm before man appears on the landscape. If, in fact, we are the interrupting factor, and another ice age is delayed, how bad can that be???
The “greenhouse effect” of CO2 is junk science. Almost no energy leaves the earth’s liquid and solid surface as radiation to be absorbed by CO2. Most of the heat leaves the Earth through conduction, convection and evaporation. In any case, a one percent change in water vapor has the same “greenhouse effect” as doubling the CO2 in the air and atmospheric water vapor changes one percent every five minutes whether large or small scale.
Actually, increased atmospheric CO2 is a net benefit for human quality of life because the increased CO2 has increased average plant growth world wide about 15% to 20%.
The real reason we need to work to save endangered species is that they are bellweathers–the species decline indicate serious stress in the ecosystem they rely on–and eventually the ecosystem we humans rely on as well.
Fortunately we’re seeing a turnaround in one of the main causes of species decline–global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. It’s clear to the vast majority of climate scientists that global warming is human caused, it is rapidly increasing, and the impacts on the earth can be devastating for our cities, our coastlines, our agriculture, and our very way of life.
But the main cause of global warming in the US has finally hit a brick wall. Coal power is dead in the US.
Dozens of coal plants have been cancelled in the US–and that’s due to simple economics–not anything to do with environmentalists.
The fact is that building multibillion dollar coal plants, and getting 30-year bonds approved to finance them, is an ancient approach to providing power. Banks and government financing has finally wised up to the risks and huge costs of coal–cold, hard economics is what’s putting and end to coal power.
New, nimble, and less costly approaches are what’s winning the day now–wind plants, natural gas peaking facilities, and especially energy efficiency and demand management. All are much cheaper to bring online than coal.
Coal needs to face the economic realities–even without factoring in the eventual carbon taxes that will happen, coal is finished as a viable fuel.
The move to ship our Montana coal to China is a final desperate act to feed the only market left–one in a communist country.
Surely we Montanans have more pride than to ship our state’s coal overseas where it will be used to create pollution and power that will be used to produce more low-cost crap to sell back to Americans!
Let’s leave our coal in the ground until it can be proven to be safer, cleaner, and less expensive than alternatives. But don’t hold your breath on that ever happening.
-Jon Cheever