Presidents in advertising

Franklin Pierce and Millard Fillmore to sell Japanese cars.

Ulysses S Grant has gotten in on the trend to former presidents making ad pitches.

What do you think?

Ad from the Pew Charitable Trust’s campaign for mine law reform.

Deserved praise for Rachel Carson

New article in Prospect praises Rachel Carson — the authors post the longer version at Crooked Timber.

It’s spring. It’s not a silent spring here in Dallas, thanks to the efforts of Ms. Carson and others more than 40 years ago.

It’s spring, and the efforts to smear Carson and all people who work for clean air and water and good wildlife habitat ramp up again. Articles accusing Carson of genocide are on the upswing. Iain Murray has a book out on the disreputable Regnery label, so desperate to smear that he names this author, and so morally vacuous he includes a chapter complaining about “endocrine disruptors” without acknowledging that one of the chief endocrine disruptors is DDT and its byproducts.

Take a deep breath. If your air is clean, you’re lucky. Now let’s go to work to make sure others can safely take a deep breath, too.

Tip of the old scrub brush to reader Bernarda.

More about Rachel Carson at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

• World malaria politics, every day
• Dangerous, anti-science, bigoted ignorance
• ‘Twas DDT nearly killed the beast
• Rising at Buffalo News:  Carson was right
• DDT linked to testicular cancers in next generation
• World Malaria Day 2008
• DDT no silver bullet; environmentalists, medical care not monsters
• How to tell if someone is wrong about DDT and Rachel Carson
• Quote of the moment: Ted Williams (the conservationist)
• 100 things about DDT:  Dissecting #10

Censorship in the oddest of places

I think it was Euripides who said, “Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad.” Evidence of the madness sometimes is small compensation for bearing the burden of having to deal with the madness of others.

Iaian Murray’s book is getting accolades from some of the odd sources you’d expect to rave over the book without ever having seen it or giving it a moment’s analysis as to accuracy, relevancy, or morality. I stumbled into a bunch of such sites looking to see why Murray took after me, and what I had said that he quoted, to earn me a place in his index.

One would not expect to run into a censorship buzzsaw at a site that proclaims itself to be free enterprise. But Bloodhoundblog has frustrated all my attempts to correct their errors on DDT, in a post “Cleaned by Capitalism: Our professed love of nature is an artifact of our enormous prosperity.” Perhaps I shouldn’t complain — the offending language on DDT was removed eventually. The extolling of Murray’s book remains, however, in an odd screed against public roads and compact fluorescent lightbulbs (go read the site — can you tell what the guy thinks about CFLs?)

Can the irony get much deeper?

Humorously, there is an ill-informed discussion of fascism vs. socialism as communism in the thread — the discussants blithely unaware that totalitarian censorship is a sin under any fair government scheme.

Was it just that they don’t want to discuss the science of DDT? I’ve corrected a minor error in history, too, in a later comment; will that comment hold up? You might want to check out the comments. Do you think the existence of public lands encourages their abuse? It seemed to me the discussants didn’t understand at all that much of our environmental trouble has occurred on private land, often problems of toxic pollution created by the owners of the land.

Ardent and loud “capitalists” often are the first to sell out. They fall for censorship, they fall for hucksterism — just so long as they still get to wave their flag, insult the academy, and a promise they can make some money doing it. Businesses didn’t stand up to fascism in the early 20th century — nor much of any other time business was promised a license to continue operations.

The issues are not simple. If we insist FedEx not do business in China, do we miss a great opportunity to insinuate a capitalist enterprise as a wedge into a crumbling structure of oppressive politics? If we allow China to host Olympic games, do we strengthen their oppressive structure, or weaken it?

Should we stand idly by while the Chinese government censors the internet (and this blog) to its own people? Should I not kick a little when Bloodhoundblog censors my comments?

DDT linked to testicular cancers in next generation

Rachel Carson’s careful citations in her book Silent Spring have been reinforced by a recent study that shows a more direct link between DDT and human cancers, contrary to claims by lobbyists, junk science purveyors and practitioners of voodoo science.

Another study suggests DDT causes damage to the reproductive organs of children of people exposed to the pesticide.  The connection is again to the daughter product, DDE.

Danger appears to result from exposure in utero or from breast feeding.  The Reuters India story said:

Researchers led by Katherine McGlynn of the U.S. government’s National Cancer Institute examined blood samples provided by 739 men in the U.S. military with testicular cancer and 915 others who did not have it.

The link between DDE and cancer was particularly strong with a type of testicular cancer known as seminoma, which involves the sperm-producing germ cells of the testicles.

If diagnosed, testicular cancers are among the most treatable.  It generally strikes men in their 20s and 30s.  About 8,000 new cases per year show up in the U.S.  In an average year testicular cancer kills 380 Americans.  The NCI study suggests about 15 percent of cases in the U.S. can be attributed to DDT exposure.

It is possible some of the men who later developed cancer of the testicles were exposed to DDE at very young ages — in the womb or through breastfeeding, the researchers said.

“In testicular cancer, there’s a fair amount of evidence that something is happening very early in life to increase risk,” McGlynn said in a telephone interview.

DDE remains ubiquitous in the environment even decades after DDT was being banned in the United States — and is present in about 90 percent of Americans, McGlynn said.

“The trouble with these chemicals is they hang around a long time. It’s in the food chain now,” McGlynn added. People who eat fish from contaminated areas can absorb it, for instance.

The study was published on-line in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on April 29, 2008, ahead of print publication.

Resources:

• CTV (Canada) story, with links to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute
• MLA format citation:  Journal of the National Cancer Institute. “Pesticide Metabolites Associated With Increased Risk Of Testicular Cancers, Study Shows.” ScienceDaily 30 April 2008. 2 May 2008 <http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/04/080429170604.htm>; more colloquial format: McGlynn, K. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, April 29, 2008: vol 100: pp 1-9
• Science Daily report on the study
• Web/MD report, “Cancer Risk Lingers for Long-banned DDT“
• Earlier Science Daily report on Yale study that will look at potential causes of the spike in testicular cancers, focusing on endocrine disruptors like DDT and its byproducts.
• NCI Cancer Trends Report, 2007 - Pesticides

The $7 million dogwood blossom

Not perfect — there is a brown spot on it; but beautiful, surpassingly rare, a creature of the serendipity of nature, it is a natural dogwood blossom in Dallas County, Texas:

What we came to see - the magical dogwood blossoms.

On April 5 Kathryn and I joined David Hurt and a jovial band of hikers for a trip into Dogwood Canyon in Cedar Hill, Texas. The physical formation of Cedar Hill upon which the city of the same name and several others stand, is one of the highest spots between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. It is an outcropping of chalk, a formation known as the Austin Chalk, that runs from Austin, north nearly to the Oklahoma border.

This rock formation creates a clear physical marker of the boundary between East and West. Dallas is east of the line, Fort Worth, Gateway to the Old West, is 30 miles farther west. On this outcropping is married the plains of the west with the oaks and forests of the east. Within a few miles of the line, the botanical landscape changes, cowboy prairie lands one way, forest lands the other.

On the chalk itself, the soil is thin and alkaline. The alkalinity is a function of the chemical composition of the chalk underneath it.

Dogwoods love the forests of East Texas with their acidic soils. Early spring produces fireworks-like bursts of white dogwood blossoms in the understory of East Texas forests. Dogwoods die out well east of Dallas as the soil changes acidity; driving from Dallas one can count on 30 to 60 miles before finding a dogwood.

Except in Dogwood Canyon. There, where entrepreneur David Hurt originally planned to build a family hideout and getaway, he found a stand of dogwoods defying botanists and the Department of Agriculture’s plant zone maps, blooming furiously in thin alkaline soil atop the Austin Chalk.

(continued below the fold)

World malaria politics, every day

World Malaria Day passed yesterday (see immediately previous post).  News articles and blog articles educating people about malaria and how to fight it increased modestly.

Now it’s back to the grind.  Malaria is killing hundreds of thousands.  Some people are interested in using those deaths for political gain, to get economic gain, at the expense of the dead and others whose deaths could be prevented.

In order to fight malaria, the world has come around to the tactics of fighting the mosquitoes that transmit it from human to human that were advocated by naturalist and author Rachel Carson, in her book on pesticides and other hydrocarbon chemicals, Silent Spring.

Carson realized that poisoning the air, water and soil could not work to stop disease, ultimately.  She sounded the alarm with her book in 1962.   In the 1950s DDT became ineffective against bedbugs.  By the middle 1960s, resistance and immunity to DDT by malaria-carrying mosquitoes was almost world wide.  The attempt to “eradicate malaria” collapsed when mosquitoes became resistant, coupled with the failure of too many nations to get an anti-malaria program up and running — and the disease came roaring back when the malaria parasites themselves became resistant to the pharmaceuticals used to treat the disease in humans.

New strides against malaria have been made with the creation of new pharmaceutical regimens to kill the parasites in humans, and the adoption of the rigorous, Rachel Carson-advocated programs of integrated pest management to control insects that are a necessary part of the malaria parasites’ life cycle.

Unfortunately, about 6 out of every ten stories done on mosquitoes and malaria in the past year have scoriated Carson as wrong on the science (she was not), and as a “killer of children” despite the millions her work is saving.  There is a big business in spreading false tales about DDT, about malaria, and about Rachel Carson.

Who would do such a thing?  I call your attention to Uganda, where modest use of DDT in Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) was started earlier this month despite lots of loud protests — from businesses.  Tobacco and other big business agriculture interests opposed spraying DDT in homes.  Why?

It’s silly.  But tobacco interests are mad at the World Health Organization for campaigning against cigarette smoking.  To frustrate WHO’s pro-health, anti-tobacco campaign, tobacco companies started attacking WHO for being “soft on malaria” about a decade ago.  The idea was that, if the case could be made that WHO was lacking in credibility, no one would listen to WHO about tobacco.

Tim Lambert and Deltoid have the story summarized, “Taking Aim at Rachel Carson.” Go read it.

In the fight against malaria, the bad guy, the villain, is malaria; malaria’s unwitting henchmen are mosquitoes.  Good science and good information, coupled with consistent governmental action to improve health care, are the good guys.  Rachel Carson is one of the good guys.

When you see a piece that says Rachel Carson is part of the problem, you’ve found a piece written by a tempter, or a dupe, or maybe just someone who isn’t thinking about the issues.  Don’t give money to that person’s organization to promote junk science and political calumny.  Don’t waiver in your resolve against malaria — find another, good charity, to give your money, time and effort to.  The Global Fund is a good group for contributing.  Africa Fighting Malaria spends a lot of time asking bloggers and reporters to write dubious stories against Rachel Carson and environmentalists, and not enough time or effort against malaria.  I do not recommend Africa Fighting Malaria as a recipient of your money.

Information, science, action:  Fighting malaria requires we keep our wits and reason about us, and act.

A Few Resources:

• Bug Girl’s Blog
• Denialism Blog
• Episcopal Life Online
• UNICEF News - Zambia
• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - Malaria
• Nothing But Nets campaign

Hydrogen power: Still a gas after all these years

There must have been news conferences, press releases and lengthy stories, but I missed them.  It came as a quiet surprise to stumble across GM’s website talking about a fleet of 100 hydrogen fuel-cell cars, on the road now.

Chevy has launched a test fleet of hydrogen-powered fuel cell Equinox SUVs. This fleet hit the streets of New York City, Washington, D.C., and Southern California.

“Project Driveway” is the first large-scale market test of fuel cell vehicles with real drivers in the real world. Why? Because hydrogen fuel cells use zero gasoline and produce zero emissions. They’re a sustainable technology for a better environment. And they ultimately reduce our dependence on petroleum. Equinox Fuel Cell is an electric vehicle powered by the GM fourth-generation fuel cell system, our most advanced fuel cell propulsion system to date. The electric motor traction system will provide the vehicle with instantaneous torque, smooth acceleration, and quiet performance.

The Equinox Fuel Cell will go nearly 150 miles per fill-up, and reach a top speed of 100 mph. Green Car Journal has given the Chevy Equinox Fuel Cell its Green Car Vision Award. The Equinox Fuel Cell won the award over several nominees, including the Honda FCX Clarity and Toyota Prius Plug-In.

If you live in one of those cities, you may be eligible to test drive one of the vehicles.  Were I there, my application to try one would have been in before I started this piece.

It took 20 years longer than it should have to get hybrid fueled vehicles on the road; hydrogen power lags at least as far back.  To those of us who long ago gave up hoping the Detroit Big 3 might see the light on hydrogen in any form, the news GM has a fleet of fuel-cells in pre-Beta testing is most interesting.  We remember GM’s last foray into electric cars.  Hopes do not rise, at least not great hopes, and not high.

It’s been 31 years since Roger Billings drove a hydrogen-powered internal combustion car in Jimmy Carter’s inaugural parade.  Hope abides, but not forever.  Feathers cannot sustain hope that long, Emily.

Fuel cells provide significant advantages, though.  The need for something like fuel cells should drive a market to make the things work.   [More about fuel cells, hydrogen, and Roger Billings, below the fold.]

Saturday jellyfish

Pelagia plastica

In the meantime, I’ll post a photo of a jellyfish I crocheted from plastic yarn recently (I’ve felt that I have the brains of a jellyfish when I get home from work lately). It is loosely modeled on Pelagia spp. jellyfish, and I created the yarn from newspaper wrappers that friends at work saved for me. I used the hyperbolic crochet technique for the tentacles, and a simple cap pattern for the bell. All parts were crocheted using a size L hook.

In case you were wondering what to do to keep those plastic bags your newspaper comes in from ending up as junk/food that will kill a turtle in the Gulf of Mexico, I offer this jellyfish, from Guadelupe Storm-Petrel. (I think this may be a Texas blogger.)

Cocoa buyers stand against DDT use in Uganda

Stephen Milloy can’t even herd his own cats — why should we listen to him?

While Milloy proclaims junk science and loudly impugns the reputation of a dead woman (Rachel Carson), it’s his business colleagues who demand Uganda avoid DDT, not environmentalists.

New Vision in Kampala reports that a local council has rejected DDT use, and told Uganda’s government the reasons why:

Bundibugyo district council has rejected the Government’s programme of indoor residual spraying of DDT.

During a council meeting last Wednesday, the councillors argued that the anti-malaria project would scare away organic cocoa buyers.

According to the LC5 chairman, Jackson Bambalira, Olam and Esko, the cocoa buyers, threatened to stop buying the produce if the area was sprayed with DDT.

“We know that malaria is a number one killer disease in our district but we have no option. The Government should look for another alternative of containing malaria by supplying mosquito nets but not spraying DDT.”

You and I know that indoor residential spraying (IRS) shouldn’t harm crops in any way, even if DDT is the pesticide used. Can the cocoa growers and buyers be convinced DDT won’t get into their products?

How many stories like this have to appear before the anti-environmentalists stop their unholy campaign against Rachel Carson? Complaining, falsely, about evils of environmentalism doesn’t save anyone from malaria, especially when it’s not environmentalists blocking the campaign against the disease.

DDT and other poisons in the Great Lakes: Alma Conference update

Earlier this month, just before the conference at Alma College, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a draft report on toxic wastes found in the Great Lakes and other surrounding waters. Was it the pending conference that kicked the thing loose?

See the report at CDC’s site, here.

The Center for Public Integrity snagged a copy of the study earlier, and published it at their website. Some of us infer the hurdles for the report to be more the administration’s War on Science. But supression of a report is a lot easier if there are no copies circulating on the internet.

CDC had sat on the report for most of a year. After this interview of Chris Derosa, the report’s author appeared on CNN, and before the Alma Conference on DDT, CDC got a sudden change of heart and released the report.

Too few news reports came out of the conference. Let’s hope the proceedings will be available soon.

Logo from the Center for Public Interest project on Great Lakes area health, used at the release of the suppressed health report.

DDE-shortened lactation link

DDT does break down once released into the wild, and can do so rather quickly, DDT advocates love to point out. It’s part of the sleight-of-hand necessary to argue for DDT. Yes, DDT breaks down, but the first step is a breakdown to the more resilient and consequently more damaging substance known as DDE.

DDE mimics endocrine hormones in the wild and has been implicated in gender ambiguity in alligators, fish and amphibians. These animals feature underdeveloped male sex organs, are often hermaphroditic, and sometimes unable to breed. Endocrine mimics — not always DDE — are implicated in swelling the breasts of male mammals (humans are mammals, by the way), and shrinking testes in animals of all kinds.

Some studies suggest that something causes women’s ability to produce milk to nurse infants is significantly curtailed. A few studies suggest DDE is the culprit.

From a lawyer’s blog, I learned of a study in Mexico that showed no significant discernible link between DDE and the length of lactation (milk production). Something else appears to be injuring these women and their babies.

They conclude that the data from this relatively large study in a highly exposed area of Mexico did not support the hypothesis that exposure to DDE shortens length of lactation, and thus the association seen in women who previously breast-fed was likely attributed to a noncausal mechanism. Nonetheless, the authors note that DDT may have other potential adverse effects which are in need of study.

The blog post is written by Thomas H. Clarke, Jr., J.D., M.S., Chair of the Ropers Majeski Kohn & Bentley Environmental Practice Group.  The blog, Ear to the Ground, is new this month so far as I can tell — in this case it’s useful because it has a workable link to the full text of the article in Environmental Health Perspectives (in case you are, as I am, too lazy to get your own free subscription).

How will the DDT advocates spin this one? Look for pronouncements that DDT “absolutely has no effect on human lactation.” And look out for them — that’s not what this study says at all.

Understanding trouble in Tibet

Tibet a “powderkeg?” How could that be?

Photo of Potala Palace by the late Galen Rowell, circa 1981; for Rowell’s famous photo of the Palace and Rainbow, click here. Read Sweeney’s post, note the difference between the two photos here.

Julia Sweeney discusses her trip there nine years ago. You’ll see things more clearly.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Pharyngula, again, and he tips to Stranger Fruit. Myers is about a lot more than just biology, and so are most other blogs by biologists.

Photo: Chinese MIG on display in front of Potala Palace, one of Tibetans’ most sacred landmarks. From WhereIsEven.com

March 27, 1912: Cherry trees for Washington, D.C.

From the Library of Congress:

Potomac Blossoms

View of Washington Monument, Cherry Blossoms and Tidal Basin
Theodor Horydczak, photographer, circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was, 1923-1959

On March 27, 1912, First Lady Helen Herron Taft and the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted two Yoshino cherry trees on the northern bank of the Potomac River Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. The event celebrated the Japanese government’s gift of 3,000 trees to the United States. Trees were planted along the Potomac Tidal Basin near the site of the future Jefferson Memorial, in East Potomac Park, and on the White House grounds.

The text of First Lady Taft’s letter, along with the story of the cherry trees, is available from the National Park Service’s official Cherry Blossom Festival Web site. From the opening screen, scroll down to the paragraph beginning, “The history of the cherry trees.”

A lot more, with good links, at the Library of Congress “Today in History” site.

Plants refuse to listen to climate change skeptics

March 20 brought the Spring equinox, but our daffodils have been up for a couple of weeks. Spring comes a little earlier every year.

That fact, and news stories like these below must cause great angst in the bowels of the offices of U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and other places climate change deniers hold sway. One can almost imagine some poor sap of a Coburn minion laboring away long into the night trying to devise legislation that will prevent Canadian thistles, redbuds, marigolds, wheat, soybeans and corn from reading about climate change or going to see Al Gore’s movie, and getting the wrong ideas.

I hope that minion is imaginary.

Here’s story #1: The Tuesday Science Section of the New York Times carried a story by Jim Robbins, “In a Warmer Yellowstone Park, a Shifting Environmental Balance.” Longtime readers probably know of my deep affection and ties to Yellowstone and the Mountain West. So of course this story catches my eye.

Robbins details an interesting set of changes being studied by Robert L. Crabtree, who is “chief scientist with the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center in Bozeman, Montana”: Invasive Canadian thistle, an exotic weed harries cattlemen throughout the world for the ways it destroys pasture land; despite its name, this thistle is an exotic from Asia, accidentally introduced to the Americas. The Lamar Valley in Yellowstone, formerly a wetland, continues to dry as a result of rising temperatures and lack of usual rainfall (a predicted effect of global climate change). Canadian thistle loves drying wetlands, and has invaded along the Lamar River. Officials fought the invasion for several years, but the fight seems lost.

The changes are dramatic, to observant ecologists:

Enter the pocket gopher, a half-pound dynamo that tunnels into the ground near the surface. The gophers love the abundant, starchy roots of the plant and burrow beneath it to harvest the tubers. What they do not eat they stockpile under plants or rocks.

The expansion of pocket gophers and thistle is not gradual, Dr. Crabtree said, but a rapid positive-feedback loop. As the gophers tunnel, they churn surface soil and create a perfect habitat for more thistle. In other words, the rodents help spread the plant. And more plants, in turn, lead to more pocket gophers.

“The pocket gophers are unconsciously farming their own food source,” said Dr. Crabtree. Their numbers here have tripled since the late 1980s, he said.

For their part, grizzly bears have discovered the gophers’ caches and raid them. As a result, the Lamar Valley is pockmarked with holes where grizzlies have clawed up bundles of roots. Bears also devour gophers and their pups.

Dr. Crabtree thinks the bears started feeding in earnest on the new food source in 2004 — a poor year for another bear staple, the white bark pine nut. Now, he adds, they seem to be eating the gophers and roots more routinely.

Tom Oliff, chief scientist for Yellowstone, confirms that the growing season for the park has expanded 20 days a year since the mid-1990s, which may explain the spread of Canada thistle. Mr. Oliff said the park reduced control efforts because evidence showed that the plant ebbed and flowed and that the range would probably shrink on its own.

One doesn’t have to be a fan of the Craigheads or a biologist to be dimly aware that the Yellowstone ecosystems are intensely studied and intensely threatened. Climate change played a contributing role in the cataclysmic fires in the park in 1988; reintroduction of wolves still sparks some controversy, though the return of a top predator has already produced other dramatic changes in Yellowstone ecosystems. Yellowstone is home and refuge to a wild bison herd, and beautiful and unique — generally revered as a “crown jewel” of America’s features.

Nor does one need to be a climate scientist to recognize the signs of warming listed in the article, and the dangers that are implied: Drying wetlands, invasive species, dying traditional foodstocks for grizzlies, population explosions that almost always are a symptom of serious trouble in an ecosystem.

So I was surprised, dumbfounded even, to see The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE claim this as a good story. Why?

Something absolutely unheard-of before: an entire New York Times article talking about Global Warming but… with no hint of impending doom or catastrophes:

In a Warmer Yellowstone Park, a Shifting Environmental Balance by Jim Robbins - published: March 18, 2008

Destruction of wetlands, displacement of native species, upset of the ecological apple cart — and this is “no hint of impending doom?” (While you’re at the NY Times site, also see this story, about how warmer temperatures threaten the grizzly.)

Here’s story #2:

Cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., now appear weeks earlier than they used to. April 5 was the date of the debut of the blossoms 30 years ago, according to a story at National Public Radio, but they are out already and will have peaked by the end of March this year.

Washington’s blossomless Cherry Blossom Festivals (the dates for the festival have not kept pace) provide one more indicator that spring comes earlier. A geographer from Virginia Tech, Kirsten de Beurs, uses remote sensing satellite data to look at the dates plants spring forth, and has determined that spring is moving up 8 hours every year. (Go to the NPR site and listen to the story.) (This science is called “phenology,” the study of the timing of biological phenomena.)

Here’s the problem for climate change deniers: How can they convince the birds, bees, grizzlies, and especially the trees and flowers, that they shouldn’t be acting as if the climate were changing? How can the climate change skeptics get the Canadian thistles to stop invading, the Japanese blossoming cherry trees in the Tidal Basin to delay their blossoms, the bluegrass of Kentucky to delay its greening, the prairies of Kansas to delay the wildflowers and grasses?

Have all those plants been suckered in by Al Gore’s movie? Don’t those plants know that Anthony Watts has shown that the weather measuring stations across the U.S. are placed wrongly, and so there cannot be warmer weather?

Church authorities got Galileo to lie low on the issue of heliocentricity centuries ago; but according to the legend, as he left the room where he had agreed to keep quiet, he muttered, “but still, it moves,” referring to the motion of the Earth about the Sun. This is the problem of the climate change deniers: Still, the climate changes.

Canute couldn’t command the tides not to flow; climate change deniers cannot command the flowers not to bloom. That force that through the green fuse drives the flower? It’s the destroyer of skepticism, too. Climate change skeptics curse it today.

Satellite photo composite: “Land surface phenologies across CONUS in 2000 revealed by hree AVHRR biweekly composites.” From USA National Phenology Network (USANPN)

• Project Budburst: You can be a citizen scientist, and help climatologists and geographers map the coming of spring. Details here. Contact Barron Orr at the University of Arizona, barron@email.arizona.edu.

Problem for climate change skeptics: Climate changing

It’s just one more report to throw on the pyre of reports to be burned if it ever turns out as skeptics say and others hope, global climate change is just a momentary trend: From 1999 to 2006, the pace of glacier melting worldwide picked up.

We had a cold winter; skeptics will argue that the winter of 2007-2008 was not included, and it reverses the trend.

If only that were so.