Not Flying South

Backyard feeders plus a strange sense of direction may have begun to split one bird species into two.
In southern Germany, some 10 percent of blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) fly not south, toward warmth, but rather northwest for the winter, says evolutionary biologist H. Martin Schaefer of the University of Freiburg in Germany. This novel journey, on record since the 1960s, probably became survivable thanks to the rise of backyard bird feeding in Britain, he says. Enthusiasts setting out seed and suet have kept the birds from starving until it’s time to wing back to Germany to nest.
The returnees from Britain nest in the same German forests as the more conventional migrators that fly to Spain. Yet the two groups now show subtle but distinct genetic and visible physical differences, Schaefer and his colleagues report online December 3 in Current Biology.
“It’s a good example of how humans can influence evolutionary trajectories,” Schaefer says.“The really cool thing here is that it seems to be driven by migration,” says behavioral ecologist Jeff Podos of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Other researchers have looked for these kinds of genetic differences between populations with different migration destinations, but have not found any, he says.
One or just a few genes are thought to control the migration direction for blackcaps, Schaefer notes. A classic study showed that offspring of parents that flew in divergent directions for winter grew up to migrate in an intermediate direction.
Migratory genes would, of course, differ between differently migrating populations, but Schaefer and his colleagues wanted to look for other genetic differences as well. Northwesters and southwesters varied slightly in parts of their genome that don’t involve migration. Small as that difference was, it was greater than the difference between southwest migrators hailing from far-flung parts of Germany, says Schaefer.
Northwester birds also had slightly rounder wings than the southwesters, the researchers said. Rounder wings improve flight maneuverability but don’t perform as well on long hauls. The northwester birds fly only two-thirds the distance the others do, so the slight shift in wing shape might be the beginning of adaptation to their new route.
Likewise, beaks on Anglophile blackcaps tended to take on a different shape, one more like the narrow beaks on generalist feeders. Schaefer speculates that winter feasting on olives and other big, fruity mouthfuls encourages wider beaks in the Spanish migrators. These blackcaps are more likely to choose mates that have similar winter tastes, thus preserving migratory differences in their offspring. The two bird groups aren’t new species yet, Schaefer says. But they’ve taken a few flights in that direction. More than 50 species that have recently rerouted their migrations may be experiencing similar changes, Schaefer says.

Sediment dynamics in the Rhine catchment :

Quantification of fluvial response to climate change and human impact
Dissertation
Publisher: www.knag.nl
Author: Erkens, Gilles

Pointer's birth place
Fluvial systems are strongly respon- sive to changes in climate and land use — but take their time to show it. Accurate prediction of the timing and degree of future fluvial response requires comprehensive understanding of fluvial response in the past. This PhD-thesis studied the response of the river Rhine over the last 20,000 years, as recorded in the morphology, composition and volumes of its sediment. Borehole data and various dating techniques were combined to time-slice cross-sections and to construct a series of palaeogeographic maps. A method to calculate amounts of sediment carried both in suspension and as bed load during millennia-long time slices was developed. This research shows that only climate changes during the glacial-interglacial transition and the strong rise of human land use during the late Holocene were large enough to trigger response and overwhelm ongoing autogenic behaviour of the river and the buffering capacities of the Rhine catchment. The climatic changes at the glacial-interglacial transition triggered incision and abandonment of the Pleniglacial braidplain terrace along the entire Rhine valley. This was accompanied by a shift from a braided to a meandering fluvial style, but it took several millennia to complete the transition to a single meandering channel. As a result, the Rhine was a multi-channel river during the Late Glacial and most of early Holocene. The last phase of fluvial response to the glacial-interglacial transition consists of increased delivery of fine sediment during the first half of the Holocene (until ~ 6000 years ago). This sediment had been stored in the upstream tributary valleys since the full glacial, and was released by incision of the Rhine and its tributaries when they adapted to the interglacial climate conditions.



Overall, this study shows that sizable fluvial catchments adapted slowly to large scale climatic changes, in both spatially and temporally complex ways. During the Holocene other external factors than climate change became important for the development of the Rhine system. In the Rhine delta, the combination of eustatic sea level rise and subsidence provided in large accommodation space for sediment delivered from upstream. Release of bed load by the meandering and incising Rhine in the trunk valley forms the source for bed load delivery to the delta. Both the Rhine trunk valley and delta are sinks for suspended sediment, and the amount of stored sediment in these areas was used to reconstruct fine sediment transfer through the lower Rhine. Following the aforementioned increased delivery of fine sediment during the first part of the Holocene, sediment transfer stabilised during the middle Holocene. During the last 2000 years the delivery of fine sediments to the sinks is up to 150 % higher compared to the directly preceding millennia. This can only be explained as the result of progressive deforestations for agricultural land use since the late-Neolithic (6300 years ago). The timing of the increased delivery of fine sediments suggests that pre-Roman land use was already extensive. Hence, prehistoric land use should be regarded as a drainage basin-wide forcing factor for fluvial systems.

No Health Care For All

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Copenhagen Climate Talks Set to Begin: What's Likely to Happen and What's at Stake

Here are a few of the places that bear watching, to see if some kind of consensus develops over the course of the proceedings:

• What's the science really saying? For almost five years, the consensus position of those who cared about producing a treaty has been that we're struggling to avoid a temperature rise greater than two degrees, and that to do that we'll need to limit atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to less than 450 parts per million. These sound like the kind of eye-glazing numbers that journalists try to avoid -- but the vast and slow-moving bureaucracy of the climate negotiations process has adopted them as the goal, and most of the proposals on the table are geared to reaching (or plausibly approaching) those targets.
  
  The problem is, that's not good science any more. After the rapid melt of Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2007, researchers recalibrated. A NASA team said that the right figure is 350 -- that anything more is not compatible with "the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." That assertion has been backed up by no less than Rajendra Pachauri, the UN's chief scientist, who has gotten grief for saying -- most recently in an interview with Yale Environment 360 -- that 350 is where we need to go. Ninety-two of the poorest nations on Earth have officially signed on to that target, and at the moment it's still in the negotiating text, albeit in a preamble about a "shared vision" for the future.
  
  The problem, of course, is that meeting a 350 target goes far beyond anything the Obama administration, much less the Senate, or the Chinese, or many of the other big players, are currently contemplating. We now know that Obama will arrive on Dec. 9 en route to Oslo, and that he will offer roughly a 17 percent cut in 2005 emissions levels by 2020. That would be about a zero percent cut from 1990 levels; in other words, not very ambitious -- the absolute minimum for saving face, but not enough to save the world.
  
  Going further would be fundamentally disruptive -- it would mean not incremental change but a wartime footing. So the question of which science you embrace is really a proxy for how much you're willing to do. And in this case "political realists" are the opposite of "scientific realists." If you're figuring the odds, there will more politicians than scientists on hand in Copenhagen.


• How tough will the developing countries be? Since Obama's announcement that he will go to Copenhagen robbed journalists of their first cliffhanger, the next is likely to be whether the most vulnerable nations walk out on the proceedings. Here's Mohammed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, whose country sets aside money in its budget each year in case it needs to buy a new homeland when its current one sinks beneath the waves, talking about what a 2 degree Celsius temperature increase would mean: "At two degrees we would lose the coral reefs. At 2 degrees we would melt Greenland. At 2 degrees my country would not survive." He called the proposals from the big players a "suicide pact" and pledged to try and stop them. "As a president I cannot accept this. As a person I cannot accept this. I refuse to believe that it is too late, and that we cannot do anything about it."
  
  Nasheed rallied a dozen of the most vulnerable nations earlier this month at a summit in his capital of Male. And virtually every poor nation is starting to realize how badly they're going to be hit by climate change: The vulnerability of Andean glaciers, Asian monsoons, African rainfall patterns become clearer with each passing year. But the pressure from the rich nations -- and indeed from some of the big environmental groups -- not to be a skunk at the garden party will be intense. And it will come with sums of money attached — the kind of money that traditionally has been enough to buy off the anger of the poor world.


• Which leads to the next obvious question -- just how much money will be on the table? The sums required are staggering. The World Bank recently estimated that keeping temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius would mean spending $140 to $675 billion a year in the developing countries -- which, after all, will only be developing if they keep figuring out how to acquire more energy. And adaptation -- dealing with the effects of the climate change we can't prevent — would run another $75 billion a year (an estimate that other research paints as extremely optimistic).
  
  Sums like that are not on offer. The Europeans have talked about a deal in the range of $100 billion a year, but that depends on the Americans ponying up, and so far the U.S. has been as coy about its willingness to pay as about its willingness to rein in emissions. Everyone outside the U.S. knows that this is -- overwhelmingly -- a problem we've caused; since the carbon molecule has a residence time of over a century in the atmosphere, it will be the decades before the Chinese, despite their vastly larger numbers, are as responsible for climate change as Americans. But if Obama puts a realistic number on the table, Senator James Inhofe (R-Armageddon) will be on hand to take it off. (Inhofe originally announced he was going to Denmark as a "one-man truth squad," but then added John Barasso (R-WY) and "a secret person" to his delegation). In our poisonous politics, the idea of the U.S. meeting anything like its moral obligation seems small -- and without that, the politics gets harder for everyone else in the world.

Against this backdrop, there's a lot of important and less flashy stuff that has to move forward if we're ever going to reach an agreement. Nations with large swaths of forest, for instance, seem willing to make a deal to stop their destruction. It's cheap compared with the other steps we'll need to take, so it will probably happen -- though the devil is deeply in the details. The same with credits for farmers for keeping carbon in the soil -- it could be a big help, or a loophole large enough to drive an endless fleet of combines through.

Reactions of the Afghan people to Obama's new strategy

Sign the Petition

Did 20 pro-choice Democrats forget what happens when women are denied access to abortion?

Why did pro-choice Democrats vote to approve the Stupak amendment, the most serious assault on abortion rights in a generation?

According to FiveThirtyEight.com, 20 of the 64 Democrats who joined Republicans to pass the measure are nominally pro-choice. We're telling these 20 Democrats -- all of them men -- to reconsider their vote and urge Congressional leadership to do everything they can to ensure the health care bill that comes out of committee does not take us back to an era of coat hangers and back alley abortions.

Sign our petition and we'll send a coat hanger to the 20 formerly pro-choice Democrats who voted to take away women's rights.

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Rep. Joe Baca (CA-41)
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Sign this petition and send a coat hanger to the 20 formerly pro-choice Democrats -- all men -- who voted to pass the Stupak Amendment.

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Iran: No uranium stockpile abroad to be processed for peaceful purposes

Outgoing Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, left, talks to U.S. Ambassador Glyn Davies prior to the start of the IAEA's 35-nation board meeting at Vienna's International Center, in Vienna, on Friday, Nov. 27, 2009
With a decision on Afghanistan, we will now see whether a reluctant president can persuade a reluctant Congress and inspire a reluctant nation to accept additional wartime sacrifice. But the administration must feel relieved. The mere act of choosing releases accumulated tension like shooting a bow, wherever the arrow lands.

That relief, however, will be short-lived. Coinciding with the Afghan decision, Iran has entered a final stage of irrevocable choices about its nuclear program. It has backed out of a deal that would have sent most of its uranium stockpile abroad to be processed for peaceful purposes. Following a censure of Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced plans to construct 10 additional nuclear enrichment sites. Iran's parliament passed a resolution urging decreased cooperation with the IAEA. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami preached a sermon at Tehran University pledging that Iran would produce its own high-grade uranium for "medical research." This is a regime in total defiance of international demands, moving toward breakout nuclear weapons capability.

So, have President Obama's diplomats failed? Were their honeyed words not sweet enough? Not really, because the current crisis has little to do with their skill, or lack of it. It is being caused by internal dynamics in Iran that seem immune to the rational offers and counteroffers of diplomacy.
In Iran, we are seeing the consolidation of a military dictatorship. Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, the nation's clerical leaders have had a military arm -- the Revolutionary Guard Corps -- that has acted as their ideological enforcers. It polices Tehran, organizes paramilitary forces, effectively runs Iranian elections, dominates large sectors of the economy, operates missile systems, directs Iran's international support for terrorism, controls Iran's chemical and biological weapons, and would be in charge of an Iranian nuclear bomb. Ahmadinejad and many other leaders are former Guard officers.
But in reaction to mass protests after the fraudulent presidential election in June, the Guard's control has expanded comprehensively. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently reorganized Iran's intelligence services to give the Guard the lead role -- clearly fearful that the regular intelligence agencies were unreliable. The Guard has assumed greater power over Iranian media. It is increasing Internet censorship and placing militia instructors in elementary schools. Experts on Iran now debate whether the Guard is fully under Khamenei's control or whether it may be beyond all control.
Iran's theocracy has become a military junta with a veneer of religion. There are fatigues beneath the robes. On the nuclear issue, the main question is: Does this regime believe that nuclear weapons will help ensure its survival? There is every reason to believe that it does. As the disorders since June revealed the regime's vulnerability, it has sped up its nuclear program. Drained of legitimacy and fearing a color revolution, Iran's military government seems to believe that the bomb will confer influence and permanence. It is not an irrational calculation.
In this light, Obama's policy of setting deadlines for cooperation that are violated with impunity, and continually extending the hand of engagement after it is slapped again and again, is both weak and irrelevant. But the alternatives are not easy or obvious. The crippling economic isolation of Iran is worth trying, again. But it would require a number of unreliable nations to sacrifice large economic interests in Iran -- something they have been unwilling to do before. Direct military options are uncertain and opposed by the military itself. It is difficult to imagine Obama, the Great Deliberator, taking actions that George W. Bush concluded were too risky.
But the security implications of a nuclear Iran could be greater than failure in Afghanistan. Iran is an unstable revolutionary power with global ambitions and terrorist ties. Nuclear proliferation does not get more dangerous than this.
There is, however, an untried option. So far, President Obama has seemed to view Iran's ongoing democratic uprising as a pesky obstacle to engagement. The administration has reduced funding for human rights programs in Iran and looked the other way as exiled opponents of the Iranian regime have been attacked within Iraq.
In addition to serious economic and military pressure, Obama could try the strategy the Iranian regime most fears: supporting, overtly and covertly, the democratic resistance against military rule. Not out of idealism, but realism. It would be a source of leverage on the Iranian regime, at a time when American leverage is limited. And it might hasten the return of civilian control in Iran, so that America would actually have a negotiating partner.