Kyoto 10 Years Later
The Kyoto Protocol began the race to halt global warming. On its 10th anniversary, why are temperatures still going up?
Cover Stories
You’re getting warmer
I remember so well the final morning hours of the Kyoto conference. The negotiations had gone on long past their scheduled evening close, and the convention-center management was frantic — a trade show for children’s clothing was about to begin, and every corner of the vast hall still was littered with the carcasses of the…
The view from Kyoto
Ten years. In geological time, 10 years is hardly noticed — a speck of dust. But for sentient beings, much happens in 10 years. Children grow up, parents and friends pass away, wars start and end, presidents are elected and disgraced, political parties rise and fall. In the last 10 years around 1.2 billion babies…
New Sheriff At FPPC
There’s an interesting article in last week’s Capitol Weekly about the new chairman of the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission, the state agency that oversees California’s money-in-politics regulations. The new guy looks pretty burly: The FPPC, spawned by the Watergate scandals, is the state’s political watchdog (although few at the FPPC like that term) with…
Homeland Security $ for SoHum – don’t worry, it’s a good thing
It’s always nice when pork-barrel politics helps out your friends. And who is more deserving than SoHum’s backwoods volunteer firemen? WASHINGTON – Today, North Coast Congressman Mike Thompson (CA-01) announced that the Beginnings Volunteer Fire Department in Redway will receive a federal grant of more than $97K. The grant will be used to replace degraded…
K-i-s-s-i-n-g
Yep, after years of acrimony fueled, it is said, by pernicious personality differences, two of the biggest homegrown environmental organizations in this Humboldt/North Coast surroundscape have officially locked lips and sealed their alliance: the Environmental Protection Information Center and the Northcoast Environmental Center , wed at last. They’ve been sorta growing close over the past…
EPD Brass Arraigned
Lt. Tony Zanotti testifying in the coroner’s inquest into the death of Cheri Lyn Moore . Drawing by K. Rudin. Press release just in from the District Attorney’s Office: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 10, 2007 Retired Chief of Police David Douglas and Eureka Police Lieutenant Anthony Zanotti appeared for arraignment today in Department 8 of…
Farmed Fish Gone Wild
In The New York Times Magazine’s “The 7th Annual Year in Ideas,” one story addresses what’s being done to combat dwindling stocks of wild fish in the face of overfishing and environmental changes: manipulate farmed fish to taste wild. This spring, after 10 months of testing, the aquaculture company HQ Sustainable Maritime Industries created what…
Ouch
The November 2007 issue of the Humboldt Economic Index is out. The above graph represents seasonally-adjusted lumber production in the county — 55 percent of total manufacturing employment, according to the Index’s authors. And slipping rapidly, apparently. In other Economic Index news: Home prices continue to drop , though home sales rallied somewhat.
Truths, Inconvenient and Otherwise
Today on NPR’s Morning Edition, Neda Ulaby reports that the new focus on global warming in the media may be “too much of a good thing.” Listen here . To learn more about the effects of global warming on California’s water system, check out The California Report ‘s seven-part series, Climate Change and California’s Water…
Monday Morning Papers
The Chronicle reports that Humboldt State is now the last member of the California State University system to have no building named for private donors. Probably not for lack of trying. A new history — Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans — is reviewed in the Chicago Tribune . According to the review,…
Klamath Dams = Toxic Waste?
That’s the argument being advanced by Klamath Riverkeeper and the Yurok and Karuk tribes in a $1 billion lawsuit filed yesterday. The Associated Press gives the rationale: The argument is that the Iron Gate and Copco dams south of the Oregon border in Northern California create the perfect conditions for the toxic algae Microcystis aeruginosa…
Mr. Van Eck’s Forest
Fred Marinus van Eck loved trees. The New York City investment banker owned thousands of acres of them all over the world. And it wasn’t only their cool, fragrant, fern-swept, critter-harboring selves that enchanted him, but their potential — he loved working trees, timber. And one patch he was particularly fond of was the nearly…
The California experiment
By Cosmo Garvin If you wiped California off the face of the planet, just made it disappear — left behind no car or SUV, politician, person or cow — you’d eliminate only about 1.6 percent of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. Keep California and lose Texas, and you’d more or less double…
Footloose?
Melody Walker and friends call the "Ladylike Open Mic" at Muddy’s Hot Cup "Menstrual Monday," providing fodder for all sorts of bad puns I won’t repeat here. On Monday of this week Melody was not singing at Muddy’s, nor was anyone else. She called me that evening to explain that live music at Muddy’s is…
How did our marine terraces form?
An example of a marine terrace is the surface on which McKinleyville is built. At some time in the past, roughly 85,000 years ago, this terrace was barely below sea level, and that is why it is flat. Land above sea level was eroded down by rain and surf, while submerged land was built up…
I’m Not There
Soundrack featuring various artists Columbia/Sony Director and writer Todd Haynes’ new film, an unusual, eccentric biopic of Bob Dylan entitled I’m Not There, stars six different actors, including Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, portraying the enigmatic singer/songwriter in different stages of his life and career. With the wide release of at…
The Tenth Muse: My Life In Food
Book by Judith Jones Knopf The opening scene in Judith Jones’ memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, says it all: Her mother was well into her 90s, and she had one question for her daughter. All she needed was an honest answer. Jones braced herself for something heavy-duty. But her mother needed to…
Jeanne D’Arc
Game by Level-5 Play Station Portable I had the fortune of winning a PSP in a contest a few weeks ago, and in my hunt for an inaugural game for the system, I spotted Jeanne D’Arc on a shelf in a local toy store. Because the cover sports an awesome girl with a sword and…
‘No Country ‘ Thrills, Chills
Previews Once again, there are only two films opening locally on Friday, Dec. 7, which makes my life easier. The Golden Compass, the first installment of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, stars Nicole Kidman, the most recent "Bond Girl" Eva Green, Daniel Craig and Sam Elliot in a fantasy tale involving alternate universes and…
Coffee Shop
We stop at them on the roadside, walk…
Positively F St.
Smashed potatoes? You read it right. I found those intriguing words on a Post-it note my wife Amy left on our kitchen counter a few weeks back, then by chance saw them again on the menu of my new favorite restaurant, the F St. Café. We’ll get to how that happened later, but first let’s…
Pray for the ‘Reporter!’
In my favorite movie, Three Days of the Condor, the assassin Joubert advises Robert Redford’s character, Joe Turner, to leave the United States. Turner says "I’d miss it if I were gone." Turner knows that people within the U.S. government hired Joubert to kill him, but he still doesn’t want to leave. He’d miss it.…
Which century?
Wow. I received dozens of e-mails and letters to the editor following a story I wrote a few weeks ago for the Journal’s outdoor column ("Off the Pavement," Nov. 8). My friends and I love to walk, hike and mountain bike on weekends. And, quoting my friend Pat, we are beginning to wonder if we…
Hot and Cool
In the very second episode of this column (Sept. 7, 2006), we took note of some puzzling statements made by former Humboldt State University President Alistair McCrone in the letters page of the Times-Standard. McCrone’s topic was global warming, and specifically the idea that human activity could somehow influence the Earth’s climate. Nonsense, said the…
