Today's Cool News

Boat Wars: The Sea Lions Fight Back with Poop

And you thought sea lions were just cute, smelly creatures who keep the tourists engaged at Fisherman's Wharf.. well think again because it appears the Sea Lions are declaring war on humans.

The San Luis Obispo Tribune reports sea lions are on the attack all up and down the West Coast.

The sea lions are a dilemma because tourists love to snap pictures of the playful seals as they bark and joust on docks. But the brown behemoths also commandeer boat landings, swamp skiffs and poop on sailboats.

This year at the port, they have damaged numerous boats, may have contributed to sinking three of them and seem to be losing their fear of humans, harbor Manager Steve McGrath said.

(snip)

Port San Luis’ sea lion problem mirrors a trend along the West Coast from Baja California to British Columbia, said Garth Griffin, supervisory fish-

eries biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Portland, Ore.

Sea lions are increasingly feasting on migrating salmon, raiding bait boats and making themselves at home on docks.

Fishermen also complain that sea lions and other seals are depleting fish stocks.

“There’s an upward trend of conflict,” Griffin said. “All of this is happening in a way that we are getting more and more complaints from more and more locations.”

Harbor managers and boat owners are frustrated, though, because they are constrained by federal law in the methods they can use to protect property from sea lions.

You can squirt water on them, shoot paintballs at them, scare them with loud noises and even prod them with a broomstick — if you dare get that close.

But you can’t do anything that could injure a sea lion.

Just wait until this war escalates and see if humans don't take the gloves off.

A Fondness for Heresy aka We're All Doomed so Let's Party!

Thanks to Tom Buckner at alt.fan.rawilson for pointing me to this.

The thing that bothers me about the Global Warming orthodoxy is that whenever you look at the history of science, when you get to the point that "every reputable scientist in the world agrees that" x is true, x is almost certain to be disproved by the next generation of scientists. 

I'm also just fundamentally turned off by all of the "Holier than Thou" "I'm more Green than you" mentality, especially the blind fervor you find in the Bay Area. 

Now here's a guy, James Lovelock, who says returning to the days of the horse and buggy ain't gonna fix the problem. 

From the Guardian.

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."

(snip)

He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.

"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics.

(snip)

There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?

"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas.
"
(snip)

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."

(snip)

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

Sounds like good advice to me.

Crisis Managers Must Plan for Volunteers

With this past week's San Francisco Bay Oil Spill, one of the most amazing things has been to see all of these California do-gooders show up to help out and be told "Go to Hell"

From the Christian Science Monitor:

When a shipping accident last week dumped 58,000 gallons of oil in San Francisco Bay, it washed onto shores that are home          to a great concentration of America's environmentalists.       

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that volunteers poured forth to help – yet officials still seemed flummoxed when it happened.

      

Flummoxed is exactly right

Officials want volunteers off beaches citing concerns about public health and the safety of frightened wildlife, but some residents question whether the extensive coastline can be cleaned quickly without more help. Partly a culture clash between a bottom-up, crowd-sourcing culture and a top-down, litigation-conscious government, it's also indicative of a national lack of planning for volunteers during crisis, say experts.

"People doing crisis-management planning who don't understand that there will be volunteers – they aren't doing crisis-management planning," says Susan Ellis, president of Energize Inc., a consulting and publishing firm specializing in volunteerism. "There's this strange feeling that somehow it's easy, or when volunteers come we'll deal with it. It's so complex that they oversimplify it."

      

There's another appropriate word for it... arrogance.