Author: postMigrator

—————————- Original Message —————————-
Subject: Troubles in Wyoming
From:    “Lance Olsen” <lance@wildrockies.org>
Date:    Sat, February 2, 2008 2:36 pm
To:      “cmcr-outreach” <cmcr-outreach@vortex.wildrockies.org>
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“You have no doubt noticed that the number of proposals for large, destructive projects on Wyoming’s public lands have increased in frequency, and thus BCA alerts to members to
by Bio-Broadcast

February Bio-Broadcast

Monthly e-Newsletter from Biodiversity Conservation Alliance

CONTENTS:

WHY SO MANY ALERTS AND DEADLINES?

Since 2001, a number of disturbing memoranda were generated by the current administration in regard to the BLM. For example:

1) oil and gas leasing will be the number-one priority for the BLM;
2) the BLM reported there were too many “impediments and restrictions” to drilling for oil and gas on public land in the Rockies; and
3) suggesting the BLM use the “least restrictive” measures to protect environmental values.

As a result, drilling permits increased 42% from 2000 to 2006, and wells started on public lands increased 46% during the same period. Literally, there are not enough drilling rigs in the nation to drill the minerals already leased.

You have no doubt noticed that the number of proposals for large, destructive projects on Wyoming’s public lands have increased in frequency, and thus BCA alerts to members to inform and advocate have increased as well. As the countdown on the current administration continues, we expect these numbers to continue to increase. There’s only one year left. Now is the time to redouble our efforts and to continue standing up for the land we all own and the wildlife that is our natural heritage. And take heart, the light at the end of the tunnel is visible!

HELP STOP SPRUCE GULCH CLEARCUT ON THE ‘BOW

The Forest Service has proposed a large clearcut logging project in the Spruce Gulch area of the Medicine Bow National Forest. Ostensibly to manage the bark beetle infestation, the proposal includes clearcutting up to 3,700 acres. In response to BCA, the Service has agreed to minimize logging within critical Canada lynx corridor habitat, important for lynx recovery in southern Wyoming.

Please write the Forest Service before February 15, 2008, and tell them you endorse their move to preserve lynx corridor habitat, but that the Spruce Gulch project cannot go forward as proposed, due to its massive scale and focus on clearcutting. For more info and talking points, visit:

general/alerts/a1February2008.html>http://www.voiceforthewild.org/general/alerts/a1February2008.html.

Mail your letter to:
Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests,
Attn: Melissa Martin, Project
Coordinator, 2468 Jackson St.
Laramie, WY  82070

or email it to:

mmartin@fs.fed.us>mmartin@fs.fed.us.

Thank you in advance, champions of the Medicine Bow!

ATTEND THE PINEDALE ANTICLINE PUBLIC MEETING

After standing-room only at the first public meeting on new proposed drilling options for the Pinedale Anticline, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has scheduled a second public meeting in Pinedale for THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, from 6-9 PM, at Rendezvous Pointe (the new Senior Center) 425 E. Magnolia Street, Pinedale, WY. The BLM needs to hear from those of us who want see energy development balanced with wildlife, air and water protections. Please plan to attend and tell the BLM that the Wyoming we want does not include wildlife population collapses, pollution of our clean air, impairment of our pristine views, and the social implosion occurring in our communities. Demand that the BLM balance energy development by making the following changes in its Preferred Alternative (Alternative D) in the Revised Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for drilling on the Pinedale Anticline:

*Maintain all seasonal wildlife restrictions and protect wildlife migration
corridors,

*slow the pace of development,

*suspend leases in the peripheral areas for the duration of development in the core area,

*require directional drilling wherever technically possible,

*control sediment runoff into watersheds to protect native cutthroat trout species,

*withdraw all un-leased areas and expired leases from future leasing for life of SEIS, and

*protect all Class I airsheds from pollution and visibility impairment.

Don’t let multinational corporations and the federal government erode our standards. THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR SPEAKING OUT FOR WYOMING! February 7, 6-9 PM, Rendezvous Pointe, Pinedale, WY

REMINDER: GREAT DIVIDE, PRAIRIE DOGS NEED YOU

Speaking of upcoming deadlines, this is a reminder to please use your voice to protect wildlife and wild places:

*The Great Divide Final Environmental Impact Statement-Comments due February 4, 2008 (next Monday) mailed to:

Jim Caswell, Director, BLM,
Attention Brenda Hudgens-Williams,
PO Box 66538, Washington, D.C. 20035.

For more info and talking points, see:

general/alerts/a9January08.html

*The Thunder Basin Prairie Dog Management Strategy-Comments due February 4, 2008 (next Monday) mailed to:

Mary H. Peterson, Forest Supervisor,
Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests and
Thunder Basin National Grassland,
Douglas Ranger District, 2250 E Richards St.
Douglas, WY 82633, attention Marilee Houtler

or faxed to 307-358-7107, or emailed to:

comments-rocky-mountain-medicine-bow-routt-douglas-thunder-basin@fs.fed.us

See the plan online at:

http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/mbr/projects/forestplans/in_progress/index.shtml

Info and talking points can be found at:

general/alerts/a21January2008.html

UPPER HOBACK DRILLING THREATENS WILDLIFE

Plains Exploration has upped the ante in the northern end of the Wyoming Range, changing their exploratory drilling package from three wells on a single wellpad to 136 wells from 17 pads, a drilling scenario that will rival the Pinedale Anticline in intensity. This project would impacts roadless areas in the Wyoming Range, destroying habitat for lynx, elk, andmoose and potentially severing an important migration and dispersal corridor along the Hoback Rim between the Gros Ventre and Wyoming Ranges. The Forest Service is currently taking scoping comments through February 7, 2008. Write in and tell the Forest Service that it should seek a buy-out of oil and gas leases to prevent drilling altogether in this sensitive area. At
minimum, the Forest Service should delay approving the Master Development Plan until after the exploratory wells prove up, and any large-scale drilling should require phased development in which no more than 2 wellpads
could be in operation at any one time. Send your comments to:

comments-intermtn-bridger-teton@fs.fed.us.

subject “Eagle Prospect and Noble Basin Master Development Plan;” the full development scenario is online under 2007 NEPA Documents at:

http://www.fs.fed.us/r4/btnf/projects/

PROPOSED BILL DISASTER FOR NONGAME WILDLIFE

Senate File 3, a bill scheduled to come before the Wyoming Legislature this session, would remove Wyoming Game and Fish Department funding for the Non-Game Wildlife Program, and give the Legislature the power of the purse-strings over nongame wildlife. The Nongame program manages all non-sporting species in the state including most rare and disappearing species. Legislature-funded programs are vulnerable to all kinds of pressure and tampering by the politicians, and the Wyoming Legislature has an extremely anti-wildlife track record when it comes to non-game species. Mostly, they vote to subject our nongame wildlife to poisoning and aerial gunning.

At present, the Nongame Wildlife Program is funded through the Wyoming Game and Fish’s budget, which comes from license fees and federal funds, and is relatively free from political meddling by the Legislature. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department needs more funding for nongame wildlife, but getting it
through the Legislature is a recipe for disaster. (Interestingly, while S.F. 3 pulls the Nongame Program out of the present protected funding stream, it provides no funding to the nongame program). Do you think the Wyoming
legislature should control the purse-strings for the nongame program? If not, then call your Wyoming legislators at 1-866-996-8683 starting
February 11, 2008, and tell them to vote NO on Senate File 3.

THANK YOU! MANY HANDS MAKE LIGHT(ER) WORK

Thanks to the hard work of many volunteers and generous contribution of coffee and goodies from Grounds Coffeeshop in Laramie, the BCA office is
almost back to normal after the New Year’s Eve flood! Thank you so much for pitching in on an otherwise overwhelming project. The staff couldn’t have done it without you. Please thank businesses like Grounds Coffee that support the BCA mission!

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY TO YOU FROM BCA!

Keep your eyes peeled about how to “green” your Valentine’s Day!

BCA
Biodiversity Conservation Alliance
PO Box 1512, Laramie, WY 82073-1512
307-742-7978, fax 307-742-7989

http://www.voiceforthewild.org

From:    Faith Gemmill
To:      ‘Faith Gemmill’
Date:    Thursday, January 31, 2008, 4:16:54 PM
Subject: FW: Alaska Natives join Lawsuit over Chukchi Lease Sale
Files:   Final AK Native Press Release – Chukchi Sea Lawsuit.doc

Please Distribute Far and Wide!!!!

For Immediate Release
January 31, 2008

Contact:

Jack Schaefer, Native Village of Point Hope, 907-368-2235

Steve Oomittuk, City of Point Hope, 907-368-2537

George Edwardson, ICAS, 907-852-3746

Faith Gemmill, Redoil, 907-750-0188

Native Groups Sue MMS Over Chukchi Sea Lease Sale
Elders Resolution Prompts Region-wide Lawsuit

Point Hope, AK – Today the Native Village of Point Hope, the City of Point
Hope, the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope (ICAS), and the Resisting
Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL) Network filed a
lawsuit to fight the Chukchi Sea Lease Sale 193. Minerals Management
Service (MMS) plans to hold the lease sale on February 6, 2008.

The Point Hope Elders Advisory Council, the traditional Inupiat leaders of
the Native Village of Point Hope, a federally recognized tribal
government, recently passed a resolution supporting a legal challenge to
prevent offshore oil and gas activities in the Chukchi Sea.

“We support a legal challenge to MMS for holding Lease Sale 193 and we
encourage others to follow us. As the traditional leaders of Point Hope,
we ask all Inupiaq people to join us in our opposition to leasing the
Chukchi Sea to oil and gas exploration and development. Help us protect
our garden and the way of life we all share,” said David U. Stone, Sr.,
President of the Point Hope Elders Advisory Council.

The City of Point Hope, the municipal government for the community
established in 1966, has joined the lawsuit.

“The people of TIKIGAQ [traditional name for the people of Point Hope]
have hunted and depended on the animals that migrate through the Chukchi
Sea for thousands of years. This is our garden, our identity, our
livelihood,” said Steve Oomittuk, Point Hope City Mayor. Without it we
would not be who we are today. Even at this present day and time the
animals from these waters shelter, clothe, and feed us. We would be
greatly impacted if anything happened to our ocean and the animals that
migrate through the Chukchi Sea. We oppose any activity that will endanger
our way of life and the animals that we greatly depend on,” said Oomittuk.

The approximately 30 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS)
Chukchi Sea 193 lease area include core habitat for polar bear and Pacific
walrus, and encompasses the migration route of the bowhead whale, which
the Inupiaq people of the North Slope have subsisted on for thousands of
years.

North Slope residents are frustrated that MMS has ignored their concerns
through government to government consultation and other public meetings.
They believe litigation is the only choice still available to them to
avoid oil and gas leasing in the Chukchi Sea and hopes other Inupiat will
also file suit.

“The Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope is the regional tribal
government for eight villages on the North Slope. We have a responsibility
to our people to stand up against threats to our whaling culture and to
protect our way of life. An oil spill in the Chukchi Sea could devastate
the bowhead whale migration and other animals we have subsisted on for
thousands of years. MMS continues to ignore our concerns. The elders have
spoken and told us to fight this and we will do so through this lawsuit,”
said George Edwardson, President of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic
Slope (ICAS).

The REDOIL Network is an Alaska Native grassroots organization with
members of the Inupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Tlingit, Gwich’in, Eyak and Dena’ina
Athabascan tribes, that resists unsustainable fossil fuel development.

“The REDOIL Network has joined in the lawsuit to support the Inupiat and
their subsistence rights which are threatened by proposed offshore
development in the Chukchi Sea. The Inupiat right to continue their way of
life as they have for generations should be upheld in this decision
instead of being compromised for multi-national oil company profits” said
Faith Gemmill, REDOIL Campaign Organizer.

“We’ve hunted and fished in the ocean since time immemorial. We have always
believed that we own the ocean and that it is our garden. We can’t afford
to stop our religious, cultural and subsistence activities that depend on
the ocean. The ocean is what our history and upon which our culture are
based,” said Jack Schaefer, President of the Native Village of Point Hope.
The Alaska Native organizations are being represented by Earthjustice, a
nonprofit environmental law firm in Juneau, Alaska. Several conservation
groups have joined the Alaska Natives in their lawsuit.

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1 ——————————————-
“Our results indicate that future reductions in Arctic sea ice cover could
significantly reduce available water in the American west….”
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GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS
VOL. 31, L06209, doi:10.1029/2003GL019133, 2004
Copyright 2004 by the American Geophysical Union.

Disappearing Arctic sea ice reduces available water in the American west

Jacob O. Sewall and Lisa Cirbus Sloan
Earth Sciences Department, University of
California, Santa Cruz, California, USA

ABSTRACT – Recent decreases in Arctic sea ice cover and the
probability of continued decreases have raised the question of how
reduced Arctic sea ice cover will influence extrapolar climate. Using
a fully coupled earth system model, we generate one possible future
Arctic sea ice distribution. We use this ”future” sea ice
distribution and the corresponding sea surface temperatures (SSTs) to
run a fixed SST and ice concentration experiment with the goal of
determining direct climate responses to the reduction in Arctic sea
ice that is projected to occur in the next 50 years. Our results
indicate that future reductions in Arctic sea ice cover could
significantly reduce available water in the American west and
highlight the fact that the most severe impacts of future climate
change will likely be at a regional scale.

2 ———————————
“Although the results reported in this study were derived from an
ensemble of regional climate simulations driven by a global climate
model that displays low climate sensitivity compared with most other
models, climate change was found to significantly affect water
resources in the western U.S. by the mid twenty-first century.”
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Climatic Change 62: 75-113, 2004

MID-CENTURY ENSEMBLE REGIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE
SCENARIOS FOR THE WESTERN UNITED STATES

L. RUBY LEUNG, YUN QIAN, XINDI BIAN , WARREN M. WASHINGTON,
JONGIL HAN  and JOHN O. ROADS

Abstract: To study the impacts of climate change on water resources in
the western U.S., global climate simulations were produced using the
National Center for Atmospheric Research/Department of Energy
(NCAR/DOE) Parallel Climate Model (PCM). The Penn State/NCAR Mesoscale
Model (MM5) was used to downscale the PCM control (20 years) and three
future (2040-2060) climate simulations to yield ensemble regional
climate simulations at 40 km spatial resolution for the western U.S.
This paper describes the regional simulations and focuses on the
hydroclimate conditions in the Columbia River Basin (CRB) and
Sacramento-San Joaquin River (SSJ) Basin. Results based on global and
regional simulations show that by mid-century, the average regional
warming of 1 to 2.5 ? C strongly affects snowpack in the western U.S.
Along coastal mountains, reduction in annual snowpack was about 70% as
indicated by the regional simulations. Besides changes in mean
temperature, precipitation, and snowpack, cold season extreme daily
precipitation increased by 5 to 15 mm/day (15-20%) along the Cascades
and the Sierra. The warming resulted in increased rainfall at the
expense of reduced snowfall, and reduced snow accumulation (or earlier
snowmelt) during the cold season. In the CRB, these changes were
accompanied by more frequent rain-on-snow events. Overall, they
induced higher likelihood of wintertime flooding and reduced runoff
and soil moisture in the summer. Changes in surface water and energy
budgets in the CRB and SSJ basin were affected mainly by changes in
surface temperature, which were statistically significant at the 0.95
confidence level. Changes in precipitation, while spatially
incoherent, were not statistically significant except for the drying
trend during summer. Because snow and runoff are highly sensitive to
spatial distributions of temperature and precipitation, this study
shows that (1) downscaling provides more realistic estimates of
hydrologic impacts in mountainous regions such as the western U.S.,
and (2) despite relatively small changes in temperature and
precipitation, changes in snowpack and runoff can be much larger on
monthly to seasonal time scales because the effects of temperature and
precipitation are integrated over time and space through various
surface hydrological and land-atmosphere feedback processes. Although
the results reported in this study were derived from an ensemble of
regional climate simulations driven by a global climate model that
displays low climate sensitivity compared with most other models,
climate change was found to significantly affect water resources in
the western U.S. by the mid twenty-first century.

3
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“The atmospheric modeling results of 1998-2002 suggest an increased
risk for severe and synchronized drying of the mid-latitudes if Š”
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SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org
VOL 299
31 JANUARY 2003

R E P O R TS

The Perfect Ocean for Drought
Martin Hoerling  and Arun Kumar

Abstract:
The 1998 -2002 droughts spanning the United States, southern Europe,
and South- west Asia were linked through a common oceanic influence.
Cold sea surface temperatures (SSTs)in the eastern tropical Pacific
and warm SSTs in the western tropical Pacific and Indian oceans were
remarkably persistent during this period. Climate models show that the
climate signals forced separately by these regions reacted
synergistically, each contributing to widespread mid-latitude drying :
an ideal scenario for spatially expansive, synchronized drought.

From concluding remarks:
It is an open question whether such tropical oceanic forcings will
become more prevalent during the 21st century. Because of deficiencies
in coupled ocean-atmosphere models, little confidence exists with
regard to projections of the future statistics of ENSO (such as its
duration and amplitude) or of the regional pattern of mean tropical
SST change itself. The atmospheric modeling results of 1998-2002
suggest an increased risk for severe and synchronized drying of the
mid-latitudes if the tropical mean SSTs or their interannual
variability increase the ocean’s west-east contrast over the
equatorial Pacific.

4 ———————————————————————–
“Future projections of drought in the twenty-first century … show
regions of strong wetting and drying with a net overall global drying
trend. For example, the proportion of the land surface in extreme
drought is predicted to increase from 1% for the present day to 30% by
the end of the twenty-first century.”
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JOURNAL OF HYDROMETEOROLOGY
OCTOBER 2006

Modeling the Recent Evolution of Global Drought and Projections for the
Twenty-First Century with the Hadley Centre Climate Model

ELEANOR J. BURKE, SIMON J. BROWN, AND NIKOLAOS CHRISTIDIS
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, Met Office, Exeter,
United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Meteorological drought in the Hadley Centre global climate model is
assessed using the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), a commonly
used drought index. At interannual time scales, for the majority of
the land surface, the model captures the observed relationship between
the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and regions of relative wetness and
dryness represented by high and low values of the PDSI respectively.
At decadal time scales, on a global basis, the model reproduces the
observed drying trend (decreasing PDSI) since 1952. An optimal
detection analysis shows that there is a significant influence of
anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gasses and sulphate aerosols in
the production of this drying trend. On a regional basis, the specific
regions of wetting and drying are not always accurately simulated. In
this paper, present-day drought events are defined as continuous time
periods where the PDSI is less than the 20th percentile of the PDSI
distribution between 1952 and 1998 (i.e., on average 20% of the land
surface is in drought at any one time). Overall, the model predicts
slightly less frequent but longer events than are observed. Future
projections of drought in the twenty-first century made using the
Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) A2 emission scenario show
regions of strong wetting and drying with a net overall global drying
trend. For example, the proportion of the land surface in extreme
drought is predicted to increase from 1% for the present day to 30% by
the end of the twenty-first century.
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