farmers 3.far.000023 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A damselfish cultivates underwater gardens of an algal species that researchers haven't found growing on its own.

The special alga could be the fishy version of people's domesticated crops, says Hiroki Hata of Kyoto University in Japan. Growth tests of the alga, surveys of its distribution, and genetic analyses support that idea, he and Makoto Kato say in an upcoming Biology Letters.

People have been slow to get the hang of farming. Starting millions of years before the rise of human agriculture, certain ants, termites, and ambrosia beetles grew fungi for food. Today, they sow, fertilize, and weed their crops. A few of these spineless cultivators even employ bacteria to make pesticides.

In simpler systems, sometimes referred to as protofarming, mollusks called limpets and certain damselfish graze in territories of edible algae. Hata and Kato have been analyzing the Stegastes nigricans damselfish's patches of a Polysiphonia, which is categorized as a red alga. The fish defends what looks like a piece of "brown carpet on the reefs," says Hata. The fish nips out bits of other algae and swims outside its territory to spit them out.

Hata and Kato began to suspect that the brown carpet might not persist untended. For example, when they kidnapped the resident damselfish, other fish and sea urchins ate up the alga within days. When the researchers caged farms to keep out both the farmer and interlopers, algae of other species quickly overwhelmed the brown carpet.

To test the farmer-alga bond, Hata and Kato recently collected various algae both inside and outside damselfish territories in the Ryukyu Islands of Japan. The scientists next distinguished four Polysiphonia species by analyzing a segment of each one's DNA. One of the species, the brown carpet, turned up only in S. nigricans territories, Hata and Kato report. The other algal species were lacking in those territories but appeared both in territories of other damselfish and outside those boundaries.

A specialist in classifying red algae, Gary Saunders of the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, comments that many animals consume these species, "but for the alga to be dependent on the animal—I just can't think of another case." http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com

He finds it plausible that the alga depends on fish farmers on the reefs that Hata and Kato examined, but he cautions that in other regions, the brown-carpet species might survive independently. "It's a big ocean," he says.http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com

Ulrich Mueller of the University of Texas at Austin, who compares farming species, notes that the algal crop restricts damselfish farms to sunny spots, a limitation that it shares with the crops raised by people. In contrast, fungus raised by insects can grow in dark, protected chambers that reduce exposure to pests.

"It is likely that many more protofarming systems will be discovered in other animal lineages," Mueller predicts.

rogue 5.rog.2221 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

One of the world's worst weeds, Caulerpa taxifolia, has been eradicated from a lagoon in southern California, government officials reported last month. It was the alga's only known invasion in the Western Hemisphere.

Once marketed globally for use in aquariums, this captive-reared alga seems to have evolved into a form quite unlike its wild brethren (SN: 7/4/98, p. 8: http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc98/7_4_98/bob1.htm). For instance, the escaped alga survives winter chills that would kill its wild kin and has almost no predators. Like a dense shag carpet, it smothers natural underwater inhabitants. Since the species' release in Monaco 2 decades ago, the alga has blanketed large portions of the Mediterranean. The U.S. infestation seemed to have resulted from a separate aquarium discard. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

Immediately after the alga's discovery in the Agua Hedionda Lagoon in Carlsbad, Calif. (SN: 7/15/00, p. 36: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000715/fob1.asp), government and private organizations created an action team. Whenever team members found Caulerpa, they put a tarp over it and poisoned it with chlorine. In March, the team reported that its regular surveys of the lagoon during the past 4 years had found no sign of the alga. The invader had initially covered roughly 1,500 square meters of the lagoon. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

Had the alga not been contained, "it would have irreversibly changed the ecosystem in California's near-shore coastal environment," says Tim Keeney, deputy assistant secretary of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "It was only through the rapid response and cooperative efforts of organizations at all levels that we were successful in preventing an ecological crisis." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

diesel 22.die.2 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Cholesterol poses a cardiovascular risk once it becomes transformed into an inflammatory building block of artery-clogging plaque. That process, which happens all the time, is triggered by oxidation. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG A new study finds that breathing nanoscale particles spewed by diesel-fuel combustion—also a common occurrence—may turn on genes that multiply cholesterol's inflammatory and atherosclerotic risks.

André Nel of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles and his colleagues subjected cells from the lining of human arteries to oxidized cholesterol or diesel particulates. Some 2,500 genes changed their activity in response to both insults. Among this group, the researchers discerned what Nel calls "a genetic footprint" of heightened activity by genes whose activity promotes inflammation. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG

Pairing a low concentration of diesel particles with a high concentration of oxidized cholesterol ratcheted up the unwanted activity of some of these genes to 15 times the activity triggered by either of the agents alone. Nel's team reports similar genetic changes in mice engineered to develop high cholesterol, when they were exposed to Los Angeles traffic for 5 hours per day, 3 days a week, for 2 months. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG

The findings were published online July 26 in Genome Biology, an online journal.

People who eat fatty foods or who have a genetic predisposition to high cholesterol can't completely avoid air pollution's exacerbating impacts by moving to remote areas. "You probably will be exposed to far more ultrafine [combustion] particles in Los Angeles," Nel says, but emerging data show that once emitted, such particles travel long distances—even across oceans. In other words, he notes, "they're everywhere." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

v.s. naipaul 774.nai.444 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

V.S. Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001, sometimes seems like a mandarin literary figure from another age, a novelist and outspoken social philosopher who makes high claims for his art and who fully expects to be regarded, by future generations, as a member of the literary pantheon, the Tolstoy of his time. He may indeed deserve such regard.

Reading "The World Is What It Is," Patrick French's exhaustive, tell-all biography, we are reminded, among other things, of Mr. Naipaul's startling bluntness, his willingness to make statements or pursue themes that run counter to current pieties -- his willingness to offend, sometimes in the name of principle.http://louis1j1sheehan.us

But we also learn, as never before, that in his life as well as in his writings Mr. Naipaul has been no respecter of persons. Among those who have come in for abuse at his hands -- both physical and psychological -- are his longtime first wife and a long-suffering mistress. One might even say that Mr. Naipaul himself, by authorizing such a biography, is visiting some sort of abuse on himself. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Mr. Naipaul seems to be emulating the brutal honesty of Oliver Cromwell, who famously told an artist to paint his portrait "warts and all." He has not only given Mr. French access to his copious archive of manuscripts, letters and diaries but also spoken at length to him, on the record, about details of his private life that would have made anyone less brazen blush and hide. http://louis1j1sheehan.us The result is a book that reveals a great deal, sometimes inadvertently. http://louis1j1sheehan.us

The upside of such cooperation is a wealth of information: about Mr. Naipaul's ethnically Indian family, his upbringing and schooling in colonial Trinidad, his education at Oxford, his uneasy relationship with his adopted homeland of England, his peripatetic existence as traveler and observer, his scorn for many contemporary writers (including Derek Wolcott and his late friend Anthony Powell) and his admiration for dead white writers like Somerset Maugham, apparently a major influence.

It must also be said that Mr. French, while chronicling a brutal life in salacious detail, pays due attention to his subject's writings, which are after all the reason for such a biography in the first place. He notes that, with "Guerrillas" (1975), Mr. Naipaul captured the perils of radical chic by making a novel out of the real-life involvement of a radical-leaning British woman and a Third World thug. It was "A House for Mr. Biswas" (1961), a novel set in colonial Trinidad, and "A Bend in the River" (1979) that brought Mr. Naipaul to the attention of major critics and a larger public. Both books, in their way, take up what Mr. French calls "the paradox of civilization." "A Bend in the River," in particular, chronicles the grim despair and horror of central Africa and thus sounds a major theme in Mr. Naipaul's oeuvre: the barbarous behavior and seeming hopelessness of so much of the Third World. (Though Mr. Naipaul was fitfully critical of America, too, in 1989's "A Turn in the South.")
[VS Naipaul] Dept. of Spec. Coll./McFarlin Library/Univ. of Tulsa

V.S. Naipaul with his sisters Sati, Mira and Kamla in Trinidad.

In his later years, Mr. Naipaul, in addition to writing meditative travel books, has pushed the novel's form into nearly postmodern shapes. Mr. French writes of "The Enigma of Arrival" (1987) that it was "unlike any other book, a work of intermittent brilliance, a cross between a partially fictional autobiography and an essay and a slowly revealed study of the life of the mind, but billed as a novel."

But a determined refusal to fit into conventional or simplistic categories is a hallmark of Mr. Naipaul's distinctive brand of literature as well as a characteristic of his life as a whole -- his refusal to heed the dictates of political fashion or even of common politeness. Mr. French traces this propensity to a particular aspect of Caribbean parlance: "It was what Trinidadians call 'picong,' from the French 'piquant,' meaning sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener sent reeling."

Mr. Naipaul's "picong" remarks range from silly putdowns -- such as when he said of one of Queen Elizabeth's grandchildren that she had the face of a criminal -- to snippy but revelatory show-off remarks, like his comment that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for "The Satanic Verses" was an extreme form of literary criticism.

Sometimes his comments contain a judgment as valuable as it is politically incorrect: for instance, his plague-on-both-houses dismissal of Africa's twin curses of racist white colonial settlers and corrupt, undemocratic post-independence governments. Although Mr. French can be harshly critical of his subject -- he finds Mr. Naipaul both vicious and self- centered -- he tends to fall into the role of apologist. He prefers to explain away remarks of Mr. Naipaul's that offend liberal nostrums -- offering excuses and noting extenuating circumstances -- instead defending them or valuing their verity.

No matter how assiduous Mr. French tries to be about examining Mr. Naipaul's writings and blunt pronouncements, it is the life that galvanizes our attention, and little wonder. Mr. Naipaul's conduct, as presented in "The World Is What It Is," is shocking, and the sordid revelations are endless.

We read about the many abortions Mr. Naipaul demanded of his mistress, an Anglo-Argentinian woman named Margaret (whom he saw throughout his 41-year marriage to Patricia Hale and whom he threw aside, with a cash payment, upon Pat's death in 1996); their sado-masochistic sexual obsessions; their bouts of Dionysian frenzy, which included his beating her so badly that she could not appear in public. We read about his constant recourse to prostitutes; his seeming eagerness to subject his first wife to humiliation and contempt, throwing into her face both his infidelity and his low opinion of her. In episode after episode, seemingly without provocation, Mr. Naipaul is rude and nasty and supercilious to the women in his life, to friends and would-be friends, and to mere acquaintances.
http://louis1j1sheehan.us

V.S. Naipaul with his mistress, Margaret Gooding.

None of this ugliness, it should be said, helps us to understand Mr. Naipaul's novels, nor does Mr. French really try to make such a connection. Mr. Naipaul himself says, at one point, that his sexual adventures have been a necessary part of his effort to seek a subject as a writer. If such was the reason, the effort appears to have been a failure: How many of us read Mr. Naipaul for his sexual realism?

Even more shocking than certain details of Mr. Naipaul's life is his willingness to share them. By giving Mr. French access to so much damaging material, including his first wife Pat's written accounts of her misery, Mr. Naipaul seems to be lashing himself into an orgy of public remorse, resembling nothing so much as an evangelist confessing his sins before his congregation.

Is such remorse, in this case, a genuine attempt at atonement? Or is it one more way of abusing a hapless wife and mistress? Laying bare so much cruelty seems to rub salt into their wounds as well. Their humiliation, so painstakingly laid bare in these pages, seems boundless.

And what about the biographer's role in this psychodrama (or soap opera)? If Mr. Naipaul's supposed self-abasement is going to really hurt, isn't it necessary for there to be someone else to lay on the whip? Certainly Mr. French is not shy about characterizing Mr. Naipaul's conduct or quoting other people's harsh judgments of it. And yet and yet. Is he not functioning as an enabler for the continuing abuse of Mr. Naipaul's victims?

It is notable, in this regard, that "The World Is What It Is" breaks off 12 years ago, in 1996, with the death of Mr. Naipaul's first wife and his marriage, two months later, to his second. There are apparently limits to Mr. Naipaul's honesty and fearless revelations. It is a parlous proposition to write a biography of a living figure -- one way or another he will dictate boundaries. Was this then the bargain: no holds barred about Pat and Margaret but lay off the current life and marriage?

“A voyage across the oceans and a stint as a bonded or indentured labourer was an alternative to destitution.” Read an excerpt from "The World Is What It Is" http://louis1j1sheehan.us

Yet when it suits the enterprise, Mr. French will range beyond 1996. Take the fraught matter of "Sir Vidia's Shadow," Paul Theroux's outraged memoir of a friendship gone sour. Although it appeared in 2003, well after the biography's purview, Mr. French devotes five pages of his text to an analysis of it. Correctly calling it "an act of vengeance, but also an act of homage," he then proceeds to demolish the book, picking holes in the narrative and finding other people to quibble about minor details. And at the end of his discussion, he quotes from one of his interviews with Mr. Naipaul, in which Sir Vidia (as he is often called, in knighthood) gets his own back with a judgment on his former friend that is much more devastating -- and magisterial -- than anything Mr. Theroux has said of him.

In the end, one is left with a queasy feeling that, after all, Mr. French is acting as Mr. Naipaul's instrument. Whatever else he is, Mr. Naipaul is no fool, and he has probably gotten exactly what he wants from this project: kudos for his honesty, more attention than ever, and a chance to act out his hostility, yet again, against choice targets who cannot or will not defend themselves, and all on his own terms. Is there a Nobel Prize for audacity?

Mr. Rubin is a writer in Pasadena, Calif.

babbitt 3998.bab.22999 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. “New Orleans, at the end of the century, will be an island” — literally, predicts Bruce Babbitt. The city won’t wash away, he says, but “much like Venice,” its long term survival will depend on the maintenance of high, dike-like walls. Most of the roughly 2 million people who now reside outside of the city will eventually have to undergo a “managed retreat from that delta country” as it becomes submerged, he says, a victim of the global sea-level rise associated with climate warming. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/

Babbitt, who was Interior Secretary in the Clinton Administration, painted a grim picture of southern Louisiana, this morning. It was part of a briefing that had been organized to unveil a new report by the Center for American Progress.

Before any new major federal program can commence, its administrators must sign off on an Environmental Impact Statement — an analysis of how the program might affect the environment or be affected by it. The new CAP report argues that one facet of every EIS should be an assessment of how the program would contribute to climate change or be affected by global warming. Currently, climate change is all but ignored by analysts who prepare an EIS, the authors of the new report say.

Carol Browner agrees. She headed the Environmental Protection Agency throughout the Clinton administration and served as the moderator of a panel, today, that argued there is a need for EIS climate-change assessments. Browner interlaced quips from her own experience between the responses of her panelists – among them, authors of the new CAP report.

But Babbitt is the one who offered the riveting anecdote of the session. He focused on a 2004 EIS that the Army Corps of Engineers commissioned in anticipation of launching a $14 billion Coast 2050 program. Its goal: to reverse a century-long degradation of the Mississippi delta ecosystem – one that has been inexorably washing away into the Gulf.

Since the 1930s, the Louisiana delta has lost more than 1.2 million acres of land (485,830 hectares). “The cumulative effects of human and natural activities in the coastal area have severely degraded the deltaic processes and shifted the coastal area from a condition of net land building to one of net land loss,” the EIS explained. Throughout the decade ending in 2000, the delta was losing some 15,300 acres per year (6,194 ha/year), a rate that was expected to eventually slow down to about 6,600 acres per year for the next half century.

So the Corps of Engineers entertained proposals from a host of stakeholders and research groups to redress the problem. The only problem, Babbitt argues, is that the Corps neglected to account for the region’s topography and the effect global warming would have on it.

More than 95 percent of the terrain in a 10,000 square mile area at the mouth of the Mississippi — the Louisiana delta — resides a mere 3 feet or less above sea level. Due to subsidence, the area is also losing about a foot in height per century, Babbitt notes. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/ Those two features are bad news for the region, he argues, because global warming is already beginning to raise sea levels around the world. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/

“The ineluctable fact,” he maintains, is that within the lifespan of some people alive today, “the vast majority of that land [the 10,000 mi² delta] will be under water.” He also faulted federal officials for not developing migration plans for area residents. Then again, he charged that Uncle Sam lacks the “honesty and compassion” to tell Louisiana residents the “truth.”

And the reason this is important for environmental assessments, he argued, is that in some instances — such as the Corps' efforts to rehabilitate the Louisiana delta — the feds risk throwing huge sums into a money pit. In the end, he worries the $14 billion gesture will have proven "meaningless" if the area is ultimately drowned by seawater.

Clearly, Babbitt offered up some great quotes. The problem, of course, is that the glib orator can’t prove his prognostications will come to pass. Nor can anyone else. He argues that his crystal-ball gazing has been informed by conclusions issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the huge consensus group that has deliberated on the science of climate.

So, do we accept the analyses of a skilled political animal, like Babbitt, to cautiously and accurately apply climate science to the Louisiana delta?

In fact, I don’t think it matters. I think he was really having sport with reporters and climate-policy analysts in the audience today. Deliberately putting a dramatic slant on the situation.

But if his what-if scenario is at least partially right, Louisiana and the nation may find it prudent to indeed begin taking climate change into account during environmental-impact assessments.

Only five days ago, I sat across the table at dinner, with an executive of a major insurance company that insures other insurance companies. These “reinsurance” firms are a very conservative lot. And this executive noted that his company and others reinsurers do take climate change very seriously.

The kind of havoc climate change could wreak to infrastructure threatens to break the bank, he said. It’s that simple. And that disturbing.

And if insurers are worrying about this, then I’d argue that we – and Uncle Sam – should too. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

cancer dna 993.can.221 Louis J. Sheehan

For the first time, a complete cancer genome, and incidentally a complete female genome, has been decoded, scientists report online Nov. 5 in Nature. In a study made possible by faster, cheaper and more sensitive methods for sequencing DNA, the researchers pinpoint eight new genes that may cause a cell to turn cancerous. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

“Since cancer is a disease of the genome, this newfound ability to determine the complete DNA sequence of a cancer cell is enormously powerful,” comments Francis Collins, a geneticist and former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., a group that raced to sequence the first entire human genome.

“We need to know the genetic rules of cancer,” says coauthor Timothy Ley of Washington University in St. Louis. Ley and colleagues read each of the 3 billion building blocks of DNA from tumor cells in a woman with acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, a highly malignant form of blood and bone marrow cancer. Then the team compared the long string of code with one taken from noncancerous skin cells from the same woman.

This new sequencing technology, called massively parallel sequencing, makes it possible to compare the normal DNA sequence to the cancerous DNA sequence in the same patient. That, in turn, allows researchers to find individual DNA bases — the needles in a haystack of 3 billion pieces of straw — that had mutated in the cancerous cells.

Kevin Shannon, director of the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of California, San Francisco, studies the genes that may lead to leukemia and calls this work “a major achievement,” one that is “remarkable for its rigor and precision.”

None of the researchers knew what to expect for the number of mutated genes in the cancerous cells. “We were flying blind,” says Ley. But after rigorously pruning the data to keep only the most significant mutations, the researchers identified 10 mutations, eight of which were in genes never before implicated in AML. Of these eight new mutations, none were found to be mutated in tumors from other, smaller-scale studies, suggesting that individual AML cases are distinct.

It may be that the disease is so specific doctors will need to sequence each individual with AML to determine the best course of treatment, says coauthor Elaine Mardis, also of Washington University.

At the same time, because those earlier studies did not sequence the entire genome, and because this new study had a sample size of only one patient, it is too early to tell if AML has different kinds of mutations in different patients.

So, equally possible is that common mutations in similar groups of genes may contribute to AML. Discovery of these gene networks could allow doctors to use these common pathways of disease to treat patients similarly.

“It’s fun to speculate,” Maris says, “but we just don’t know.”

Understanding the genetic basis of cancer could lead to highly personalized treatments, says Mardis. “Right now, they’re all treated the same way they were 25 years ago,” she says of AML patients. It would be nice, Mardis says, if doctors could tell their patients, “Here’s what we know about your disease, and here are your best treatment options.”

Although scientists read every base pair in the patient’s genome, they only analyzed mutations in the DNA sequences that produce proteins, an estimated meager 1 to 2 percent of the human genome. To find mutations in other regions called intergenic DNA will require intensive statistical analyses. “We haven’t finished the job,” says Ley. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

Because this study was designed to find genes that were mutated in a cancer genome, researchers omitted the DNA sequences from the sex chromosomes, the Xs and Ys, when making comparisons. Little is known about the differences between a male and a female genome. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

The research team currently has funding to support more cancer genome sequences in the next few years. “What we need are thousands of genomes from each cancer,” says Ley. “We’ve already started a second patient, and are nearly finished, but our hopes are to do more.” Louis J. Sheehan

heat 883.hea.0 Louis J. Sheehan

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

The United States is already feeling the effects of climate change that’s mostly caused by humans, says a long-awaited U.S. summary of climate science released May 29.

The report is “a one-stop-shop” for what’s known about causes and effects of climate change in the United States, said Sharon Hays of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as she introduced the document at a press conference the morning of May 29. Issued by the National Science and Technology Council and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the report draws on scientific papers from researchers around the globe.

The previous science assessment, required by the Global Change Research Act, came out in 2000. The required follow-up assessment has lagged, though. Today’s assessment is two days ahead of a May 31 deadline set by a federal court after environmental groups sued to demand its release.

The new report is “a wonderful example of what happens when federal scientists are given the freedom to actually do their jobs,” says Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. The Center joined two other groups in the suit that prompted the deadline from the U.S. District Court of the Northern District California Oakland Division in August, 2007.

“I think it’s quite a thorough and comprehensive summary of the science that’s out there,” says Mike Brklacich of Carleton University in Canada after a quick look at the report. “I didn’t read it and say ‘Oh my God, thousands of voices have been suppressed again in the science community.”

WILDER FIRESAs temperatures warm, wildfires will very likely intensify. Already recent years have brought increases in both their extent and severity. Courtesy of National Park Service

Brklacich does say he’d like to see more consideration of the interconnected effects of climate issues, but says that report’s approach is common in the field.

The assessment starts with the question of cause: “Studies that rigorously quantify the effect of different external influences on observed changes (attribution studies) conclude that most of the recent global warming is very likely due to human-generated increases in greenhouse gas concentrations,” stated the report.

Hays jousted a bit with reporters during the press conference over whether the report signals a change of heart in the administration. “It’s simply not correct to say that this is the first time we’ve recognized the link between greenhouse gases and climate change,” she said. She cited a speech in 2002 in which President Bush referred to a National Academy of Sciences report making the link. Asked about later statements that there’s debate over the cause, she said, “There has been a debate.”

The report, after dealing with the cause, lists changes already observed within the United States. Average temperatures have risen in both this and the last century. Increasingly more of the annual precipitation fell as rain rather than snow during the past five decades. Several droughts have been severe but the last 50 years overall saw a tendency toward decreasing severity and duration of droughts. Sea level has been rising 0.08 to 0.12 inches per year along most of the U.S Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

For the future, the report notes that most of the models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports predict average warming in the United States this century topping 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Changes in five out of the 21 models used in the IPCC report shot above 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. The report also draws on IPCC projections of global sea level rise between 7 and 23 inches this century.

In determining what all this means to Americans, the assessment pulls work from topical reports called SAPs, some of which are still to be published. Most discussion of energy to date has focused on how to reduce emissions, the report says, but climate changes will the affect these industries. In places, hydropower or nuclear plants will have less water.

Transportation will feel the difference too. Railroad tracks may buckle and highways more easily soften into ruts with hotter, more frequent and longer lasting heat spells. Coastal flooding and landslides will slam roads and rails as well as ports. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise

For farmers and resource managers, the new report also draws a SAP summary about agriculture released earlier in the week by the Climate Change Science Program. “We’re seeing effects happening rapidly, more rapidly than some of us expected,” says Anthony Janetos, one of the lead authors and director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Md. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise

“ An important feature of this report is that it dispels the commonly held notion that the United States and other wealthy nations will be spared the worst impacts of climate change,” says ecosystem biologist Jay Gulledge at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Va. Having the wealth doesn’t mean having the will to deal the problems, he says. “The Congress and the White House have much work to do to prepare our country to deal successfully with climate change.”

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire