[Water_news] 3. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATERSHEDS - 10/10/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

October 10, 2008

 

3. Watersheds –

 

 

Supreme Court takes on whales, Navy sonar

San Francisco Chronicle

 

Clear Lake Fish Die-Off Appears Nearing an End
Sacramento NEWS10

 

Climate change forcing animals to move up

San Francisco Chronicle

 

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Supreme Court takes on whales, Navy sonar

San Francisco Chronicle – 10/9/08

By Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Hearst Newspapers

 

(10-09) 04:00 PDT Washington - --

Several Supreme Court justices seemed skeptical Wednesday about a federal judge's decision to protect whales and other marine life off the California coast by limiting the Navy's use of sonar.

 

The case pits environmental causes against national security and military interests.

 

Environmentalists warn that the mid-frequency sonar used by the Navy can harm or kill whales by forcing the mammals to dive deep to avoid the sound, causing decompression sickness. The electronic devices also interfere with the mammals' ability to navigate underwater and prompt them to change their breeding habits.

The Bush administration, which appealed a lower court order against the Navy, argues that the sonar is essential to military training exercises designed to help sailors learn how to detect enemy submarines. The government contends that the sonar causes only "temporary" problems for whales and other marine mammals.

Sonar "is vitally important to the survival of our naval strike groups deployed around the world and therefore critical to the nation's own security," said Solicitor General Gregory Garre, arguing for the U.S.

 

The administration has taken issue with a U.S. District Court judge's order barring the Navy from using sonar whenever marine mammals are within 1.25 miles.

The judge's order "seriously interferes with critical training exercises that the president (and) his chief naval officers have determined to be in the paramount interest of the United States," Garre said.

 

The case was prompted when the Navy decided last year not to issue an environmental impact statement before launching 14 sonar-training exercises. A federal law generally requires such an environmental impact statement, known as an EIS, before any action that could significantly affect the environment.

 

The Navy argued that dolphins, whales and other marine life faced "harassment" from the sonar but that bigger problems weren't likely and, therefore, an official environmental impact statement wasn't necessary.

 

The Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups asked a U.S. District Court judge to restrict the sonar training exercises, saying the Navy should have produced the impact statement.

 

District Judge Florence Marie Cooper in Los Angeles agreed with the environmentalists that the sonar almost certainly harms marine life and barred the Navy from using sonar when marine mammals are nearby. The decision was later affirmed by the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The government appealed to the Supreme Court.

 

The importance of the case goes beyond the now almost-complete training exercises, because it will decide who has the final say - the courts or executive agencies - in deciding when an environmental impact statement is required before a government action. The Supreme Court's decision in the case could dictate how much latitude federal judges have to stop military exercises on environmental grounds.

 

Several justices on Wednesday signaled that they agreed with the administration's argument that the trial judge had gone too far in limiting the Navy's training exercises because the plaintiff environmentalists had not proven it was likely that marine mammals would face "irreparable injury" from the sonar.

Justice Antonin Scalia said the impact statements were only a "procedural requirement," and failing to file one does not result in "concrete harm" to the animals or the environmentalists who brought the lawsuit.

 

Justice Samuel Alito wondered whether the trial judge was obligated to defer "to the Navy on that military issue about whether the training would be effective" even under the restrictions. "Is Judge Cooper an expert on anti-submarine warfare?" he asked.

 

But Justice Stephen Breyer noted that an environmental impact statement would have filled in those gaps - giving the Navy valuable information about how its exercises might hurt marine animals and how the military could modify its regimen to curb the potential harm.

 

Justice John Paul Stevens said "the whole theory of the environmental impact statement is that we don't really know what the harm will be."

"Without the EIS, the Navy is acting in a state of some degree of ignorance," Stevens said.

 

The Supreme Court is expected to decide the case by next spring.

 

The case is Winter vs. Natural Resources Defense Council, No. 07-1239.#

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/09/MNLI13DOHT.DTL

 

Clear Lake Fish Die-Off Appears Nearing an End
Sacramento NEWS10 – 10/9/08

CLEAR LAKE, CA - They have been dying for weeks. Thousands of carp, many between 8 and 15 pounds, that have been washing up along the shores of Clear Lake.

 

"It smells and it's horrible and we can't even go boating anymore because you can't even enjoy it. You can't even jump in the water," said Tawney Christopher of Kelseyville along the southern end of the lake.

 

Lake County has put in three disposal sites for the fish carcasses, including two trenches in county parks.

Experts believe a virus or bacteria may be responsible for the die-off.

 

"They're bottom feeders and they get close to each other when they are feeding and so if it was a bacteria or a viral-type disease, they transmit it from one to the other," said outdoor writer Terry Knight, who has been covering the story for a local paper.

 

An estimated 12,000 to 15,000 fish have died, but whatever is killing them is not believed to be any threat to human health. "Many of these diseases that affect wildlife do not cross over to humans," said Lake County Medical Officer Karen Tait.

 

The effect on local tourism has been another matter. "A lot of the people that aren't used to the smell don't want to be near it," said local resident Terry Clark, who said tourism has been down.

 

Knight said he believes the fish-kill is nearly over. "I was out on the lake yesterday and it looks to me like the die-off has about run it's course," Knight said.

Some believe the die-off may be nature's way of taking care of business. "This could very well be nature's way of balancing the biomass and the lake's to keep the young that are coming on, supported, so that they can make it through the wintertime," said Clear Lake Land Coordinator Skip Simkins.

Regardless, locals are urging bass fishermen and boaters not to stay away. "They can come on up," said Knight.#

http://www.news10.net/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=48924&catid=2

 

Climate change forcing animals to move up

San Francisco Chronicle – 10/10/08

By David Perlman, Science Editor

 

(10-09) 18:06 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- From the mountains of Yosemite to the tropical lowlands of Costa Rica, global warming is forcing animals and plants to move to higher and higher elevations, searching for climates that have allowed them to evolve and thrive for millions of years.  The exodus from less tolerable habitats to cooler and more benign environments has been taking place for nearly a century, according to scientists who scrambled over rocks and ridges, through steamy rain forests and up steep volcanic slopes to complete their painstaking surveys.

 

And in a few cases, the moves are taking a toll: Some mountain animals, left with smaller ranges to forage for food, may face extinction, while others are up against Darwinian competition as their new habitats intrude on already-established animal populations.

 

"These kinds of changes have been going on forever," said James L. Patton, a biologist at UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. "The only difference is that this has probably happened in our lifetime. It's the speed with which these changes are taking place that gives one pause."

 

As the pace of global warming quickens, change is everywhere: from glaciers melting in Greenland, to ice shelves crumbling in Antarctica, to coral reefs dying in tropic seas - and now to animal and plant life in many parts of the world.

 

In a report appearing today in the journal Science, Craig Moritz, also of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Patton and their colleagues describe how they surveyed 28 species of mammals studied by the late UC ornithologist Joseph Grinnell beginning in 1914. They covered many of Grinnell's sites from the San Joaquin Valley across all of Yosemite, over the crest, and down to Mono Lake and then compared the results.

 

Their report is appearing with another one on the effects of climate change in Costa Rica by an international group headed by Robert K. Colwell, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut who was formerly also a UC Berkeley scientist.

 

The impacts of warming

Moritz and Patton note that since Grinnell completed his work, the central Sierra has seen continuous warming, with nighttime low temperatures averaging 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they were 90 years ago. During the same period, more than half of the species he studied have shifted their ranges upward by as much as 1,600 feet, the researchers said.

 

Many of the others, Moritz and Patton said, stayed put in ranges that shrank over time, largely the result of human development rather than climate change.

The California vole, the California pocket mouse and the western harvest mouse, for example, have all increased their ranges by moving up-slope, while the bushy-tailed wood rat and Allen's chipmunk remained at lower levels but their ranges have diminished, the Berkeley scientists found.

 

Another chipmunk, the alpine species, saw its range shrink before it moved upward more than 2,000 feet seeking a friendly climate, Patton said. Ninety years ago, that same species of alpine chipmunk was common in lodgepole forests below 7,800 feet, but Patton said he found none living lower than 9,600 feet. As a result, he said, it may now face the risk of extinction because of its diminished range.

 

Similar changes are also endangering plant and insect species in some of the warmest places on Earth, according to the international survey team headed by Colwell, an evolutionary biologist.

 

In the tropics the climate has warmed by nearly 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1975, Colwell's report in Science notes, and climate models for the tropics indicate it could get hotter by nearly an additional 6 degrees before the end of the century.

 

Working their way up the forested slopes of Volcan Barba in Costa Rica - from sea level to the volcano's summit at nearly 10,000 feet - Colwell and his team of scientists surveyed the ranges of 1,902 different species of insects and plants, including moths and ants, orchids, mosses, ferns, fungi and the shrubs and bushes that live beneath forest canopies.

 

Trouble ahead for insects

Based on their observations, the scientists foresee trouble ahead: As the climate warms, even in the wet tropics, Colwell said, the ranges of many insect species will become more isolated in their higher habitats.

 

Some species now living part way up the volcano will have to move their ranges as much as 2,000 feet higher if the climate heats up by as much as 6 degrees, and that will put them into wholly new environments facing competition that evolution hasn't equipped them to face, the scientists said.

 

At the same time, species already living near the volcano's summit will find themselves with nowhere higher to move. In Colwell's words, they'll face "mountaintop extinction" as the climate warms even more.

 

In the tropical lowlands, little opportunity exists for plants or animals to escape future increases in temperature by migrating either north or south - it's all hot everywhere. So as temperatures increase, according to Colwell's report, about half the species the Costa Rica team studied will disappear - unless they retained the genetic tolerance for greater heat that their ancestors possessed some 55 million years ago when the world was far hotter than it is now.

 

The others may seek new habitats in wetter regions that are at least somewhat cooler than where they live now, but even then the warming trend will increase the dangers from drought and forest fire.

So the future looks tough all over. #

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/10/MNA113DMFK.DTL&hw=climate+change&sn=002&sc=947

 

 

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