Photographic Tribute to Our National Parks

This is a tribute to our amazing national parks and to Ken Burns whose PBS series this week reminds us of the need to be eternally vigilant against their destruction by mining, drilling, hunting and honky-tonk development. Climate change is now attacking the parks as well, melting glaciers, drying up rivers, sparking massive wildfires and messing with wildlife, trees and ecosystems. As one who has visited many of the national parks and finds them every bit as compelling as the much vaunted Alps or New Zealand landscape, I have selected some pictures from Flickr to reproduce the beauty I witnessed:


Grand Tetons National Park photo by Alaskan Dude/Fred Kovalchek


Arches National Park photo by Vtveen


Yellowstone National Park photo by Alaskan Dude/Fred Kovalchek


Glacier National Park photo by Spunkinator/Danny


Grand Canyon National Park photo by Cobalt123


Everglades National Park photo by Bill Swindaman


Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, photo by Wugging Gavagal


Bryce Canyon National Park photo by by Vtveen


Yosemite National Park photo by Jim Brekke


Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii, photo by RaSchi/Ragnar Schierholz

Burns' series continues tonight (Monday) on PBS.

Massive new study links global warming to physical, biological changes on planet

(Photo of Alps from Flickr and Philippe Tarboureich.)

News Update: An international team of scientists has affirmed and expanded on last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report by linking human activity and rising temperatures to physical and biological changes observed on Earth over the past 30 years. “The human footprint on the planet is clear,” said one of the authors, Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The study, published in Nature, matched changes like melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, warming lakes and rivers, longer growing seasons, earlier migration and breeding of birds, movement of heat-intolerant species up mountains, and changes in fish communities. They point to a few specifics, by continent: 89 flower species blooming earlier in Europe, melting glaciers in the Alps and in Patagonia, changes in the freeze depth of permafrost in Russia, and a 50% decline in the Emperor penguin on the Antarctic peninsula. Temperature was far more a factor than land use, pollution and population, according to the 30,000 data sets studied. In a second study published in Nature, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was found to be 28% higher than at any time in 800,000 years, according to gas bubbles in ice in Antarctic -- and methane was 124% higher. Both add carbon to the atmosphere. (Sources: E&E News PM, The Daily Green, Planet Ark.)