Northman's Fury

Click for larger view

Yes, that's my very own Narwhal tusk. (Okay, technically it's my father's, but he left it here when he moved south, so I've basically appropriated it unless and until he notices.) Living in the Arctic, such things aren't terribly uncommon, but that may change in the near future.

The polar bear has become an icon of global warming vulnerability, but a new study found an Arctic mammal that may be even more at risk to climate change: the narwhal.

The narwhal, a whale with a long spiral tusk that inspired the myth of the unicorn, edged out the polar bear for the ranking of most potentially vulnerable in a climate change risk analysis of Arctic marine mammals.

. . .

"What we wanted to do was look at the whole picture because there's been a lot of attention on polar bears," said study co-author Ian Stirling, a polar bear and seal specialist for the Canadian government. "We're talking about a whole ecosystem. We're talking about several different species that use ice extensively and are very vulnerable."

. . .

Stanford University biologist Terry Root, who wasn't part of the study, said the analysis reinforces her concern that the narwhal "is going to be one of the first to go extinct" from global warming despite their population size.

"There could a bazillion of them, but if the habitat or the things that they need are not going to be around, they're not going to make it," Root said.

Polar bears can adapt a bit to the changing Arctic climate, narwhals can't, she said.

. . .

The narwhal, which dives about 6,000 feet to feed on Greenland halibut, is the ultimate specialist, evolved specifically to live in small cracks in parts of the Arctic where it's 99 percent heavy ice, Laidre said. As the ice melts, not only is the narwhal habitat changed, predators such as killer whales will likely intrude more often.

"Since it's so restricted to the migration routes it takes, it's restricted to what it eats, it makes it more vulnerable to the loss of those things," Laidre said in a telephone interview from Greenland, where she is studying narwhals by airplane.

. . .

Inuit natives of Greenland were telling scientists last year that it seemed that the narwhal population was in trouble, Corell said.

Over-hunting is a danger the Inuit understand and can control, and they've shown remarkable ability to provide more accurate estimates of animal populations using traditional knowledge than the scientists using their models. So when they worry, I worry.

Climate change is something the tiny Arctic population can't do much to control, but it is here that it's effects will be most felt. And as per usual, it is the animal population that will be the first victims of man's destructive tendencies, and that beautiful spiral tusk of mine may go from being a byproduct of an annual harvest to an irreplaceable memento of a lost species.

Cross-posted to In The House and Senate

In large part, this kind of thing was expected to happen thanks to the obesity of today's population, but whatever the cause, people in the US, and particularly women, are starting to die younger.

For the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women.

In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation's women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today.

The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. The most dramatic change occurred in two areas in southwestern Virginia (Radford City and Pulaski County), where women's life expectancy has decreased by more than five years since 1983.

I do have one major nitpick with the article, though. For all of it's searching for possible causes, it leaves out one rather major and glaring one. One that can be guessed at when they widen their scope for a moment.

The phenomenon appears to be not only new but distinctly American.

"If you look in Western Europe, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, we don't see this," Murray said.

You see, there's something all of those countries have that the US lacks. Something that would definitely affect the poorest members of a population far more than the wealthiest.

Universal Health Care.

To me, that's the kind of thing I'd start looking at if it turned out that the US was alone among the industrialized nations to see a significant fraction of its population's life expectancy drop, among people who are less likely to have health insurance.

Via The Galloping Beaver

Scientists studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound effects on the world's climate and ocean currents.

. . .

Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica to the bottom of the ocean about 5 km (3 miles) down was becoming fresher and more buoyant.

So-called Antarctic bottom water helps power the great ocean conveyor belt, a system of currents spanning the Southern, Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans that shifts heat around the globe.

Dave gives a good synopsis of the science behind all this:

The average density of surface seawater is 1.025 grams per millilitre at 4 degrees Celsius. When compared to fresh water, with a density of 1.0 grams per millilitre at 4C, seawater is denser and heavier. That's an average of course, since the density of seawater varies around the planet.

Using SI units the mass density of surface seawater ranges from about 1020 to about 1029 kilograms per cubic meter. That depends on several fundamentals but the two most important factors are the surface temperature and the percentage of salinity. Generally speaking, surface seawater has a saline level of anywhere from 3.1 to 3.8 percent, (although in around areas which discharge fresh water it can be considerably lower.) The average salinity of surface seawater is about 3.5 percent or 35 practical salinity units (PSU).

I know, I'm probably boring you with all this, but stay with me a little longer and this might just get interesting. (If you find alarm bells interesting.)

Here's another factor. Deep seawater, because of the increased pressure, can achieve a density of 1050 kilograms per cubic meter.

We all know that cold air falls and warm air rises. The same occurs with water. And we all know that something dense will fall faster than something less dense occupying the same space. Fresh water is more buoyant than salt water so it would make sense that it floats nearer the surface. However, it's water. It mixes with the salt-water and changes the salinity thus the density. Add too much fresh water and reduce the density of the sinking salt water and the velocity at which it sinks is significantly reduced.

Now the nitty-gritty. The surface seawater around Antarctica hovers between 33.8 to 34.5 PSU. Because it's cold and relatively dense, it sinks. As it sinks it becomes even more dense and the rate of sink is accelerated. That movement displaces the water below it and causes the deeper waters to move, creating a current. A big current.

The same thing happens off Greenland in the North Atlantic. Simply put, between the Antarctic and Greenland movements of deep, dense, bottom salt water, they constitute the major natural engines which cause the ocean conveyor belt which drives the ocean currents.

Without those ocean currents the distribution of global heat would be completely altered and the world would experience total chaos. Not just a little bit either. It would be a complete global disaster.

We’re seeing what is probably the prelude to a shut-down of one of the major climate control features for the planet. I have little faith that our governments or industries will act in time to stop or even slow the effect down, so I suggest preparing for the inevitable.

At least as it relates to letting your anger out.

Whether or not it is reasonable, we are letting things get to us, and that can be bad news on the health front. Anger puts people at high risk for cardiovascular disease, the No. 1 cause of death in Canada.

For men, bottling it up makes it even worse. Males can reduce the risk of stroke and coronary heart disease by letting out their anger, according to a 2003 Harvard study.

Researchers tracked 23,500 male health care professionals, age 50 to 85, with no previous record of cardiovascular disease for two years. They found that the men who suppressed their anger were twice as likely to suffer strokes and heart attacks as men who expressed anger at moderate levels.

Women also benefit from venting but only if they do it once in a while. Women who usually suppress their anger recover their blood pressure more quickly after venting than those who usually express it, according to a 1992 study by Canadian researchers Josanna Lai and Wolfgang Linden.

Anger still isn't the best thing for your health, but since it really isn't good to bottle it up, the occasional ranting on the intertubes is probably a good thing for you.

Granted, that can get a lot of other people angry at you, but nobody's perfect.

A far more interesting contest than that waste of time last night. Popular Mechanics did a head-to-head test and review of the two rivals. And the winner is:

In both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple’s computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn’t come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine. Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward OS X. In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software—and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.

. . . Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot—and still save $100.

Writing this on my iMac, I can only say, "Haw Haw!". And it looks like the PC may find itself in further trouble down the road:

Windows is "collapsing" and Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to the way it does business if it wants to remain viable, according to a pair of Gartner analysts.

. . .

The Redmond, Wash.-based software behemoth is being dragged down by nearly two decades of legacy code, which has made it impossible for it to quickly design a new version of Windows that has any meaningful improvements. That is primarily why computer users have been so slow to voluntarily adopt Windows Vista, Silver and MacDonald said.

"This is a large part of the reason Windows Vista delivered primarily incremental improvements," they said at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas. "Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile."

. . .

"Apple introduced its iPhone running OS X, but Microsoft requires a different product on handhelds because Windows Vista is too large, which makes application development, support and the user experience all more difficult," they said. "Windows as we know it must be replaced."

Of course, Microsoft still has the MS Office monopoly that will keep it in business for the foreseeable future, but it's days as the OS king may be shorter than most people would have guessed.