Sunday, September 09, 2007

APEC Is Not Kyoto

Todays Headlines.

Made In Canada APEC Climate Accord.

More Hot Air in Sydney Declaration.

And, Harper gets his wish.

So if Kyoto is a failure for Australia, Canada, and the United States they get to scuttle the whole deal with their
Sydney Declaration on Climate Change

Which Harper can further use as evidence that Kyoto doesn't work. Abroad or at home. Canada will then set its own targets regardless of Kyoto. Which was his agenda all along. That and killing bill C-3o.

Note that the mutually agreed upon target date is the Tories target date of 2050.

Orwellian speak abounds in and around the APEC Anti-Kyoto statement. And that is all it is. An attempt to justify Canada's target date versus that of the rest of the G8 which has set more rapid targets.

"No one meeting, no one agreement is going to fix this issue," Howard said of human-caused climate change. "Kyoto didn't fix it. The Canadian prime minister made the comment about Kyoto that it was really an agreement that produced two groups of countries, those countries that didn't have any targets to meet, and those countries that have failed to meet the targets that were set."

But Harper said Howard was taking his comments out of context, and even messed up the punch line of his joke.

"The quip I think I said in a (previous international) leaders' meeting was that Kyoto divided the world into two groups: those that would have no targets and those that would reach no targets. It's, as I say, just a quip, but I think there's a fair amount of truth to it."



The Sidney Declaration is a self fulfilling prophecy for Harper and Howard.


Prime Minister Stephen Harper says it premature to be demanding climate-change goals of other countries, but he hopes that the participants at this weekend's APEC conference can at least agree those goals must be set.

"We haven't reached the point where we can dictate targets to the rest of the world," the Prime Minister told a late afternoon press conference on Friday.

Mr. Harper pointed out that the reduction targets set out in the Kyoto Accord — targets that his government rejects as being too costly to the environment — were never approved by countries that produce two third's of the world's emissions. And he said he believes that a G8 meeting held last June in Berlin produced the most reasonable approach to cutting the production of the gases that have been linked to global warming.

"Canada, Japan and others have articulated a specific goal that we would like to see which is a reduction of emissions by half by the year 2050. Not everybody even in the G8 yet subscribes to that," said Mr. Harper.


The 1997 Kyoto treaty – aimed at halting the speed of global warming – treats developing countries differently. It puts the burden of mandatory emissions cuts squarely on the shoulders of wealthy countries.

Harper, Howard and U.S. President George W. Bush are critical of that deal, with Harper suggesting yesterday it offered developing countries an escape hatch.

"Let's remember . . . if we can get an international protocol, this is a big, big step. It will be the first time the world has done this. In the Kyoto protocol, nations representing two-thirds of emissions essentially opted out. So we have to do a better job next time."

But Graham Saul, of Climate Action Network Canada, said in a telephone interview from Ottawa that Harper's statement is "outrageous" and "a total misrepresentation" of Kyoto's premise of "common but differentiated responsibilities."

"Kyoto is based on the principle that the rich countries are disproportionately responsible for the problem and so bear disproportionately the responsibility for solving it, and poor countries like India, where 500 million people don't even have light bulbs in their homes, shouldn't be forced to accept binding targets."

Until a global deal is reached, Harper also told reporters Canada would do well to join a group like the Asia Pacific Partnership, or AP-6, a six-member group co-founded by the U.S. and Australia that opposes binding targets on governments. Rather, it endorses a voluntary approach to greenhouse gas cuts, leaving governments to establish their own best methods of reaching goals.

Environmentalists have dismissed the climate-change declaration signed Saturday by the leaders of 21 Pacific Rim countries, including Canada.

The deal, announced in Sydney by Australian Prime Minister John Howard, includes the intention to set aspirational — voluntary — emissions reductions targets, and other green initiatives.

"We agree to work to achieve a common understanding on a long-term aspirational global emissions reduction goal," said the Sydney Declaration, issued after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders meeting.

Canada was given credit Saturday for helping the leaders set the targets. "We appreciate the efforts of Japan and Canada in proposing a long-term global goal," the declaration said.

Howard said that it "does transcend a number of international divisions. In particular I note that it is the first such gathering that has included both the United States and China in coming together regarding the aspirational goal."

Even a member of Howard’s cabinet had harsh words about aspirational targets in April. In a lecture at Monash University, Australia’s Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said aspirational targets are “code for ‘a political stunt.’ An aspirational target is not a real target at all.”

This appears to be part of the increasingly popular attempt by resistant governments to SAY they are taking climate change seriously while doing nothing serious about it. Australia's "principles" on climate change were clear enough when it helped to create the anti-Kyoto Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate: it seemed largely a matter of making the world safe for unrestrained coal exports.

Now, we have the prospect of the more formal and influential APEC organization joining this campaign to set a "long-term aspirationial goal."

It's instructive in these circumstances to listen closely to what people are actually saying. A goal, traditionally, is something that you want to achieve. A "long-term aspirational goal," on the other hand, sounds very like something that you would like to put off, or perhaps merely enshrine in a declaration while continuing to undermine the single international agreement (Kyoto) that has real and measurable climate change "goals."

There has been real movement in the last year on this issue. U.S. President George Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Australia's Prime Minister Howard no longer try to deny the science of climate change.

But their new tactic - nodding enthusiastically to a worried electorate while continuing to block international action - is still just so much spin. Until the world's largest energy producers (including coal countries like the U.S. and Australia) stop talking "aspirations" and start committing to measurable targets, there is no reason to take their declarations as anything more than public relations in its most poverty stricken form.

And again we have Alberta/Canada writ into the Sidney declaration, with reference to intensity targets.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, host of the APEC summit, nevertheless says the leaders have agreed on three "important and very specific things."Firstly, the need for a long-term aspirational global emissions reduction goal. And that is enshrined in the Sydney Declaration," he said. "Secondly, the need for all nations, no matter what their stage of development, to contribute accordingly to their own capacities and their own circumstances to reducing greenhouse gases. Thirdly, we have agreed on specific APEC goals on energy intensity and forestry, and we've also agreed on the important role of clean coal technologies." "Energy intensity" is a measure of energy efficiency. The declaration said members should aim for a 25 percent reduction in energy intensity by the year 2030.


Ironically it is the Chinese who are demanding these three countries meet their Kyoto obligations as the basis for China coming into the second round of the Kyoto accord. Something that won't happen as long as Harper says we can't.


THE Prime Minister, John Howard, compromised on his Sydney climate change declaration to accommodate the tough stance of the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, supporting the United Nations and the Kyoto Protocol. The protocol includes binding targets for developed countries to cut emissions.

At the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum leaders' meeting on Saturday, shortly before the release of the declaration, Mr Hu bluntly told Mr Howard that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change "and its Kyoto Protocol" was the legal basis for any international co-operation on climate change.

He also told Mr Howard the framework and the Kyoto Protocol were "the most authoritative, universal and comprehensive international framework" for tackling climate change.

"Developed countries should face their historical responsibility and their high per-capita emissions," Mr Hu insisted, saying the countries should "strictly abide by their emission reduction targets set forth in the Kyoto Protocol". His remarks were circulated by Chinese officials after the APEC leaders' meeting and before the final Sydney declaration was released.

So it goes back to the old cyclical argument; China is not in, the United States and Australia haven't signed on yet, and Canada can't meet its targets, so Kyoto is a failure. But that is just an excuse, and one that won't last through the next election.


But the program adopted by the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit set precedents that the United States, Japan and Australia say are important as the world grapples with climate change. Chiefly, China, which if not already the biggest polluter will be soon, agreed to a goal that also applies to rich countries.

"This is the first occasion ever that China ... has agreed to any notion of targets at all for developing countries as well as developed countries," Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told local television on Sunday. "That is, by the way, an enormous diplomatic breakthrough."

Although Chinese President Hu Jintao agreed to the climate-change pact, he argued that developing nations like China have a lesser role to play. In remarks to fellow leaders Saturday, Hu said rich countries have polluted for longer and thus must take the lead in cutting emissions and providing money and technology to help developing countries clean up.

"In tackling climate change, helping others is helping oneself," Hu said.

China, Indonesia and other poorer APEC members like Kyoto because it holds richer countries to this higher standard and exempts developing countries from emissions targets. Even though Kyoto supporters Canada, New Zealand and Japan have failed to meet their targets, experts say the agreement has had a positive effect.

"It's not simply whether any one particular country actually achieved its target or not, it's the overall impact of the protocol which has had an effect of bringing down emissions from what they would have been," said Graeme Pearson, who was the climate director of Australia's main scientific research body from 1992-2002.


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298 Baptistina

The more important discovery of a particular asteroid hitting earth, and wiping out the dinosaurs, which is how the MSM covered it, is the final two paragraph's.

IT WAS once suggested, to illustrate the chaotic and unpredictable way in which natural systems behave, that the beat of a butterfly's wing in China could eventually trigger a hurricane in the Atlantic. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but the point was that even in the theoretically deterministic world of Newtonian mechanics, only a small amount of complexity is needed to make practical prediction well nigh impossible.

Thus it is perhaps not as far-fetched as it sounds to suggest that the collision 160m years ago of two space rocks, albeit quite large ones, resulted in the stormy death almost 100m years later of the dinosaurs and many other species on Earth. For although the orbits of the planets look to astronomers like a model of regular, Newtonian clockwork, on a scale of millions of years, the solar system is every bit as chaotic as the Earth's weather.

Asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs traced

Around 65 million years ago, one 10-kilometre-wide piece crunched into Earth, unleashing a firestorm and kicking up clouds of dust that filtered out sunlight. In this enduring winter, much vegetation was wiped out and the species that depended on them also became extinct. Only those animals that could cope with the new challenge.

The trace of the great event, called the Cretaceous/Tertiary (or K-T) extinction event, can be seen today in the shape of a 180-kilometre-diameter impact crater at modern-day Chicxulub, in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.

The trio of researchers – William Bottke and David Nesvorny of Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, U.S. and David Vokrouhlicky of the Czech Republic's Charles University in Prague – took their theory a stage further and checked out sediment samples from the Chicxulub site. They found traces of a mineral called carbonaceous chondrite, which is only found in a tiny minority of meteorites, as the Earthly remains of plummeting asteroids are called. Most asteroids can be excluded from the Chicxulub event, but not Baptistina-era ones, they contend.

Putting simulation and chemical evidence together, the team rule out theories that a comet was to blame rather than an asteroid, and say there is a "more than 90 per cent" probability that the killer rock was a refugee from the Baptistina family.

The investigators also argue that there's a 70 per cent chance that a four-kilometre-wide Baptistina asteroid hit the Moon some around 108 million years ago, forming the 85-kilometre crater Tycho.

An important point raised by the study "is how severe the repercussions of cataclysmic collisions in the asteroid belt can be for the Earth–Moon system," commented geologists Philippe Claeys and Steven Goderis of Vrije University in Brussels, Belgium, in an accompanying commentary also in Nature.

"The terrestrial impact record needs to be scrutinized more closely to identify and understand these periods of more intense bombardment, and to link them to the huge and dangerous game of billiards continuously being played out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter,"
they said.

Science Photo Library


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Try it as Wallpaper

I have it is awesome.





Star V838 Monocerotis


Star's Mysterious Light
In January 2002, a dull star in an obscure constellation suddenly became 600,000 times more luminous than our sun, temporarily making it the brightest star in our Milky Way galaxy. The mysterious star has long since faded back to obscurity, but observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of a phenomenon called a "light echo" have uncovered remarkable new features. These details promise to provide astronomers with a CAT-scan-like probe of the three-dimensional structure of shells of dust surrounding an aging star.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA and H.E. Bond (STScI)


+ Full Resolution (412 Kb)



+ 800 x 600 | + 1024 x 768 | + 1600 x 1200 |




More Star Picture Posts:

Star Dust Dreaming

Wow

Mutual Aid In Space



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Felix lll

So who does more in the region? USAID to Nicaragua is the price of a Starbuck's coffee. Ok an expensive one, but cheap is as cheap does. Luckily Cuba had medical missions in place since Hurricane Mitch. Rather than waiting for swift boat aid from the U.S.

In response to the Nicaraguan government’s request for international assistance, USAID provided an initial $150,000 to support the relief efforts, in addition to the $25,000 for hurricane preparedness provided prior to Felix’s landfall. As Felix approached the region, USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance deployed 23 disaster response experts in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, and Mexico, to support response wherever the storm made landfall.

As Washington raises the profile of its assistance to the region,
the U.S. military is helping victims of natural disasters. On Wednesday, it diverted the U.S. Navy amphibious ship USS Wasp from military exercises off Panama to help Nicaragua recover from Hurricane Felix. Venezuela also sent aid to Nicaragua, and 57 Cuban doctors and nurses already established on the Miskito coast on medical missions were helping as well.

Cuban doctors assist hurricane evacuees in Nicaragua

The head of the Cuban medical brigade, Luis Carlos Avila, said eight Cuban doctors along with their patients had been evacuated from Puerto Cabezas, capital city of the North Atlantic Autonomous Region(RAAN), located 536 kilometers from Managua.

Avila noted that some 57 Cuban doctors and nurses are serving in RAAN while a similar number are serving in the South Atlantic Autonomous Region as part of the cooperation agreements established between the island and Nicaragua.

He added that in Waspam to the north
and also a target for Hurricane Felix there is another 40 Cuban doctors. The arrival of Hurricane Felix forced the evacuation of some 10 000 people.

Along with Cuban doctors and local healthcare personnel, those working shoulder-to-shoulder with them in these improvised facilities include 20 young Nicaraguans in their fifth year of medical school at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM, in Cuba).

The group is part of the 59 students who in the weeks previous to the disaster had been carrying out community work in remote areas of Nicaragua under the supervision of instructors in the Cuban medical brigade.

Cuban health cooperation benefits poorest hondurans


Cuban health cooperation benefits poorest hondurans
The Cuban Medical Brigades that arrived to Honduras on November 3, 1998, after the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch, have assisted more than 1.6 million people and continue to offer care with a staff of 280 healthcare professionals.

PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua: Thousands of people on Nicaragua's remote Caribbean coast urgently need food, water, medical supplies and tools to rebuild their communities following Hurricane Felix, residents and a U.N. official said.

Felix devastated remote jungle beaches and communities along the Miskito coastline when it struck Tuesday as a Category 5 hurricane, destroying crops, erasing homes and killing scores of people.

The U.N. representative in Nicaragua, Alfredo Missair, said Friday that more than 100,000 Nicaraguans were directly affected by the storm and the country will need US$43.5 million (€32 million) in aid over the next six months

Nicaraguan television reported that Canada offered US$1 million (€730,000) to Central American countries affected by Felix, and 10,000 blankets for Nicaragua. Taiwan and Japan also donated money and supplies, Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Samuel Santos said.

The U.S. Embassy in Managua said in a statement Saturday that it will donate US$1 million (€730,000) through the United States Agency for International Development to help an estimated 30,000 people.

The U.S. also sent four helicopters from the USS Wasp, rerouted to Nicaragua from Panama, and two helicopters and a reconnaissance plane from a military base in Honduras to help assess damage, rescue victims, and deliver supplies. Venezuela also sent aid and 57 Cuban doctors and nurses already established on the Miskito coast on medical missions were helping as well.


The dead from Hurricane Felix wash up on the beaches


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Felix II


Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Carlos Fuller, the deputy director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, described the southern hurricane activity as part of a "strange" weather pattern.

"About 10 years ago, we saw one develop in the south Atlantic where your professor would tell you that never occurs.

"Unfortunately, the two hurricanes have been Category Five hurricanes, they made landfall as Category Five hurricanes. It is the first time in history and we have data going back to 1885; this has never happened," the meteorologist said.

Fuller said a high-pressure system, known as the Bermuda High, kept both 'Dean' and 'Felix' on a westerly track.

As the remnants of powerful Hurricane Felix dissipate today over Central American mountains, some meteorologists are voicing concerns about the computer models that were meant to forecast the storm's intensification. "In general, computer models did very poorly in forecasting the development of this system," said Keith Blackwell, a hurricane researcher at the University of South Alabama's Coastal Weather Research Center in Mobile.

Felix set a record by strengthening from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane—the category for the most destructive storms on the Saffir-Simpson scale—in only 51 hours.

"It strengthened more rapidly than any other storm on record, anywhere in the world," Blackwell said.


If the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season ended tomorrow, we would still call it extraordinary. The year's first two hurricanes, Dean and Felix, both reached Category 5 classification. That's a record, one among many that these two storms helped establish.

To begin with, in the archives (which go back to 1851, with varying degrees of completeness) only three other seasons - 1960, 1961 and 2005 - had more than one of these monster storms. And no season can rival this additional feat: Both Dean and Felix struck land at full Category 5 strength.

There hadn't been a Category 5 landfall in what hurricane experts call the Atlantic basin (the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic north of the equator) since 1992's Hurricane Andrew ravaged southern Florida. Now we've seen two in two weeks.

The scariest factoid, however, is this : We've now witnessed eight Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic basin in the past five years (Isabel, Ivan, Emily, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Dean and Felix).

You have to go back to the 1960s, with six recorded Category 5s, to find another decade that even approaches the present one in this regard. (And if you look beyond the Atlantic? In June, Cyclone Gonu was a Category 5 and the strongest storm ever observed in the Arabian Sea.)

It's hard to keep up with the crazed weather. As I write, a heat wave has killed over 50 people in the Midwest and South, with temperatures reaching 112 degrees in Evening Shade, Arkansas. Torrential storms have flooded Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, and South Dakota. California has its second largest wildfire ever. Texas and Kansas are battening down for new storms, while still recovering from last month's floods, along with Oklahoma, which is now getting flooded again. A few weeks before, a massive rainstorm closed down the New York City subways. That doesn't count over 2,000 dead and millions displaced in India and Bangladesh floods, runaway forest fires in Greece, the hottest-ever temperature in Japan, or unprecedented melting of Arctic icecaps. Tomorrow the weather will ricochet off the charts someplace else.

This surge of weird weather offers a powerful warning. Placed in context, its lessons could also help us overcome the denial that's prevented the United States from taking action on global climate change. They could give courage to elected representatives who've wanted to act but have been hobbled by timidity. They could create a political opening to defeat prominent elected climate-change deniers whose seats used to seem unassailable and are running for reelection in hard-hit states. They could help the Senate leadership stand strong and call the bluff of those threatening a filibuster or a Bush veto. As Samuel Johnson wrote, knowing you’ll be hanged in two weeks concentrates one’s mind wonderfully. What's happening to our weather just might foreshadow that hanging.

A few years ago, global warming felt remote to most Americans. Although they heard it debated, it didn’t seem real. The media gave “equal time” to deniers and the most respected scientists. Now 84% of Americans view human activity as at least contributing to global climate change, and 70% demand greater government action. Responses have shifted in the wake of Katrina and the succession of local disasters; Gore's Inconvenient Truth; the international IPCC report and similar impeccably credentialed scientific studies; and the start of serious media coverage, from Parade and the AARP magazine to Vogue. Add the impact of so many ordinary citizens speaking out, and Americans are starting to link the disasters they're seeing around them with what's happening to the planet.

When people's communities are hit with exceptional floods, droughts, tornadoes, heat waves, or runaway wildfires, or they see these events on TV, even conservatives who would have once treated them as random "acts of God" start recognizing their deeper roots in the patterns of human action. In a May 2006 poll of South Carolina hunters and fishermen, for instance, 68% agreed that global warming was an urgent problem requiring immediate action, and a similar number said they'd seen the immediate impact of climate change on local fish and wildlife. Even before this summer's parade of calamities, 75% of all Americans said recent weather had been stranger than usual

So our national frame on the weather is beginning to shift. Each new "natural disaster" now reinforces the sense that just maybe not all these disasters are so natural after all. And if we fail to seriously address their roots, similar ones or worse will dominate our future.

Of course global climate change doesn’t cause every extreme weather event. And not all our fellow citizens are quite ready to act on the full enormity of the climate crisis, still resisting much of what needs to be done, such as increasing gas taxes. But most Americans want someone to do something, even if they're ambivalent about paying the costs. The more our warnings resonate with what people see around them, the more they can draw broader links, and the more the Exxon-funded denials ring hollow.

This situation expands political possibilities. While memory of this summer of disasters is still fresh, why not begin now to make a major issue of the rabid global climate change denial of Senators like Oklahoma's James Inhofe, Texas’s John Cornyn, and Oregon's Gordon Smith. Inhofe, who's called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," has been considered to have a safe seat. But his approval rating, just after last November's election, was a lowly 46%, and Cornyn's 45%, both lower than just-defeated Virginia Senator George Allen. So they may already be more vulnerable than conventional wisdom suggests. Gordon Smith's race has long been forecast as tight. Instead of writing off the prime deniers as unbeatable, or dismissing global climate change as too complex to make an electoral difference, why not brand them with their stands, juxtaposing their dismissal of the crisis with images of flooded homes and farms?


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Chandler Says Breed More Conservatives

On the Project Alberta forum outspoken Craig Chandler comes up with a solution to the problem of immigrants to Canada and migrants to Alberta voting Liberal or NDP. Of course historically the folks that vote Liberal federally are New Canadians.

If you hadn't guessed the
racist implications of his comments before this, it can't be much clearer.

Rhys,

Congrats. Now start breeding because lately it seems the only way to beat the Liberals is to out breed them.

Craig



SEE:

I Was Misquoted

Chandler Redux

Outing Chandler

Vote Conservative...Or Else



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Children and Dogs


As I pointed out here earlier; children and dogs in North America share something in common; being abandoned in hot cars to die of hypothermia.

Two recent cases involving a child and a police dog made news the same day.

Ohio Mother Leaves Child in Car for 8 Hours

Yesterday we brought you the tragic story of a 2-year-old girl who died after her mother left her in a locked car for eight hours as the temperature approached 100 degrees outside -- and came close to 150 degrees inside.

The mother, Brenda Nesselroad-Slaby, had changed her daily routine that morning before going to work as an assistant principal at a middle school in Ohio. Instead of dropping off her daughter with the babysitter, she went to buy donuts for her fellow teachers, then went to work -- forgetting that her daughter was still asleep in the back seat.



PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- A suburban police officer is accused of leaving a police dog in a patrol car for more than 12 hours on a 109-degree day, killing the animal The sheriff's investigation showed Bandit was in Lovejoy's patrol car from about 9 a.m. to shortly after 10 p.m. August 11. During that time, the investigation found, the officer ran errands, napped and ate out with his wife. Lovejoy later found the dog dead in the car.


And surprisingly there are as many dog fatalities as those of children.

Dogs

Ga. police dog also dies after being left in patrol car

Amherst Police arrested a Niagara Falls man Friday afternoon at the Boulevard Mall, after the man's dog was discovered suffering from the heat in a vehicle.Humane Investigator William Sullivan said they used a special thermometer to check the temperature in the vehicle. "It was 105 degrees," he said.

A woman was charged with animal cruelty Tuesday after her dog died after being left in a closed car, allowing the pet's temperature to reach 108.3 degrees,

Cary police have charged a woman with leaving a dog inside a 122-degree car

Man Arrested after Dog Left in Hot Car Dies - Associated Content

Absecon woman charged after dog left in car dies - Topix

Dog Left In Sweltering Car As Owner Goes To Beach -

Man charged with locking a dog in hot car, leaving it to die

Man Arrested After Dog Dies In Boiling Car

Children

New City man charged with DWI; child in car

Mother pleads guilty to leaving toddler in car

Florida Toddler Dies After Being Left in Hot Car Outside City Hall

Father Arrested After Leaving Toddler in Car at Brothel Parking Lot

Police: Man Leaves Child In Car, Shops For Porn

MOUNTAIN VIEW: NANNY ARRESTED AFTER LEAVING CHILD IN CAR

Sometimes the child or dog is rescued.

Torrance police rescue baby trapped in car

Statistics for children and dogs left in cars shows a wide discrepancy. While the statistics for children left in cars is for the U.S. the stats for dogs are from the Ontario Humane Society. Despite the disparities in numbers they share the same underlying causes.

In 2007 there have been at least twenty-six deaths of small children after being left inside a hot vehicle. Last year there were at least twenty-nine such fatalities in the United States due to hyperthermia after they were left in hot cars, trucks, vans and SUV's. This sadly followed forty-two child deaths in 2005. Since 1998 there have been at least a total of 323 of these needless tragedies. This study shows that these incidents can occur on days with relatively mild (i.e., ~ 70 degrees F) temperatures and can occur very rapidly.

STATISTICS

  • Total number of U.S. hyperthermia deaths of children left in cars, 2007: 26
  • Total number of U.S. hyperthermia deaths of children left in cars, 2006: 29
  • Total number of U.S. hyperthermia deaths of children left in cars, 1998-2007: 347
  • Average number of U.S. child hyperthermia fatalities per year since 1998: 36

In the summer of 2006, the OHS EAPS responded
to 93 calls about dogs left in cars in extreme heat
conditions. We're pleased to see the numbers of these
calls decreasing each summer. Thanks to our educational
efforts and public awareness campaigns, more
people are becoming conscious of the dangers of
leaving animals in hot cars.



The reason for child car deaths and those of animals is simple lack of laws and severe enough penalties.

An Associated Press analysis of more than 310 fatal incidents in the past 10 years found that prosecutions and penalties vary widely, depending in many cases on where the death occurred and who left the child to die - parent or caregiver, mother or father: -Mothers are treated much more harshly than fathers. While mothers and fathers are charged and convicted at about the same rates, moms are 26 percent more likely to do time. And their median sentence is two years longer than the terms received by dads. -Day care workers and other paid baby sitters are more likely than parents to be charged and convicted. But they are jailed less frequently than parents, and for less than half the time. -Charges are filed in half of all cases - even when a child was left unintentionally.


It's wrong that an Ohio mother has escaped prosecution for the death of her 2-year-old daughter, who the mother forgot and left inside a sweltering SUV while she went to work.

The decision not to prosecute Brenda Nesselroad-Slaby of suburban Cincinnati for the death of her daughter Cecilia came yesterday from Clermont County Prosecutor Don White. He said leaving Cecilia in the car was ''a substantial lapse of due care'' but did not meet the legal test for reckless conduct requiring prosecution.

We don't buy it. A toddler died because the primary caregiver forgot her primary duty. The loss of a child's life can not be written off as an unfortunate mistake, no matter how unintentional, or how much the parent is grieving personally.

The legal obligation of a parent to protect a child has few rivals, and the law must penalize the failure to meet that obligation.

His name is Cyrus and he's lucky to be alive. But he faces a long road back and he may never be what he was before Tuesday. He's the three-year-old Rottweiler who was found locked in his owner's SUV in a parking lot near King and Jameson. The pet was near death when Toronto Humane Society cruelty investigator Tre Smith knocked out a window to rescue the creature. The dog was foaming at the mouth and in severe distress as it was rushed for emergency treatment.

Now veterinarians have determined what they most feared - that the sad-eyed pooch has suffered both brain and kidney damage from which he won't be able to recover. "There's definitely some brain damage there," sighs the Society's Lee Oliver. "It's not as severe as we thought. He's able to stand on his own with some help. We've had him out for a walk. He's able to move his feet in a normal walking order which means he's got motor functions."

While cruelty charges have been laid against the owner, there's a terrible irony in the fact that the man accused of the crime could one day get his animal back. It's an old dilemma Smith faces every day in his difficult but rewarding job. The penalty for a conviction is a $2,000 fine or up to six months in jail and a possible two year prohibition against owning animals. Smith is aware pets can't be put on the same scale as humans, but he wonders if the law is adequate enough to send the right message about mistreating one of the tender hearted creatures.

"They're not tough enough," he makes clear. "They don't have any teeth. We're gumming our way through this thing. How can anyone expect us to do our job properly if we don't have the tools, the resources and the laws and the people to back us up?"


The other factor is the use of car seats. And now this is being pushed for use by children up to eight and nine years of age!

Ironically, one reason was a change parent-drivers made to protect their kids after juvenile air-bag deaths peaked in 1995 - they put them in the back seat, where they are more easily forgotten.

Texas leads the nation with at least 41 deaths, followed by Florida with 37, California with 32, North Carolina and Arizona with 14 apiece, and Tennessee with 13. There were deaths recorded in 44 states - most in the Sun Belt, but many in places not known for hot weather.

The correlation between the rise in these deaths and the 1990s move to put children in the back seat is striking.

"Up to that time, the average number of children dying of hyperthermia in the United States was about 11 a year," says Jan Null, an adjunct professor of meteorology at San Francisco State University who has studied this trend. "Then we put them in the back, turned the car seats around. And from '98 to 2006, that number is 36 a year."


And sometimes it is simply thoughtlessness.

When Andrea Williams and her boyfriend returned to their car, they found their puppy strangled by her leash.

Now Williams wants to spread the word about a danger she had never considered.

"We are so devastated," she said. "The notion never even crossed our minds to unhook the leash."

The puppy, a pug named Lucy, was nearly 6 months old. She apparently jumped from the back seat to the front and back and got caught up in the leash, which Williams found wrapped around the passenger-side seat.


Or I didn't think I would be gone that long.

Family and friends stand by mom after baby left in car


Which means that this wouldn't help anyways; Baby In Hot Car Reminder Devices


Even on a relatively cool day, the temperature inside a parked car can quickly spike to life-threatening levels if the sun is out, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found. They hope their findings will put to rest the misconception that a parked car can be a safe place for a child or pet in mild weather.

“There are cases of children dying on days as cool as 70 degrees Fahrenheit,” said lead author Catherine McLaren, MD, clinical instructor in emergency medicine. Though past research has documented the temperature spike inside a car on extremely hot days, this is the first time anyone has looked at cooler days, she added.

McLaren collaborated with James Quinn, MD, associate professor of emergency medicine, and Jan Null, an independent certified consulting meteorologist, to measure the temperature rise inside a parked car on sunny days with highs ranging from 72 to 96 degrees F. Their results, published in the July issue of the journal Pediatrics, showed that a car’s interior can heat up by an average of 40 degrees F within an hour, regardless of ambient temperature. Eighty percent of the temperature rise occurred within the first half-hour.


Pets, more so than humans, are susceptible to overheating. While people can roll down windows, turn on the air conditioner or exit the vehicle when they become too hot, pets cannot. And pets are much less efficient at cooling themselves than people are.

Dogs, for example, are designed to conserve heat. Their sweat glands, which exist on their nose and the pads of their feet, are inadequate for cooling during hot days. Panting and drinking water helps cool them, but if they only have overheated air to breathe, dogs can suffer brain and organ damage after just 15 minutes. Short-nosed breeds, like pugs and bulldogs, young pets, seniors or pets with weight, respiratory, cardiovascular or other health problems are especially susceptible to heat-related stress.

Why compare dogs and children?

Because in North America dogs and cats have become surrogate children (and grandchildren). And in Japan too.

They are no longer 'pets', property, but companions.

Approximately one half of all Canadian families include a companion animal, so many of us care passionately about these animals and how to improve their care.


They have evolved a new social role.

Profound changes are happening in the animal health market. Pet owners in the United States are demanding more advanced and expensive treatments for companion animals, driving growth in the companion-animal sector. At the same time, concerns about livestock health care and feeding are driving changes in industrial animal husbandry.


And if you cannot take care of your companion how can you take care of a child.

Media reports of illegal dogfights and illegal betting prompted police to raid 1915 Moonlight Road. After that, Vick began to lie about his involvement in dogfighting and gambling. He lied to his coach, to the team's ownership and to the commissioner of the National Football League (NFL). Not until his lawyers were confronted by the overwhelming amount of evidence against Vick in the federal indictment did he begin to tell at least part of the truth. He signed a plea bargain admitting guilt. He turned state's witness. Last week he held a nationally televised press conference at which he apologised, expressed his shame, and renounced dogfighting.

Vick will be sentenced on December 10. He will go to jail. He will receive a heavy fine. When the new NFL season starts this Saturday, he won't be there. He has been suspended indefinitely by the NFL. The $US71 million in salary for the remaining seven years of his contract has been suspended. He has lost all endorsement contracts. The Atlanta Falcons will seek reimbursement for up to $US22 million of his signing bonus.

Polls show that most American sports fans never want to see him on a football field again. All this even though he has not been convicted of any violent crime against another human being, nor any involvement in narcotics. Rather, Vick's years in the violent underground world of dogfighting represented an affront to the special place dogs hold in society.

What does it mean, then, that this special place is being eroded by the pressures of modern life? In Australia, keeping dogs as companions is in serious decline. Earlier this year, a study commissioned by the Australian Companion Animals Council found a significant decline in the dog population. In 2000, Australians kept 4 million dogs as companions. By this year, the number had dropped to 2.75 million, a plunge of 31 per cent. (Cat numbers also declined over the same period, from 3.2 million to 2.3 million, a fall of 28 per cent.)

Experts attributed the sharp decline to children spending less time playing outdoors and much more time playing video games, and watching TV and the internet. One byproduct of this behavioural shift has been a surge in childhood obesity. Another byproduct, it appears, has been a decline in the role that companion animals, especially dogs, occupy in family life.

Researching this subject, it was fascinating to find the many scholarly studies which measured positive roles that companion animals play in social life, with dogs at the forefront. Various studies have concluded that animal owners have lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol levels, higher survival rates after serious illness, and suffer less from loneliness or depression. A number of studies have concluded that companion animals tend to enhance family life.

If dogs are being pushed aside by the accelerating pace of modern life - more technology, less time - if we have less time for the altruism required to keep a dog exercised and engaged, then we are in danger of losing a better part of who we collectively are.


SEE:

Animal Crimes

Katrina: It's a Dog-Gone Crime

Tiger Tiger Burning Bright

We Love Animals


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Alex RIP

You may have seen Alex on TV. That is where I first came across him.

He provided evidence that animals are not dumb.

And he gave new meaning to bird brained.

The African Grey Parrot is a medium-sized parrot of the genus Psittacus native to Africa, and is considered one of the most intelligent birds. Pet owners often liken the experience of keeping an African Grey to that of raising a young child, not only because of the birds' intelligence, but also arising from the substantial time commitment which they require.

Sad! Alex the Grey Parrot, Dead at 31

Dr. Pepperberg purchased Alex from a Chicago pet store in June, 1977. He can label seven colors, is learning the alphabet and can count up to six objects. Alex is also working on identifying objects from photographs. Alex likes cardboard boxes, keychains, and corks.



Teaching an Avian Scholar


Here at the lab, we are often asked exactly how it is that
Alex is trained. Just as you would assume, Alex has
been taught using a strong language-based format. We
are careful to always use words in context when
speaking to Alex, Griffin, and Wart, and we constantly
label all actions and objects associated with their daily
lives. Objects we’re likely to speak about include
everything from food items to toys to favorite perches.
Common actions that are labeled include such activities
as making breakfast, taking a shower, giving a tickle, or
going back (which is the delightful way Alex asks to be
returned to his cage top).

We simply talk to the birds in a way that most people speak to human babies
and small children during their quest to acquire language. However, that is by
no means suggesting that meaningless baby talk is ever used with the lab parrots.
Rather, we use sentence frames as a way of inserting and stressing the label for
a single object in several different sentences.

For example, let’s say the target word might be ‘corn’. While offering corn to Alex,
we might say “Alex, would you like some corn?” and “Did you notice the corn is
yellow?” and “Corn tastes yummy.”

The practice of using such sentence frames combined with consistently labeling
everyday objects and actions has greatly aided in Alex’s vocabulary development.
However, we use actual training sessions to teach Alex the necessary things he
needs to know for the research work.

Alex (1976 - 2007)

Category: Animal Behavior
Posted on: September 8, 2007 3:54 PM, by Coturnix

It is not unusal to write an obituary when a great scientist passes away. It is much more unusual to do so when a lab animal does so. But when that animal is not just an experimental subject, but also a friend, colleague, teacher and collaborator, than the species boundaries lose importance. And Alex, the famous African Grey Parrot, was just that, and more, to Irene Pepperberg and to the entire field of cognitive ethology. He died yesterday, unexpectedly, at the age of 31 (about half the normal life expectancy for the species) and he will be sorely missed. You can send donations, that will assure the research goes on with Alex's younger buddies Griffin and Wart, to the Alex Foundation.


Repost: The Story of Alex

Category: Friday Grey Matters
Posted on: September 8, 2007 4:52 PM, by Shelley Batts

This is a repost from July of 2006. I thought it was appropriate, given Alex's passing. Please check out Friday Grey Matters in my archives for many more reports on Dr. Pepperberg's work with Alex.

alex%201.bmp

Alex is a 28-year-old African Grey parrot who lives in the lab of Irene Pepperberg, in Brandeis University, and is the eqivalent of a superstar in the bird world. Long ago, Dr. Pepperberg chose Alex at a pet store as neither an exceptional nor sub-par bird. Through the years, Dr. Pepperberg has engaged Alex in a complex form of communication, where, much like a parent teaching a child, Alex is taught the proper "name" for an object. Now, he can label more than 100 items, including seven colors, five shapes, counting up to six, and three categories (color, shape, material of an object). This is amazing when you consider that this bird is working with a brain the size of a walnut! In addition, Alex has learned to ask for an item he wants. When the incorrect item is brought, he will either ignore it, or throw it at the person! :) He has learned to say "no" if an item is incorrect, and to tell his handlers when he wants to go back to his cage, or come out.

Here's an example of a test that Dr. Pepperberg might present to Alex: seven items on a tray, of differing colors and shapes. She asks "What shape is green and wood?" (This is the way to ask what is the shape of the object which is green and made of wood?) Amazingly, Alex answers correctly over 80% of the time. This is obviously far more than chance, and operant conditioning also cannot account for it as he answers the same, even to novel researchers. The content of the question, and answer, is understood by this bird. She also might ask, "How many wood?" (How many objects on the tray are made of wood?) He looks at the tray for a few seconds, and then answers with a number, again correct 80% of the time! He can replicate this up to six items.

Alex has also "coined" words, or made up new words to use for unfamilar objects. An example of this is when he first encountered an apple. He already knew the word for "banana" and "strawberry, " and the first time he saw an apple he called it a "bananaberry." This was hypothesized to be because an apple was red like a strawberry by white inside like a banana, so Alex put the two words together to make a new word! He has done this several times, like calling an almond a "cork nut" because of the nut's texture like a cork. He can be inventive and creative.

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