ENVIRONMENTALISTS LOVE AND PROTECT CROCS -- TOO BAD IF THEY EAT A FEW PEOPLE

Estuarine and saltwater crocodiles are found in coastal streams and estuaries in Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn, with the greatest populations in Cape York, the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Northern Territory. The reptiles were hunted so heavily until the 1960s for their skins that their numbers were heavily depleted, but estimates now put crocodile populations in Australia at several tens of thousands.

Commercial harvesting of wild crocodiles in Queensland ended in 1972 and numbers have increased enormously since then. As far back as 1986, the then National Party environment minister Martin Tenni, who was something of a loose cannon, announced numbers had increased to such an extent close to populated areas of north Queensland that crocodiles needed to be culled. He released studies showing 237 crocodiles of at least 1.8m had been counted in a survey of rivers between Port Douglas and Tully in north Queensland, with 60 in the Daintree River, where local woman Beryl Wruck had been taken by a monster croc the previous month. Conservationists were horrified, but locals knew Tenni was telling the truth.

Tuesday's tragedy, which claimed the life of Townsville railway shunter Barry Jeffries, was the 14th crocodile attack in Queensland in the past decade. Four of the attacks involved fatalities. Jeffries and his wife, Glenda, were doing what they had done for years -- fishing from a canoe at Lakefield National Park -- when a croc grabbed Jeffries's arm as he tried to fend it off with a paddle.

The warning signs have been around for years. Guivarra says croc numbers have exploded in far-north rivers and creeks. "Each year the primary industries department does a count in Tentpole Creek, north of Mapoon, which is a well-known breeding area for crocs," he says. "Recently they did one sweep at night along 8km and counted more than 500 sets of eyes. That's a lot and absolute evidence that culling is now needed. "Our children swim in the waterways even though they are told not to do so and it is only a matter of time before one gets taken. When we see a [croc] hanging around Mapoon for more than a day, we chase it with boats. If it does not move on, we get serious. "If you ring the wildlife people, they come and trap it, and it takes several days, and there is an invasion of the privacy of the community, and it costs thousands of dollars. Compare that with the 80c it costs for a .308 bullet, if you catch my drift."

Guivarra, like many other leaders in Aboriginal communities, has long been lobbying the Queensland Government to allow local and overseas trophy hunters, through a permit system, to take a limited number of larger crocs. Hunters from Europe and the US would be willing to pay up to $20,000 for the privilege. "It would help us keep the numbers in check and provide another employment-generating business in Aboriginal communities," Guivarra says. "But, as usual, there is paralysis in government ranks when something positive is suggested for Aboriginal people. There is always a reason not to do it and in this case it is because they are frightened of the environment lobby. Is it going to take another dozen tourists being taken to get some positive action?"

Aborigines are allowed to kill crocodiles for their own consumption, a right that was spelled out by the High Court in October 1999 when Gulf of Carpentaria activist Murrandoo Yanner challenged a court conviction for killing and eating a croc. Yanner has been a strong advocate for the limited commercial hunting of crocs, but has come up against bureaucratic opposition. "We kill them and eat them, and nobody gets anything out of it," he says. "Why can't blackfellows make an industry of this?" The High Court decision acknowledged that hunting, gathering and fishing rights for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were part and parcel of native title.

The injuries inflicted on people by crocodile attacks are horrific. A large croc will grab a person in its powerful jaws, go back into the water and start to roll, drowning its prey. The most recent attack before Tuesday's tragedy occurred close to the same locality: at Bathurst Bay, where three Brisbane families were camping more than 100m from the water's edge last October. Diane and Andrew Kerr and their three-month-old baby were sleeping in a tent when they were woken by a noise. A 4.2m crocodile grabbed Andrew by the leg. He yelled to his wife, "Get the baby!" Diane could only watch in fear and horror as her husband was dragged away.

Alicia Sorohan, a 60-year-old grandmother who was in the neighbouring tent with her husband, heard the screams. She jumped on the croc's head, causing it to release Andrew, but it grabbed her arm instead. Sorohan's son Jason grabbed a rifle and shot the crocodile in the head. The croc was estimated to be 50 years old. Its victims, although seriously injured, survived.

On December 22, 2003, three men who were riding their quad bikes near the Finniss River in the Northern Territory decided to go for a swim. Brett Mann, 22, was carried down the river on the tide and his two companions watched in horror as a 4m crocodile attacked and killed him. The two survivors spent 22 hours in a tree with the crocodile circling around, until they were winched to safety by a police helicopter the following day.

In the main street of the gulf township of Normanton is a fibreglass replica of a crocodile shot in 1958 by Krystina Pawloski, a teacher who found the animal on a sandbank near the school. It measures nearly 9m and a large man can easily fit in its mouth. Its teeth are the size of milk bottles. While governments sit on their hands and make consoling sounds every time someone is killed in a croc attack, nothing changes. As Guivarra says: How many deaths will it take before some sensible measures are adopted to control the numbers of these animals in our river systems?

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CLIMATE SHIFTS APPEAR TO BE COMMONPLACE EVENTS

Excerpts below from Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology Article in Press, 2005

Climate shift at 4400 years BP: Evidence from high-resolution diatom stratigraphy, Effingham Inlet, British Columbia, Canada

By: Alice S. Chang, and R. Timothy Patterson Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6

Abstract

Diatom paleoecology and climatic interpretations were assessed from a 15-cm long laminated sediment slab extracted from an anoxic fjord in southwest British Columbia. The slab spans at least 62 years of deposition, determined from counting varves, and is dated at approximately 4400 years BP. The slab shows a sedimentation pattern where thick diatom-rich varves at the bottom become thinner and more silty toward the top. Thin section analysis reveals that the thicker varves contain a distinct succession of diatoms, representing seasonal deposition throughout each year. Annual-scale subsampling shows that the abundance of coastal marine diatoms, namely a weakly silicified form of Skeletonema costatum, decreased over the 62-year period, while benthic and brackish water diatoms, such as Planothidium delicatulum and Achnanthes minutissima, increased with the concomitant increase in silt. The increase in such benthic species and silt, along with the presence of 1 cm thick nonlaminated intervals, is interpreted to represent deposition during progressively increasing precipitation over time. These sedimentation patterns and changes in diatom assemblages may signify a change in the relative intensities of the Aleutian Low (AL) and North Pacific High (NPH) atmospheric pressure systems. Thicker diatomaceous varves at the bottom of the slab reflect a stronger NPH system with associated coastal upwelling and enhanced diatom production. The thinner silty varves at the top of the slab suggest that the AL system was prevalent, resulting in greater amounts of precipitation and reduced upwelling. The findings of this study show that significant natural environmental change can occur within a twenty-year time frame, and can provide a basis for the study of modern change in the ocean-atmosphere system over the northeast Pacific Ocean.

1. Introduction

Assessing modern climate and environmental change is of utmost importance as society becomes increasingly aware of the sensitive balance in natural systems. In the 21st century, understanding the causal factors involved in rapid (decadal to bidecadal) change can be challenging because anthropogenic and natural signals need to be differentiated. Although instrumental records exist for the last 150 years and can be compared to contemporary sediments to determine the relationship between climate, primary production and depositional patterns, these modern sediment records can be tainted from the effects of industrialization. Hence, older sediments from the pre-industrial era must be used to provide a natural baseline. Large-scale ocean-atmosphere oscillations such as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (Mantua et al., 1997) and the 50-70 year oscillation (Minobe, 1999) can have a profound influence on climate over the northeast Pacific Ocean and biological production off the coast of British Columbia. For 20th century records, primary production and fish migratory patterns were observed to oscillate between warm and cool climate phases in the northern Pacific (Mantua et al., 1997 and Chavez et al., 2003). These shifts in production have a major impact on coastal communities that rely on the commercial harvesting of economic fish species. It is therefore important to understand the causes and timing of these productivity cycles.

One way to investigate this issue is to determine whether such changes have occurred previously, or are recurring phenomena, by looking into the sediment record. Recent studies of finely laminated sediments in the fjords of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, have utilized high-resolution imaging and/or statistical techniques in order to resolve late Holocene depositional and climate patterns (e.g., Dean et al., 2001, Chang et al., 2003, Dean and Kemp, 2004 and Patterson et al., 2004a). These studies reveal that there are a multitude of climate cycles that have left an imprint within the sediments for at least the last 4500 years.

In this paper, we examine a high-resolution laminated sediment record and primary production proxy from Effingham Inlet, southwest Vancouver Island, by determining diatom abundance and assemblages and measuring changes in lamina thickness. Thin sections and successive annual samples were extracted from a 15-cm long sediment slab that encompasses at least 62 years of deposition and was dated at approximately 4400 years BP (Chang et al., 2003). The objectives of this study are to (1) describe the seasonal components of the sediments from thin section analysis, (2) present quantitative results from the enumeration of diatoms, and (3) interpret past climatic and oceanographic trends derived from the sedimentation patterns and diatom assemblages. The results of this study should be able to provide a foundation for comparison to modern sediments from similar depositional environments.

[...]

7. Conclusion

Sediment texture, composition and diatom assemblages were determined at subseasonal to interannual scales. The stratigraphy of Slab 8 from Effingham Inlet suggests that major environmental change can occur within a couple of decades after a relatively prolonged period of climatic stability. The progressive decrease in the thickness of the varves and changes in diatom assemblages indicate that the production of marine species, and the environmental factors that support them, deteriorated over time. The concomitant increases in silt and benthic taxa point toward enhanced precipitation and continental runoff into the basin. The causal factor behind this kind of climate and environmental shift likely involves large-scale changes in the ocean-atmosphere system, namely a transition from a climate phase dominated by the NPH to one dominated by the AL. The bidecadal-scale climate shift at 4400 years BP, along with shifts observed throughout the 20th century, indicates that these shifts, whether long or short, rapid or gradual, appear to be commonplace events.

The Doi (permanent) address for the above article is here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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