PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A judge has refused to block a plan to shoot more than 10,000 double-crested cormorants in the Columbia River estuary.

The plan was released earlier this year by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It wants to stop cormorants from eating millions of baby salmon.

Conservation groups sought a preliminary injunction. They say hydroelectric dams — not cormorants — are the main threat to salmon. The groups filed suit in April against the Corps, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Wildlife Services agency in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Corps said Wildlife Services will manage the killing.

The plan also calls for destroying 26,000 nests on East Sand Island.

The decision came Friday from U.S. District Judge Michael Simon.

STATESMAN JOURNAL

Hazing of cormorants has begun on Oregon estuaries

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/tech/science/environment/2015/05/11/judge-wont-block-plan–kill-cormorants–save-salmon/27134063/

In a separate but related project, Fish and Wildlife will take up to 50 double-crested cormorants at the mouth of the Umpqua River.

The collection effort is part of ongoing research to study the diet of double-crested cormorants in estuaries.

Oregon has a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that allows for limited kill of double-crested cormorants, which are protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Fish and Wildlife also will be doing a project looking at the potential use of low-power hand-held lasers to scatter cormorants from feeding and roosting sites.

Laser-based hazing will be ongoing on a trial basis at several coastal locations.

Imagine if you were killed for eating your standard diet? That’s what’s happening to sea lions living below the Bonneville Dam in waters between Oregon and Washington. They are being branded and killed by wildlife officials for eating a negligible number of salmon and steelhead.

But the decline in salmon and steelhead numbers is not caused by the sea lions—it’s caused by humans. It’s just th…at the sea lions are the ones who pay the price. Please read on…

In less than one week, inexcusable negligence and lack of oversight by the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) has resulted in the brutal deaths of three sea lions. The first of last week’s deaths occurred on May 1 when two sea lions were crushed to death after an ODFW trap “malfunctioned.” Nine sea lions “accidentally” became imprisoned in one trap at some point during the night and by morning two of them were dead. The deaths this week are just the most recent instances.

This was the second such reported instance of “malfunctioning” trap doors slamming shut, leaving the animals imprisoned to suffer slow and torturous deaths. In 2008 an unattended trap malfunctioned and six sea lions became trapped in a cage where they died from prolonged exposure to extreme summer heat. At that time, ODFW claimed they implemented “new protocols” to prevent unattended traps from closing, including magnetic locks requiring a code to hold the doors open. We can see how well that worked.

The second death in the last week happened on May 5, in what ODFW calls a “freak accident”–a stellar sea lion drowned after becoming entangled in cables at the Bonneville Dam’s trap site. This death occurred while trapping was suspended, pending consultation with NOAA (National Oceanic National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the project’s Institutionalized Animal Care and Use Committee regarding the crushing deaths just four days prior.

So even with traps shut down, the program manages to kill and abuse marine mammals!

Please immediately call/email the wildlife officials listed below and let them know these incidents are not accidents and cannot be continually attributed to equipment malfunction. Ask them to shut down this project immediately because there is a clear history of negligence and lack of oversight. It wouldn’t hurt to remind them that the real cause for the decline in salmon and steelhead is not the insignificant number of fish eaten by sea lions—it’s due to degraded habitat, dams blocking migration routes, and over-fishing.

Thank you for speaking out!

ODFW Director: Curt Melcher, 503-947-6044

ODFW Marine Mammal Program Coordinator: Robin Brown, 541-757-5245, 503-947-6200, robin.f.brown@state.or.us

NOAA Division Manager: Garth Griffin, 503-230-5400

WDFW Director: Jim Unsworth, 360-902-2700, director@dfw.wa.gov

WDFW Marine Mammal Coordinator: Steve Jeffries, 253-589-7235

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26909-as-casualties-mount-scientists-say-global-warming-has-been-hugely-underestimated

Dahr Jamail | As Casualties Mount, Scientists Say Global Warming Has Been “Hugely Underestimated” Monday, 20 October 2014 11:07
Written by 
Dahr Jamail By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report

As we look across the globe this month, the signs of a continued escalation of the impacts of runaway anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) continue to increase, alongside a drumbeat of fresh scientific studies confirming their connection to the ongoing human geo-engineering project of emitting carbon dioxide at ever-increasing rates into the atmosphere.

A major study recently published in New Scientist found that “scientists may have hugely underestimated the extent of global warming because temperature readings from southern hemisphere seas were inaccurate,” and said that ACD is “worse than we thought” because it is happening “faster than we realized.”

As has become predictable now, as evidence of increasing ACD continues to mount, denial and corporate exploitation are accelerating right along with it.

The famed Northwest Passage is now being exploited by luxury cruise companies. Given the ongoing melting of the Arctic ice cap, a company recently announced a 900-mile, 32-day luxury cruise there, with fares starting at $20,000, so people can luxuriate while viewing the demise of the planetary ecosystem.

This, while even mainstream scientists now no longer view ACD in the future tense, but as a reality that is already well underway and severely impacting the planet.

It is good that even the more conservative scientists have come aboard the reality train, because a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-led (NOAA) study published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has provided yet more evidence linking ACD with extreme heat events.

To provide perspective on how far along we are regarding runaway ACD, another recent study shows that the planet’s wildlife population is less than half the size it was four decades ago. The culprits are both ACD and unsustainable human consumption, coupling to destroy habitats faster than previously thought, as biodiversity loss has now reached “critical levels,” according to the report. More than half of the vertebrate population on the planet has been annihilated in just four decades.

Let that sink in for a moment before reading further.

Meanwhile, the situation only continues to grow grimmer.

NASA announced that this August was the hottest globally since records began in 1880. Days later, NOAA confirmed this and added that 2014 is on track to become the hottest year on record.

Shortly thereafter, NASA announced that this September was the hottest since 1880.

And emissions only continue to increase.

Global greenhouse gas emissions rose this last year to record levels, increasing 2.3 percent.

The effects of all these developments are especially evident in the Arctic, where sea ice coverage reached its annual minimum on September 17, continuing a trend of below-average years. According to the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center, Arctic sea ice coverage this year is the sixth lowest recorded since 1978.

Equally disconcerting and symptomatic of the aforementioned, 35,000 walruses crowded onto land near the Northwest Alaska village of Point Lay late last month, when they couldn’t find their preferred resting grounds of summer sea ice.

Earth

The European Space Agency announced that, due to billions of tons of ice loss, a dip in the gravity field over the Western Antarctic region has occurred, making even gravity itself the latest casualty of ACD.

A recent analysis of 56 studies on ACD-related health problems revealed that increasing global temperatures and extreme weather events will continue to deleteriously impact human health on a global scale.

On a micro-scale, another report showed how Minnesota’s warming (and increasingly wetter) climate is escalating the risk of new diseases in the area, according to the Minnesota Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment.

Further north, warming temperatures continue to disrupt the fragile ecological balance in the Canadian Arctic, which is warming faster than most of the rest of the planet. Canada’s minister for natural resources provided a new report detailing the impact ACD is having on that country’s forests, which are being impacted “faster than the global average.”

In neighboring Alaska, summer heat and invasive insects are taking a similar toll on interior Alaska birch trees, according to experts there.

Wildlife populations continue to struggle to adapt to the dramatic changes wrought by ACD. In California, one of the largest populations of state-protected Western pond turtles in the southern part of that state is struggling to survive as its habitat, a natural two-mile long lake, has become a smelly, severely alkaline death trap due to drought and fires there.

More: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26909-as-casualties-mount-scientists-say-global-warming-has-been-hugely-underestimated