The opening weekend of Wisconsin’s deer season was marred by the fatal shooting of an 11-year-old boy by a member of his hunting party.
Officials are asking all hunters continuing in the nine-day gun deer season, which opened Saturday, to follow thefour basic rules of firearm safety, including always being aware of where the gun’s muzzle is pointing.
On Sunday in Green Lake County, a 41-year-old man was attempting to unload his gun to place it in the back seat of the vehicle when the gun went off, hitting the 11-year-old in the chest. The boy was flown to a nearby hospital, where he died.
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources officials…
On Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022 around 9:45 a.m., Wahkiakum County Emergency Management Services and Sheriff’s Office and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Police responded to a report of a hunting incident in Cathlamet at the Elochoman Slough. A shotgun discharge seriously injured a 53-year-old male from Cowlitz County.
It was reported that the two friends were duck hunting in a small boat that morning and, while retrieving ducks from the water, the shooter’s shotgun fell over from a propped-up position. In an attempt to retrieve the shotgun, the shooter fired the firearm striking the victim.The shooter immediately called 911 and transported the victim to the Cathlamet Marina where he met medical aid. The victim was transported to Longview and then flown to Vancouver’s SW Medical Center where he is currently in stable condition recovering from his injuries.
In a letter to the New York State Department of Agriculture & Markets, local and national animal protection organizations are calling on Commissioner Richard Ball to suspend operations at the 87 live animal markets across the state that sell live animals to the public and slaughter them on the premises. The calls come amid an avian flu outbreak at a Queens live poultry market that led to the temporary closure of 34 similar markets in New York and New Jersey. Approximately 170 birds were killed in the Queens facility where the flu was found.
Deckhands aboard the crab boat Arctic Hunter in the Bering Sea off Alaska separate male and female snow crab, March 21, 2013. There will be no Bering Sea red king crab or snow crab harvests this year.Steve Ringman/The Seattle Times/TNS
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Last week, there was mass confusion as to why Alaskan snow crabs have disappeared.
This week, there may be a plausible answer as to why crab legs will be so hard to get your hands on.
According toYahoo, climate change may be the prime suspect in a mass die-off of Alaska’s snow crabs, experts say, after the state took the unprecedented step ofcanceling their harvest this seasonto save the species.
Here’s the thing.
There’s an annual survey of the Bering Sea floor carried out…
Clockwise from top left: a frog from Panama; a close-up of coral; hand-pollinating pear trees in China; pest-eating ants; and an Indian white-rumped vulture.Photograph: Alamy, Getty Images, Shutterstock
Seven ways in which our destruction of the natural world has led to deadly outcomes
1.As Indian vultures decline, the number of rabies cases rise
In the early 1990s, vultures across India started dying inexplicably. Long-billed, slender-billed and oriental white-backed vultures declined to the brink of extinction, with the number of India’s most common three vulture species falling by more than97% between 1992 and 2007. Six other species were in sharp decline too. Scientists started testing the dead birds and worked outthey had been exposed to diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug routinely given to cattle in south Asia…
One of the largest volcanoes on Venus is the 2-mile-tall Maat Mons, which has lava flows spilling for hundreds of miles around it.(Image credit: NASA/JPL)
Massive global volcanism that covered 80% of Venus’ surface in lava may have been the deciding factor that transformed Venus from a wet and mild world into the suffocating, sulfuric, hellish planet that it is today.
The surface temperature onVenusis a sweltering 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead, and there’s a crushing pressure of 90 atmospheres underneath the dense clouds of carbon dioxide laced with corroding sulfuric acid. Often decried asEarth‘s “evil twin,”…
Planet Earth, sun and stars Getty images/NASA/egal
The Permian–Triassic extinction event, also called The Great Dying, has certainly earned its nickname. It was the largest mass extinction in the geological record, wiping out between 83 and 97 percent of all species living on Earth. Although the exact cause is debated, extreme volcanic activity that perhaps cooked the planet has been fingered as the main culprit.
But somehow, despite being pummeled by asteroids and space radiation, life on this planet has kept on keeping on for almost four billion years. As our planet enters a Sixth Mass Extinction, driven by a wave of human activity that has wiped out thousands of species, the question of how this works — particularly, how the Earth seems to bounce back from large-scale disasters, or extreme changes in atmosphere or climate — becomes even more pressing.
It turns out the answer may, in part, be even stranger than anyone imagined. New research in the journal Science Advances suggests that Earth can self-regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years. In other words, there are large-scale geologic processes that seem to absorb carbon dioxide over huge time scales. However, the time scales involved are far, far too long to correct for the sudden spike in carbon dioxide caused by fossil fuel combustion, meaning that the mechanism won’t save us from climate change.
“You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time?”
Constantin Arnscheidt and Daniel Rothman, two researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, crunched the data from multiple datasets documenting the global temperature for the last 66 million years. These paleoclimate records include ice cores from Antarctica and the chemical makeup of prehistoric marine fossils, which can tell us a lot about what Earth’s atmosphere was like in the distant past.
“This whole study is only possible because there have been great advances in improving the resolution of these deep-sea temperature records,” Arnscheidt said in a statement. “Now we have data going back 66 million years, with data points at most thousands of years apart.”
The two MIT scientists found a strong pattern suggesting that Earth employs feedback loops to keep its temperatures within a range where life can thrive. However, this happens on a timescale over hundreds of thousands of years, so while it implies our planet will bounce back from anthropogenic climate change, it won’t happen soon enough to save us.
Related video: WION Climate Tracker: UN Climate talks in disarray
deal. The loss and damage fund has been a hot topic at this year’s
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“One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,” Arnscheidt said. “But it’s never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth’s climate.”
The finding has big implications for our understanding of the past, but also how global heating is shaping the future of our homeworld. It even helps us better understand the evolution of planetary temperatures that can make the search for alien-inhabited exoplanets more fruitful.
“You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,” Arnscheidt said. “But it’s never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth’s climate.”
Many scientists have proposed that Earth has self-regulated its temperature throughout history, but this has been difficult to prove. In the 1960s, the late inventor and environmentalist James Lovelock applied Darwinian processes to the entire planet, rather than a single organism, to explain how such a complex system evolved. He called this the Gaia hypothesis, which explains how Earth and its biological systems formed feedback loops that keeps our planet favorable for living organisms.
It also helped explain the Faint-Sun Paradox, first proposed by astronomers Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972. Essentially, our Sun used to be a lot smaller and colder 4.5 billion years ago. Back then, based on our current understanding of the life cycle of stars, the Sun would have been about 30 percent dimmer than it is today. This in turn would have made Earth too cold for liquid water, preventing life from forming — yet obviously this happened. So how did our rocky world pull this off?
The answer seems to lie in how carbon is cycled through the planet. A prominent theory is that when our planet first formed, it had an atmosphere chock full of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, that allowed it to absorb heat, even though the Sun was colder.
“On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback. But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.”
A complex process known as silicate weathering then removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and buries it at the bottom of the ocean. Over time, this cools the planet. Then, something like major volcanic eruptions or humans driving cars, pumps more carbon dioxide in the air, warming the planet again. Over the eons, Earth seems to be balancing between too cold and too hot, explaining why some call Earth a Goldilocks Planet.
The MIT study helps match existing data with this long-held theory, which helps us better understand our past and the consequences of unchecked climate change. And it would make sense that if these feedback loops exist on our planet, they may also exist in other galaxies, informing the hunt for extraterrestrial life.
“On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheidt said. “But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.”
However, Arnscheidt’s model was unable to account for this balance on timescales longer than one million years, so random chance may have also played an outsized role in life’s success on this rock.
“There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheidt said. “We’re able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable.”
It may have been a mix of randomness and feedback loops like silicate weathering that influenced Earth’s temperature in the past. But in humanity’s future, it will be free will —our policy, our consumption, our choices — that determines the temperature of the planet going forward. And we may just overwhelm these natural systems so much that they won’t be able to balance out, similar to prominent theories about potential life on Mars.
“The heating of the Sun has been slow enough to allow life to evolve, a process which takes millions of years. Unfortunately, the Sun is now too hot for the further development of organic life on Earth,” Lovelock wrote in his 2019 book “Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence.” “The output of heat from our star is too great for life to start again as it did from the simple chemicals of the Archean Period between 4 billion and 2.5 billion years ago. If life on Earth is wiped out, it will not start again.”
SPALDING TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WLUC) – A Menominee County hunter was found cold but not injured in Spalding Township.
Menominee County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to River Road and Sand Road on the morning of Nov. 15. The hunter had been in the woods since the night before.
Deputies used terrain association and audio signals to locate the hunter. Menominee County Sheriff’s Office was assisted by Hannahville Police Department, Michigan DNR, Menominee County Central Dispatch and Gene’s Towing.
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