Bad humans. BAD HUMANS. What do we need to do, put a sign on Florida’s marine life saying, “Please do not touch”?
Instead of protesting against the evils of carbon pollution, many officials and environmental advocates are adopting the model of boy scouts when it comes to climate change: Be prepared.
Some are planning cities that will simply adapt to more water.
But climate-proofing a city or coastline is expensive, as shown by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $20 billion plan to build floodwalls, levees and other defenses against rising seas.
The most vulnerable places are those with the fewest resources to build such defenses, secure their water supplies or move people to higher ground. How to pay for such measures is a burning issue in U.N. climate talks, which just wrapped up a session in the German city of Bonn.
A sampling of cities around the world and what they are doing to prepare for the climatic forces that scientists say are being unleashed by global warming: READ MORE.
Front page news in St. Augustine:
Neither the Bell 206 helicopter nor pilot E. Hoke Smith of SK Logistics in St. Augustine were experiencing any problems before the crash early in the morning on Dec. 26, 2011, according to the NTSB probable cause report, published late Monday.
But the helicopter was not certified to handle the sporadically misty and overcast conditions between the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville and Shands Hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
The board found that Smith’s decision to continue flying in the poor conditions resulted in the crash in a remote, wooded area in Clay County, killing all three men on board.
Smith did not make any backup plans for the organ transport. Other SK Logistic pilots told investigators that they would have made the same flight but would have arranged for ground transportation or a flight by a fixed-wing aircraft if they could not complete the mission as scheduled, according to the report.
“Contributing to the pilot’s improper decision was his self-induced pressure to complete the trip,” according to the report. … READ MORE.
Front page news in The Villages, Florida: Butterfly research! … They just used a picture of the wrong swallowtail. The story link below has the right picture.
MIAMI (AP) — The fate of an endangered butterfly species in the Florida Keys may rest on the fragile wings of a single female Schaus swallowtail and a handful of caterpillars captured in Biscayne National Park, according to University of Florida researchers hoping they have a second chance to save it from extinction.
A memorial to the victims of ValuJet Flight 592 stands along the Tamiami Trail west of Miami. There is no memorial to the victims of Eastern Flight 401, though, and the survivors of that crash are trying to change that. Above is a picture of the memorial they hope to build (photo provided by Ron Infantino). For more information about the memorial or to donate to the project, contact the survivors through their website.
I interviewed the Eastern survivors in 2007, when they reunited with their airboat hero. Why bring this up today? A Florida python hunter found something that may have belonged to someone on either plane when it went down.
After all these years, something that likely was lost in one of two tragic jetliner crashes in the Florida Everglades finally might be making its way home to the right family, thanks to a man who was looking for Burmese pythons.
MIAMI (AP) — Like most people who signed up for Florida’s official Burmese python hunt last winter, Mark Rubinstein slogged a couple times through the Everglades without ever seeing one of the elusive snakes.
Something else caught his eye, though.
In the dirt along a levee, about 10 miles deep into the wetlands, Rubinstein found a gold pendant, with sapphires forming a cross inside a circle of diamonds. One edge of the penny-sized medallion was melted and misshapen.
It may have fallen from the sky. Rubinstein was hunting near the crash sites of two airplanes that went down in the same area: Eastern Flight 401, a New York flight that crashed as it prepared to land in Miami in 1972, and ValuJet Flight 592, a 1996 flight to Atlanta that caught fire shortly after takeoff and plummeted into the remote swamps west of Miami. READ MORE.
I also wrote about the 2007 reunion of the Eastern Flight 401 survivors with their airboat hero. Rereading those interviews now, it’s amazing how many little things went wrong and led to the crash, but it’s also amazing how many things went right so that 77 people could be saved.
… From 10 miles away, Bud Marquis and his friend saw a fiery orange flash and sped toward it.
Marquis had recently turned to commercial frogging after years as a state game officer. He knew how to pick out island silhouettes in the dark, to feel the changing terrain beneath his boat. Fifteen minutes later, he reached a levee where he’d thought he’d seen the flash.
Marquis heard a voice: “I can’t hold my head up anymore!” Jet fuel seeped into his boots when he jumped into the water to yank the man up. All around, he could see people still strapped in their seats, some turned face down in the water.
“I’m one person in the midst of all this,” Marquis said. “I’m no doctor. I didn’t know what to do.” READ MORE.
MIAMI (AP) _ The fate of an endangered butterfly species in the Florida Keys may rest on the fragile wings of a single female Schaus swallowtail and a handful of caterpillars captured in Biscayne National Park, according to University of Florida researchers hoping they have a second chance to save it from extinction. Only four of the butterflies were found in the wild last year in surveys conducted by university researchers, volunteers, and state and federal wildlife agencies. While the captive breeding program is revived in Gainesville, efforts to restore native plants and remove exotic plants from the national park will continue so that any butterflies that are released find more habitat available, said Mark Salvato, lead butterfly biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Other challenges the delicate creatures face include exotic predators such as green iguanas that eat the plants that shelter their eggs and caterpillars and tropical weather that can wipe out remaining habitat. READ MORE.
MIAMI (AP) _ While urging coastal residents to prepare for the Atlantic hurricane season, federal officials said Friday that they were doing what they could to get ready for a storm season that includes furloughs in the agencies that forecast and respond to tropical storms.
Furloughs required by the federal budget cuts known as the sequester are expected to affect the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the country’s hurricane forecasting hub in Miami, and the National Guard, which can be deployed during disasters. READ MORE.
What should you take away from the annual prediction for how many tropical storms and hurricanes are expected this year?
It’s hurricane season and there will be hurricanes. Be prepared, already. It only takes one storm to screw up the rest of your year.
The annual NOAA prediction for the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season isn’t a checklist, it’s not a crystal ball and, I think, it doesn’t matter all that much. What should matter: paying attention to the forecasts and storm warnings that affect you over the next six months.
Fun tropical weather fact: It’s the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that makes the storm season prediction each year, not the National Hurricane Center. The hurricane center focuses on the storms that actually appear, not the seasonal outlook. And if no hurricane develops, the forecasters at the hurricane center are as happy as we are.
(AP Video)
The National Hurricane Center’s efforts to improve how they communicate the danger of storm surge is front page news in Pensacola.
MIAMI (AP) — During a hurricane, storm surge is one of the greatest threats to life and land, yet many people don’t understand the dire warnings from forecasters to get out of its way. So this season, they hope to offer easy-to-understand, color-coded maps and change the way they talk to the public. (Read more …)
(AP Video)
Sometimes when we call the National Hurricane Center and ask questions about jargon in their forecasts about storm surge, they get a little huffy and start reading the forecast back to us. “No, wait, we can read it,” we say. “We just don’t understand what it means.”
It turns out that it’s not just us — it’s pretty much everyone who isn’t a hurricane specialist. Emergency managers, broadcast meteorologists, journalists and members of the general public need those forecasts to know whether to evacuate ahead of storm surge, the greatest threat to life and property in a hurricane. If they don’t understand what the hurricane center is saying about storm surge, even when the forecast is accurate, things can go very badly for the people in a hurricane’s path.
The hurricane center has caught on to the communications problem and is changing the way it talks about storm surge risks. It’s a process that began several years ago but became urgent in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.
MIAMI (AP) — During a hurricane, storm surge is one of the greatest threats to life and land, yet many people don’t understand the dire warnings from forecasters to get out of its way. So this season, they hope to offer easy-to-understand, color-coded maps and change the way they talk to the public.
Simply put, storm surge is the abnormal rise of sea water. Predicting it is far more complicated, and so is explaining it, as forecasters at the National Hurricane Center discovered, again, during a review of Superstorm Sandy.
“Scientists by their very nature use very sophisticated language, technical language,” said Jamie Rhome, leader of the hurricane center’s storm surge team. “It turns out that nobody else understands what we’re talking about. So once we figured that out, we started using more plain language.” … (read more).
A man who lost most of his face and his eyesight in last year’s face-chewing attack in Miami has a message for the people who donated to his care: Thank you.
If you want to send a message back, tag your tweets #Wishes4Poppo, and his nurses will read him the notes.
A video posted online by the hospital that has been caring for Poppo shows him sitting in a hospital bed, wearing a baseball cap and strumming a guitar.
Facing the camera, Poppo thanks the public for their contributions and support.
Donna Karan has been working with Haitian artisans through her Urban Zen Foundation since the 2010 earthquake. The video above was produced for urbanzen.com.
Karan was in Miami this week to talk about her work in Haiti, coinciding with the opening of the Discover Haiti Exhibition at the Little Haiti Cultural Center.
Miami, Florida on Flickr.
She said the tote bag and other similar fashion and decorative items made by Haitian artisans are part of her “dressing and addressing people” campaign: taking art to where the most people will buy it.
“A painting can say anything, but let’s get it out there in the world where people buy T-shirts,” Donna Karan said at the opening of a Little Haiti Cultural Center exhibition of art, accessories and furnishings produced by artisans in Haiti and sold through Karan’s Urban Zen Foundation.
It’s no charity craft fair. The items artfully displayed in the Miami gallery would sell in any mainstream home furnishings store. What sets them apart is their origin: handmade in Haiti from stone, wood, metals and textiles sourced or repurposed in the Caribbean country. … (read more)
Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.
MIAMI (AP) - There’s finally a crack in the dam blocking the natural flow of water into Everglades National Park.
The Tamiami Trail that traverses South Florida’s wetlands has kept water from flowing into the park for more than 80 years. On Wednesday, a backhoe broke through a 1-mile stretch of the old roadway that has been replaced with a bridge.
The bridge opened in March. The Department of the Interior says getting $30 million to raise the next 2.6-mile section of the bridge is a top priority.
The bridge and the removal of the old highway are among Everglades restoration projects that languished through funding and legal challenges since Congress approved them in 2000.
The park has long suffered from a lack of water due to various water-control structures and the highway.
