Girlz Mag

QUINCY, Mass. – Seventeen rare sea turtles suffering a variety of ailments are recovering at the New England Aquarium after being rescued over the past two days off of Cape Cod, Mass.

The turtles rescued by volunteers with the Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary at Wellfleet Bay are being cared for at the aquarium's new animal care center in Quincy. They eventually will be released back to the ocean.

Most of them are Kemp's ridley turtles and are suffering from hypothermia, dehydration and malnourishment. The turtles usually migrate to warmer waters in the winter, but aquarium officials say strong northwest winds Wednesday drove the turtles to shore.

Many had body temperatures in the 50s, when they should have been in the 70s.

An aquarium spokesman says it's unusual for the center to care for so many at one time.

ZITACUARO, Mexico – This small patch of mountain fir forest is a model of sorts for the global effort to save trees and fight climate change. The problem is that saving trees has not saved the forest's most famous visitors: Monarch butterflies.

Millions of Monarch butterflies migrate here from the United States and Canada every year, but their numbers declined by 75 percent last year alone, apparently because of changing weather and vegetation patterns.

The Monarch butterfly reserve shows how complex the battle against climate change has become, as the world prepares for a United Nations climate conference in Cancun next week. The conference is expected to focus in part on how best to preserve forests, with questions about who should pay and and how to treat communities who already live in the jungles and forests of developing countries.

Forest preservation is the goal of a popular U.N.-sponsored program known as REDD, or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, which garnered more mentions than any other program approved at the last international climate meeting in Copenhagen. The hope is for developed nations to pay poorer ones $22 to $38 billion per year to help them preserve forests.

'It is not a hypothetical idea or theory,' said Mexico's Environment Secretary Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada of the REDD program. 'It's working in many countries around the world. What we really require is....that it convert into an agreement at Cancun.'

The Monarch butterfly reserve is an example both of how the program could work, and of its limitations.

The reserve in the mountains west of Mexico City benefits from international help, such as payments to communities to preserve trees and alternative income projects. The deforestation rate there is down by about 95 percent.

Fernando Solis Martinez, 54, is the head of a 'communal property commission' that takes care of jointly-owned land inherited from Indian ancestors in San Juan Xoconusco, a village within the 13,550 hectare (33,482 acre) reserve. He oversees the watering and replanting of oyamel fir seedlings at the village's tree nursery. The 120,000 seedlings will be distributed throughout the reserve come June, when the rains return, to replace areas cut or washed away in severe storms.

'This nursery is a way to do maintenance on the forest, and provide jobs for more people,' said Solis Martinez, as he takes a break from efforts to rebuild a balky water pump.

Set up three years ago with help from the World Wildlife Fund, the nursery is part of a mix of projects — direct payments from the government and contributions from private companies; a scheme for collecting sap and selling it to turpentine manufacturers; sales of woven pine-needle artisanry, and hopes for a tourist operation — that could provide income streams for future generations.

It is not paradise; most residents of Xoconusco still have to work for about 120 pesos ($10) per day) at flower hothouses down in the valley, and illicit loggers are a constant threat. Most communities send patrols of 10 men into the mountains every day to listen for the distant sounds of chain saws. But despite the challenges, the program appears to be working.

Gabriel Colin Camacho, 37, the new head of communal lands in the village of Crescencio Morales, has started to turn around that community's reputation as one of the worst areas for deforestation in the reserve. Now he says most of his neighbors realize that a steady stream of government payments would end if the forest disappears.

'Before, we saw the forest as nothing more than money, that we could take without any considerations,' he said. 'You could say that we were fools, because we sold the wood for less than it was worth.'

Deforestation and soil degradation causes between 17 and 20 percent of greenhouse gases worldwide, a greater proportion than transport. But the idea of saving forests to trap greenhouse gases has come a long way since the days when simply planting a stretch of eucalyptus trees on a clear-cut plain would qualify as 'offsets,' the practice of balancing greenhouse-gas emissions in one place by 'trapping' carbon in trees.

The world is still losing 12.8 million acres (5.2 million hectares) of forest per year, despite reforestation efforts that reduced the annual rate of loss from 20.3 million acres (8.3 million hectares) in the 1990s. So far, an alliance of about a dozen developed nations is providing about $4.6 billion in funding for projects in about 60 developing nations.

But when you're talking that amount of money, you want some accounting and control, tree by saved tree. And of course you have to raise the money: high-emission companies looking for offsets offer a potentially rich source of funds. The idea angers many activists.

'We do not accept, and the people of the world will not accept, using forests as a sort of reserve so that big corporations can keep on polluting,' said Raul Benet, an activist who is organizing protests at Cancun.

While the Monarch Butterfly Reserve is a success story, trees alone won't keep it going.

If the butterflies disappear — and by all accounts they are doing badly — interest in the forest could quickly evaporate. The REDD program has been improved to take into account the importance of biodiversity in forests.

While experts aren't really sure what has been battering the butterflies, changing weather patterns are clearly taking a toll.

Last year, clusters of butterflies covered a total area equal to only about 1.9 hectares (4.7 acres), compared to about 8 hectares (almost 20 acres) in the 2008-2009 winter season. Experts say it is still too soon to estimate figures on this year's migration.

Monarch expert Lincoln Brower cites climate swings of wet and dry weather, storms that damaged the reserve, and the crowding out of the only plant the Monarchs lay their eggs on, the milkweed, by genetically-modified crops.

Javier Espinosa, the coordinator of statistics for Mexico's National Weather Service, said February 2010 — when most of the storm damage occurred — was the wettest on record for the area in 70 years. Brower thinks the February storms may have killed 30 percent of the butterflies.

Brower cautions that a cold snap, combined with wet weather and spotty tree cover, could be disastrous, freezing the Monarchs, but warmer weather could hurt them by making them more restive, burning up the fat reserves they need to fly north in the spring.

Any extreme variation in weather hurts the migration, and that is more or less what climate change is expected to cause. 'I think it's a disaster of major proportions that's not being recognized,' Brower said.

CHERSKY, Russia – During the last Ice Age, shaggy mammoths, woolly rhinos and bison lumbered across northern Siberia. Then, about 10,000 years ago — in the span of a geological heartbeat, or a few hundred years — the last of them disappeared.

Many scientists believe a dramatic shift in climate drove these giant grazers to extinction.

But two scientists who live year-round in the frigid Siberian plains say that man _either for food, fuel or fun — hunted the animals to extinction.

Paleontologists have been squabbling for decades over how these animals met their sudden demise. The most persuasive theories say it was humanity and nature: Dramatically warming temperatures caused a changing habitat and brought a migration of men armed with deep-piercing spears.

No one knows for sure what set off global warming back then — perhaps solar activity or a slight shift in the Earth's orbit. But, in an echo of the global warming debate today, Sergey Zimov, director of the internationally funded Northeast Science Station, and his son Nikita say man was the real agent of change.

For the Siberian grasses to provide nutrition in winter, they needed to be grazed in summer to produce fresh shoots in autumn. The hooves of millions of reindeer, elk and moose as well as the larger beasts also trampled choking moss, while their waste promoted the blossoming of summer meadows.

As the ice retreated at the end of the Pleistocene era — the final millennia of a 1.8 million yearlong epoch — it cleared the way for man's expansion into previously inaccessible lands, like this area bordering the East Siberia Sea.

Northeastern Siberia, today one of the coldest and most formidable spots on the globe, was dry and free of glaciers. The ground grew thick with fine layers of dust and decaying plant life, generating rich pastures during the brief summers.

When humans arrived they hunted not only for food, but for the fat that kept the northern animals insulated against the subzero cold, which the hunters burned for fuel, say the scientists. They may also have killed for prestige or for sport, in the same way buffalo were heedlessly felled in the American Old West, sometimes from the window of passing trains.

The wholesale slaughter allowed the summer fodder to dry up and destroy the winter supply, they say.

'We don't look at animals just as animals. We look at them as a system, with vegetation and the whole ecosystem,' said the younger Zimov. 'You don't need to kill all the animals to kill an ecosystem.'

During the transition from the ice age to the modern climate, global temperatures rose 5 degrees Celsius, or 9 Fahrenheit. But in Siberia's northeast the temperature soared 7 degrees, or nearly 13F, in just three years, the elder Zimov said.

The theory of human overkill is much disputed. Advocates of climate theory say the warm wet weather that accompanied the rapid melting of glaciers spawned birch forests that overwhelmed the habitats of the bulky grass eaters.

Adrian Lister, of the paleontology department of London's Natural History Museum, said humans may have delivered the final blow, but rapid global warming was primarily responsible for the mammoth's extinction. It brought an abrupt change in vegetation that squeezed a dwindling number of mammoths into isolated pockets, where hunters could pick off the last herds, he said.

People 'couldn't have done the whole job,' he told AP Television News.

Mammoths once ranged from Russia and northern China to Europe and most of North America, but their numbers began to shrink about 30,000 years ago. By the time the Pleistocene era ended they remained only in northern Siberia, Lister said.

As in millennia past, Sergey Zimov believes hunting is a problem today.

'I believe it's possible to increase the density of herbivores in our territory 100 times,' says Zimov, who keeps a 6-foot-long yellow-brown tusk of an 18-year-old female in a corner of his living room. 'I say let's stop the poaching. Let's give freedom for animals.'