No skiing = no jobs in my old home

CBC reported that Blue Mountain, the big ski hill two hours north of Toronto, laid off 1,300 people due to lack of snow. No snow, no skiing. No skiing, no jobs.

Blue Mountain is just outside of Collingwood, Ontario. That's where I grew up. My grandfather and Dad were friends with Jozo Weider, the Czech visionary who started the ski industry there.

When Jozo was getting skiing going, the tourist industry didn't mean a lot to Collingwood. The shipyard was the big employer. I would guess that about 1 in 10 local people worked there at one time. The whistle used to blow at the end of the day and everyone from the yard went home for dinner.

During the 60s and 70s the demand for Great Lakes freighters and other ships of the size built at Collingwood dropped off. There were layoffs seasonally, and then the big one, for good.

If you visit Collingwood today you will not see any ships at the end of Hurontario Street. Now it's condos and concrete.

Although different industries have come to Collingwood, the ski hill's contribution to the local economy has grown to be important. Now with 1,300 people losing their jobs, at least for a few weeks, it's like the old days all over again. Layoffs. The tourist economy doesn't pay much to start with. To lose the part-time seasonal work is going to cause hardship to those workers, and in turn to all the merchants who rely on them.

A warm winter hits home.

Those fires in California are more because of climate, not land use practices

Forest fires are scary things. We humans want to put them out. Perhaps some of us were influenced by the terrifying fire in Bambi, and certainly Smoky the Bear's stern warning, "Only YOU can prevent forest fires" had an impact on my generation. But even without the propaganda, a fire is so powerful, unpredictable and destructive that we're right to be afraid.

It's common to hear that our land use practices, particularly the way we suppress natural fires, are the reason for so many fires in the USA and Canada. In the days before the European colonization here, lightning and other natural causes started fires, which burned and regenerated both forests and grasslands. With fire suppression comes a build-up of fuel and ultimately, more intense fires.

A paper published in August 2006 in the journal Science, "Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity" by A. L. Westerling, H. G. Hidalgo, D. R. Cayan and T. W. Swetnam studied the relationship between fires and climate.

The overall conclusion is that climate - less water, warmer temperatures - causes fires even where land management hasn't changed over the centuries. The recent (since the mid-1980s) warm climate and the increase in forest fires in the study area are related.

Here are the details from Science to help you locate the original paper.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/1128834.pdf
full/1128834/DC1
Materials and Methods
Figs. S1 to S3
References
17 April 2006; accepted 28 June 2006
Published online 6 July 2006;
10.1126/science.1128834
Include this information when citing this paper.
RESEARCH ARTICLES
www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 313 18 AUGUST 2006 943

Polar bears are drowning, but are they endangered?

A year ago (December 18, 2005), the Sunday Times from Britain reported on polar bears drowning. Due to global warming, the gaps of open water between the ice floes where the bears rest are becoming so large that the bears can't make it across.

The source quoted by the Sunday Times was a study by the U. S. government, specifically the Minerals Management Service. The related paper appears to be this one: "Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea", by Charles Monnett and Jeffrey S. Gleason, in the journal Polar Biology, Vol. 29, No. 8, July 2006.

The abstract does NOT attribute the polar bear drownings to global warming, but says that the deaths of polar bears may increase "if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues."

I'm willing to bet that pack ice regression and open water is an effect of global warming. It's possible that the paper says so directly; I only read the abstract because I don't have a subscription to the database where the full paper resides.