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The elusive snow leopard – long considered an endangered species – has been upgraded to “vulnerable,” international conservationists said Thursday. But experts warned the new classification does not mean they are safe.

The animals still face serious challenges including poaching and loss of prey in their high Himalayan habitat.

“The species still faces ‘a high risk of extinction in the wild’ and is likely still declining – just not at the rate previously thought,” said Tom McCarthy, head of the snow leopard program at the big cat conservation group Panthera.

Snow leopards had been listed as endangered since 1972.

The reclassification announced Thursday by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, followed a three-year assessment during which experts determined the Himalayan cats no longer numbered fewer than 2,500 in the wild, and was not in steep decline – the two criteria for being considered “endangered.”

Using improved methods for counting cat numbers, experts now estimate there are about 4,000 snow leopards in the wild.

But experts stressed that estimate was based on an assessment that included a detailed survey of only 2 percent of the snow leopard’s high-mountain range, across 12 countries in Asia.

Some positive conservation developments included an increase in the number of protected areas within that range, as well as stepped-up efforts by local communities to protect the animals from poachers.

Communities were also working to prevent cases of local herdsmen retaliating for lost livestock by building predator-proof livestock corrals, according to team member Rodney Jackson, who heads the Snow Leopard Conservancy group, according to a statement.

Still, the animals are hunted for their thick fur and bones. They also face declining numbers of wild prey, as domestic livestock have degraded grasslands.
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The bristlecone pine tree, famous for its wind-beaten, gnarly limbs and having the longest lifespan on Earth, is losing a race to the top of mountains throughout the Western United States, putting future generations in peril, researchers said Wednesday.

Driven by climate change, a cousin of the tree, the limber pine, is leapfrogging up mountainsides, taking root in warmer, more favorable temperatures and leaving little room for the late-coming bristlecone, a study finds.

Researchers compare the competing tree species to a pair of old men in a slow-motion race up a mountainside taking thousands of years, and climate change is the starting gun.

“Limber pine is taking all the good spots,” said Brian Smithers, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, who led the research. “It’s jarring.”

Lifespan of 5,000 years

The bristlecone pine can live 5,000 years, making it the oldest individually growing organism on the planet, researchers say.

Forests of the diminutive bristlecone pines are found in eastern California, Nevada and Utah. They thrive in desolate limestone soil that is inhospitable to most trees. They grow at high elevation, hammered by wind and extreme temperatures.

The punishing conditions give shape to their twisted limbs. To survive long dry spells, parts of the tree dies and sheds its bark appearing dead, except for small spouts of green pine needles, signaling life, researchers say.

Among the oldest and most famous is Methuselah standing in the White Mountains of eastern California. It remains unmarked among its grove, so vandals cannot find it.

The bristlecone pine’s distant relative, the limber pine is also a hearty survivalist, living 2,000 years. Researchers say they found that the limber pine, which typically grows at lower elevations, has begun to leapfrog past the bristlecone

The three-year study involved counting the trees newly sprouting within the last 50 years above the historical tree line. Most of those growing at the higher elevation are limber pine, researchers said.

“It’s very odd to see it charging upslope and not see bristlecone charging upslope ahead of the limber pine,” Smithers said. “Or at least with it.”

Extinction not a risk yet

Smithers said he could not estimate how many bristlecone pine trees exist throughout the Western U.S. They are not at risk of extinction, but they could be crowded out in some places they’ve grown for thousands of years.

This research on climate change’s impact on these two species of trees can be used to understand more complex forests with several types of trees harvested for timber, Smithers said.

Researchers at U.C. Davis’ Department of Plant Sciences and the U.S. Forest Service published their research Aug. 30 in the scientific journal, Global Change Biology.
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After a 20-year mission, including two extensions, the spacecraft Cassini is preparing to make a final death dive into the planet Saturn on Friday.

Scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said their decision to end the life of the spacecraft in this way is because of what they found during the mission, the ingredients for life on some of Saturn’s moons.  

“At the time of its design, we had no idea that ocean worlds existed in the outer solar system,” said Morgan Cable, Cassini’s Assistant Project Science Systems Engineer of the Cassini.

The discovery of ocean worlds on some of Saturn’s moons could mean life. One unexpected discovery came from the south pole of Enceladus, a moon embedded in one of Saturn’s rings.

“It has a liquid water ocean underneath and it shoots geysers and these cracks open up and these geysers shoot up,” Molly Bittner, Cassini spacecraft operations systems engineer, said.

Instruments on Cassini have been able to taste the grains and gas coming from that geyser plume.

“We know that there are salts. Now this is important for life because life needs certain minerals and salts to exist.  We have very strong evidence that there are hydro-thermal vents down at that base of that ocean, the ocean flood. Now any time you find hydro-thermal vents here on Earth, you find rich communities of organisms,” Cable said.

Photo Gallery: Cassini’s Amazing Photos of Saturn, Rings and Moons 

Cassini was also able to gather data from the Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which has lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane instead of water. There is also evidence of a liquid ocean beneath the surface that probably contains ammonia and water.  Scientists and engineers say the environment could still hold life.

“We’re still open to trying to look for weird life in places like this and we found a strange place right here in our solar system,” Cable said.

These discoveries helped Cassini’s scientists and engineers decide what to do with it once it runs out of fuel. They do not want any earthly organisms that may be on Cassini to contaminate a moon that may have life.

“I want to find life elsewhere in a place like Enceladus but I don’t want to realize later on that we put it there,” Cable said.

Scientists and engineers are already envisioning future missions back to Saturn and its moons such as Enceladus, to look deeper into the possibility of life.

“We really need to understand what’s in that plume, and if there is evidence of life, and I think with today’s instrumentation, things that we could put on a spacecraft right now, we could find that life with our instruments of today,” said Cable.

The end of Cassini looks like a death dive into Saturn’s atmosphere, sending critical data to Earth until the very end. It’s information that will be studied and analyzed by scientists long after the end of Cassini.
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Wildfires that are blackening the American West in one of the nation’s worst fire seasons have ignited calls, including from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, to thin forests that have become so choked with trees that they are at “powder keg levels.”

The destruction has exposed old frictions between environmentalists and those who want to see logging accelerated, and it’s triggered a push to reassess how lands should be managed to prevent severe wildfires.

Zinke’s directive Tuesday for department managers and superintendents to aggressively prevent wildfires was welcomed by Ed Waldron, fire management officer at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.

Waldron was exhausted after fighting two fires that have been burning since late July in or near the park, whose centerpiece is a lake that fills the remains of an erupted volcano and is the deepest in the United States. But he wondered where the additional resources would come from to hire contractors to thin the fuel.

For now, Waldron and other firefighters have been too busy fighting blazes that forced the closure of a road into the park to thin vegetation elsewhere.

“We’ve been working hard,” he said Tuesday. “It’s day 50.”

For decades, logging was king in the West, notably in Oregon, which is famed for its majestic ponderosas and towering Douglas firs.

But restrictions on harvesting timber from federal lands to protect endangered species and lower demand led to a freefall in the industry starting around 1990. Meanwhile, wildfires — nature’s way of thinning and regenerating forests — were being extinguished instead of being allowed to burn.

The forests grew too thick, and they began to overlap, covering meadows and other areas.

“We’ve allowed forests to develop that never developed naturally,” said John Bailey, a professor of fire management at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Fueling megafires

There is now a record amount of fuel for fires, such as brush, and “as a result, we have longer and hotter fire seasons that drive these megafires,” he said.

He advocated thinning forests through logging, prescribed burns and allowing naturally occurring fires to be managed instead of extinguished.

A fire becomes a megafire when it reaches 156 square miles (404 square kilometers). A megafire in southwest Oregon is the largest blaze in the West, having burned 290 square miles (751 square kilometers), authorities said Wednesday. It was reported July 12 and isn’t expected to be under control until Oct. 15.

Across the West, more than 12,000 square miles (31,080 square kilometers) have burned this season, making it among the worst in land scorched.

Oregon state Sen. Herman Baertschiger Jr. called for a work group to revamp fire policy.

“The inability to manage our forest resources due to environmental concerns is threatening the safety and well-being of Oregonians and ultimately damaging our beautiful state,” the Republican said last week.

Residents protest plan

Residents of several communities in southwest Oregon opposed to a planned federal sale of old-growth trees say logging the fire-resistant timber will increase the risk of blazes spreading to communities. They say younger, uniform trees that will grow densely there will be twice as likely to burn. A coalition of residents will protest the sale Thursday in the town of Grants Pass.

“As fires burn throughout the region, area residents believe maintaining our last fire-resistant, old-growth forest is increasingly critical,” the coalition said in a statement Wednesday.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has denounced inadequate efforts to thin dead and dying trees, calling it a yearslong pattern.

He urged smarter policies, criticized the “broken system of fighting wildfires” and complained that federal funds earmarked for fire prevention are instead used for firefighting.

“The idea of ripping off prevention, which you need most, defies common sense,” Wyden said on the Senate floor last Thursday, standing next to a large photo of flames leaping from trees in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. “Shoddy budgeting today leads to bigger fires tomorrow.”

Bailey, the fire management professor, lamented that Zinke’s directive does not recommend using fire as a tool to restore forests.

Questioning motives

Oregon Wild, which campaigns for conservation of roadless areas, suspects an ulterior motive behind the order from Zinke, who oversees more than 500 million acres of federal land, though the Forest Service, a unit of the Agriculture Department, is the nation’s largest firefighting agency.

“Sadly, policy will be all about more logging, not better fire management,” Oregon Wild tweeted.

In Montana, environmental groups last month sued over a proposal by the U.S. Forest Service to allow timber harvesting and some prescribed burning to reduce the risk of severe wildfires in the Flathead National Forest. The lawsuit argued the agency failed to analyze how the timber project, combined with another one nearby, would affect Canada lynx, grizzly bears and their habitat.

Forest fuels are at “powder keg levels,” Paul F. Hessburg Sr., a U.S. Forest Service research landscape ecologist, recently told an audience in Bend, Oregon, a former logging town that has remade itself into an outdoor recreation and microbrew mecca.

“If we don’t change a few of our fire management habits, we’re going to lose a few of our beloved forests,” he said.
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China plans to expand use of ethanol in gasoline nationwide by 2020 to curb smog and fossil fuel demand, the government said Wednesday, joining United States, Brazil and other nations that use blended fuel.

The announcement adds to a series of initiatives to clean up smog-choked Chinese cities and control surging demand for imported oil. The government is spending heavily to develop an electric car industry and has raised sales taxes on vehicles with larger engines.

Plans call for China to develop a demonstration facility by 2020 that can make 50,000 tons of ethanol a year from cellulose, according to the Cabinet’s National Energy Administration. It said that would expand to commercial scale by 2025.

“It is an ideal alternative to fossil fuel,” said an unidentified NEA official quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency.

China is the world’s biggest energy consumer and auto market. It started producing ethanol from corn in 2004 but banned use of food crops in 2007, prompting suppliers to switch to straw stalks and other materials. About one-fifth of gasoline produced in China has added ethanol, according to Xinhua.

Regulators later eased the ban on use of food crops in some areas. Xinhua said the latest plan is intended in part to use up aging stockpiles of corn.

Other governments including Brazil and the United States require gasoline to contain from 10 percent to as much as 85 percent ethanol to curb emissions and reduce petroleum demand.

The NEA gave no indication what level of ethanol would be required, but Xinhua said it would be 10 percent.

On Saturday, a deputy industry minister said Beijing is developing a timetable to phase out production and sales of traditional fuel cars. France and Britain announced similar plans in July. 
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A puzzling study of U.S. pregnancies found that women who had miscarriages between 2010 and 2012 were more likely to have had back-to-back annual flu shots that included protection against swine flu.

Vaccine experts think the results may reflect the older age and other miscarriage risks for the women, and not the flu shots. Health officials say there is no reason to change the government recommendation that all pregnant women be vaccinated against the flu. They say the flu itself is a much greater danger to women and their fetuses.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reached out to a doctor’s group, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, to warn them the study is coming out and help them prepare for a potential wave of worry from expectant moms, CDC officials said.

“I want the CDC and researchers to continue to investigate this,” said Dr. Laura Riley, a Boston-based obstetrician who leads a committee on maternal immunization. “But as an advocate for pregnant women, what I hope doesn’t happen is that people panic and stop getting vaccinated.”

Past studies have found flu vaccines are safe during pregnancy, though there’s been little research on impact of flu vaccinations given in the first three months of pregnancy.

Flu and its complications kill thousands of Americans every year. The elderly, young children and pregnant women are especially at risk. When a new “swine flu” strain emerged in 2009, it killed 56 U.S. pregnant women that year, according to the CDC.

The study’s authors, two of whom are CDC researchers, saw a big difference when they looked at women who had miscarried within 28 days of getting a shot that included protection against swine flu, but it was only when the women also had had a flu shot the previous season.

They found 17 of 485 miscarriages they studied involved women whose vaccinations followed that pattern. Just four of a comparable 485 healthy pregnancies involved women who were vaccinated that way.

The first group also had more women who were at higher risk for miscarriage, like older moms and smokers and those with diabetes. The researchers tried to make statistical adjustments to level out some of those differences but some researchers don’t think they completely succeeded.

Other experts said they don’t believe a shot made from killed flu virus could trigger an immune system response severe enough to prompt a miscarriage. And the authors said they couldn’t rule out the possibility that exposure to swine flu itself was a factor in some miscarriages.

Two other medical journals rejected the article before a third, Vaccine, accepted it. Dr. Gregory Poland, Vaccine’s editor-in-chief, said it was a well-designed study that raised a question that shouldn’t be ignored. But he doesn’t believe flu shots caused the miscarriages. “Not at all,” said Poland, who also is director of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic.

Though this study may cause worry and confusion, it is evidence “of just how rigorous and principled our vaccine safety monitoring system is,” said Jason Schwartz, a Yale University vaccine policy expert.

Some of the same researchers are working on a larger study looking at more recent data to see if a possible link between swine flu vaccine and miscarriage holds up, said James Donahue, a study author from the Wisconsin-based Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. The results aren’t expected until next year at the earliest, he said.
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Microsoft, Walt Disney Co. and General Motors are among hundreds of companies calculating how much they spend on carbon emissions to show investors they are concerned about global warming, a study said on Tuesday.

More than 700 other businesses around the world plan by 2018 to introduce so-called carbon pricing, said the report by the U.S.-based Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES).

The findings come amid efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to scale back climate change-related regulations on grounds they are burdensome to the economy.

Putting a monetary value on carbon dioxide emissions helps limit the burning of fossil fuel, which contributes to global warming, and signals to investors that companies are aware of the financial risks posed by global warming, the study said.

Some 500 companies, including 80 in the United States, reported using carbon pricing, it said, drawing on an array of previous research.

Many oil and gas companies such as British energy company BP use an internal, or “shadow,” accounting method to track their carbon emissions, it said.

“It just stands to reason that investors, in looking at enterprises, of course are looking at ‘Are they resilient to all kinds of changes in the future?'” Bob Stout, vice president for BP America, said during a telephone briefing with reporters and others.

“Climate change and carbon pricing as a policy obviously are key factors that businesses need to look at,” he said.

Other companies charge carbon fees to internal business units.

Microsoft, which charges its business units for emissions ranging from electricity consumption to employee air travel, sees carbon pricing as crucial “regardless of national policies,” said Liz Willmott, a company program manager.

“We as companies can enable partnership and collaborations with countries to help them meet the Paris targets,” she said.

Trump has withdrawn the United States from the historic 2015 Paris global agreement to fight climate change, saying the accord would cost the nation trillions of dollars, kill jobs and hinder oil, gas, coal and manufacturing industries.

According to the World Bank, 42 governments have or plan to have a way to tax carbon emissions or have a cap-and-trade system that allows industries with low emissions to sell their unused permitted capacity to larger emitters.

The United States is not among them.
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From Houston and Miami, to cities in South Asia, 2017 has been a year of intense weather and devastating floods. A combination of climate change and urban development has created a perfect storm for catastrophe.

“We are living in a warmer world. We are living in a world where potentially, hurricanes could be more damaging,” said Bill Patzert, climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Sea levels are rising. They have risen almost nine inches (22 centimeters) in the last century,” he said. Rising sea levels, however, make up only a small fraction of the problem, he said.

“It has the appearance that flooding due to great storms or during the monsoon season over Asia is becoming more severe. So what is really happening is that the population of the planet, especially along the great river valleys of Asia and along the coast, for instance, of the United States, we tend to migrate toward the coasts.” Patzert added, “so there is just more infrastructure. There are more people.  There is more damage.”

An example is the recent flooding in neighborhoods near dams and levees in the Houston, Texas from Hurricane Harvey. 

“It is a symptom of the way that we have not been able to control development and to control where and how developers build,” said Kian Goh, assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Architects and urban planners said many cities in potentially flood-prone areas should rethink how they are built and their relationship with water.

“Many urban designers have acknowledged that leaving out natural systems is actually a big problem and the reasons why these cities are flooding is because we have taken away wetlands; we have paved over rivers, we have largely ignored the interaction between physical and natural systems,” said Goh.

One approach to fight floods is what architects call “passive design.”   

“Passive approach, which is effectively what nature has done from the beginning, tries to minimize damage. Or as the Dutch have discovered, the water will be there, but how do you make it design in such a way that when it comes and goes, that recovery is not catastrophic,” said Rives Taylor, a long-time Houston resident and architect at Gensler, an architecture, design and planning firm.   

“So passive means in a lot of ways, less technology, and more kind of learning from nature,” said Taylor.

“For instance, we could design for more parks that for most of the year it would just be lovely park land that you can play with your kids or just visit, and in the once or twice a year events where it does flood, it is fine. It is a field, it will flood and it will come back,” said Goh.

Another design idea with multiple benefits is building a green roof, “which is good because it also cools the neighborhood, urban heat island, every day, but the roof could slow the water down,” said Taylor.

Another factor to consider in designing cities in flood-prone areas is transportation, including looking at cities with a “car culture,” such as Houston.

“For every Houston inhabitant, there are between 25 and 30 parking spaces,” Taylor continued. “That’s another urban design rethink. Do we need that much parking in this era of Uber and Lyft and autonomous vehicles?”

Goh said studies show that spending money on redesigning and planning a city will show long-term positive results in future rain events.  

Planners, however, said since local officials determine how a city is built, it will be up to them to decide how to rebuild after a devastating flood and where the money will come from.  
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More than 60 percent of the world’s nations are expected to meet some of their health targets in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The targets include reducing child and maternal deaths and deaths from malaria. However, fewer than five percent are projected to meet their targets on reducing the number of overweight children, tuberculosis infections and traffic deaths.

The news comes in a report published Wednesday by the British journal The Lancet that analyzed health-related Sustainable Development Goals in 188 countries. The 17 wide-ranging goals spearheaded by the U.N. focus on improving health and education, ending poverty, combating climate change, making cities more sustainable and protecting oceans and forests. They were adopted at a U.N. summit in 2015.

Singapore, Iceland and Sweden were the highest performing countries in the health-related goals. Somalia, Central African Republic and Afghanistan ranked the lowest. Nordic and other European countries plus Australia, Canada, Antigua and Barbuda rank in the top 20. The U.S. ranks 24th. 

The report, which was funded by the U.S. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the findings should help shape policies in order to address long-standing and emerging health challenges.

Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute of Health Metrics Evaluation and a professor of global health at the University of Washington, was the lead author.

Murray said in The Lancet, “China, Cambodia and many other middle and low-income nations deserve recognition for improving their citizens’ lives, as evidenced by impressive improvements in under-five mortality, neonatal mortality, vaccine coverage, maternal mortality, and malaria.”

The report was prepared ahead of the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly, beginning in New York later this month.

The authors pointed to policies that set the stage for substantial improvement. For instance, China expanded its health insurance scheme to rural populations and unemployed urban residents in the first years of this century and followed with further reforms in 2009-10; similarly, Cambodia’s health reforms from 1990 onwards have laid the groundwork toward national health planning.

Having access to health care seems to be key. Between the turn of the century and 2016, a number of countries made notable improvements in achieving universal health care. They included Cambodia, Rwanda, Equatorial Guinea, Laos, Turkey and China; however, some low-income countries, such as Lesotho and the Central African Republic, as well as high-income countries, such as the U.S., showed minimal gains.

Kazakhstan, Timor-Leste, Angola, Nigeria and Swaziland were projected to have the largest improvements on the overall health-related goals index by 2030. 

On the downside, only seven percent of countries were projected to meet the HIV/AIDS target, and no country was projected to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) target on tuberculosis.

To reach their conclusions, the study authors measured 37 of 50 health-related indicators from 1990 until 2016 for 188 countries. Then, on the basis of these past trends, they projected health-related progress to 2030. They said understanding both gains and gaps is essential for decision-makers as they aim to improve the health of their populations.
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