Daily Score Blog

There is new evidence that the world's glaciers are melting, reported today in the Denver Post. A glacier expert at the University of Colorado calculated that the total volume of the world's glaciers has declined by a tenth over the past 40 years. And the melting has been even more severe in Alaska, the Andes, and the Alps. To see some arresting imagery of the vanishing glaciers in Alaska, see our recent post on the subject.

Melting glaciers are not news to long-time mountain climbers. Lou Whittaker, for instance, Cascadian climber extraordinaire who runs Rainier Mountaineering, Inc., believes that changing climate conditions are altering the glaciers on Mount Rainier, a peak he's bagged more than 250 times. The Denver Post article taps several Colorado-based climbers who agree.

In truth, glacial retreats happen for a variety of reasons, not all of them related to human-induced climate change. But global warming almost certainly exacerbates the trend. In the Northwest, nearly fifty scientists recently issued a consensus statement, pointing out that in a quarter century, a quarter of the Cascade's snowpack will be gone.

Here's a clear example in which an ounce of prevention would have been worth at least a pound of cure:  The Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the facility in central Washington that, for four decades, produced plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal.

The site is severely contaminated, and cleanup costs are absurdly expensive, somewhere in the range of $50 to $60 billion through 2035.  Now, as the Tri-City Herald notes, new liabilities are piling up, this time to compensate workers from Hanford and other federal nuclear sites whose health has suffered as a result of their on-the-job exposures.  The Department of Labor has just taken over one such compensation program, after it languished in the hands of the Energy Department.  Through the end of 2004, a similar Labor Department compensation program for nuclear workers had racked up outlays of about US$ one billion.

All of this, obviously, is being paid for by federal taxpayers, adding expenses to an already out-of-balance federal buget.  It all makes me wish that someone had been taking precautions earlier on.  That way, my kids wouldn't still be paying in their middle age for toxic blunders that were made before their father was born.

Oregon is usually the Cascadian state best known for its political "firsts." But with today's inauguration of Christine Gregoire as governor and with two female US Senators in office, Washington marked its own "first" as the first US state to have women holding the three top posts in state government.

It's not surprising that Washington was the first to reach this milestone. For the past decade, the state has boasted the highest percentage of female legislators in the US, and it currently has a female majority on a state Supreme Court (five out of nine), and women serving as both the House and Senate Majority Leaders. Washington's share of women in the state legislature-33 percent-far surpasses the share in the federal legislature (16 percent).

The participation of women in government is a good indicator of the overall standing of women: countries that have a high percentage of women in government-like Sweden and the Netherlands-also tend to rank high in the UN's Human Development Index (pdf, women-in-government rankings on page 96).

Sweden and the Netherlands--where Sightline draws its goal for the Cascadia Scorecard population indicator, another proxy for the well-being of women overall--enjoy equality not only in government representation, but also in the workplace, education, and in access to health care. Washington's milestone is one sign of the region moving closer to this level of equality for all of its residents.

P.S./Update: Among Oregon's firsts were the first secret ballot, first to make beaches public property, and the first bottle bill, as referenced here and here.

There's a great article on wolves in today's Seattle Times. The article describes the ecological changes in Yellowstone National Park that an Oregon State University researcher, Bill Ripple, has been documenting. Ripple's findings show that wolves have a, uh, ripple effect on their native ecosystems. Plants flourish, as do red foxes, beavers, and songbirds. Coyotes and elk fare less well. 

There are a couple of lessons we can draw. First, the return of the wolf to its native ecosystems means a return to a more natural state, a point we made in a post last week. Second, ecosystem dynamics are incredibly complex and we are only just beginning to understand the role that even a single species can play.

Wolves already inhabit two of Cascadia's four jurisdictions, British Columbia and Idaho. They'll likely soon be returning--if they have not already--to the more remote areas of Oregon and Washington. Let's hope Cascadians welcome them back as the agents of ecological restoration that they are.

According to this article yesterday in the Puget Sound Business Journal, timber cutting in Oregon and Washington's national forests was up by 50 percent in 2004, as compared to 2003. In 2005, cutting may be even more rapid. The article implies that increased cutting on public lands will also increase jobs in the forest sector. But that's not necessarily true.

Cutting in Washington's national forests declined dramatically in the wake of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan--and the overall timber harvest declined too, though less precipitously. But according to a Washington Employment Security Department report, from 1992 to 1998, "employment has been relatively stable in forestry services" ("forestry services" is the largest sector of forestry). And, in fact, from 1981 to 1998, total forest sector employment actually increased by 2.6 percent, despite overall declines in logging.

Weirdly, the reverse can also be true. Just as less logging does not necessarily mean fewer jobs, so more logging does not necessarily mean more jobs. As this recent post on timber industry growth points out, because of new technology investments, more cutting has not brought many more jobs. What's more, in Oregon, as in Washington, the economic importance of the forest industry (and other resource extraction industries too) is waning.

All of the above to say that the old saw about increasing logging to create more jobs may be more myth than reality. But now may also be a good time to consider a new way to manage our public forest resources--one that's good for both workers (and the larger economy) and the environment.

The US government's diet guidelines are starting to catch up with reality. As I noted here, the official Food Guide Pyramid is disastrously wrong, misinforming people about what to eat. Well, the pyramid is about to get an overhaul, based on new diet guidelines just released, as the New York Times reports.

Of course, it would be simpler for the US Department of Agriculture simply to adopt the Healthy Eating Pyramid already introduced by Walter Willett of Harvard.