Oregon's Wolves Are Back
Hot on the heels of the news that Washington is once again home to wolves, the Oregonian today reports that biologists have confirmed wolf packs in Oregon.
...Oregon's first reproducing pack of wild wolves since the predators were exterminated from the state decades ago.
State biologist Russ Morgan and another biologist heard the howls of at least two adult wolves and two pups in the predawn hours Friday in northern Union County, north of La Grande, Morgan said Monday. The biologists themselves were howling under a bright moon, trying to produce an audible response from wolves. That's a common method of surveying for the animals.
For a while we've known that individual wolves have made their way back into Oregon, but now this is sign of an actual resident population. There's every reason to believe that wolves will flourish here:
The biologists heard the Oregon wolf pack on the edge of the 177,000-acre Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness, part of the Umatilla National Forest. It is rugged, remote and thickly forested, with plenty of potential prey for the wolves, Morgan said.
This is great news for Washington too because the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness overlaps state boundaries in the sparsely populated corners of southeast Washington and northeast Oregon (in fact, about two-thirds of that protected wilderness is in Washington). If you haven't spent any time in northeast Oregon, it's difficult to convey how rugged and wild it is. There's the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest (with its Eagle Cap Wilderness), the Hell's Canyon National Recreation Area (with its Hell's Canyon Wilderness), and many, many miles of scrub and rangeland.
Yet Another Greenhouse Gas
Time to head back into my pillow fort:
Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) can be called the missing greenhouse gas: It is a synthetic chemical produced in industrial quantities; it is not included in the Kyoto basket of greenhouse gases or in national reporting under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); and there are no observations documenting its atmospheric abundance...With 2008 production equivalent to 67 million metric tons of CO2, NF3 has a potential greenhouse impact larger than that of the industrialized nations' emissions of PFCs or SF6, or even that of the world's largest coal-fired power plants.
Yoiks. So there's at least one greenhouse gas that's NOT recognized by international global warming protocols, but IS a significant climate concern. Great. Just great. Of course, the gas is used in tiny quantities -- but molecule-for-molecule, NF3 is about 17,000 times as potent as CO2 in warming up the atmosphere.
Still, there's a pretty straightforward solution here: just add nitrogen trifluoride to the list of climate-warming pollutants that are covered under any global warming regulatory system or GHG tax. (Are you listening, WCI? How 'bout you, British Columbia?)
[Hat tip to Brandon.]
