Because of its dismal fertility rate, Japan's population peaked in 2008; it has already shrunk by a million since then. Last year, for the first time, the Japanese bought more adult diapers than diapers for babies, and more than half the country was categorized as "depopulated marginal land." At the current fertility rate, by 2100 Japan's population will be less than half what it is now. [More]The mind boggles.
In 2010, there were 1,202,500 farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers and an estimated 757,900 agricultural workers were employed in the US. Animal breeders accounted for 11,500 of those workers with the rest categorized as miscellaneous agricultural workers. [More]That's a pretty reliable number, I think. But there are some issues with it as well.
In 1993 the Census Bureau stopped counting the number of Americans who live on farms. "Farm residence," it reported, "is no longer a reliable indication of whether or not someone is involved in farming. ... The cost of collecting and publishing statistics on farm residents and farmers in separate reports could no longer be justified." [More]
Farm Bureau’s national membership rose to 6,279,813 member families in 2010, marking 50 consecutive years of membership growth. State Farm Bureaus overall reported a total 2,149 more member families this year than in 2009. [More]Member families? A more accurate label would be "insurance customers who are required to become members of the FB". The fact that TN is the largest membership state should be a clue these numbers say little about actual farmers. Somehow this distinction is skirted when FB testifies before Congress, allowing the organization name to imply a vast base of voluntary dues-paying members.
We’re slowly getting a sense of how many TGBQLX people there are in America. I.e. how many homosexuals, lesbians and transgenders there are in the population. When I was a newbie gay, the mantra was 10 percent. We were “one in ten”. Seriously.Sullivan is right: why does it matter? We don't get subsidies because of block voting - we were heavily against Obama and he is our best hope to continue the handouts, especially the ethanol mandate. Clearly government money messes with your mind.
This immediately struck me at the time as a) obviously propaganda and b) ridiculously insecure. There was no way to know for sure, given the ubiquity of the closet back in the 1980s, but ten percent is a hell of a lot of people: 30 million. Why did I keep bumping into faces I recognized wherever I was in the US? If it were really ten percent, where were they all?
And why on earth does it matter if we make up 10 percent or 1 percent? A minority’s civil rights are not dependent on how many of them there are or how large a segment of society they form. Do we say: sorry, guys, you only form 2 percent, you don’t meet the minimal bar for becoming a minority? It’s not like running for the Knesset. It struck me then and now as part of a wearying tendency among some gays to think that every straight dude is just a few beers away from being gay (that’s not how it works); or a desperation to feel somehow more significant because of larger numbers.
Which simply make it all the more of a relief to see that Gallup has finally come up with a believable number of around 3.5 percent. (Check how gay your state is here.) DC is the super-gayest “state” – but that is a little distorted since DC is really the inner city of a larger metropolitan area and the gays tend to congregate there. But there’s also the attraction of politics for gay men. If you’ve ever spent much time among the staffers on the Hill, you’ll know what I mean: the US capitol makes the Vatican look straight. [More]
By training the appropriated isotope ratio-meter on the carbon dioxide emitted from burning a bit of honey, Weidmann and company are able to use isotopic fingerprints to compare samples from all over and determine their origins. The same process works for other foods, too, which means better regulation could be coming to the chocolate and olive oil industries as well.
Let this be a lesson to all would-be food counterfeiters. We built a laser for Mars, but instead, we’re aiming it at you. [More]I would also suspect the price of honey is about to jump as well.
Government is to drop the "willing-buyer, willing seller" principle with regard to land reform and restitution, President Jacob Zuma confirmed on Thursday.This method of land redistribution did not fare well in Zimbabwe, either.
"We must shorten the time it takes to finalise a claim. In this regard, government will now pursue the 'just and equitable' principle for compensation, as set out in the Constitution," he announced in his state-of-the-nation address on Thursday
Telling MPs that the land question in South Africa was a "highly emotive matter", Zuma said the willing-buyer, willing seller principle previously applied had forced the state to pay more for land. [More]
As of 2012, much of the seized land remains in large plots in the hands of Mugabe's cronies and produces little, but the small plots remaining in the hands of ordinary black farmers are now producing quite well. Their productivity does not match that of the previous large industrial farms that were displaced, but the profits are much more widely distributed and collectively these micro-entrepreneurs are one of the best performing sectors of the Zimbabwe economy.[24]Combined with the recent rise in minimum farm wage, this strikes me as utterly unsettling, and one reason many economists are pessimistic about the SA economy in 2013.
...Before 2000 land-owning farmers had large tracts of land and utilized economies of scale to raise capital, borrow money when necessary, and purchase modern mechanized farm equipment to increase productivity on their land. As the primary beneficiaries of the land reform were members of the Government and their families, despite the fact that most had no experience in running a farm, the drop in total farm output has been tremendous and has even produced starvation and famine, according to aid agencies.[28] Mostly crops for export have suffered severely, e.g. Zimbabwe was the world's 6th largest producers of Tobacco in 2001.[29] It produces nowadays less than 1/3 of the amount produced in 2000,[30] the lowest amount in 50 years.[31] Zimbabwe was once so rich in agricultural produce that it was dubbed the "bread basket" of Southern Africa, while it is now struggling to feed its own population.[32] About 45 percent of the population is now considered malnourished.
[More]
Of all the companies worried that the Affordable Care Act will be bad for business, H&R Block may lay claim to the most unique gripe.Given the intense tax-prep warfare being waged now, I don't see that being a stand-alone strategy got Block. Meanwhile, governors are analyzing the new laws to see how best to respond. While this could simply gaming the system, it represents how we can best implement admittedly imperfect rules to get better results.
The firm prepares millions of tax returns, one of every seven that gets filed to the Internal Revenue Service. The vast majority of its consumers receive a refund; all told, their 26.5 million customers received $50 billion in refunds in 2012.
The Affordable Care Act could change that: It charges a tax penalty to Americans who do not carry health insurance coverage. And that has H&R Block worried that some of those refunds will get eaten up – with a lot of angry customers pointing a finger at them.
“Eighty-five percent of our customers get a refund,” Kathy Pickering, who directs the H&R Block Tax Institute, says. “That refund could be offset by the penalty. And if that happens, they’re going to be understandably angry.”
Last year, the company started thinking about how to curtail those types of surprises; they did consumer research to understand how much people knew about the law, what they liked and what they didn’t.
Now, during this tax season, H&R Block is rolling out a Health Care Review product, a no-charge assessment of the subsidies and penalties they will likely face in 2014.
The health law’s subsidies for insurance coverage and penalties for not carrying a plan don’t start in 2014. But the income that will determine how big of a subsidy an individual or family will receive — that’s the income that’s being filed right now, in 2013. [More]
Wisconsin’s Scott Walker recently became the 13th governor to turn down federal money to expand Medicaid, opting instead to move Wisconsinites between 100% and 200% of the poverty line into the ACA health care marketplaces. [More of good two-sided coverage of this effort]This reminds me of all the work by seed companies, land investors, and farmers to manage climate change on their own microeconomic level even as they deny much of the evidence for it.
Nothing good has ever come of chemistry. From the toxic gases that slaughtered billions in World War I, II and III, to the toxic liquids pumped into our innocent, crying children daily under the pretence of “vaccination” and “public health”, we’re surrounded by chemicals. Chemicals are toxins. Chemicals are evil.Those wacky Aussies...
Sadly, no matter how vigilant you feel you are, it’s likely that chemicals have infiltrated your home. This is partly the government’s fault: with their engorged wallets bursting at the seams with cash “donations” from Big Chemistry, it’s no wonder politicians turn a blind eye to the blatant poisoning of their citizens. But you’re also to blame. Your ignorance of basic science is probably killing your family.
But luckily, with a few easy modifications and substitutions to your way of living, you can begin an effective physical (and spiritual) detox and be rid of 6 of the major sources of household chemicals.
Books
It’s no secret that chemists love to read, so it’s no surprise that many, if not all, books contain some truly deadly chemicals. You may not have been taught this in school, but paper (the primary component of books) is made out of cellulose, a substance so foreign to our bodies that our own digestive system refuses to break it down, much like chewing gum. Cellulose, in turn, is made of glucose, which has been implicated in numerous diseases, including (but surely not limited to) diabetes. Glucose is also the main fuel for cancer, which makes a whole lot of sense considering 99.5% of cancer patients read, on average, one to eight books prior to their diagnosis. Coincidence? There are no coincidences when dealing with chemicals.
Chemical-free replacement: Ancient scrolls. It’s safe to read any text printed before the discovery of the structure of cellulose, but make sure you wear gloves. [More shocking news]
In a letter to the university, Harkin wrote that concerns about restrictions on research led him to make the decision, despite the appeal of leaving his papers at ISU where he learned “the force of ideas” and was exposed to diverse opinions.I realize this type of investing attracts the umm, more speculative investors at first, and many of them tend to mingle politics and profits. But I'm getting a nervous feeling too much of what passes for legitimate business practice in the world of global farmland is only our version of LIBOR rules.
“But after a time, it became evident that the university would not grant the Institute the very freedoms that I learned to cherish at Iowa State,” wrote Harkin, a Democrat who is not seeking re-election in 2014.
The institute has been a source of political controversy since the Iowa Board of Regents, which governs the state’s universities, voted to create it in April 2011. Republicans have questioned the ethics of naming the institute after a sitting senator. The institute’s advisory board and regents leaders also battled over guidelines for agriculture research.
State Sen. Joe Bolkcom, D-Iowa City, on the Senate floor Wednesday, decried the circumstances that resulted in Harkin’s decision. Specifically citing Regents Craig Lang and Bruce Rastetter for “unnecessary meddling,” Bolkcom said he was disappointed in what had occurred and described it as a threat to academic freedom. [More]
Second, for all the attention given to America’s culture of guns, ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows. Since 1973, the GSS has been asking Americans whether they keep a gun in their home. In the 1970s, about half of the nation said yes; today only about one-third do. Driving the decline: a dramatic drop in ownership of pistols and shotguns, the very weapons most likely to be used in violent crimes. [More]
The annual duck hunting season in the United States is traditionally big business, but while bird numbers are rising faster than they have for decades, the number of hunters continues to fall. Far from being good news for ducks a new study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin shows how the loss of revenue from ‘duck stamps’ could result in millions of lost dollars for vital conservation work.Or deer.
“The last 15 years have brought hunting opportunities not seen since the turn of the last century,” said Dr Mark Vrtiska from Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. “The waterfowl population has passed 40 million six times since 1995, something only seen nine times since records began. These should be the glory days for duck hunting.”
However, in stark contrast, the annual sales of the ‘duck stamp’, the Federal licence needed to hunt, are declining. While over 2,100,000 stamps were sold annually in the 1970’s, between 2004 and 2008 this declined to 1,300,000. This fall is continuing with an annual decline of 36% in duck stamp sales. [More]
The fact is, hunter numbers peaked nationwide in the late 1970s and then started sliding. By the 1990s they were plunging across America as the percentage of hunters in the population declined.The decline of hunting could be a real game changer as fewer of us are familiar with firearms and probably more likely to be averse to ownership as a result. Nor is it a sport you "take up" like golf, I would think. It seems more like something you grow up with, as a rule.
Wisconsin dodged that 1990s plummet, insulated by a large rural population that embraces hunting and has easier access to hunting land. From 1991 through 2000, Wisconsin averaged 675,185 gun-deer licenses annually, up 2.6 percent from 658,257 during 1981-1990.
But as more urbanites built homes and planted lawns where cows, steers, deer and farmers once roamed, our hunting population was destined to drop. From 2001 through 2010, annual gun deer licenses averaged 642,466, down 5 percent from the '90s. [More]
The source of the horsemeat that ended up in beef factories in Ireland and France before being processed into food for British and Irish supermarkets is still unclear. ABP told us it had never knowingly imported horsemeat to its factory and was cooperating with investigators. It initially blamed its continental European suppliers and denied that any of the suspect material came from its own factory in Poland, pointing the finger at other Polish suppliers. Tests on meat from five Polish abattoirs identified from paper records as part of the ABP supply chain came back negative, however, and official Polish veterinary staff suggested the British and Irish look closer to home.Of course, we're not so much a ground beef exporter as higher level cuts, but still, the marketing campaigns almost write themselves:
The trail moved rapidly through the week from Poland, back to a cold store for frozen meat in Newry, Northern Ireland, called Freeza Meats, where a large consignment, already quarantined and removed from the food chain by the authorities for irregularities, was found to contain 80% horsemeat.
A spokesman for Freeza Meats' owners told us they had refused to buy the meat because they were suspicious of its state and the accuracy of its labelling with Polish healthmarks, and were merely holding it in store as a "goodwill" gesture for the company that had sent it to them, McAdam Foods.
ABP acknowledged that it had on occasion bought Polish meat "in good faith" for the factory that made the dodgy burgers for Tesco, Burger King and other retailers, from McAdam Foods. But ABP and McAdam could not agree what had been bought when. McAdam in turn passed the blame for the horsemeat to one of its suppliers, saying it had sourced the 80% horse consignment which ended up in Freeza Meats from a Hull-based company called Flexi Foods, which in turn has operations in Poland.
Neither McAdam nor Flexi Foods were answering their phones when the Guardian made repeated attempts to contact them. The French manufacturer Comigel did not respond to requests for comment.
With the next vast round of new tests due in next week, few expect the horse meat scandal to end here. [More]
Rural U.S. lawmakers with ties to the cattle industry and economically-strapped horse breeding registries have been pushing to reopen horse slaughterhouses since the last three plants shut down in 2007 (two in Texas, one in Illinois).The above source is mildly slanted, IMHO, to be sure, but I'm sure legislators and the equine industry trying to solve this problem were just thrilled to see this blunder across the pond. Great timing, you bozos!
On Tuesday, February 5, 2013, they're poised to try again in Oklahoma when a new bill sponsored by state Senator Mark Allen (SB375) is scheduled for a second reading in the state's Agriculture and Rural Development Committee. Allen's bill would overturn Oklahoma's existing 1963 ban on selling and producing horsemeat.
Representative Skye McNiel is also pushing to overturn the ban with another bill, HB1999.
What's behind it are 140,000-150,000 U.S. horses that are now being slaughtered in Canada and Mexico for the EU and Japan plus about 45,000 mustangs unwisely removed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from public lands and warehoused at taxpayer expense, many in long-term holding pens in Oklahoma.
Quite a few people in the meat trade are pushing to weaken laws that would allow them to legally buy and sell these protected wild horses at a large profit to slaughter plants. (In fact, they've been doing this illegally for some time, as revealed in the National Journal article, "Is the U.S. Government Complicit in the Killing of Over 1,000 Wild Horses?" as well as in an investigation reported on in The Desert Independent).
They also want to slaughter horses disposed of by racetracks, rodeos, horse breeders and owners struggling in the recession -- a surplus market that has made the actual raising of horses as meat animals (the way cattle are) completely unnecessary in the U.S. for decades.
Sen. Allen's and Rep. McNiel's bills are trying to harness that business for their home state, which ranks fourth in the nation in horse ownership per capita and bills itself as the "horse show capital of the U.S."
It also happens to have several struggling racetracks as well as a large cattle industry--same as in Ireland and the UK. They don't raise horses for meat over there, either. [More]
The fight between the Post Office and Congress is a very peculiar one. Normally, when the government owns some incredibly profligate business, it’s Congress which tries to impose efficiency gains and fiscal discipline, while the business insists that all of its spending is absolutely necessary and that it has already cut to the bone. In this case, however, the roles are reversed: the Post Office wants to change, and it’s Congress which is stopping it from doing so.This action could also attract some unwelcome attention to the rural/urban divide, both cuturally and economically. With less access to broadband, I expect strong arguments for continued mail delivery in the country will emerge from rural state Senators.
The latest move from the Post Office is a bold one: to abolish Saturday delivery unilaterally, starting August 1. This is a bit like Citicorp announcing that it was merging with Travelers: it’s illegal, but that’s not going to stop them, and the clear expectation is that somehow Congress will make it legal, before or shortly after it happens in reality.
As Jesse Lichtenstein details in his amazing 10,000-word Esquire story about the Post Office, the organization does actually have a detailed plan for becoming fully self-reliant over the next few years. Abolishing Saturday delivery is just one small part of that plan; all of it, by law, requires Congressional buy-in. The plan may or may not be successful, but, as they say, plan beats no plan. The big problem is simple, but huge: Congress isn’t playing along, and instead is just making matters worse, unhelpfully micromanaging everything from postage rates to delivery schedules to health-care contributions.
That’s why I love the idea of the Post Office doing something that’s clearly illegal, putting the ball squarely in Congress’s court. The idea is both delicious and dangerous: go ahead an implement the plan whether Congress likes it or not. And then dare them to bring down the hammer, or simply capitulate to the inevitable. They might not like the latter option, but the former would surely be worse for all concerned. [More]
But the monopoly has become less lucrative and that's not going to change in the future. That's squeezed the budget, squeezed postal workers' compensation packages, and is now squeezing the quality of nationwide mail service. As a country, we need to ask ourselves whether providing subsidized mail delivery to low-density areas is really a key national priority. Without the monopoly/universal service obligation, it's not as if rural dwellers wouldn't be able to get mail, it's just that they might need to pay more in recognition of the fact that it's inconvenient to provide delivery services to low-density areas. Nostalgia-drenched Paul Harvey Super Bowl ads aside, it's not the case that rural Americans are unusually hard-pressed economically or are disproportionate contributors to the economy. They are, rather, the beneficiaries of numerous explicit and implicit subsidies, of which the Postal Service's universal service obligation is one. [More]While everyone in farm country is thrilled by the now-famous commercial, frankly it makes me uncomfortable. Not only was it cloyingly flattering to farmers, it was based on a way of life that is much less common, and mostly on smaller farms. Didn't see many pictures of CAFO's or 120' boom sprayers. Or my neighbors in Naples, FL on the golf course. The commercial looks like a lead-in to Big Ag subsidy pitch to me.
There is nothing wrong with being bearish on asset X, but permanently bearish makes no sense.Don’t be surprised if someone soon creates an ETF to track the verbiage expended by traders, investors, and the financial press about a bond bubble.In the trading pits and on fixed-income desks, there’s a general appreciation that bonds today, with their puny yields and vastly appreciated values, seem rich. The press and brokerage firms, having remembered how they (we) whiffed on calling the bubble in subprime and financial engineering, can’t help declaring that bonds at these levels are a ticking time bomb, so run—don’t walk—away!
But bond mania, and the attendant hand-wringing over it, could go on for a while. There’s a lot—institutionally, generationally, situationally—driving that seemingly indefatigable bull.
Look at the (above) chart from Birinyi & Associates, which shows how many cautionary, even alarmist, headlines have overlayed the run of the past six months, amid a record year for bond issuance and buying. [More]
An economic bubble (sometimes referred to as a speculative bubble, a market bubble, a price bubble, a financial bubble, a speculative mania or a balloon) is "trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values".[1][2][3] It could also be described as a trade in products or assets with inflated values.Well, that cleared that up!
While some economists deny that bubbles occur,[4][page needed] the cause of bubbles remains a challenge to those who are convinced that asset prices often deviate strongly from intrinsic values.
While many explanations have been suggested, it has been recently shown that bubbles appear even without uncertainty,[5] speculation,[6] or bounded rationality.[7] It has also been suggested that bubbles might ultimately be caused by processes of price coordination[8] or emerging social norms.[7]
Because it is often difficult to observe intrinsic values in real-life markets, bubbles are often conclusively identified only in retrospect, when a sudden drop in prices appears. Such a drop is known as a crash or a bubble burst. Both the boom and the burst phases of the bubble are examples of a positive feedback mechanism, in contrast to the negative feedback mechanism that determines the equilibrium price under normal market circumstances. Prices in an economic bubble can fluctuate erratically, and become impossible to predict from supply and demand alone. [More]
SLM, known as Sallie Mae, boosted its originations of non- government-guaranteed education loans to $1.2 billion in the first quarter, up from $940 million in the year-ago period, according to a statement yesterday. The Newark, Delaware-based company is forecasting $3.2 billion of originations in 2012.Certainly the hysteria is bubble-like. And it seems to me to have some justification.
While rejecting claims that a bubble is forming in the student-loan market, Lord said that the $200 billion in new loans taken out during the past two years was surprising.
“I confess to being a bit wide-eyed myself at the $200 billion number,” he said.
Less than $20 billion of that debt was private, or non- government guaranteed, he said. Sallie Mae is increasing private loan originations after legislation passed in 2010 cut companies out of the market for government-backed lending. [More]
As Business Insider noted in the summer of 2012, federal student loan debt is only part of the equation. According to a report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dated August 29, 2012, U.S. consumers have in excess of $150 billion in private student loans on their books. The report notes that the market for private student loans grew alongside investors' demand for asset-backed securities and between 2005 and 2007,Seriously, SLABS? For the most part I feel scant sympathy for investors who would buy a product with this name. Meanwhile, this reinforces my opinions of most in the financial community who will sell you anything if the pass-through fee works for them.
...the percentage of [private] loans to undergraduates made without school involvement or certification of need grew from 18% to over 31%...[as lenders] originated loans to borrowers with low credit scores...[making] private student loans riskier for consumers."The private loans were securitized and those doing the securitizing could realize a 5% profit upon the sale of student loan asset-backed securities (hilariously called 'SLABS') to investors. Of course, the SLABS effectively transferred the risk of default to the investors and as such, it made little difference to the originators of the loans or to those doing the securitizing whether the borrowers ever intended to repay the debt or not. All of this changed when the credit bubble burst of course and as the demand for asset-backed securities declined, so too did the amount of private student loan originations. [More]
The biggest difference between previous estimates and the final figures from OMB is crop insurance subsidies. While the sequestration statute exempts “prior legal obligations” of the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation from sequestration, OMB opts to exempt nearly all crop insurance subsidies from automatic cuts, reducing the total hit on the farm bill by at least $5 to 6 billion, and possibly more if crop insurance subsidy costs continue to climb.Even with Sen. Thad Cochran in a key position to help Southern interests, the move to an all-insurance type farm entitlement seems to gather momentum. Being protected from an increasingly likely sequestration certainly greases the skids, it seems to me.
This decision to call all future crop insurance obligations “prior” would appear to be a political decision, not a legal one. Indeed, based on personal communications over the course of many months with budget staffers, it appeared to us that the decision on crop insurance premium subsidies had gone the other way during earlier OMB technical reviews. Whether any further explanations will be provided by the Administration remains to be seen, though we tend to doubt anything more will be said or revealed. [More]
The new minimum wage comes into effect on March 1.
The job losses could spark a repeat of the violence in which police had to use rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse protesting farm workers blocking highways and torching vineyards and warehouses in the agricultural belt east of Cape Town.
Trade union federation COSATU said the job losses were expected but blamed them on commercial greed.
"This is just the backlash we expect from the reactionary farmers," regional COSATU leader Tony Ehrenreich said. "That is why we are saying government must pay them out and take the land to give it to farmers that are serious about farming." [More]
The 2010 United States federal budget spent $52.7 billion out of $3.55 trillion (1.5%) on foreign aid. $15.0 billion was military; $37.7 billion was economic aid (of which USAID received $14.1 billion).[1] [More]So, still less than farm bill costs. Next, who gets the money?
Israel is currently the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II. Although aid to Israel began in 1949 with a $100 million bank loan, large-scale U.S. assistance for Israel increased dramatically throughout the several Arab-Israeli wars in the 1960s and 1970s.Now let's look at the Hagel confirmation hearing.
A 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service, “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel,” characterizes the historical financial relationship, types of military spending and current trends.
Among the highlights of the report are:
[More]
- To date, the United States has provided Israel $115 billion in bilateral assistance. It is currently the second largest recipient of aid worldwide, with Afghanistan now first.
- The fiscal year 2013 budget request “includes $3.1 billion in Foreign Military Financing [FMF] for Israel and $15 million for refugee resettlement. Within the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s FY2013 budget request includes $99.8 million in joint U.S.-Israeli co-development for missile defense.”
Blake Freking, a musher who trains Siberian huskies on the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota, said he planned to compete in the Beargrease race in January. “With global warming, it’s hard to deny that there are some big changes going on right now,” he said. “We’re in it. It isn’t looking good.”During last year’s snow season, defined as July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012, Anchorage had 134.5 inches of snow, according to Jake Crouch, a climate scientist with the National Climatic Data Center. This season’s tally in Anchorage was 39.2 inches, through Wednesday. North of Fairbanks, another area where mushers train, snowpack is 21 percent of average.“This is a pretty big deal,” said Crouch, who is among the climate experts who attribute the conditions to global warming. He said climate change had resulted in warmer temperatures for Alaska over the last century.“One of the things we’re seeing with climate change is that the high latitudes are experiencing the brunt of it,” he said. “They’re very vulnerable.”Mushing in Alaska originated with Native American settlers and pioneers who traversed the chilly landmass using dog sleds out of necessity. Canine-powered transit was a practical option for transporting fur, medicine, freight, mail and passengers in the snow. Even as airplane travel diverted much from mushers’ daily business, the culture endured along with the Iditarod trail, which stretches about 1,000 miles from Anchorage to Nome.“It definitely has us concerned,” Erin McLarnon, a musher and spokeswoman for the Iditarod, said of the long-term effects of the weather. She is among the mushers breeding dogs with thinner coats, more suitable for warmer weather. [More]
