I'm more worried about the cancer leaking into it from Vermont Yankee, but I suppose that's a different post...
SUNDERLAND — The dream seemed tantalizingly within reach: restoring majestic Atlantic salmon to the Connecticut River, where dams had blocked the waterway so completely the overfished population became extinct.
Let me get a Cash WinFall while I'm there.
Now, almost 50 years and more than $25 million later, the federal government is giving up on restocking the river.
The coveted sport fish follow an intricate, circuitous life journey along the 407-mile long Connecticut. Born in tributaries, they swim to the ocean off Greenland before returning to that same tributary to spawn the next generation. Many of their most daunting foes — dams — are now equipped with fish ladders and lifts, allowing the easiest passage in centuries for the salmon.
But the fish confront a new nemesis: the changing ocean. So few Connecticut salmon today are surviving their arduous sea journey — a tenfold decline since the early 1990s — federal officials say they can no longer justify spending money to save them. This year, only 54 fish returned to the Connecticut River.
No one knows exactly why, although theories abound, including the consequences of climate change....
Pffft.
You know, I'm not going to worry about it anymore.
New England rivers from northern Maine to Connecticut once teemed with the fish, which became such a regional icon that one was ceremoniously delivered to the US president each year. Pursuit of the wily fish became a quintessential New England sport: salmon clubs proliferated in Maine, and tales of their power at the end of fishing lines were part of family lore. Today, most people know of Atlantic salmon from restaurant menus, but those fish spend their lives in pens, not battling nature to survive....
The end of the federal government’s salmon restoration in the Connecticut River has not sparked enormous outcry from the public: The fish had been gone for so long, there weren’t even great-grandparents who remembered them.
No wonder I never caught anything out of the river.
Some argued money should be freed up for other species.
For a long time, the quest to restore salmon to the Connecticut “was the emperor’s new clothes,” said Karl Meyer, a Greenfield environmental journalist who has criticized the program because he felt the money could be better used for other seagoing river fish. “Now, they are talking about the other species, and that’s good.”
County local gives him column space sometimes.
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Related: Lightning strike destroys Rowe school
"Thousands of fish die as Midwest rivers and streams heat up" Associated Press August 06, 2012
LINCOLN, Neb. — Thousands of fish are dying in the Midwest as the hot, dry summer dries up rivers and causes water temperatures to climb in some spots to nearly 100 degrees....
I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky up h're.
So many fish died in one Illinois lake that the carcasses clogged an intake screen near a power plant, lowering water levels to the point that the station had to shut down one of its generators....
The fish are victims of one of the driest and warmest summers in history. The federal Drought Monitor shows nearly two-thirds of the lower 48 states are experiencing some form of drought, and the Department of Agriculture has declared more than half of the nation’s counties — nearly 1,600 in 32 states — as natural disaster areas. More than 3,000 heat records were broken last month....
Look, I will admit we may be going through a warming cycle at this time. I don't deny climate change because it is always changing; what I deny is the acce$$ to your wallet by the very $ame people who plan to benefit from the carbon-trading and tax scams. I'm thinking guys like Al Gore and all the Wall Street firms that will be underwriting a market literally created out of air (yeah, know, they do it all the time).
And about those smart meters, Al....
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Also see: At state and county fairs, drought casts pall over deep-fried fun
"Many Oklahomans forced to leave their homes because of raging wildfires were allowed to return Sunday, despite some fires continuing to burn.... possible arson."
