Is this the way you wake up?
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Good Morning! Your own ideas on any subject are welcome here.

Four years after tsunami, Japanese fisherman reunites with his boat in B.C.

After he clambered aboard, Mr. Sasaki sat in the bow, buried his face in his hands and wept. It had been a long time since he’d last seen the small open boat, which drifted across the Pacific, along with more than one million tonnes of debris, after the tsunami struck Japan on March 11, 2011, killing more than 15,000 people.

Mr. Sasaki’s boat was salvaged near Klemtu, on the central B.C. coast 200 kilometres south of Prince Rupert, in 2013. The barnacles were scraped off, and it was named the Japanese Drifter and put into service by the Spirit Bear Lodge, which uses it to take tourists looking for the area’s famed spirit bears.
[…]
She said that in addition to seeing his boat again, Mr. Sasaki was lucky enough to see a spirit bear, a black bear with white fur.

For more on the Spirt Bear and the Great Bear Rainforest check out David Suzuki's The Nature of Things.

Fukushima Update is a site that promises to remain neutral with neither a pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear focus.

Most of the information from Japan on this disaster comes from its nuclear industry TEPCO which supplies the UN with its data. The damaged reactors at Fukushima have been leaking into the ocean on and off for 4 years. Yet studies of the Pacific Coast of North America are proving that there is very little radiation to worry about on our side of the ocean.

Scientific information on our side of the Pacific ocean comes from a collaboration between US and Canadian researchers under the acronym InFORM. The Canadian study at University of Victoria is financed by the Canadian government, the nuclear industry and other industries with economic concerns, like seafood, fishing, ship-building, etc.

How Worried Should We Be About Nuclear Fallout from Fukushima?

By June 2013, the "Fukushima signal," as it is known, had reached the Canadian continental shelf. By February of this year, the signal had increased to a value of 2 *Becquerels (Bq) per cubic meter throughout the upper 150 meters (500 feet) of the water column. The study's authors said that the increase resulted in "an overall doubling of the fallout background from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests."

Global cesium-137 levels, pre-Fukushima. (Image: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

While "doubling of the fallout background" may sound somewhat ominous, 2 Bq per cubic meter is a tiny amount of radiation.

From my layperson’s interpretation, I doubt that there’s “nothing to worry about.” From the article above, if one is worried about the long term damage to the environment and human health from the Fukushima disaster, one is likely suffering from “fear of radiation” because people have “radiophobia - the fear that any level of ionizing radiation is dangerous.” Another talking point is that “radiation is everywhere, so get used to it.” But what the experts fail to emphasize is that radiation is cumulative in the human body and also that the health problems from exposure do not always show up right away. I am just a little skeptical about the reports that 4 years of leaking into the ocean have had little negative effect on our coasts. We are not getting the full story on this.

[*The becquerel (symbol Bq) (pronounced: /ˈbɛkərɛl/ BEK-ə-rel) is the SI derived unit of radioactivity. One Bq is defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second.]

Greenpeace releases confidential IAEA Fukushima-Daiichi accident report

[Greenpeace doesn't agree with the June 2015 IAEA report. This their initial analysis:]
Yukiya Amano, the IAEA Director General says the report is 'an authoritative, factual and balanced assessment, addressing the causes and consequences of the accident, as well as lessons learned.'
Yet our experts find it to be full of inaccuracies, uncertainties, and that it fails to address several highly important issues. We've sent our findings to Mr Amano.
Here are some examples.
- The IAEA admits that radiation monitoring was not working properly in the days immediately after the Fukushima disaster began.
- Despite this uncertainty, the report downplays the health risks to the disaster's many victims.
- This means that the estimates of the levels of radiation the people of Fukushima were exposed to cannot be trusted.
- The IAEA's analysis of the new safety regulations in Japan are superficial at best, and they offer no evidence in the report that the Japanese nuclear industry is operating to the global highest standards of nuclear safety.

The reality is that there are major flaws in nuclear regulation in Japan with seismic and other threats to nuclear plants safety ignored or underestimated.
The report dismisses the environmental impact of the disaster on animal life despite scientific investigations finding measurable effects on the region's fauna.
The report fails to acknowledge the uncertainties that still surround the causes of the disaster. Much of the critical systems inside the reactors that melted down have not yet been inspected.

Coastal Temperate Rainforests

We have two seasons on the west coast, wet and dry but this year we had a very scant wet season. I can't find the figure for the rainfall so far this year. The conditions are all around us though. Recently we visited Mystic Vale, a sliver of a rainforest near the University of Victoria. I had great memories of it from a visit at the end of May 2014 around the end of the rainy season, when the Hobbs Creek was running right through the ravine, the air was misty and the forest undergrowth was lush and green with native plants but how things changed.

The “sensitive eco-system” of Mystic Vale features over 75 native plant and wildlife species including oceanspray, snowberry, Indian plum and sword fern. In fact, some species, such as rattlesnake plantain, stink currant and vanilla-leaf, are seldom found anywhere else around Victoria. The oldest verified trees in Mystic Vale are approximately 100 to 150 years old but some trees are likely between 350 to 500 years old.

A wide-array of mammals inhabit the ravine including black-tailed deer, raccoons, eastern cottontail rabbits and bats. River otter tracks have been spotted along the creek bed and there was a rare cougar sighting in 2005. Birds found in Mystic Vale include the bald eagle, Cooper’s hawk, the great horned owl and five species of woodpeckers. Wiki

A rainforest is a mystic place in the best of times, it’s bursting with life. This year by May we were in a drought. I didn't know how badly the drought had damaged Mystic Vale when I invited my son to come for a hike there. When we arrived we were somewhat disappointed. The canopy was tall and beautiful, alive with bird song and we saw a Pileated Woodpecker quite close up. We expected to see a seasonal difference but the forest in late August looked more like late October, it was tinder dry. ivy was growing up most of the trees and it had sucked the forest undergrowth dry, in fact in many places all there was only ivy. Hobb's Creek and the ponds that were restored as recently as 2011 were mostly dried up, with only a small wet section here and there.

May 2014 First Graders on a trek show just how tall the forest is. I only capture half length of those trees.

This is the lush moss, May 2014, about 7 months before the drought began.

This is moss August 2015 and when it's dry it becomes tinder for forest fires.

Since that August visit to Mystic Vale, the Pacific North West Coast has mercifully received lots of rain.

Will This Be Remembered as The Summer North Americans Woke Up to Climate Change?

“It was a surreal experience,” says Lertzman, who teaches at the University of San Francisco and Victoria’s Royal Roads University. “We’re all driving along and it’s so smoky and it’s terrifying. Yet we’re all doing our summer vacation thing. I couldn’t help but wonder: what is going on, how are people feeling and talking about this?”

It’s really the question of the hour. Catastrophic wildfires and droughts have engulfed much of the continent, with thousands displaced from their homes; air quality alerts confine many of the lucky remainder behind locked doors (with exercise minimized and fresh-air intakes closed).

Firefighters have been summoned from around the world to battle the unprecedented fires, which are undoubtedly exacerbated by climate change. Yet the seemingly reasonable assumption that witnessing such horrific natural disasters may increase support for action on climate change is vastly overestimated, Lertzman tells DeSmog Canada.

When the rain storms came this week, 400,000 people were left without power. I imagine that's when Climate Change literally hits home - when we are shut off from our electricity and the cell towers go out.

“There’s real opportunity there because it can force us to really think creatively and critically about how we live and how we want to live and what kind of future we want to have,” Lertzman concludes.