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Wisconsin’s catastrophic flooding is a glimpse of the Midwest’s drenched future

An entire summer’s worth of rain has fallen across a broad swath of the Midwest in recent days. The resulting record floods have wrecked homes and altered the paths of rivers, in one case destroying a waterfall in Minnesota. The worst-affected region, southwest Wisconsin, has received more than 20 inches of rain in 15 days– more than it usually gets in six months.

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin declared a statewide emergency last week, mobilizing the Wisconsin National Guard to assist flood victims if necessary. The Kickapoo River in southwest Wisconsin rose to record levels — as high as six feet above the previous high water mark — producing damage that local emergency management officials described as “breathtaking.”

In the tiny Wisconsin town of Gays Mills, this is the third catastrophic flood in 10 years. After floods a decade ago, about a quarter of the residents left, and the town was partially rebuilt on higher ground. But this time around is even worse — with almost every home in the town damaged.

Is there a connection to climate change? Well, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, and the region’s main moisture source — the Gulf of Mexico — has reached record-warm levels in recent years, helping to spur an increase in precipitation intensity. Since the 1950s, the amount of rain falling in the heaviest storms has increased by 37 percent in the Midwest.

But there’s more to it than that. Decades of development have also paved over land that used to soak up rainwater. Earlier this year, Wisconsin took controversial steps to loosen restrictions on lakeside development.

Madison, home to the state’s flagship university, has seen the brunt of the flooding so far. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s center that specializes in studying lakes is itself flooded. “This is what climate change looks like,” Adam Hinterthuer, the center’s spokesperson, wrote in a blog post. On Twitter, the center posted maps of recent floods alongside projections for the worst expected floods later this century. They matched remarkably well.

For Eric Booth, a climate scientist at the university, the whole thing is almost too much to comprehend. His research project on small stream water temperatures was washed away by the flooding. “The scale of what is happening is absolutely unbelievable to witness,” Booth wrote in an email. Booth’s own calculations showed that rainfall over the past 30 days is an approximately 1-in-1,000 year occurrence, assuming a stable climate. (That, obviously, isn’t a good assumption anymore.)

Flooding in the Madison area has boosted lake levels to all-time highs, reigniting a more than 150-year dispute between boaters (who like lake levels high to avoid damage to their boats), conservationists (who want to avoid damage to sensitive shoreline ecosystems and wetlands), and property owners downstream (whose land gets flooded when water is released too quickly). That conflict has creeped into Madison’s mayoral election, where candidates have called for a new lake management plan in the face of more frequent extreme storms.

By late this century, on a business-as-usual path, those storms could nearly double in frequency, according to University of Wisconsin research. As an editorial earlier this summer in the Des Moines Register said, “Climate change never feels more real than when you’re dragging wet carpet from a flooded basement.”

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Wisconsin’s catastrophic flooding is a glimpse of the Midwest’s drenched future

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What Poverty Does to Kids’ Brains

Mother Jones

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A new study suggests that growing up poor affects brain development at an early age, and those brain changes can have huge effects on academic achievement.

Researchers from Duke University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison tracked nearly 400 children and young adults in a longitudinal study over the course of six years, between 2001 and 2007. Every two years, the researchers met with the participants, whose socioeconomic backgrounds ranged from far below the poverty line to far above it.

At each meeting, the participants would undergo a brain scan, which measured the amount of gray matter in parts of the brain that are key to academic achievement: the frontal lobe (which helps with executive functioning and emotion regulation), the temporal lobe (memory and language comprehension) and the hippocampus (long-term memory). The participants also took tests designed to evaluate skills necessary to perform well academically, like visual processing, math computation, visual motor coordination, concept formation, and more.

The results, published today in JAMA Pediatrics, were striking: Kids who came from families below the poverty line exhibited “systematic structural differences” in their brains, with 7-10 percent less gray matter in the three tested areas than those children living above the poverty line. The participants below the poverty line also scored significantly lower on the academic achievement tests; the researchers estimate that 15 to 20 percent of this difference can be attributed to the differences in brain development.

The developmental changes likely come from the “environmental circumstances of poverty,” says Seth Pollak, a study co-author. He describes the problem as two-pronged: There’s a lack of things that help stimulate brain growth, like people to read to you, crayons and books, a bed in which to get good sleep. And there’s too much of the stuff that delays it: stress and crowding, not knowing where the next meal is coming from, unstable housing situations, and exposure to violence. “All these things together affecting the central nervous system,” says Pollak.

One oddly hopeful takeaway is that brain development only seemed to correlate with poverty levels for the poorest kids: There wasn’t a difference in brain development between lower-middle class kids and affluent kids. This suggests that some gains could be made by developing programs for very young children in poverty that give them some of the same cognitive stimulation and stability as their middle-class peers, including preschool and parenting programs.

This isn’t the first research to show that poverty adversely affects brain development of children. Perhaps the most well-known study, by researchers at Rice University, found that by age three, poor children hear roughly 30 million less words than their more privileged counterparts. And there’s also research showing the effects of poverty on the achievement gap: Children growing up in poor families, even when allowed to go to better schools, tend to perform worse than their middle class peers.

But the study released today was the first to connect these findings. “It was stunning to see the circle closed—the delay in brain growth explains the achievement deficit in poor children,” says Pollak. Poverty, he notes, isn’t just a social problem—it’s a biomedical one.

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What Poverty Does to Kids’ Brains

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Can Tiny Houses Help Fix Homelessness?

Mother Jones

More Coverage of Homelessness


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Heartbreaking Photos and Tragic Tales of San Francisco’s Homeless


How Does a City Count Its Homeless? I Tagged Along to Find Out


This Massive Project Is Great News for Homeless Vets in Los Angeles


Here’s What It’s Like to Be a Homeless Techie in Silicon Valley


Hanging Out With the Tech Have-Nots at a Silicon Valley Shantytown

In November 2013, June lived in a makeshift encampment of tarps and cardboard, squeezed between a road and a chain link fence in West Oakland, California. “It can happen to anybody, man,” he says of life on the street. “Up today, down tomorrow. That’s the way it goes.”

Come last winter, June upgraded from his ramshackle encampment to a pink wooden house with a tan door and shiny roof. The new house, which is just long enough for him to lie down inside, cost only $30 to build.

It’s one of about 25 colorful homes artist Greg Kloehn has fashioned from the massive amounts of garbage dumped illegally in Oakland—a city where a minimum wage worker would have to put in 150-hour weeks to afford a fair market, two-bedroom apartment. He uses whatever materials he happens upon—pallets, bed boards, sheets of plastic, dryer doors. One home has an umbrella and grill propped on its miniature front porch. Wheels accommodate the “nomadic life” of people living on the street, who relocate frequently to avoid cops and city cleanup crews. As Kloehn jokes, he builds “illegal homes out of illegal garbage.”

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Can Tiny Houses Help Fix Homelessness?

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Climate adaptation goes mainstream in Wisconsin

Climate adaptation goes mainstream in Wisconsin

Federal agencies released their plans for adapting to climate change in February. The European Commission approved its adaptation strategy in April. New York unveiled a $19.5 billion plan in June, prompted by Hurricane Sandy to join the likes of London, Chicago, and Quito, Ecuador.

But climate adaptation isn’t just for the big players. Today, Dane County, Wis., which has a population of 500,000, will propose a budget that includes nearly $1 million worth of climate-adaptation spending — aimed at everything from new storm water infrastructure to sand bags and other emergency equipment.

Richard Hurd

A summer storm over Wisconsin’s capital, Madison, which is in Dane County.

“We’re looking at warmer and wetter weather and preparing for the potential challenges,” Dane County Executive Joe Parisi told The Cap Times:

Dane County may have already experienced what a warmer Wisconsin could look like. Last year saw a summer drought, a winter of few but major snow events, a quick spring meltdown and then summer thunderstorms that brought flooding.

UW-Madison climate scientists are now predicting that by 2050, statewide annual average temperatures are likely to warm by 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, with three or more weeks per summer where temperatures exceed 90 degrees.

The state is also likely to see a trend toward more precipitation overall continue, with the most probable increases in winter, spring and fall. Soil erosion rates could double by 2050 from 1990 levels. …

In addition to replacing traditional County Sheriff cruisers with 4-wheel drive SUVs, the county is looking at converting Parks Department vehicles to “blizzard busters” by adding tractor-treads. They also plan to connect parks rangers with public safety officials via an improved radio system.

“Last year we had motorists stranded on the road we couldn’t reach,” said Parisi.

Way to take climate change in your stride, Dane County.


Source
Dane County budget to address climate change, The Cap Times

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Climate adaptation goes mainstream in Wisconsin

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