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Mother Jones
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After a remarkably quiet start, the US tornado season exploded into action over the weekend, as a battery of tornadoes in Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma killed 16 people. The Arkansas towns of Mayflower and Vilona were particularly devastated. Based on preliminary assessments, some of the twisters may have reached EF-3 or stronger on the Enhanced Fujita scale, meaning that they had wind gusts of more than 136 miles per hour.
It all amounts to quite the burst of weather whiplash. Just days ago, after all, USA Today could be found calling 2014 the “safest start to tornado season in a century.” April 2014 was certainly looking nothing like April 2011, which featured a staggering 753 tornadoes in the United States, a new all-time record. So what’s up with this sharp variation in the behavior of tornadoes, these extraordinarily powerful storms that afflict the US more than any other part of the world? And could global warming have something to do with the matter?
Until pretty recently, scientists really felt that they couldn’t say much about that question. “The issue of global warming and severe thunderstorms which often result in tornadoes has been an outstanding challenge for the scientific community,” explains Noah Diffenbaugh, an Earth scientist at Stanford University who has focused on the question. For instance, a recent consensus report on extreme storms and climate change, published early last year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, found that there was “little confidence” of any trend in tornado occurrence, and also concluded that there were no clear changes in the environments in which these storms form.
In recent months, though, this consensus—that we really don’t know what’s happening with global warming and tornadoes—has been challenged by some interesting new research. To understand why, it helps to first grasp some basics on how tornadoes form, a crucial first step toward determining whether global warming may change them.
Tornadoes emerge in some, but not all, severe thunderstorms, powerful explosions of atmospheric energy that also frequently feature lightning, hail, strong winds, and intense rainfall. Scientific research has determined that while a variety of environmental and atmospheric conditions support severe thunderstorm development, two in particular are crucial. The first is that there have to be high levels of so-called “convective available potential energy,” or CAPE, which denotes the instability of the atmosphere, and thus how friendly it is to thunderstorm updrafts. The second condition is that there must be strong wind shear, defined as the difference in speed or direction of winds as one ascends from the surface higher into the atmosphere.
Based on this knowledge, researchers have turned to global climate models in order to predict how global warming could change the relationship between CAPE and shear in the the future. And for a long time, the two factors were basically expected to offset each other. Or as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tornado researcher Harold Brooks put it in a 2013 paper summarizing the consensus: “Climate model simulations suggest that CAPE will increase in the future and the wind shear will decrease.” So even though higher overall heat might lead to the potential for more explosive storms, the expected decrease in shear meant that potential might not get realized. In other words, it was basically looking like a wash.
The environments in which tornadoes form are changing, according to the latest research. NOAA/Wikimedia Commons
That conclusion fell into question late last year, though, with a paper by Diffenbaugh and two colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using a suite of the most state-of-the-art climate models, the researchers found, once again, that wind shear decreases under global warming. However, they also found that that didn’t really matter, because the number of days with both high CAPE and high shear nonetheless increased. “We find that in fact, at the monthly or seasonal scale, that decrease in shear does occur over the US,” Diffenbaugh says, “but it’s concentrated in these days with very low CAPE.” That means that the net number of days with high CAPE and high shear was still projected to increase in the future.
That means more favorable environments for severe thunderstorms in general, but what about the subset of those storms that produce tornadoes? For tornado occurrence, Diffenbaugh explains, wind shear very close to the surface appears to be particularly important. In their new modeling study, Diffenbaugh and his colleagues looked at this parameter too, and they found an “increase in the fraction of severe thunderstorm environments that have high CAPE and high low-level shear,” as Diffenbaugh puts it. As the authors wrote, this result is suggestive “of a possible increase in the number of days supportive of tornadic storms.”
The paper by Diffenbaugh and his colleagues represents “the first significant evidence that we might expect to see a change in tornadoes,” says NOAA’s Brooks.
Meanwhile, Brooks thinks he might have found a trend in a different area: actual tornado statistics.
In general, the scientific consensus has been that our tornado data just isn’t good enough to support the idea of any clear, historic trend in tornadic activity. But in his latest research, Brooks thinks he has detected a “pretty strong signal that there’s been an increase in the variability of tornado occurrence on a national scale.” What does that mean? Basically, an increase in erratic behavior: periods with little or no activity, followed by intense bursts of activity.
There’s been “a decrease over the last 40 years in the number of days per year with at least one F1 tornado occurring somewhere in the US,” says Brooks. “At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of days with at least 30 F1 tornadoes.”
As noted above, recent tornado behavior has certainly seemed pretty up and down. According to Brooks, in recent years we’ve seen records for the most tornadoes ever in a 12-month period, as well as for the fewest in a 12-month period. And Brooks says we are also seeing increasing variability in terms of when the tornado season actually starts. (Note: The relationship between Diffenbaugh’s research, and Brooks’ new finding, isn’t clear at this point.)
In summary, then, it would be very premature to say that scientists know precisely what will happen to tornadoes as global warming progresses. However, they have come up with some interesting new results, which point to potentially alarming changes. More generally, the upshot of this research is that tornadoes must change as a result of climate change, because the environments in which they form are changing.
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Mother Jones
I know there are more important things going on in the world, but I really had to stifle a giggle at the latest attempt to blame Jimmy Carter for every conceivable ill of the pre-Reagan world. Here is Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal today:
Jimmy Carter’s Costly Patent Mistake
Today’s patent mess can be traced to a miscalculation by Jimmy Carter, who thought granting more patents would help overcome economic stagnation. In 1979, his Domestic Policy Review on Industrial Innovation proposed a new Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which Congress created in 1982. Its first judge explained: “The court was formed for one need, to recover the value of the patent system as an incentive to industry.” The country got more patents—at what has turned out to be a huge cost. The number of patents has quadrupled, to more than 275,000 a year.
Jeebus. Legal scholars spent the entire decade of the 70s arguing about this. Under the old system, different appellate circuit issued different rulings on patents, and it was the business community that was mostly unhappy about this. Several commissions recommended plans for a more uniform and efficient system, including one drafted by Carter’s Department of Justice. It never went anywhere, but business leaders kept pressing, and Congress reintroduced court reform legislation in 1981, which was signed by Ronald Reagan a year later. It’s absurd to give Carter more than a footnote in this history.
However, Crovitz gets this part right:
The new Federal Circuit approved patents for software, which now account for most of the patents granted in the U.S.—and for most of the litigation….Until the court changed the rules, there hadn’t been patents for algorithms and software. Ideas alone aren’t supposed to be patentable. In a case last year involving medical tests, the U.S. Supreme Court observed that neither Archimedes nor Einstein could have patented their theories.
Actually, to give them their due, the new court held out against software patents for quite a while. Eventually, though, contradictions kept piling up, and in the mid-90s they essentially threw in the towel and approved the granting of pure software patents. This is hardly the whole story, though. The Supreme Court could have overruled them. The patent office could have fought back. The president could have offered new legislation. Congress could have acted.
None of them did. The software industry wanted software patents, and they got them. Big business won the day, as they usually do. But I guess that’s not a headline the Journal editorial page is interested in.
Hidden in this story, however, is the key fact that demolishes the argument in favor of software patents: “the mid-90s.” Before that, software patents were rare or nonexistent. And guess what: The era from 1950 through 1995 featured one of the most innovative and fruitful tech explosions in history. Billions of lines of software were produced, the world was transformed, and it was all done without patent protection.
So why do we need them now?
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Mother Jones
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is expected to hold a confirmation vote today for Cornelia “Nina” Pillard, who was nominated by President Obama to sit on the second-highest court in the United States: the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Pillard is a Georgetown University law professor and a magna cum laude graduate from Harvard Law School who has argued and filed briefs on dozens of cases that have come before the Supreme Court. She is also unabashedly feminist and pro-choice and supports access to contraception and comprehensive sexual education. As a result, she’s attracting a wave of attacks from Republicans, who are waging a battle to make sure she never gets to join the conservative-dominated court.
“I have concerns about your nomination…Your academic writing, to me, suggest that your views may well be considerably outside of the mainstream,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said during Pillard’s July hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which in September voted to advance her confirmation to the full Senate. Conservative think tanks have been less diplomatic with their views: Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, wrote that Pillard promotes “militant feminism,” and “America can’t afford to give a lifetime appointment to a radical ideologue.”
The two biggest Supreme Court cases that Pillard worked on helped affirm rights for both men and women in the United States. In 1996, her brief helped persuade the US Supreme Court to end the Virginia Military Institute’s decades-old men-only policy. And in 2003, her argument led the Supreme Court to uphold the inclusion of men in the Family and Medical Leave Act. It’s not these cases, but rather Pillard’s academic writings on reproductive rights, that have sparked Republican fears of her “militant feminism.”
At a September Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) went so far as to read Pillard’s writings to another DC Circuit judicial nominee to see if he disagreed—without revealing that Pillard wrote them. A Democratic Senate aid told the Huffington Post he found the exchange “super weird.” The writings Grassley quoted came from a 2007 Georgetown University Law Center paper, in which Pillard noted that “reproductive rights, including the rights to contraception and abortion, play a central role in freeing women from historically routine conscription into maternity.” That insurance plans were not required to cover women’s contraceptives was, she wrote, “emblematic of a much broader failure,” and she expressed support for more comprehensive sex education in schools.
In a 2006 entry for the Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties, Pillard wrote that “accurate health education can help to make abortion less necessary by teaching teens about reproduction and birth control.” Republicans aggressively attacked this viewpoint. “You have argued that if a state decides to teach abstinence-only, that that decision…in your judgment, may be unconstitutional. Is that indeed what you were arguing?” Cruz asked at the July hearing.
Pillard replied: “I’m a mother. I have two teenage children, one boy and one girl…I want both of my children to be taught to say no, not just my daughter. I want my son to be taught that too. The article was very explicit. I don’t see any constitutional objection to abstinence-only education that does not rely on sex-role stereotypes.”
Cruz said that he found that to be “an extraordinary position,” and Ed Whelan, writing in the National Review, accused Pillard of “false testimony” on the abstinence education issue. “No one who seeks to use the Constitution to impose and advance her own dogmatic belief…should be trusted with judicial power,” he wrote. Pillard has said repeatedly that her personal views will have no place in her judicial decision-making, and Media Matters has called the National Review‘s attacks on Pillard “sexist, hypocritical, and flawed.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also brought up Pillard’s writings at the July hearing, accusing Pillard of comparing anti-abortion protesters to white supremacists. “Do you believe that pro-life protesters are fairly analogous to Klu Klux Klan members who lynched African Americans?” he asked. Pillard disagreed, noting that the brief in question referred to why protesters shouldn’t interfere with law enforcement, and, at the time, there wasn’t a more relevant statute to cite. She said that after that case, Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinics Entrances Act in 1994, which made it illegal for protesters to obstruct people going to health clinics.
If Pillard’s confirmation is blocked by Republicans, it will be because they can’t handle an openly feminist, pro-choice federal judge—or because, as Reid has pointed out, they are stonewalling all of the Obama administration’s nominees, no matter their background. Obama has nominated two others to the DC Circuit, one of whom has already been filibustered by Republicans. “While Senate Republicans are blocking President Obama’s nominees to this vital court, they were happy to confirm several judges to the DC Circuit when Presidents Reagan and Bush were in office…Pillard is incredibly qualified and dedicated,” Reid said.
At least one conservative legal scholar agrees: “I know well Professor Pillard’s intellect, integrity, and temperament…I know her to be a straight shooter when it comes to the law and legal interpretation,” wrote Viet D. Dinh, who served as the assistant attorney general for legal policy under President George W. Bush. “I am confident that she would approach the judicial task of applying law to facts in a fair and meticulous manner​.”
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The Republican Freakout Over This Feminist, Pro-Choice Federal Judicial Nominee
Mother Jones
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This story first appeared on the Atlantic Cities website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Should you pilot a small, rickety craft across international waters this summer, it would be wise to consult this unusual map of foul ocean weather. The gusty cartography plots the paths all the tropical cyclones recorded in the past 170 years. Brighter areas show where they have overlapped in space, representing areas of historically frequent hurricane activity—tumultuous ocean zones probably best to steer around.
Visualization super-nerds at NOAA (that’s meant in the most flattering way) conjured this top-down look at hurricanes and Pacific cyclones using storm-track records from the National Climatic Data Center. The records date back to 1842 and include both satellite data and first-person accounts from (no doubt really stressed) mariners. Though the U.S. government stocks such information on 11,967 tropical cyclones, that number is probably smaller than what has actually blown across the seas over the ages. Satellites nowadays keep a laser bead on these powerful storms, but back when sailors were responsible for snitching on them, one could flail about in the middle of the ocean without many people noticing.
This key shows where on the map the highest points of overlap are:
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Mother Jones
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In March, Associated Press reporters sent the Montana Department of Justice a public records request for a copy of the state’s database of concealed firearm permit holders. That’s not especially unusual; the AP has requested such information from the state regularly over the years. But there was a hitch: In 2013, Montana’s legislature passed a new law officially classifying concealed carry data as confidential. Tim Fox, the Republican attorney general, rejected the AP’s request in mid-July—and then proceeded to notify every sheriff and county attorney in the state of what he had done. The AP never wrote about the rejected request, but the word somehow got out anyway:
News of the AP request and Fox’s denial first broke July 24 on the website for Aaron Flint, a conservative Billings commentator and broadcaster with Northern Broadcasting System, who has a daily statewide radio show. Flint said he had received a copy of Fox’s memo from a source outside of the Attorney General’s Office and posted it on his website. A day later, Media Trackers, a conservative Montana website that covers Montana politics and the media, picked up the story.
The reporters who had requested the data found their personal information (including photos of their homes) posted on the Internet, along with thinly-veiled threats, prompting the wire service to file a complaint with the Helena Police Department. The fact that the AP never has and never planned to indiscriminately publish personal information about concealed carry holders in the first place was lost in the angry backlash.
So what is Fox’s response to the threats? Blame the media—for following up on the story.
“All of the media attention on this issue has come from the media,” he told Montana Public Radio’s Dan Boyce on Tuesday. ” I think that’s important to know. Because some reporters have blogged that I have initiated these things and my office has initiated it. But its been the media that’s run with this. That’s what the media does. The media asks for information. They did so on who it was that requested the concealed weapons permit information and then they wrote their stories.”
Although Fox was quick to call the online intimidation “darn-right wrong,” he ultimately warned journalists that reporters should keep such threats in mind when they request public information in the first place: “Whether or not there is a chilling effect I guess the media, the journalistic profession needs to contemplate when they ask for information whether or not they are creating a chilling effect in their own profession.”
Montana isn’t alone in relocating its concealed carry data to an undisclosed location; seven states passed laws to reclassify concealed carry databases as confidential information in the first half of 2013. And Montana’s isn’t even the most strict. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) signed into a law bill last spring that would criminalize the publication of private gun records by journalists.
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Montana AG: Public Records Requests Create "Chilling Effect"
Mother Jones
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A quarter of New York City could be a flood zone by 2050, according to a new report commissioned by the Bloomberg administration. On Tuesday, Bloomberg laid out an accompanying $20 billion plan to fortify the city against future disasters brought on by climate change.
Many of the Bloomberg administration’s recommendations would take years to carry out, far longer his remaining 11 months of tenure as mayor. The 440 page plan covers everything from the protecting coastline with levees to improving emergency bus routes. Neighborhood by neighborhood, it lists recommendations for the city: building dunes to help fortify the Rockaways, offshore breakwaters to temper big waves (and provide habitats for oysters) in Staten Island, and a new, above sea-level neighborhood dubbed “Seaport City” in southeast Manhattan, among others. Bloomberg estimates that $15 billion of the $20 billion in funds can come from already existing city and federal money, and said that “we’ll press the Federal government to cover as much of the remaining costs as possible.”
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Bloomberg’s Sweeping Plan To Protect New York From the Next Sandy
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