Author Archives: KimberlUMA

The Planet Just Shattered Another Heat Record

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story originally appeared in Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hot enough for ya? It should be: January 2016 was the hottest January globally since records began in 1880. And it didn’t just edge out the previous record holder for January, it destroyed it.

The temperatures used here are land and ocean measurements analyzed by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, using NOAA temperature measuring stations across the world. These are extremely high quality and reliable datasets of global temperature measurements—despite the fallacious cries of a few.

If you want to see how temperatures have changed over time, it’s useful to compare them to an average over some time period. GISS uses the dates 1951–1980; it takes all the temperatures over that range for a given month, averages them, then subtracts that number from the average temperature measured for a given month. This forces the monthly range of 1951–1980 to give an average equal to 0, which is used as the baseline. You can then easily read off how much monthly temperatures deviate from that average, which is called the temperature anomaly; if a month is colder than usual for that month in the data, that shows up as a negative anomaly. If it’s warmer, the anomaly is positive.

January 2016 land and ocean temperature anomalies (deviations from average temperatures in January from 1951 to 1980). The conclusion is pretty obvious. NASA/GISS

The global temperature anomaly for January 2016 was 1.13° Celsius. That makes it the hottest January on record (the previous record was 0.95° C in 2007). But there’s more: 1.13° is the largest anomaly for any month since records began in 1880. There have only been monthly anomalies greater than 1°C three times before in recorded history, and those three were all from last year. The farther back in the past you go, the lower the anomalies are on average.

Yes, the world is getting hotter.

On the blog Hot Whopper (and on ThinkProgress) it’s shown that a lot of January’s anomaly is due to the Arctic heating up far, far more than usual, as it has been doing for some time. The temperature map above makes that clear.

Look at how much warmer the Arctic is! Not surprisingly, Arctic sea ice was at a record low extent in January 2016 as well, more than 1 million square kilometers lower than the 1981–2010 average. But almost the whole planet was far hotter in January 2016 than the 1951–1980 average.

A lot of deniers will say this is a statistical fluctuation; sometimes things are just hotter. That is utter baloney. If that were true, you’d expect just as many record cold days/months/years as warm ones. Two Australian scientists looked into this and found record hot and cold days were about even…until the 1960s, then hot days started outpacing cold ones, and from 2000 to 2014 record heat outnumbered record cold by a factor of 12 to 1.

As it happens, we’re in the middle of an El Niño, an event in the Pacific Ocean that tends to warm surface temperatures. This is also one of if not the most intense on record. Some of that record-breaking heat in January is due to El Niño for sure, but not all or even a majority of it. As I pointed out recently, climate scientist Gavin Schmidt showed that El Niño only accounts for a fraction of a degree of this heating. Even accounting for El Niño years, things are getting hotter.

The root cause is not El Niño. It’s us. We’ve been pumping tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the air every year for decades. That gas has trapped the Earth’s heat, and the planet is warming up.

Several of the months in 2015 were the hottest on record, leading to 2015 overall being the hottest year ever recorded (again, despite the ridiculously transparent claims of deniers). Will 2016 beat it? We can’t say for sure yet, but judging from January, I wouldn’t bet against it.

Taken from:  

The Planet Just Shattered Another Heat Record

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Planet Just Shattered Another Heat Record

Conservative Culture and the Fear of Reverse Racism

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Bruce Bartlett has written a new paper that examines the role of “reverse racism” in the rise of Donald Trump. Bartlett touches on a number of topics—e.g., changing demographics, partisan realignment, the media promotion of race as an in-group marker—but the cornerstone of his narrative is a simple recognition that fear of reverse racism is deep and pervasive among white Americans. Here’s the basic lay of the land from a bit of research done a few years ago by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers:

As you can see, everyone agrees that racism was endemic in the 50s, and everyone agrees that it’s improved since then. But among whites, a majority believe that racism against blacks has improved so much—and reverse racism against whites has intensified so much—that today there’s literally more bias against whites than against blacks.

The Norton-Summers study doesn’t break down racial views further, but it’s a safe guess that fears of reverse racism are concentrated primarily among political conservatives—encouraged on a near daily basis by talk radio, Fox News, and Republican politicians. Given this, it’s hardly any wonder that Trump’s barely-coded appeals to racial resentment have resonated so strongly among Republican voters. Trump himself may or may not have any staying power, but his basic appeal is rooted in a culture of white grievance that’s been growing for years and is likely to keep growing in the future as white majorities continue to shrink. No matter what happens to Trump himself, he’s mainstreamed white victimhood as a political force to be reckoned with for the foreseeable future.

Original link: 

Conservative Culture and the Fear of Reverse Racism

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Conservative Culture and the Fear of Reverse Racism

Say What You Will About Almonds, but They Are Wildly Popular

Mother Jones

California’s thirsty almond orchards have been generating an impressive amount of debate as the state’s drought drags on. But that won’t likely stop their expansion. The title of a new report from the Dutch agribusiness-banking giant Rabobank explains why: “California Almonds: Maybe Money Does Grow on Trees.”

The report is “exclusive for business clients of Rabobank,” but an accompanying blog post offers some good tidbits. “Drought conditions and the stronger US dollar have increased the price of almonds for all buyers,” it states. On the US East Coast, wholesale prices for premium almonds have risen 20 percent since last year. “In Europe, the almond is becoming increasingly popular, not only as a nutritious snack but especially as a go-to ingredient for manufacturers,” it continues. There, wholesale prices are up 50 percent since last year, while “buyers in India and Hong Kong are paying 25 percent and 20 percent more, respectively.”

Those higher prices will evidently more than compensate California farmers for higher watering costs, and inspire than to expand acreage. Rabobank expects California almond production to rise by 2 percent to 3.5 percent per year over the next decade, accoring to Sacramento Bee‘s Dale Kasler, who got a look at the Rabobank study.

That’s impressive growth. If almond output expands by 3 percent per year over the next ten years, then—using this trusty formula—production will grow a whopping 34 percent between now and 2025. That’s a lot of growth for a state that already churns out 80 percent of the world’s almonds. This scenario doesn’t imply a 34 percent expansion in almond acreage—some of the almond trees that will contribute to that growth in output have already been planted and will be coming into production over the next few years (it takes almonds about four years to begin producing after they’re planted). But it does imply a robust expansion. Kasler quotes the study:

Higher prices and good profits for California almond growers will continue to encourage more planting of almond orchards…. Nurseries report very little slowing in orders of new trees.

See the article here:

Say What You Will About Almonds, but They Are Wildly Popular

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Say What You Will About Almonds, but They Are Wildly Popular