Author Archives: N0bodyh56

Today’s Mini Rant About Online Ads

by N0bodyh56 Posted on March 21, 2013

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Every day, the Wall Street Journal plasters a demand at the bottom of my screen that I try Portfolio, their fabulous new investment tracker. I have no interest whatsoever in this. When I go to the LA Times website to get the day’s crossword puzzle, I first have to sit through a 30-second video ad. I subscribe to both of these newspapers.

Is it too much to ask that if I spend several hundred dollars a year on your product, my online access should be at least as convenient and non-annoying as the print version? I don’t think so! But maybe I’m just a fossil.

Mother Jones
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Today’s Mini Rant About Online Ads

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A Warming Climate Is Turning the Arctic Green

by N0bodyh56 Posted on March 11, 2013

A map showing increasing (blue) and decreasing (red) plant growth over the past 30 years. Photo: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

The further you get from the equator, the greater difference there is between summer and winter temperatures. It’s not just the cold or the heat that makes the most extreme environments so hostile, but this “seasonality” in the temperature—the range of conditions to which plants and animals living in these areas can be subjected. A thick layer of fat and a heavy coat of fur can keep you warm in winter, but the same insulation can be dangerous if the summer heat is too high.

But, with global climate change, says a new study, that temperature seasonality is going down. And satellite records and other observations from the past 30 years, says NASA, show that this change in temperature seasonality is already affecting plant growth in higher latitudes. Higher temperatures and longer growing season mean that large portions of the Arctic, subarctic and temperate ecosystems are seeing more plant growth than they did in the past.

In practice, that means the Arctic is turning green. NASA:

The Arctic’s greenness is visible on the ground as an increasing abundance of tall shrubs and trees in locations all over the circumpolar Arctic. Greening in the adjacent boreal areas is more pronounced in Eurasia than in North America.

So far, the effect has been only a small shift in vegetation patterns, with plant growth in one location mimicking how it was 30 years ago in a location five degrees latitude to the south. By the end of the century, however, scientists think that the changes will be equivalent to a 20 degree shift. Think Alaska’s capital Juneau, at 58 °North, acting more like Louisville, Kentucky, at 38 °North.

However, rising temperatures aren’t the only thing to take into account, and the other effects of climate change could actually hurt the increasingly lush Arctic.

Researchers note that plant growth in the north may not continue on its current trajectory. The ramifications of an amplified greenhouse effect, such as frequent forest fires, outbreak of pest infestations and summertime droughts, may slow plant growth.

And, if a nice green Arctic sounds like a pleasant consequence of climate change, just try to imagine what a 20 degree shift in climate would do to somewhere further south.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Arctic Dispatch: Thermokarst and Toolik
The Arctic Is Running Out of Snow Even Faster Than It’s Running Out of Ice

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A Warming Climate Is Turning the Arctic Green

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WA state legislator doesn’t understand CO2, transportation, science

by N0bodyh56 Posted on March 6, 2013

WA state legislator doesn’t understand CO2, transportation, science

By Susie Cagle

wahousegop

Ed Orcutt is confused.

Ed Orcutt is a Republican state representative in Washington, and he appears to be confused. As a member of the House Transportation Committee, Orcutt had a somewhat testy email exchange recently with a bike shop owner about a proposed bike fee. Reuters reports:

“You claim that it is environmentally friendly to ride a bike,” Orcutt wrote to Dale Carlson, the owner of three bicycle shops in the Tacoma and Olympia areas who voiced concern that a proposed $25 fee on bicycle sales of $500 or more could hurt his business.

“But if I am not mistaken, a cyclists has an increased heart rate and respiration … Since CO2 is deemed a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclist [sic] are actually polluting when they ride,” Orcutt wrote late last month.

Carlson thought Orcutt “was being sarcastic or something.” That wasn’t the case, but Orcutt soon felt compelled to apologize.

On Monday, Orcutt hit the brakes and made a U-turn.

“My point was that by not driving a car, a cyclist was not necessarily having a zero-carbon footprint,” Orcutt wrote in an email delivered to constituents. “In looking back, it was not a point worthy of even mentioning so, again, I apologize.”

Orcutt’s comments provide some insight into a twisted way of thinking. Cyclists breathe hard, so they’re just as bad as drivers! False equivalency! Republican science!

I mean, politics as usual.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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WA state legislator doesn’t understand CO2, transportation, science

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Salute to James Ridgeway

by N0bodyh56 Posted on March 5, 2013

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Jim Ridgeway—who leaves MoJo’s staff roster this week to become a contributing reporter—is, though he’d never put it this way, one of the legends of modern muckraking. Back in 1965 he helped establish the nascent field of consumer reporting when he revealed that GM had run a dark-ops campaign against a young Ralph Nader, whose book Unsafe at Any Speed detailed how automakers had knowingly sacrificed safety for sales. He went on to break more stories than we can count, digging into everything from energy politics to national security to the sex industry. MoJo co-founder Adam Hochschild remembers becoming a Ridgeway reader in 1968, when Jim and the late Andrew Kopkind started a newsletter called first Mayday and later Hard Times.

I still remember the yellow paper it came on, how eagerly I waited for each issue to arrive, and the pleasure of instantly knowing we shared a view of the world if I found that a new acquaintance was also a reader. It is sobering, in a way, to see how many of the problems Jim wrote about half a century ago are still with us. But it’s inspiring to see someone keep the faith all these years, especially someone who could have very easily had a successful and doubtless much more lucrative career writing unthreatening stories for the mainstream media. That, in fact, is where more than of few of the dissenters of the 1960s ended up.

Also among Ridgeway’s admirers was Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Village Voice (where Ridgeway had become a staff writer) as part of his New York Magazine Co. acquisition in 1977.

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Salute to James Ridgeway

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Sustainable Seafood – Seas Optional

by N0bodyh56 Posted on March 4, 2013

green4us

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Sustainable Seafood – Seas Optional

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for February 22, 2013

by N0bodyh56 Posted on February 22, 2013

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U.S. Army Spc. Ladarion Banks, assigned to Killer Troop, 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment, fires his M249 Squad Automatic Weapon during squad level training at the Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, Feb. 12, 2013. U.S. Army photo by Markus Rauchenberger.

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for February 22, 2013

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Environmental, conservative, media organizations rank our lovable Congress

by N0bodyh56 Posted on February 22, 2013

Environmental, conservative, media organizations rank our lovable Congress

By Philip Bump

This place.

It is awards season, everyone! For cool people (well, cooler people than me) that means it’s time for the distribution of Grammys and Emmys and Oscars and Whatevers. For other people, it’s awards and accolades strewn upon Capitol Hill, meaning the various ratings of members of Congress by media entities and advocacy organizations.

It is, as I have analogized previously, like the trophies given out at the end of a season to kids in a youth basketball league, except some of the awards come from the coaches and others come from fawning parents. Like youth basketball awards, these accolades will sit on shelves in the corners of rooms for a few years and eventually be thrown out.

Anyway, here they are.

The League of Conservation Voters

Every year, the LCV ranks how members of the House and Senate vote on issues related to the environment. How did those august bodies fare this year, LCV?

From an environmental perspective, the best that can be said about the second session of the 112th Congress is that it is over. Indeed, the Republican leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives continued its war on the environment, public health, and clean energy throughout 2012, cementing its record as the most anti-environmental House in our nation’s history. …

The good news is that while the U.S. House voted against the environment with alarming frequency, both the U.S. Senate and the Obama administration stood firm against the vast majority of these attacks. There are 14 Senate votes included in the 2012 Scorecard, many of which served as a sharp rebuke of the House’s polluter-driven agenda.

Very, very surprising, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The LCV also made little maps, so you can see which states hate the Earth the most. Here’s the House, which really hates the Earth a lot.

LCV

And the Senate, which hates it a little less.

LCV

You can see at the bottom there the average vote for each body: The House voted the right way on environmentally important legislation 42 percent of the time; the Senate did 56 percent. Nice work, everyone. You can also see how that compares to other congresses in this graph.

LCV

The terrible House has gotten terribler recently which, again, is completely unsurprising.

But no one cares how each team did. People want to know about the players. Who was the most environmentally friendly member of the House? Was it Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio)? Was it Rep. Paul Ryan (R-VP)? No, it was not either of those guys! Eight House members had perfect scores: Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Woolsey (D-Calif.), Stark (D-Calif.), Honda (D-Calif.), Capps (D-Calif.), Polis (D-Col.), Quigley (D-Ill.), Markey (D-Mass.). Nice work, everyone. Here is a small trophy to put in your district office.

Here’s the full scorecard [PDF], which should be used for betting purposes.

The National Journal and some conservative group

Remember how this article was about awards season? Yes, it’s still about that.

The Huffington Post runs down (in both senses) these other accolades.

Every year, the National Journal determines the ideological standouts from within the Democratic and Republican caucuses in the House and Senate. It takes the “roll-call votes in the second session of the 112th Congress,” and sorts through them until it has identified the ones that put the ideological differences between the parties in the sharpest relief. The Journal checks who voted for what on those occasions, subjects those votes to statistical analysis, assigns weights “based on the degree to which it correlated with other votes in the same issue area,” and factors in the various absences and abstentions. Finally, they cut the head off the duck and watch the duck’s dying torso stagger around a Ouija board while listening to Enya. Ha, just kidding, I made up the part that actually sounds like it might have been fun!

At any rate, after all is said and done, the Journal arrives at results. And so, without further ado, your 2012 winners:

– Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) is the most conservative senator.

– Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) tied for the most liberal senator.

– Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) is the most conservative member of the House (like you couldn’t have guessed that).

– And a whole mess of Democratic representatives have tied for the most liberal member of the House. They are Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), Pete Stark (D-Calif.), Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), John Olver (D-Mass.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), John Lewis (D-Ga.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Mike Honda (D-Calif.), Donna Edwards (D-Md.), Danny Davis (D-Ill.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), and I promise you that is it.

And some conservative group gave awards!

Those who score 100 percent on the [that group’s] scale get recognized as a “Defender of Liberty.” This year, the senators earning that distinction are: Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.).

The similarly honored House members are Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Diane Black (R-Tenn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Paul Broun (R-Ga.), Dan Burton (R-Ind.), Mike Conaway (R-Texas), Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), John Fleming (R-La.), Bill Flores (R-Texas), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), Tom Graves (R-Ga.), Wally Herger (R-Calif.), Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Jeff Landry (R-La.), Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), Pete Olson (R-Texas), Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Tom Price (R-Ga.), Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.), Todd Rokita (R-Ind.), Ed Royce (R-Calif.), Steve Scalise (R-La.), David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.), Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.), and Joe Wilson (R-S.C.).

The LCV rankings for the senators were 35. In sum. Cumulatively. I didn’t bother to add up those for the House, but it was probably the same grand total.

My personal rankings

Everyone got a 100 percent and a pizza party.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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