Author Archives: TWTKamwbbsdhe

Another El Niño is nearly upon us. What does that mean?

by TWTKamwbbsdhe Posted on November 21, 2018

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A new El Niño is brewing in the tropical Pacific, threatening an uptick in global temperatures and extreme weather.

Scientists around the world have been tracking the looming El Niño — the warm phase of a normal three to five year global weather cycle — since at least May, watching the warming waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean for telltale signs that a large-scale shift in winds and weather patterns has set in.

On Tuesday, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology said that water temperatures have now crossed El Niño thresholds, and a full-scale El Niño is likely to start sometime in December. U.S. forecasters place a 90 percent chance of El Niño to form by January.

The last El Niño, peaking in late 2015, was the strongest ever recorded. Rainfall patterns shifted worldwide, causing enormous fires in Indonesia, spurring the largest coral bleaching episode in history, and impacting more than 60 million people worldwide. The coming El Niño isn’t expected to be as severe as 2015’s, but will likely have serious consequences nonetheless.

In response to the news, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report listing several countries at high risk of food shortages. Food crises could worsen or erupt in Pakistan, Kenya, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, Mozambique, and the Philippines, according to the report. In the U.S., El Niño often brings torrential rains to California. It can also boost East Coast snowstorms, which, in an era of sea-level rise, now routinely cause serious flooding.

Since El Niño also works to warm the atmosphere, it’s possible that 2019 could beat 2016 as the warmest year on record. As El Niño begins to set in, both October and November have been unusually warm globally, and that trend is likely to continue, according to Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at University of California-Berkeley. “It’s not a safe bet 2019 will beat 2016, but it will very likely be warmer than 2018,” Hausfather told me.

There’s a growing body of evidence that suggests global warming is pushing the Pacific towards more extreme El Niños, with amplified effects around the world like 2015’s massive wildfires — another example of a vicious feedback cycle in a changing climate. Not only is El Niño making weather worse; it’s doing it at an ever-faster rate.

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Another El Niño is nearly upon us. What does that mean?

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Here’s the Ugly Side of Bipartisanship

by TWTKamwbbsdhe Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dylan Matthews, after running down all the obnoxious amendments to the omnibus spending bill currently wending its way through Congress, wonders aloud if it’s still worth supporting:

If you’re Barack Obama, or a liberal Democrat generally, most of these riders are setbacks, in some cases significant ones. Indeed, Obama’s condemned the Dodd-Frank and campaign finance provisions. He could, in theory, reject the deal and demand that Congress send him a bill without changes to Dodd-Frank, or one that doesn’t meddle in DC’s affairs, etc. And yet he has come out in favor of House passage of the bill.

Is he making a massive mistake?

This is one of those things that demonstrates the chasm between political activists and analysts on the one side, and working politicians on the other. If you take a look at the bill, it does indeed have a bunch of objectionable features. People like me, with nothing really at stake, can bitch and moan about them endlessly. But you know what? For all the interminable whining we do about the death of bipartisanship in Washington, this is what bipartisanship looks like. It always has. It’s messy, it’s ugly, and it’s petty. Little favors get inserted into bills to win votes. Other favors get inserted as payback for the initial favors. Special interests get stroked. Party whips get a workout.

That’s politics. The fact that it’s happening right now is, in a weird sense, actually good news. It means that, for a few days at least, politics is working normally again.

I understand that this sounds very Slatepitchy. But it’s true. Even at its best, politics is lubricated by venality, ego, and mutual backscratching. And you know what? By the normal standards of this kind of stuff, the obnoxious riders in the current spending bill are pretty mild. Really. The only one that rises above the level of a political misdemeanor is the provision that allows banks to get back into the custom swaps business, and even that’s hardly the end of the world. Swaps may have provided a tailwind to the 2008 financial collapse, but they were far from its core cause.

So should working politicians avert their gaze from the muck and vote to keep the government functioning? Of course they should. Government shutdowns are immensely costly in their own right, after all. This kind of crass calculus sucks, but that’s human nature for you. All things considered, I’d say we all got off fairly easy this time around.

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Here’s the Ugly Side of Bipartisanship

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The EPA Dithers While a Popular Pesticide Threatens Ecosystems

by TWTKamwbbsdhe Posted on July 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ah, summer—the season when trillions of corn and soybean plants tower horizon-to-horizon in the Midwest. All told, US farmers planted more than 170 million acres in these two crops this year—a combined landmass roughly equal in size to the state of Texas. That’s great news for the companies that turn corn and soy into livestock feed, sweeteners, and food additives; but not so great for honeybees, wild pollinating insects like bumblebees, and birds.

That’s because these crops—along with other major ones like alfalfa and sunflower—are widely treated with pesticides called neonicotinoids. Made by European chemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, these chemicals generate a staggering $2.6 billion in annual revenue worldwide—and have come under heavy suspicion as a trigger of colony collapse disorder and other, less visible, ecological calamities.

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The EPA Dithers While a Popular Pesticide Threatens Ecosystems

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