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California, already parched and fire-scorched following two consecutive snow- and rain-deprived winters, is on track to experience its driest year on record.
“It’s absolutely dry,” Bob Benjamin, a National Weather Service forecaster, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We just went through October where there was no measurable precipitation in downtown San Francisco. That’s only happened seven times since records started.” From the article:
The state’s reservoirs are all well below their normal carrying capacity, according to Arthur Hinojosa, the chief of hydrology and flood operations for the California Department of Water Resources.
“Generally speaking, it has been dry across the state, and it has been remarkably dry where the population centers are and where the bulk of the water storage is,” Hinojosa said. “Most operators plan on multiyear dry years, but nobody plans on as dry as we’ve seen.”
The dry weather is also extending the fire season. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has responded to 6,439 fires this year, almost 2,000 more fires than during an average year, said Battalion Chief Julie Hutchinson. That doesn’t include fires on federal land like the Rim Fire, which burned 400 square miles in and around the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park.
As winter approaches, water officials are getting ready to take matters into their own hands: They plan to step up cloud seeding. The Sacramento Bee reports:
As California concludes a second drought year and water managers hope eagerly to avoid a third, utilities across the state are poised for that first mass of pillowy gray clouds to drift ashore from the Pacific Ocean.
When it arrives, if conditions are right, they’ll be ready with cloud-seeding tools to squeeze out every extra snowflake, with the goal of boosting the snowpack that ultimately feeds the state’s water-storage reservoirs. …
As practiced in California and elsewhere in the West, cloud seeding involves spraying fine particles of silver iodide into a cloud system to increase snowfall that is already underway or about to begin. Silver iodide causes water droplets within the clouds to form ice crystals. As the crystals grow larger, they become snowflakes, which fall out to create more snow than the storm would have generated on its own.
Cloud seeding is done only when temperatures within the clouds are between 19 and minus-4 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the range at which silver iodide does its best work, as demonstrated by decades of research.
“It enhances precipitation that’s already occurring,” said Dudley McFadden, a civil engineer at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District who manages the utility’s cloud-seeding program. “Once you’ve got snow, you can make more with this approach.”
Of course, cloud-seeding only works when there are clouds in the air to begin with. It’s certainly not a real fix for climate change, which is drying out the American West and fueling wildfires.
Source
Cloud seeding, no longer magical thinking, is poised for use this winter, The Sacramento Bee
California on course for driest year on record, San Francisco Chronicle
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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It’s the first video from Funny or Die’s new series of pro-Obamacare videos. The above two-minute segment, titled “Scandalous with Jennifer Hudson,” is a playful spoof of Scandal, ABC’s hit political-thriller series starring Kerry Washington. “I prefer covert scandal manager,” Hudson says when people refer to her as a “fixer.” But the main point of the video is to promote the benefits of Obamacare and to show viewers how to sign up. The sketch ends with this image, with the narrator encouraging you to visit the website:
funnyordie.com
On October 1, the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges—in which uninsured Americans will be able to buy coverage using federal subsidies—open up for business. While conservative groups are emphasizing doom and government excess (this includes the Koch brothers-backed young-conservatives group Generation Opportunity, which recently released this creepy, sort of rapey anti-Obamacare ad), Funny or Die, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay‘s comedy site, has planned a short series of comedic celebrity web videos aimed at educating American twenty-somethings about the law.
In July, a cluster of Hollywood big-names attended a meeting at the White House to chat about how they could help spread the word about Obamacare. (President Obama swung by for roughly half an hour to mingle and hear some of their ideas.) The meeting was run by senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, who gave a presentation on health care reform and talked about pushing back against conservative memes surrounding the law. Here is Jarrett tweeting about Funny or Die’s Scandal-themed PSA, using the hashtag “#GetCovered,” a hashtag that appears in the video:
Watch our #ACA gladiator @IAMJHUD take the “scandalous” out of #Obamacare. #GetCovered http://t.co/mDuF3Va8v0
— Valerie Jarrett (@vj44)
And here’s the White House sharing it:
Now this is “scandalous” Please share! –> http://t.co/eMEaGQCYux #GetCovered #OurSalud @funnyordie @imjhud
— La Casa Blanca (@lacasablanca)
Hudson and Mike Farah, president of production and “ambassador of lifestyle,” were both present at the July meeting. “We want to make the right amount of videos—ones that are smart and break through the clutter and rhetoric,” Farah told Mother Jones. “If we can help make signing up for Obamacare a normal thing, something that isn’t politicized, something that comes second nature to younger people (like putting your seatbelt on), that is something we’d want to do…It’s not like one Funny or Die video can change the world—it’d be nice if it could! But people have to hear about this issue from all sorts of directions.”
Funny or Die has generated and promoted Obamacare-related content before, including “The Mis-Informant” (starring Jack Black as a “professional mis-informant who gets paid a buttload of cash” to lie about Obamacare) and “Injured Americans Against Obamacare.” The website pumps out a lot of political satire in general. Shortly after the 2008 election, it released the star-studded “Prop 8 – The Musical.” More recently, Funny or Die produced a sketch warning of the dangers of sequestration, and worked with actress Alyssa Milano on her “sex tape” that turned out to be all about the bloodshed in Syria.
From:
Jennifer Hudson Promotes Obamacare, Impersonates Olivia Pope in New Funny or Die Video
Mother Jones
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Another day, another Snowden document released by the Guardian. But this one involves Israeli intelligence, which should guarantee an extra frisson of outrage, especially given the context: starting in 2009, the NSA began to routinely hand over raw data—some of which includes surveillance of U.S. citizens—to the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (INSU).
The memo that confirmed this arrangement is crystal clear that Israeli use of NSA data must be “consistent with the requirements placed upon NSA by U.S. law and Executive Order to establish safeguards protecting the rights of U.S. persons under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.” There follow numerous paragraphs setting out the rules of the road, which basically say that Israel isn’t permitted to use this data to target U.S. persons in any way. Whether this comforts you probably depends on whether you think Israel takes these rules seriously, or whether it was strictly a wink-wink-nudge-nudge sort of arrangement, where everyone knows perfectly well that once it has its hands on this stuff the Israelis will use it any way they please. It’s not as if they’re famous for their reluctance to spy on Americans, after all. In fact, another document seen by the Guardian noted that “A NIE National Intelligence Estimate ranked them as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.”
As for me, I’m just going to straight-up admit that this stuff is coming too fast and furious for me to truly digest it all. On the one hand, it’s not as if it comes as any surprise that we share intelligence with friendly countries. On the other hand, raw, unminimized intelligence? With a country whose previous efforts to spy on America are pretty well known? I honestly have no idea how seriously to take the promises in this memo that NSA’s raw data will never, ever be used to target Americans, cross our hearts and hope to die. I wonder if NSA deliberately inserts test cases in the data they hand over just to find out if INSU reports them back, as they’re supposed to?
For now, then, I’ll just highlight the part of the memo below. Note that Israel is allowed to hold files that contain the identities of U.S. persons for a year. But files that contain the identities of government officials? Incinerate on contact and salt the earth behind them. Priorities, priorities.
Continue at source:
Photograph obtained by the
Oil polluting the ground at Cold Lake in Alberta.
Thousands of barrels of tar-sands oil have been burbling up into forest areas for at least six weeks in Cold Lake, Alberta, and it seems that nobody knows how to staunch the flow.
An underground oil blowout at a big tar-sands operation run by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. has caused spills at four different sites over the past few months. (This is different from the 100-acre spill in Alberta that we told you about last month, which was caused by a ruptured pipeline.)
Media and others have been blocked from visiting the sites, but the Toronto Star obtained documents and photographs about the ongoing disaster from a government scientist involved in the cleanup, who spoke to the reporter on condition of anonymity. The prognosis is sickening. From Friday’s article:
The documents and photos show dozens of animals, including beavers and loons, have died, and that [nearly 34 tons] of oily vegetation has been cleared from the latest of the four spill zones. …
“Everybody (at the company and in government) is freaking out about this,” said the scientist. “We don’t understand what happened. Nobody really understands how to stop it from leaking, or if they do they haven’t put the measures into place.”
The disaster raises big, scary questions about the safety of the underground oil extraction method being used:
The company’s operations use an “in situ” or underground extraction technology called “cyclic steam stimulation,” which involves injecting thousands of gallons of superhot, high-pressure steam into deep underground reservoirs. This heats and liquefies the hard bitumen and creates cracks through which the bitumen flows and is then pumped to the surface. …
Oil companies have said in situ methods are more environmentally friendly than the open-pit mining often associated with the Alberta oil sands, but in situ is more carbon and water-intensive.
And perhaps more spill-intensive:
“This is a new kind of oil spill and there is no ‘off button,’” said Keith Stewart, an energy analyst with Greenpeace who teaches a course on energy policy and environment at the University of Toronto. “You can’t cap it like a conventional oil well or turn off a valve on a pipeline.
“You are pressurizing the oil bed so hard that it’s no wonder that it blows out. This means that the oil will continue to leak until the well is no longer pressurized,” which means the bitumen could be seeping from the ground for months.
The spills are happening on traditional territory of the Beaver Lake Cree First Nation, whose members are understandably seething. From iNews 880:
[Beaver Lake Cree Nation citizen Crystal] Lameman says as a Treaty Status First Nation person she feels her rights and treaties are being violated as she is not being allowed in her ancestor’s traditional hunting ground.
“We should have free access to it as treaty status Indians and we have no access to it and we can’t trust what we’re being told now,” explains Lameman.
… The First Nation is pursuing a constitutional challenge that argues the impacts of the oil sands are infringing their treaty rights to hunt, fish and trap.
In case you’d forgotten, it’s just this kind of tar-sands oil that would be shipped down the middle of America through the Keystone XL pipeline. If the Obama administration approves the pipeline project, even more tar-sands oil extraction is likely in Alberta [PDF] — and even more spills.
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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Via Tyler Cowen, here are the top five most abandoned classic books, as chosen by Goodreads:
Oddly enough, I’ve read all five, and the only one I abandoned was Ulysses.1 200 pages was all I could take. Maybe someday I’ll try again with one of those annotated versions that explains the half dozen obscure allusions on every page. If I do, maybe next I’ll take up Bleak House and Foucault’s Pendulum, the only other remaining titles on my list of books that defeated me.2 Probably not, though.
1OK, I never plowed through the whole John Galt radio address in Atlas Shrugged. But come on. That doesn’t count, does it?
2Moby-Dick fell off the list in 2009. The Brothers Karamazov was conquered last year. Three remain!
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Mother Jones
Earlier today the House defeated the most recent version of the Farm Bill, a $940 billion piece of legislation that regulates both food stamps and farm subsidies in the US, by a vote of 195-234.
Both Republicans and Democrats voted against the bill: Republicans complained that it didn’t create enough savings while Democrats took issue with the bill’s deep cuts to food stamps. “What is happening on the floor today was major amateur hour,” Nancy Pelosi (who was speaker when the last Farm Bill passed, in 2007) told Politico. “They didn’t get results and they put the blame on somebody else.”
The House bill would have saved an estimated $33 billion over ten years, with the majority of that savings ($21 billion) coming from cuts to food stamps, which account for almost 80 percent of farm bill spending. Part of those savings would come from requiring “asset tests” that ensure the 48 million Americans who participate in the food stamp program don’t have more than $2,000 in the bank, or own a car worth more than $5,000. Democrats including Pelosi have been saying for days that they wouldn’t vote for the bill if it included the cuts to food stamps.
The Senate’s version of the farm bill, passed last month, cut food stamps but only to the tune of $4 billion dollars. This chart from the congressional research service shows where the cuts would come from in each bill (“Nutrition” is the food stamps program):
When it comes to farm subsidies, the farm bill’s other main set of policies, the bills in the House and the Senate are roughly the same. USA Today explains:
The Senate and House farm bills are largely similar when it comes to farm policy issues, with both measures streamlining conservation programs, expanding the federally subsidized crop insurance program and slashing subsidy payments—including the elimination of the $5 billion a year in direct payments doled out to farmers regardless of whether they grow crops. In a bid to help Southern growers who depend on direct payments, each bill would set higher support prices for rice and peanut farmers, meaning growers would see subsidy payments kick in sooner.
But a significant divide exists between the two chambers in the scope of proposed cuts to the country’s food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, that will likely continue to be a sticking point in determining whether the farm bill passes.
Congress now has until January 1st to pass a new Farm Bill, though it’s unclear when the House will bring the bill back up for a vote again. “If it doesn’t pass, I don’t know if it’s going to come up again in this Congress,” Congressman Frank Lucas (R-Okl.), chair of the House agriculture committee who had steered the bill to a vote today, told the New York Times before today’s vote.
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Meet Alvin Sputnik, one of the few surviving humans in a world that’s well beyond any scientific predictions for sea level rise. Equipped with a special diving suit, Alvin, a creation of Australian puppeteer Tim Watts, explores the depths, encounters whales, searches for missing loved one, and learns to find happiness in a post-climate-change world. Now in its fourth year of touring the world, Watts recently stopped at New York University to introduce Alvin to an audience of kids, students, and adults; upcoming shows include Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Pinchincha, Ecuador.
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