Category Archives: Prepara

A nuclear plant designed like Fukushima is right in Florence’s path

by HildegaUNYP Posted on September 13, 2018

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On March 11, 2011, a one-two, earthquake-tsunami punch knocked out the safety systems at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, triggering an explosion of hydrogen gas and meltdowns in three of its six reactors — the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Fukushima’s facility was built with 1960s technology, designed at a time when engineers underestimated plant vulnerabilities during natural disasters. In the U.S., 20 plants with similar designs are currently operating.

One of them is slated for a head-on collision with Hurricane Florence.

Duke Energy Corp’s dual-reactor, 1,870-megawatt Brunswick plant sits four miles inland from Cape Fear, a pointy headland jutting into the Atlantic Ocean just south of the city of Wilmington, North Carolina. Brunswick has survived decades of run-ins with hurricanes, but Florence could be its biggest test yet.

The plant perches near the banks of the Cape Fear River, which drains 9,000 square miles of the state’s most densely populated regions. Like Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Florence is predicted to stall out for days, pounding the Carolinas with unrelenting amounts of water, leading to life-threatening storm surges and catastrophic flooding. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center is projecting 110 mile-per-hour winds, waves as high as 13 feet, and in some places, up to 40 inches of rain.

Officials at Brunswick say the plant is bracing for the impending destruction. “We’re monitoring the meteorological conditions, and if we have certainty that the winds onsite will reach 73 miles per hour, then we’ll begin an orderly shutdown of the units,” said Karen Williams, a spokesperson for Duke Energy, reached by phone Wednesday afternoon.

The company also brought in workers ahead of the storm’s landfall who will stay through its duration, sleeping on cots and blow-up mattresses, so that the facility has enough staff to handle multiple shifts. In the last few days they’ve been doing walk-throughs of the plant, inspecting diesel-powered backup generators and installing waterproof steel barriers on nine doors that house important safety equipment.

These precautions are relatively new for Brunswick. They’re part of a sweep of changes nuclear plants around the U.S. have adopted post-Fukushima.

Following the accident in Japan, a task force of senior Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff used the lessons from that disaster to draft new rules for the U.S. When the earthquake’s tremors hit Fukushima, knocking out the electrical grid, the plant’s emergency diesel generators kicked in as expected to provide emergency power. It was the wave of water that hit 40 minutes later that damaged that backup equipment, plunging the plant into total blackout. Without power, operators lost the ability to pump water into the reactors, exposing the cores, and leading to the explosive meltdown. From this, the NRC’s big initiative to make U.S. nuclear plants better prepared for such extreme events included the particular goal of making them less vulnerable to flooding.

“Every plant in the country was required to re-examine potential flooding hazards from any source — be it storm surge, intense rainfall, river flooding — with up-to-date models,” says Scott Burnell, a public affairs officer for the NRC. The Commission then compared the results of those reports to the plants’ flood protection features.

Duke predicted a maximum storm surge of 7 feet at the plant’s safety-related buildings. But the plant was originally designed to cope with only 3.6 feet of expected surge, according to the NRC’s 2017 summary assessment of Duke’s hazard reevaluation report, which has not been made public.

In a letter earlier this year, the NRC reminded Duke that the plant’s current design falls short of the reevaluated flood risks. According to Burnell, Duke has since submitted an assessment of how it will cope — including the use of those steel door reinforcements — which the NRC is still evaluating. “The review is not complete but there’s nothing in there to this point that causes us any concern,” says Burnell.

Duke’s Williams echoed the sentiment, saying that the company doesn’t expect any flooding damage at Brunswick, which sits 20 feet above sea level. “Our plant is designed to handle any kind of natural event, including a hurricane,” she said.

Storms can be unpredictable, however. Dave Lochbaum, who directs a nuclear safety watchdog group at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has spent a lifetime studying nuclear failures. Brunswick troubles him because in 2012, Duke found hundreds of missing or damaged flood protections at the plant, such as cracked seals and corroded pipes. According to the group, none of the NRC’s subsequent reports have mentioned repairs.

“Hopefully they’ve been fixed,” says Lochbaum. “But we’ve not been able to confirm that with the available documentation.”

He credits Brunswick for following through on the NRC’s post-Fukushima orders to install additional equipment — pumps, generators, hoses, cables, battery-powered sensors — to maintain safe levels of cooling in the event the plant loses its connection to the grid and use of its emergency diesel generators. But Lochbaum points out that history proves such preparation might not be enough.

In its 2012 post-Fukushima review, Florida Power & Light told the NRC that flood protections at its St. Lucie plant on South Hutchinson Island were adequate, despite failing to discover six electrical conduits with missing seals in one of the emergency core cooling systems. Two years later, a freak storm inundated Florida’s central coast with record rainfall, flooding one of the plant’s reactors with 50,000 gallons of stormwater. The deluge submerged core cooling pumps, rendering them useless. Had the reactor faltered during the storm, the plant would not have been able to maintain a safe and stable status beyond 24 hours, according to an NRC notice of violation issued to FPL after the incident.

Something similarly freakish happened at Entergy’s Arkansas Nuclear One plant in March 2013. Workers were transporting a 525-ton generator during a maintenance outage when the rigging collapsed, sending it crashing through the floor, rupturing a fire main. Emergency systems began pumping water into the facility, causing flooding and damage to electrical components shared by both reactors.

“I’m not projecting that Florence is going to cause the next St. Lucie, or Arkansas,” says Lochbaum. But those incidents serve as a reminder that nuclear plants are vulnerable to extreme events, like superstorms. “The only two times we’ve been challenged by floods since Fukushima we’ve come up short-handed,” he says. “Both those plants thought they were ready, until they weren’t.”

Duke is also preparing five other nuclear plants in the projected impact area of the 400-mile-wide hurricane. The good news is that local residents have had ample warning. More than 1.5 million residents across North and South Carolina have been ordered to evacuate their homes before the eye of the storm makes landfall on Thursday.

Follow this link: 

A nuclear plant designed like Fukushima is right in Florence’s path

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Prepara, Radius, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A nuclear plant designed like Fukushima is right in Florence’s path

Trump just doubled down on a lie about Hurricane Maria’s death toll

by KrisRowexbbf Posted on September 13, 2018

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

With Hurricane Florence set to pummel the East Coast, President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to brag about his administration’s widely criticized response to last year’s Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico. Trump’s comments drew outrage, with critics pointing out that Maria led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. But Trump hasn’t been able to let the matter go. On Thursday, Trump insisted in a pair of tweets that the official death toll was concocted by “Democrats” as part of a conspiracy to “make me look as bad as possible.”

In fact, the Puerto Rico numbers were collected over months by researchers at George Washington University’s school of public health, at the request of the territory’s governor. As the New York Times explained in August:

At issue has been how to assess the severity of a storm whose devastating impact on fundamental needs — water, electricity, communications, and medical care — seemed to rival or exceed that of the deadliest recent storms to hit the United States, but whose official fatality count until now was far less severe. By comparison, Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, is thought to have killed anywhere from 1,000 to more than 1,800 people.

The government’s latest revision brings to a close a year of debate and scientific scrutiny over fatality estimates that had seemed to vary widely — in some cases by thousands. Governor Ricardo Rosselló faced constant political challenges over the disparity between the official death toll, released within weeks of the disaster, and what was apparent to most scientific researchers and reporters who investigated deaths. The inability to provide a reliable death count seemed, to many critics, to echo the dysfunction apparent in the island’s lack of preparation or any swift, effective response from the local and federal governments.

The report came nearly a year after a much-maligned visit to Puerto Rico by Trump two weeks after Maria, where he implied that residents should be “proud” that the official death toll at the time was just 16 people, far lower than that of a “real catastrophe, like Katrina.” That statement ignored the difficulty of counting deaths after the hurricane decimated the island’s infrastructure. In fact, by the time Trump got on his plane to return to Washington, that official death toll had already doubled.

Original link: 

Trump just doubled down on a lie about Hurricane Maria’s death toll

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Prepara, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump just doubled down on a lie about Hurricane Maria’s death toll

As Gordon eyes the Gulf Coast, America’s most vulnerable shoreline girds itself

by LeliaGaunt Posted on September 4, 2018

The Gulf Coast is bracing for Tropical Storm Gordon, the latest extreme weather event to draw attention to America’s least climate-ready coastline.

Though Gordon’s impact isn’t expected to be catastrophic, its arrival brings into focus the sluggish efforts underway to protect the country’s “third coast.” The largely poor and strikingly under-resourced region spanning from Texas to Florida is the more susceptible to heavy rain than any other part of the continental U.S. And it’s seeing more downpours as the atmosphere warms.

The National Hurricane Center expects Gordon to reach hurricane strength by landfall late Tuesday and produce up to five feet of “life-threatening” storm surge and as much as a foot of rain. That precipitation will pile on after a week of unrelated torrential showers, heightening concerns about flooding.

Over the long weekend, as Gordon neared land, the city of New Orleans declared a state of emergency. Louisiana closed dozens of storm surge barriers constructed after Hurricane Katrina battered the region in 2005. In Mississippi, coastal cities issued mandatory evacuations and opened storm shelters for those who need to leave their homes.

There’s been a recent lull of high-profile hurricanes in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, but the Gulf Coast’s vulnerabilities go far beyond the attention-getting late summer storms. By many metrics, it’s the region most at risk — and least prepared — for climate change.

A study published last year in Science magazine showed that for the country’s poorest counties, largely located in the Southeast, climate change could exacerbate already-pervasive economic inequality. If the region continues along a business-as-usual trajectory, warming could knock 20 percent off average incomes as a result of declining crop yields, rising electricity costs, and worsening public health. Mississippi doesn’t even have a plan, and for the most part, the epicenter of America’s offshore oil industry isn’t concerned with the looming disaster on its doorstep.

“Our analysis indicates it may result in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the country’s history,” Solomon Hsiang, the Science study’s lead author, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Thirteen years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi coast, some communities have been largely abandoned as rising insurance costs have made rebuilding housing prohibitively expensive. In New Orleans, the unequal recovery has looked different for white and black residents.

But it doesn’t take a hurricane to cause a catastrophe anymore. Even more worrying than storms like Gordon is the increasing damage from non-tropical rainstorms. In 2016, an unnamed week-long deluge in Louisiana became one of the country’s worst flooding disasters in history.

Within 50 years, increasingly heavy rains and rising sea levels will be enough to swamp the effectiveness of the recently-reinforced levee system that’s supposed to protect New Orleans from Tropical Storm Gordon. In that worst case, according to a 2015 report by experts at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness: “Climate change is likely to make the Gulf Coast less hospitable and more dangerous for its residents, and may prompt substantial migration.”

Though hurricanes may come less frequently overall, the ones that do arrive will could be horrific. Last year, a study focusing solely on Gulf Coast hurricanes found that by late century, warming waters may help storms approach their theoretical maximum strength more often. That means more Category 5 monsters. (And bear in mind, Katrina entered Louisiana as a Category 3 hurricane.)

Though Gordon may pass without many headlines, there will likely be hundreds or thousands of families who will have to endure the increasingly familiar process of de-mucking their flooded belongings, hauling away cherished possessions to the dumpster, and wondering what the future has in store. The bad news is that without radical changes on the Gulf Coast, the future is already here — hotter, wetter, and more dangerous.

See the original article here: 

As Gordon eyes the Gulf Coast, America’s most vulnerable shoreline girds itself

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Prepara, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on As Gordon eyes the Gulf Coast, America’s most vulnerable shoreline girds itself

Meet Hurricane Beryl, now aimed at the Caribbean

by christoperschone Posted on July 6, 2018

The first hurricane of the 2018 season has formed in the Atlantic Ocean, and it’s headed toward the Caribbean. Those aren’t welcome words, especially considering the region’s fragile recovery after last year’s record-breaking storms.

On Friday, the National Hurricane Center upgraded a tropical storm in the central Atlantic to Hurricane Beryl, with top wind speeds of 80 mph. The storm’s hurricane-force winds are only 20 miles wide, relatively small for a hurricane, so Beryl’s behavior is especially unpredictable.

In advance of the storm, Puerto Rico’s government has opened more than 400 shelters and started distributing satellite radios to mayors. Even more worrisome: Beryl’s path takes it dangerously close to tiny Dominica, an island-nation of 75,000 people still struggling to recover after taking a direct hit from Hurricane Maria last year. Dominica’s government has already circulated a list of 120 shelters.

Beryl could strengthen to a Category 2 hurricane this weekend with winds of up to 100 mph before entering the eastern Caribbean on Sunday afternoon, according to the National Hurricane Center. Thereafter, it’s forecasted to steadily weaken as it passes by Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Islands along Beryl’s path could face torrential rains of 4 to 8 inches — enough to cause flash flooding, worrying enough in normal circumstances.

In a press briefing on Thursday, Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, said that, despite the storm’s expected weakening, Beryl remains “a danger due to the vulnerable condition of Puerto Rico.”

Puerto Rico, which just finished restoring power to all of its municipalities on July 1 — 284 days after Maria made landfall — is simply not ready for another storm. Tens of thousands of people are living in homes without permanent roofs, and the power grid routinely fails during passing showers. A recent independent estimate conducted by Harvard University showed that more than 4,000 people likely died in the storm and its aftermath, making it the deadliest natural disaster in modern American history. The island’s recovery was plagued by delays and indifference by the federal government — meaning that many of those deaths were likely preventable.

Beryl could also pose significant setback for Dominica’s recovery efforts. The country lost half of its buildings from Maria’s 160 mph winds, and is in the middle of a transformational change to prepare for the future storms of a warmer world.

The National Hurricane Center plans updated forecasts every six hours until Beryl dissipates, likely on Tuesday.

Read original article: 

Meet Hurricane Beryl, now aimed at the Caribbean

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Prepara, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Meet Hurricane Beryl, now aimed at the Caribbean

The Drug Hunters – Donald R. Kirsch & Ogi Ogas

by Myrna Posted on June 23, 2018

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Drug Hunters
The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines
Donald R. Kirsch & Ogi Ogas

Genre: History

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: December 13, 2016

Publisher: Arcade Publishing

Seller: Perseus Books, LLC


The surprising, behind-the-scenes story of how our medicines are discovered, told by a veteran drug hunter. The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity— by chewing, brewing, and snorting—some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze-age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings. Nowadays, Big Pharma conglomerates spend billions of dollars on state-of the art laboratories staffed by PhDs to discover blockbuster drugs. Yet, despite our best efforts to engineer cures, luck, trial-and-error, risk, and ingenuity are still fundamental to medical discovery. The Drug Hunters is a colorful, fact-filled narrative history of the search for new medicines from our Neolithic forebears to the professionals of today, and from quinine and aspirin to Viagra, Prozac, and Lipitor. The chapters offer a lively tour of how new drugs are actually found, the discovery strategies, the mistakes, and the rare successes. Dr. Donald R. Kirsch infuses the book with his own expertise and experiences from thirty-five years of drug hunting, whether searching for life-saving molecules in mudflats by Chesapeake Bay or as a chief science officer and research group leader at major pharmaceutical companies.

Source – 

The Drug Hunters – Donald R. Kirsch & Ogi Ogas

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, Landmark, ONA, oven, Prepara, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Drug Hunters – Donald R. Kirsch & Ogi Ogas

As coral reefs disappear, some tropical fish might just keep swimming

by CalculatorTaxaAuto7 Posted on April 20, 2018

The future looks grim for coral reefs. Warmer oceans, overfishing, pollution, and gradually acidifying waters have destroyed more than a third of the world’s shallow tropical coral reefs. Just this week, a new report said that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef — the crown jewel of the world’s oceans — lost half of its corals in just the past three years. More than 90 percent of the world’s near-surface coral habitat could be gone in the next 30 years.

This is a big deal. Coral reefs support about a quarter of all marine biodiversity in just 1 percent of the ocean’s space. And so tropical reef fish, among the most vulnerable organisms when it comes to climate change, are increasingly under threat.

But amid all the bad news, it’s vitally important to have a reality check: Some reefs and reef fish — the familiar angelfish, eels, snappers, and parrotfishes — will survive. We are just now learning some basics of how Earth’s vast biodiversity responds to warming, and there’s a growing realization that deeper, cooler waters are one possible future for coral reefs and the fish that inhabit them.

A recent study in the journal Scientific Reports builds upon other studies showing that some coral reef fish may be more resilient than we thought to climate change, boosting chances that reef ecosystems might withstand the current onslaught. The evidence suggests that tropical fish species can adapt to warmer waters just by moving a few feet down to cooler waters. For some fish, profound changes don’t necessarily lead to extinction.

Carole Baldwin, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Institution and lead author of the new study, thinks that deeper waters are the future for coral reefs, and she makes a case for hope amidst uncertainty.

“We know that fishes in general, like a lot of marine organisms, can survive a lot deeper,” says Baldwin. “We figured that there was a lot of habitat that is suitable for reef organisms between 500 and 1,000 feet, and sure enough, that is exactly what we found.”

Baldwin and her colleagues have discovered and named a new zone of the ocean between about 400 and 1,000 feet down where species may be beginning to flee and morph into entirely new ecosystems. Baldwin had to use a submarine to conduct her research off the coast of Curaçao in the Caribbean.

The new oceanic realm that Baldwin and her colleagues have identified — the “rariphotic zone” — is named for its lack of sunlight (rari = low, photic = light).

As a curator of the Smithsonian’s fish collection, the largest of its kind in the world, Baldwin knows a thing or two about tropical fish. And it’s possible that this “new” zone has actually been around for a long time, providing refuge for surface fish during times of environmental turmoil. Baldwin says there’s evidence that gobies — a type of small, bottom-dwelling fish — migrated from shallow reefs to deep reefs in response to warmer waters about 10 million to 14 million years ago. She wants to expand her work in the rariphotic zone to study other groups of fishes and the corals themselves, in an attempt to learn more about larger-scale responses to ocean warming.

“The hopeful thing is that if species start moving deeper now or in the future in response to warming surface waters or deteriorating reefs, that there are these other zones that they can go to.”

Rich Pyle, a fish scientist with the Hawaii Biological Survey, agrees that deep water corals hold immense promise for conservation efforts.

“The more we look, the more obvious it is that there are no natural ecology-wide boundaries” that prevent shallow fish from descending to greater depths, he says.

But it’s not as if surface fish can just pack up and move to deeper waters overnight, either. Pyle says that there are certain species, such as some rays, that live at both shallow and deep waters, and those are the ones that stand the best chance of survival.

“If we screw up the shallow reefs,” Pyle says, “we can take some comfort knowing that the deeper reefs still have populations of these organisms.”

Pyle is a pioneer of deep-water coral exploration. But the new zone that Baldwin and her colleagues have identified goes even further into the depths.

“These deeper coral reefs below about 30 meters have been barely looked at for the past several decades,” Pyle says. One reason is that’s about as deep as scuba diving gear allows you to easily go.

As a result, no historical data exist for species in this zone of tropical reefs. There isn’t even much data about temperature at these depths, though it is significantly cooler and more stable than surface waters.

To be sure, Pyle says there’s reason to believe that deep reefs may even be in greater danger than their shallower cousins.

For example, it’s possible that stronger hurricanes have started raining thicker plumes of sediment down on deep reefs, burying fragile corals. Increased surface level pollution may also block light, stopping photosythesis. Deep reefs are also more accustomed to steady water temperatures, so they could be more vulnerable to severe marine heat waves of the future.

All of this argues for doubling down on deep-reef research in preparation for the ravages of climate change in the coming decades.

“We just need to spend more time out there in the sub to see what’s happening,” says Baldwin. She thinks it’s a good idea to begin designating deeper reefs as marine protected areas, too.

Reefs will survive, at least in some form. It’s just a question of what they will look like. Genetic engineering of corals, farming corals, transplanting corals, or trusting corals to adapt in surprising ways are all strategies currently underway.

And it looks like coral fish have a shot at surviving, too. If they migrated to the depths in the past, maybe they could do it again.

Link: 

As coral reefs disappear, some tropical fish might just keep swimming

Posted in alo, Anchor, Crown, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Prepara, Smith's, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on As coral reefs disappear, some tropical fish might just keep swimming

Zinke says the Interior isn’t censoring science. The evidence begs to differ.

by tadeusz444 Posted on April 6, 2018

This story was originally published by Reveal and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

National Park Service officials have deleted every mention of humans’ role in causing climate change in drafts of a long-awaited report on sea-level rise and storm surge, contradicting Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s vow to Congress that his department is not censoring science.

The research for the first time projects the risks from rising seas and flooding at 118 coastal national park sites, including the National Mall, the original Jamestown settlement, and the Wright Brothers National Memorial. Originally drafted in the summer of 2016, yet still not released to the public, the National Park Service report is intended to inform officials and the public about how to protect park resources and visitors from climate change.

Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting obtained and analyzed 18 versions of the scientific report. In changes dated Feb. 6, a park service official crossed out the word “anthropogenic,” the term for people’s impact on nature, in five places. Three references to “human activities” causing climate change also were removed.

The 87-page report, which was written by a University of Colorado Boulder scientist, has been held up for at least 10 months, according to documents obtained by Reveal. The delay has prevented park managers from having access to the best data in situations such as reacting to hurricane forecasts, safeguarding artifacts from floodwaters or deciding where to locate new buildings.

The omissions reflect a broader crackdown on climate science at federal agencies, including removal of references to human impacts, since President Donald Trump took office. Trump previously called climate change a Chinese hoax, took steps to withdraw from an international agreement to cut greenhouse gases and moved toward reversing former President Obama’s policies to regulate power plant emissions.

The word “anthropogenic,” the term for people’s impact on nature, was removed from the executive summary of the sea-level rise report for the National Park Service.

Reveal News

Critics say the National Park Service’s editing of the report reflects unprecedented political interference in government science at the Interior Department, which oversees the park service.

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist and dean of the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, said the deletions are “shocking from a scientific point of view, but also from a policy point of view.”

“To remove a very critical part of the scientific understanding is nothing short of political censorship and has no place in science,” he said. “Censorship of this kind is something you’d see in Russia or some totalitarian regime. It has no place in America.”

Several scientists said the editing appears to violate a National Park Service policy designed to protect science from political influence.

“It looks like a pretty clear-cut, blatant violation of what we generally would consider to be scientific integrity,” said Jane Lubchenco, who led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Obama.

National Park Service spokesperson Jeffrey Olson said the agency would not comment on the editing of a report that had not yet been released. He said that it was premature to report on it and that it would be released soon.

A reference to “human activities” causing climate change was deleted from the report.

Reveal News

Zinke testified at a Senate committee hearing last month that the Interior Department has not changed any scientific documents.

“There is no incident, no incident at all that I know that we ever changed a comma on a document itself. Now we may have on a press release,” Zinke told the senators. “And I challenge you, any member, to find a document that we’ve actually changed on a report.”

Zinke’s press secretary said no one at the Interior Department was available to comment about the report.

A hallmark of the Trump administration is equivocation about climate change to downplay the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels are warming the planet.

Columbia University’s Silencing Science Tracker documents more than 100 instances of government trying to restrict research or public information about climate change. Among them are reports on climate change that have been stripped from government websites. Climate change was removed from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s strategic plan. Environmental Protection Agency employees were issued talking points that promote an inaccurate message about gaps in climate science and downplay the role of human activities in global warming.

The edited national parks report “is probably the biggest scientific integrity violation at the Department of Interior, by far … because this is an actual scientific report,” said Joel Clement, who was the Interior Department’s top climate change official in the Obama administration. He resigned in October after Zinke reassigned him to an oil and gas accounting office and now is a senior fellow for the Union of Concerned Scientists working on scientific integrity issues.

“By taking the words out, they are depowering the (climate change) issue,” Clement said. “It’s a horrible thing for reports to be suppressed and for the words to be changed.”

The report, titled “Sea Level Rise and Storm Surge Projections for the National Park Service,” reveals that national treasures will face severe flooding if global greenhouse gases keep increasing. Some of its projections, according to the drafts, include:

In North Carolina, the Wright Brothers National Memorial has the highest projected increase in sea level among parks nationwide — 2.69 feet by 2100 under a scenario of high growth of greenhouse gases. Along with Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras national seashores, the memorial could face significant permanent flooding. “Future storm surges will be exacerbated by future sea-level rise nationwide; this could be especially dangerous for the Southeast Region where they already experience hurricane-strength storms,” the report says.
In Virginia, three parks — Colonial National Historical Park, home of Historic Jamestowne; Fort Monroe National Monument; and Petersburg National Battlefield — face the biggest potential sea level increases in the park service’s Northeast region — 2.66 feet by 2100.
Parks in the Washington, D.C., region could experience some of the greatest sea level increases — 2.62 feet by 2100. “Storm surge flooding on top of this sea-level rise would have widespread impacts,” the report says.
If a Category 2 hurricane hit Florida’s Everglades National Park, the entire park could be flooded, with most of it under several feet of water.

Reveal obtained almost 2,000 pages of drafts of the report showing tracked changes and dating back to August 2016 — along with dozens of pages of other documents about the report and preparations to release it — in response to a public records request to the state of Colorado.

The lead author, University of Colorado geological sciences research associate Maria Caffrey, worked full-time on the report on contract with the park service from 2013 through 2017.

Caffrey declined to discuss the editing and long delay in releasing her report, instead referring questions to the park service. Asked whether she has been pressured to delete the terms “anthropogenic” and “human activities,” she replied, “I don’t really want to get into that today.”

“I would be very disappointed if there were words being attributed to me that I didn’t write,” she said. “I don’t think politics should come into this in any way.”

Although references to human-induced change were deleted, data and maps showing the severity of impacts on the parks were unchanged.

In drafts dated January 2017 to May 2017, the executive summary starts: “Changing relative sea levels and the potential for increasing storm surges due to anthropogenic climate change present challenges to national park managers.”

But editing dated Feb. 6, 2018, changed that to: “Ongoing changes in relative sea levels and the potential for increasing storm surges present challenges to national park managers.”

In a section about 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, one of the costliest storms to hit the U.S., this sentence was deleted: “This single storm cannot be attributed to anthropogenic climate change, but the storm surge occurred over a sea whose level had risen due to climate change.”

An entire sentence was removed from the report’s section on Hurricane Sandy.

Reveal News

The introduction also was substantially altered in February. These two sentences were deleted: “While sea levels have been gradually rising since the last glacial maximum approximately 21,000 years ago, anthropogenic climate change has significantly increased the rate of global sea-level rise. Human activities continue to release carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, causing the Earth’s atmosphere to warm.”

Other scientists who reviewed the draft reports said the deletions about the cause of climate change were alarming.

“It’s hiding from the public the reality of the causes and the possible options to choose or influence what scenario plays out,” Lubchenco said.

Some of the editing apparently remained in play. Caffrey has pushed back on at least some of the deletions, according to a March draft.

Editing notes in a draft obtained by Reveal indicate that many of the deletions were made by Larry Perez, a career public information officer who coordinates the park service’s climate change response program.

Perez declined to comment on why the changes were made. Watchdog groups say that in some cases, career officials within the administration may be self-censoring to avoid angering Trump appointees. In others cases, they may be responding to verbal orders from superiors who have been told to avoid creating records that eventually could be made public.

The National Park Service’s scientific integrity policy prohibits managers from engaging in “dishonesty, fraud, misrepresentation, coercive manipulation, censorship, or other misconduct that alters the content, veracity, or meaning or that may affect the planning, conduct, reporting, or application of scientific and scholarly activities.” It also requires employees to differentiate between their opinions or assumptions and solid science.

Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said “the edits are glaringly in violation” of the science cited in the report and “such alterations violate” the policy.

“The individual who edited the document is making a personal opinion/assumption that runs counter to the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions responsible for sea-level rise are of anthropogenic origin and that the threat to the National Park Service assets arises primarily from human activities,” said McNutt, who led the U.S. Geological Survey, the Interior Department’s main scientific agency, from 2009 to 2013.

Clement, who worked for seven years as a high-ranking director in the Interior Department, said it would be unusual for such editing to occur without an order from a top supervisor.

“I can’t imagine a career man or woman would take those steps without some sort of direction,” he said.

The editing seemed to cross a line that Zinke drew during last month’s hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, pressed Zinke about censoring science. She asked him about department officials deleting this line from a press release about a newly published scientific article: “Global climate change drives sea-level rise, increasing the frequency of coastal flooding.”

In his testimony, Zinke differentiated editing press releases from altering scientific reports. He also rebuffed suggestions that he considers references to climate change unacceptable, saying “man has been an influencer” on the warming climate.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska and the committee’s chairperson, summarized Zinke’s comments: “I think you were pretty clear … that within the department, you’re not altering the reports that are coming out from the agencies.”

Caffrey, the park service report’s lead author, said it’s crucial that the report address the human role in climate change. One of her key findings is that decisions about reducing greenhouse gases will determine how much peril the coastal national parks face from sea-level rise and storm surge.

The report calculates projected sea-level rise in 2030, 2050, and 2100 under four scenarios for global emissions. For instance, projections for the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington in 2100 range from 1.74 feet to 2.62 feet. The low end envisions a future in which people burn significantly less coal and other fossil fuels, while the upper number reflects increases in use.

“What scenario we choose to follow in the future will have a significant impact on how we protect our resources, like the National Park Service resources,” Caffrey said. “I feel it’s an important part to include in the report because it’s an essential part of those findings.”

In an October 2016 webinar for park staff about her research, Caffrey showed an aerial photo that depicts Washington in 2100 if global emissions rise and a Category 3 hurricane hits the city. The National Mall and Constitution Avenue are flooded. Water surrounds museums.

“We can see the results could potentially be quite catastrophic,” Caffrey said in an interview.

The report is intended to be released with an interactive website that would allow the public and park managers to visualize rising waters in their favorite parks.

“You can zoom in and move around and see the underlying infrastructure and see what’s at risk,” said William Manley, a University of Colorado Boulder research scientist who worked on data, maps, and the online viewer.

“The data and the viewer, if released, would help park decision-makers to see more clearly what decisions they should make to avoid costly mistakes,” he said. In addition, “the maps and information would be helpful to resource managers in preparation for any storms that were forecasted.”

For instance, if the report had been released by late last summer, park managers could have consulted it when hurricanes Irma and Maria, both Category 5 storms, headed toward the U.S. Virgin Islands in September. The storm surge maps for Virgin Islands National Park could have shown managers which areas were likely to flood. The interactive viewer possibly could have helped evacuation planning.

“It’s becoming clearer and clearer to most Americans that weather patterns are changing, climate change is a real phenomenon, and it’s affecting things they care about, people they love, and places that they love,” said Lubchenco, the former NOAA administrator.

“I think what we are seeing is an effort to undermine that realization in a very subtle way. And it’s very dangerous. It’s counter to the best interests of a fully democratic society.”

See original article – 

Zinke says the Interior isn’t censoring science. The evidence begs to differ.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, global climate change, LG, ONA, Prepara, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Zinke says the Interior isn’t censoring science. The evidence begs to differ.

Nor’easters are now just as dangerous as hurricanes

by kathrynhudgens7 Posted on March 2, 2018

On Friday and Saturday, the winter storm now moving up the East Coast will unleash hurricane-force winds on Washington, blizzard conditions across parts of New York and New England, and inflict the worst coastal flood in Boston’s history.

By all accounts, this storm is a monster. It’s also the latest sign that New England’s long-feared coastal flooding problem is already here — and it’s time to admit climate change is its primary cause.

The storm’s strongest winds will point squarely toward the shore, smashing huge waves the size of three-story apartment buildings into coastal defenses, and roiling the sea as far away as South America. To make matters worse, it’s arriving in conjunction with a full moon, when tides are normally highest. The system is predicted to stall out for more than 24 hours just off the New England coastline — for an astonishing three straight tide cycles.

Although the storm is getting little attention in the national news, the National Weather Service and meteorologists across the Northeast are screaming at a fever pitch. Boston-area municipalities have taken heed, issuing evacuations, preparing dive-team equipment for water rescues, and deploying a temporary flood barrier designed as a climate change-resilience measure. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has activated the National Guard to help with preparations.

Call it a nor’easter, a “bomb cyclone,” a superstorm — in an era of worsening extreme weather, fierce winter systems like this are arriving with startling frequency. And flooding is by far the most dangerous and destructive consequence. This week’s storm, like every weather event, is inseparable from the context of the warming climate. Nor’easters like this one are now a threat to public safety on par with hurricanes, and it’s time we start treating them that way.

This week’s storm is larger in size than Hurricane Sandy, with winds just as strong. National Weather Service in Boston called the storm’s gusts “about as extreme as it gets” and labeled the flooding it will spur a “life and death situation.” In a harrowing statement, the agency warns of massive power outages, the destruction of coastal homes, and some neighborhoods being “cut off for an extended time” from the rest of the metro area. It’s possible that sea walls and other semi-permanent coastal defenses could be breached, or beaches and dunes erased from the map — exposing vulnerable coastal communities and permanently altering the geography of New England.

Nor’easters draw their energy from clashing regions of warm and cold air, often producing massive circulations double the size of hurricanes. Hurricanes usually have much stronger winds at ground level, though, which is why they’re typically more destructive. But as seas have risen across the northeastern U.S. over the past century due to climate change, the flooding impact of what were once relatively routine winter storms has quickly grown.

While hurricanes are also expected to eventually grow stronger, there’s no convincing evidence they clearly have yet — although last year’s hurricane season is a worrying harbinger. Nor’easters are also expected to get worse due to climate change, as warmer air provides them with additional water vapor, fueling their ability to strengthen. Add to that, sea levels in Massachusetts have increased by about a foot over the past 100 years, and should rise by a further 3 to 9 feet by the end of this century.

Winter superstorms that bring high-level coastal flooding to northern locales like Boston are already occurring with alarming regularity. Only 34 hurricanes have passed within 200 miles of the city since 1851 — an average of one every five years. And only nine of these created a significant rise in the tides. Meanwhile more than 90 of the top 100 floods in Boston were spawned by nor’easters, and 13 of the top 20 have happened since 2000.

Though it’s one of the most severe examples in history, today’s storm is not the first one to hit the most densely populated part of the country with the power of a hurricane. It’s not even the first one this year — in January, another “bomb cyclone” floated rafts of ice into flooded Boston streets.

There are around three strong nor’easters every winter, 15 times as frequent as hurricanes — plenty of opportunity for repeat flooding disasters. A study earlier this year showed that record flooding could happen in New York City every five years starting just a few decades from now, largely because sea level rise has transformed nor’easters into coastline-devouring monsters.

Storms like these — technically called “extratropical cyclones,” because they form outside the tropics — don’t come with scary cone-shaped tracking maps like hurricanes or official names that can be blasted across social media. Still, they have quickly become the single biggest threat to coastal development across most of the northeast.

Coastal floods are one of the leading indicators that the world is warming. Given the path we’re on, the worst is yet to come.

View original article: 

Nor’easters are now just as dangerous as hurricanes

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Northeastern, ONA, Prepara, PUR, Ringer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Nor’easters are now just as dangerous as hurricanes

The Republican tax bill could lead to major job losses across the U.S. renewable industry.

by Oren46Dtyea Posted on December 14, 2017

Called “Build Back Better,” the plan focuses on providing immediate relief while also making the island’s energy infrastructure more resilient to future storms. That means fortifying the electric transmission system and bulking up defenses at power plants and substations.

The plan also envisions a Puerto Rico dotted with solar farms and wind turbines, linked by more than 150 microgrids. Of the 470,000 homes destroyed in Maria’s high winds, the report points out many could be built back with rooftop solar. New battery storage systems would allow hospitals, fire stations, water treatment plants, airports, and other critical facilities to keep the lights on without power from the grid.

Overall, $1.5 billion of the plan’s budget would go to these distributed renewable energy resources.

The plan was concocted by a bunch of industry and government groups working together, including the federal Department of Energy, Puerto Rico’s utility, several other state power authorities, and private utility companies like ConEd. If enacted, it would take the next 10 years to complete.

With a $94 billion Puerto Rico relief plan in Congress right now, it’s actually possible that $17 billion of that could go to building a renewable, resilient energy system for the future. It’d be a steal.

Link:  

The Republican tax bill could lead to major job losses across the U.S. renewable industry.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Prepara, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, Wiley, wind energy, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Republican tax bill could lead to major job losses across the U.S. renewable industry.

2 independent studies say climate change worsened Hurricane Harvey’s rains.

by Cliff0270471665 Posted on December 13, 2017

Called “Build Back Better,” the plan focuses on providing immediate relief while also making the island’s energy infrastructure more resilient to future storms. That means fortifying the electric transmission system and bulking up defenses at power plants and substations.

The plan also envisions a Puerto Rico dotted with solar farms and wind turbines, linked by more than 150 microgrids. Of the 470,000 homes destroyed in Maria’s high winds, the report points out many could be built back with rooftop solar. New battery storage systems would allow hospitals, fire stations, water treatment plants, airports, and other critical facilities to keep the lights on without power from the grid.

Overall, $1.5 billion of the plan’s budget would go to these distributed renewable energy resources.

The plan was concocted by a bunch of industry and government groups working together, including the federal Department of Energy, Puerto Rico’s utility, several other state power authorities, and private utility companies like ConEd. If enacted, it would take the next 10 years to complete.

With a $94 billion Puerto Rico relief plan in Congress right now, it’s actually possible that $17 billion of that could go to building a renewable, resilient energy system for the future. It’d be a steal.

Original link: 

2 independent studies say climate change worsened Hurricane Harvey’s rains.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Prepara, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, Wiley, wind energy, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 2 independent studies say climate change worsened Hurricane Harvey’s rains.