Tag Archives: blue marble

VIDEO: Is the BP Oil Spill Cleanup Still Making People Sick?

by LelandDuCane Posted on May 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, when an oil rig explosion sent five million barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the company behind the spill, BP, went swiftly into damage-control mode. One of its first steps was to buy up a third of the world’s supply of chemical dispersants, including one called Corexit that was designed to concentrate oil into droplets that sink into the water column, where in theory they can be degraded by bacteria and stay off beaches.

After the spill, roughly two million gallons of Corexit were dumped into the Gulf. There’s just one problem: Despite BP’s protestations to the contrary, Corexit is believed to be highly toxic—not just to marine life but also to the workers who were spraying it and locals living nearby—according to a new segment on Vice that will air tonight on HBO at 11 pm ET. (For its part, BP has said that its use of dispersants was approved by the federal government and that it isn’t aware of any data that the disperants pose a health threat.)

The show follows cleanup workers, local doctors, and shrimpers, and suggests that four years after the spill, Corexit contamination could be nearly as big a problem as the oil itself. You can watch a short clip from tonight’s show above.

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VIDEO: Is the BP Oil Spill Cleanup Still Making People Sick?

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Poll: More Than Half of America Doesn’t Believe in the Big Bang

by TaylorGriffith Posted on April 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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According to a new poll, 51 percent of Americans do not believe in the Big Bang. Fifty-one percent of Americans are wrong.

Forty-two percent of Americans are not falling for this “evolution” mumbo jumbo. They too are wrong.

Thirty-seven percent of Americans are not convinced that humans are causing global warming. Wrong.

Thirty-six percent of Americans are not buying this whole “the Earth is 4.5 billion years old” thing. Wrong wrong.

Fifteen percent of Americans are unsure that vaccinations are safe and effective. Wrong wrong wrong.

Have a nice day.

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Poll: More Than Half of America Doesn’t Believe in the Big Bang

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Watch Harrison Ford Fight Climate Change In a Fighter Jet

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on April 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Any film that opens with Harrison Ford buckling into a fighter jet for the sake of science can’t be all bad. Especially when that’s followed by Don Cheadle tromping through Texas cow country, followed by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman strapping on a flak jacket and pushing into the heart of Syria’s civil war. It’s almost enough to make you forget you’re watching a show about climate change.

But in fact, the new Showtime series Years of Living Dangerously is about just that, traversing the warming globe alongside an A-List cast that, as the season progresses, will include Matt Damon, Jessica Alba, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The show premieres Sunday (but the first episode, above, is already online), and counts Hollywood kingmakers Jerry Weintraub and James Cameron as executive producers, and Climate Progress founding editor Joe Romm and Climate Central scientist Heidi Cullen as science advisors.

If you already follow climate change, many of the stories here won’t be new—deforestation in Indonesia, drought in Texas, conflict in Syria. But Years is a rare, big-budget effort to put the issue squarely in front of an audience more accustomed to Dexter and Homeland, and it does so with spectacular cinematography and compelling, interwoven plot lines that help to propel you through the basics of climate science to arrive at… aw, don’t listen to me, just watch the thing.

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Watch Harrison Ford Fight Climate Change In a Fighter Jet

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GOP Lawmakers Scramble To Court Tesla

by JeffValdivia Posted on March 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Electric vehicle sales in New Jersey ran out of batteries earlier this month, when the Chris Christie administration voted to ban car manufacturers from selling directly to drivers. The companies must now use third-party dealers. The ban applies to all car manufacturers, but seemed particularly aimed at Tesla, which had been in negotiations with the administration for months to sell electric cars straight from its own storefronts in the state.

The move was a win for the state’s surprisingly powerful auto dealer lobby and a loss for one of the country’s biggest electric car makers. But it also cemented New Jersey’s place as a non-contender for the real prize: a $5 billion battery “gigafactory” that Tesla plans to begin construction on later this year. With an estimated 6,500 employees, the factory will likely become a keystone of the United State’s clean energy industry and an economic boon for its host state. Now, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and Nevada are scrambling to get picked, and last week Republican legislators in Arizona began to try pushing their state to the top of the pile.

It’s the latest sign that, at least at the state level, the clean energy industry’s best friend might be the GOP. Newt Gingrich quickly pounced on Christie after the direct sales ban for “artificially” insulating car dealers, just weeks after calling for John Kerry to resign after Kerry named climate change as a principle challenge of the generation. On Tuesday, Texas Governor Rick Perry called his state’s direct sales ban “antiquated” nearly a year after a Democrat-backed bill to change the policy was killed.

New Jersey and Texas aren’t the only states where you can’t buy a Tesla car directly from the company: Arizona and Maryland also have direct sales bans. But a bill passed out of committee in Arizona’s GOP-controlled Senate last week would reverse the state’s position and allow electric vehicle companies to sell directly out of their showrooms. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Warren Peterson (R-Gilbert) said he was spurred by the New Jersey situation to amend what he sees as a creeping assault on free market principles.

“For me, it’s not about Tesla or electric cars,” he said. “For me, a big concern I have now is we are limiting someone’s choice.”

But despite backing from some prominent Arizona Republicans (Sen. John McComish told the Arizona Daily Star he didn’t see why the state should “prevent someone else who has a better idea from making an effort to enter that industry”), Warren said he’s faced opposition from others who see the bill as damaging to the state’s traditional car market or a handout to Tesla, arguments that swayed the decision in New Jersey.

“I have a tough time understanding why Republicans are opposed to it, because free markets are such a big part of the platform,” he said. “States that moved away from this have made a big mistake.”

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GOP Lawmakers Scramble To Court Tesla

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Now You Can Get Solar Panels at Best Buy

by ChelseaDown Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tim McDonnell

There was an era when putting solar panels on your roof was a time- and money-sucking hassle on par with remodeling your kitchen. But the cost of going solar has been dropping fast. The latest signal of the industry’s move into the mainstream came last week, when Oakland-based SolarCity announced it would begin to sell solar systems out of Best Buy, alongside big-screen TVs and digital cameras.

“There are a lot of people out there with unshaded roofs, paying high electricity bills, who just don’t know this is an option for them,” said Jonathan Bass, SolarCity’s vice president of communications. The move into Best Buy “gives us a chance to have that conversation with more people.”

The company is the biggest installer in the country’s biggest solar market, California, a state that earlier this month broke its all-time solar power production record twice on two consecutive days, churning out enough electricity from solar panels to power roughly 3 million homes. Just since last summer, California’s solar production has doubled, according to the California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s electric grid. There’s a lot more growth where that came from, Bass said.

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Now You Can Get Solar Panels at Best Buy

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Was the Los Angeles Earthquake Caused by Fracking Techniques?

by VictorF32nso Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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The epicenter of today’s L.A. quake was 8 miles from oil waste injection wells Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance

Was the 4.4-magnitude earthquake that rattled Los Angeles this morning caused by fracking methods? It’s hard to say, but what’s clear from the above map, made by Kyle Ferrar of the FracTracker Alliance, is that the quake’s epicenter was just eight miles from a disposal well where oil and gas wastewater is being injected underground at high pressure.

Don Drysdale, spokesman for the state agency that oversees California Geological Survey, told me that state seismologists don’t think that the injection well was close enough to make a difference (and the agency has also raised the possibility that Monday’s quake could have been a foreshock for a larger one). But environmental groups aren’t so sure.

In other states, injection wells located 7.5 miles from a fault have been shown to induce seismic activity, points out Andrew Grinberg, the oil and gas project manager for Clean Water Action. “We are not saying that this quake is a result of an injection,” he adds, “but with so many faults all over California, we need a better understanding of how, when, and where induced seismicity can occur with relation to injection.”

“Shaky Ground,” a new report from Clean Water Action, Earthworks, and the Center for Biological Diversity, argues that the close proximity of such wells to active faults could increase the state’s risk of earthquakes. According to the report, more than half of the state’s permitted oil wastewater injection wells are located less than 10 miles from an active fault, and 87 of them, or about 6 percent, are located within a mile of an active fault.

Scientists have long known that injecting large amounts of wastewater underground can cause earthquakes by increasing pressure and reducing friction along fault lines. One of the best known early examples took place in 1961, when the US Army disposed of millions of gallons of hazardous waste by injecting it 12,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado. The influx caused more than 1,500 earthquakes over a five year period in an area not known for seismic activity; the worst among them registered at more than 5.0 on the Richter scale and caused $500,000 in damage. Geologists later discovered that the Army well had been drilled into an unknown fault.

As Mother Jones‘ Michael Behar detailed in-depth last year, fracking is now a leading suspect for a spate of serious earthquakes in places that hardly ever see them, such as Oklahoma, where in 2011, a 5.7-magnitude temblor destroyed 14 homes and baffled seismologists.

“In some locations of the US, the disposal of wastewater associated with oil/gas production, including hydraulic fracturing operations, appears to have triggered some low-magnitude seismic activity,” concedes Drysdale, Geological Survey spokesman. But in California, he adds, oil companies are required to evaluate surrounding geology before disposing of wastewater underground, and can’t inject it at dangerously high pressures.

Yet Grinberg, a co-author of the “Shaky Ground” report, says that the existing regulations don’t go far enough now that quake-prone California is poised for a fracking boom. Though he’d like to see a moratorium on fracking while the risks are studied, he wants any eventual regulations to at least require seismic monitoring at or near injection wells and to look at the cumulative earthquake risk of entire oil fields.

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Was the Los Angeles Earthquake Caused by Fracking Techniques?

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These Pictures of Spring Flowers Will Melt Your Frozen Heart

by EWQRoderic Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Climate change might have had a hand in the exceptionally cold winter much of the country just suffered through, but on the upside, there’s new evidence that it’s sending spring in early, and giving us more time with wildflowers.

That’s the conclusion of one of the most exhaustive surveys ever conducted on flowering “phenology,” the term scientists use for the timing of seasonal events (such as the day the first migratory birds arrive in a given place or, in this case, the first day flowers open). The study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From 1974 to 2012, biologist David Inouye* of the University of Maryland took a team to Colorado just as the winter frost was beginning to thaw, and spent the spring and summer documenting when 60 common plant species had their first, last, and peak (i.e., the most individual plants) flowering.

In all but one of the species, the date of first flowering moved incrementally forward each year, by more than a month in at least one case. You can see a sampling of the flowers in these photos, along with how much earlier they are flowering these days compared to 39 years ago, when the study began. Overall, said study co-author Paul CaraDonna, the ecological onset of spring advanced by about 25 days, from mid-May to late April, mostly thanks to warming temperatures (about 0.7 degrees F per decade here) that melted snow early.

“With these changes in climate, the plants are coming out a lot sooner,” CaraDonna said.

In addition, CaraDonna said, last flowerings are happening later in the fall, so that the overall flower season is now about 35 days longer than it was 39 years ago.

Scientists have known for years that climate change messes with nature’s datebook, throwing off plants (including flowers and trees), animals (from birds to plankton), and even fungi that rely on clues like temperature and weather to know when to breed, migrate, come out of hibernation, and whatever else they need to do. In fact, one of the first great phenologists was Henry David Thoreau, whose notes on the first flowering of some 500 plant species around Walden Pond were recently tapped by a pair of Boston University biologists to inform modern-day research, which found flowering times for these plants to have advanced an average of 10 days.

What makes this new research unique is not only the sheer size of the dataset, but that it tracks the flowers through the spring and summer until the frost comes back in the fall. Knowing the date of first flowering is important, CaraDonna said, but limited.

“It’s like if the cover of a book looks cool, but you don’t know what the rest of the book is about,” he said. “We’re really curious about how these patterns contribute to other patterns in the community that you can’t see if you just look at first flowering.”

In other words, flower phenology has implications beyond making nice company for hikers. The early appearance of flowers increases competition amongst them for pollinators, like bees, which can in turn get thrown off by unusual dining options, and the effects cascade up the ecological pyramid from there. In the biological marketplace, “things that used to be on sale at different times are now on sale together,” said co-author Amy Iler.

CaraDonna said the next step in the study is to look more closely at how the shifted timing of flowers can destabilize an ecosystem, but even now he’s confident the impacts are underway: “If you change this much of an ecological community, there will be consequences.”

* Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to biologist David Inouye as “Daniel Inouye.” We regret the error.

Photo credits:

Lanceleaf springbeauty: Wikimedia Commons

Glacier lily: Wikimedia Commons

Heartleaf bittercress: Wikimedia Commons

Western monkshood: Eric Hunt/Flickr

Slenderleaf collomia: Wikimedia Commons

American vetch: Wikimedia Commons

Ballhead sandwort: Wikimedia Commons

Aspen fleabane: Wikimedia Commons

Creeping mahonia: Matt Lavin/Flickr

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These Pictures of Spring Flowers Will Melt Your Frozen Heart

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California Just Had Its Warmest Winter on Record

by olikellopas Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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NOAA

This winter has been a tale of two Americas: The Midwest is just beginning to thaw out from a battery of epic cold snaps, while Californians might feel that they pretty much skipped winter altogether. In fact, new NOAA data reveal that California’s winter (December through February) was the warmest in the 119-year record, 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average.

The map above ranks every state’s winter temperature average relative to its own historical record low (in other words, relative to itself and not to other states). Low numbers indicate that the state was unusually cold; higher numbers mean it was exceptionally warm. As you can see, the Midwest was much colder than average, while the West was hotter than average (despite a season-long kerfluffle about polar vortexes, the East Coast wasn’t exceptionally cold, after all).

As we’ve reported, there’s currently a scientific debate over whether climate change in the Arcitc is making the jet stream “drunk,” and thereby increasing the likelihood of extreme cold spells; the exact role of climate change in California’s record heat is still unclear.

As anyone working in California’s farming industry could confirm, the state also had an exceptionally dry winter, the third-lowest precipitation on record. Other interesting facts from the NOAA report:

At the beginning of March, 91 percent of the Great Lakes remained frozen, the second-largest ice cover since record keeping began in 1973.
With reservoirs in central and northern California at 36 to 74 percent of their historical average levels, these regions would need 18 inches of rain over the next three months to end the drought, much more than the state normally gets in that time period.
Alaska’s winter was the eighth-warmest on record, 6.2 degrees F over the 1971-2000 average.

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California Just Had Its Warmest Winter on Record

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Watch the Christian Right Argue Over Whether the Earth Is Really 6,000 Years Old

by rzana79 Posted on February 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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How do we know that Bill Nye won the creationism debate with Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis earlier this month? Simple: The Christian Right is now airing its grievances over the outcome publicly, with one of its top leaders saying the debate made Christians look completely out of touch.

Via Right Wing Watch, here’s a video from last week of televangelist Pat Robertson blasting the idea that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old, as Young Earth creationists like Ham assert. “There ‘aint no way that’s possible,” explains Robertson, noting that anyone working in the oil industry can see as much as they drill through layer after geological layer to extract ancient hydrocarbons. “You can’t just totally deny the geological formations that are out there,” Robertson continued. “Let’s be real. Let’s not make a joke of ourselves.”

Watch Robertson’s comments above.

But that’s just the beginning: Ham then responded to Robertson and raised the stakes further on Facebook. “Pat Robertson is so misinformed and deceived,” Ham lamented. “Sad that so many will believe him.” Ham later continued:

Oh, that God would convict and open the eyes of Christian leaders and Christian college and seminary professors, so many of whom are as uninformed and deceived as Pat Robertson. God have mercy.

The truth is that Ham did make a joke of himself, actually arguing at one point that lions were vegetarians before Noah’s Flood. Such are the intellectual contortions required of Young Earth creationists who seriously want to insist, against not just biological but also geological and physical evidence, on an Earth that is younger than its oldest living tree.

Robertson, meanwhile, is no paragon of rationality: This is the same guy who asserted, in response to Walt Disney World’s “Gay Days,” that “I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you … It’ll bring about terrorist bombs; it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor.” And yet here, he comes off as the voice of moderation. Indeed, Robertson even seems to embrace a form of theistic or “progressive” evolution that is not necessarily incompatible with scientific understanding.

This suggests that, if nothing else, the creationism debate was highly disruptive of the evolution-creationism status quo. Just maybe, there will be enough upheaval on the Christian right to trigger a serious reconsideration of their attacks on science education across the country. (Wishful thinking, we know.)

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Watch the Christian Right Argue Over Whether the Earth Is Really 6,000 Years Old

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PHOTOS: A "Catastrophic…Crippling…Paralyzing" Ice Storm

by ElkeCulpepper Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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An ice storm the National Weather Service has called “catastrophic…crippling…paralyzing… choose your adjective” is sweeping across states from Texas to North Carolina, knocking out power in more than 100,000 homes and businesses as it makes its way toward the Northeast. Here are some photos showing the early effects of the storm.

A vehicle drives through the rapidly falling snow on the US 421 Bypass in Sanford, N.C. Chris Seward/Raleigh News & Observer/ZUMA

LORETTA CANTRELL, 75, says ” I feel like a child again playing in the snow,” during a walk on Popular Stump Road in Helen, Ga. Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/ZUMA

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PHOTOS: A "Catastrophic…Crippling…Paralyzing" Ice Storm

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