Tag Archives: boston

Massachusetts has a bunch of new roadside solar panels. Too bad they’re so ugly

by HPWTyree34164289 Posted on September 8, 2015

Massachusetts has a bunch of new roadside solar panels. Too bad they’re so ugly

By on 8 Sep 2015commentsShare

Last month, my family and I were on a pleasant drive through Massachusetts, when suddenly we came upon a huge swath of solar panels on the side of the road. “Cool!” I thought, internally fist-pumping the recent success of solar power. When we came upon a second array, my reaction was a bit more subdued: “Huh — I didn’t expect to see another one so soon.” And by the third array, I had turned full-on curmudgeon: “Geez — those things are so ugly; they’re totally ruining the view!”

For background, Massachusetts wants to power 240,000 Massachusetts homes with solar power by 2020. According to The Boston Globe, the state could produce only three megawatts of solar power back in 2008, but has since bumped that number way up to 903 — enough to power 137,500 homes. The roadside panels are a relatively new addition to the state’s solar arsenal. Here’s more from The Boston Globe:

The highway solar farms are part of an initiative launched two years ago by the state Department of Transportation that will build at least 10 solar projects on unused department property, eight of them along the Mass Pike. The remaining solar farms will be built next year near Stockbridge and in Salisbury off of Interstate 95.

Ameresco Inc. in Framingham, a publicly traded energy management and procurement company, is developing the solar projects under a contract that pays the DOT nearly $100,000 a year in land leases and allows it to buy electricity at reduced rates from Ameresco. The lower power costs could save the state $15 million over 20 years.

Driving past those new arrays, I couldn’t help but feel conflicted. On the one hand, I’ve been a firm supporter of renewable energy ever since I wrote my first ever research paper on the stuff back in middle school (and oh boy — what I wouldn’t give to read that essay today; anyone got a floppy disk reader?). On the other hand, solar panels are ugly.

Of course, ugly solar panels are better than none, so for now, yay for more solar panels! But going forward, clean energy supporters shouldn’t just sit down and shut up and give thanks to the powers that be for every giant dark rectangle on the side of their road trip. If we expect other technologies like cars, phones, and computers to look sleek and appealing, why not our energy infrastructure, too?

Fortunately, people are already working on more aesthetically pleasing panels. Scientists at a company called Ubiquitous Energy have figured out a way to make completely transparent solar panels that could be mounted on electronics or buildings. And one of the company’s co-founders, Richard Lunt, has since designed a type of transparent material that can redirect certain wavelengths of light to unobtrusive photovoltaic cells mounted on the edge of said material (good for, say, a smartphone screen). There’s also a group of Dutch researchers working on colorful — although low-efficiency — solar panels that they hope to test out on some roadsides of their own.

Hopefully, we’ll soon be looking back on these massive arrays the same way we look back on those clunky desktop computers of the ’80s and ’90s. I, for one, can’t wait to see what the 2015 Macbook version of solar panels will look like.

Source:

A bright future for roadside solar farms

, The Boston Globe.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get Grist in your inbox

Taken from: 

Massachusetts has a bunch of new roadside solar panels. Too bad they’re so ugly

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Jason, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Massachusetts has a bunch of new roadside solar panels. Too bad they’re so ugly

Charleston’s Hometown Newspaper Is Putting Awful Cable News to Shame

by TiffanySimpkins Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Shrinking newsrooms, digital “churnalism,” and armies of pundits carving up increasingly divided audiences—that’s the media we’re told we must accept to live in America today.

But have hope, news consumer! There’s another, less remarked-upon media phenomenon going on: the return of the heroic local newsroom dominating breaking national coverage.

From Boston to Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, one thing has become crystal clear: To get real reporting—and to get it fast—you’ve got to switch off cable and go local. It’s here you’ll find the scoops, the sense of place, the authentic compassion; it’s here you can avoid the predictable blather from a candidate, or pundit, or hack filling airtime. It’s here you’ll find out what’s really happening to a particular group of Americans who have just been shoved into a tragic spotlight. Turn off the TV and Google the local paper on your phone. Find their Twitter feed. Follow their journalists.

Take Charleston. During the early hours of the story on Wednesday night, cable news frustrated viewers by coming late to the game, according to this breakdown by Adweek‘s cable-addict Mark Joyella. (CNN was first to report the news just after 10 p.m., and it stayed with the story, Joyella writes—though it attracted criticism on social media for simulcasting a live feed from its global operations, CNN International, instead of staying domestic.) When Fox News and MSNBC got into the story on Thursday, their programs lined up the usual suspects to engage in a cliched debate over the national narrative: Was it guns? Was it race? Was it mental illness? And the nationally televised blame game began in earnest: While Fox mused about whether pastors should pack heat, and attacked President Obama for bringing up gun control, MSNBC commentator Michael Eric Dyson criticized the president for “obscuring” race with guns: “When will this president finally see that he doesn’t have to run from his race or run from blackness?” Dyson said. I could go on.

Meanwhile, the Post and Courier, Charleston’s major daily newspaper—winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize—seized its hometown story immediately, posting an article just before 10 p.m. the night of the shooting. It hasn’t stopped pumping out sensitively reported articles from deep within the affected community since that first notice. The paper assigned somewhere between a half and two-thirds of its newsroom of 80 people to the task of covering the unfolding story, trying to patch reporters in on shifts as much as possible to keep them from burning out in the field. After covering the death of Walter Scott two months ago, the newsroom was experienced in switching into high gear, “though you’re never quite prepared for any of these things,” Mitch Pugh, the newspaper’s executive editor, told me on Friday.

For this newsroom, it’s personal, and reporters have begun to feel the strain. “A lot of our folks know people who were either in the church or close to people in the church,” Pugh said. “We’re trying to get people more into a shift mode, and get some mental health breaks, and some downtime to get some rest.”

Some reporters, he said, just “don’t want to let go of it.” That’s the nature of reporting in a city traumatized by an event of this magnitude.

Much more so than the bigger guys who parachute in, the major advantage of being the hometown paper is that this newsroom gets it. The journalists “understand deeply the complex relationship this community has had with the issue of race,” Pugh said. “I think we’re able to report on those issues in a more responsible and authoritative way than some of the outside media.”

Cable television has been on the ground in Charleston, doing reporting and making sure Lindsay Graham and other candidates answer tough questions about a Confederate flag flying near the statehouse. But not like the Post and Courier, whose coverage has sharply focused on the community—its grieving, the memorials, intensely moving profiles of the victims, and political reactions—not simply the obsessive speculation about the motivation of the alleged killer, 21-year-old Dylann Roof.

It’s a way for the paper to “focus on our community, on the victims, on the efforts to come together and heal,” Pugh told me.

Mourners cry out during a prayer vigil held for the victims of Wednesday’s shooting at Emanuel AME Church, in Charleston. Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier/AP

That intimacy with the community has led to some extra caution. With the stakes so high, getting it wrong is simply not an option. The newspaper, for example, knew the names of some victims on Wednesday night, but waited until they were confirmed through more official channels before reporting them. Any error would be magnified under the strain of shock and anger. “We weren’t interested in being first on that,” Pugh said. “We were interested in being right.”

But they could not get everything right. When newspapers hit the streets on Thursday, some were affixed with a jarring advertisement for a gun shop just above the headline: “Church attack kills 9“. The outraged reaction was immediate and the paper apologized. “I think that being forthright and honest and taking responsibility, most people will understand and accept that,” Pugh said of readers who called and wrote to complain. The paper now has policies in place “to ensure that does not happen again,” he added.

The increased profile may have also led to unwanted attention in the form of a potential hacking attack against the paper’s website, which became inaccessible on Friday for “20-to-30 minutes at a time, sporadically,” across the morning, Pugh said. The companies responsible for hosting the website investigated the possibility of an attack. “It’s starting to look like someone tried to take our site down,” Pugh told me, though it was too early to confirm.

The Post and Courier’s response to the massacre is reminiscent of other newspapers dominating the coverage when tragedy strikes in their communities: The Baltimore Sun’s relentless coverage of the protests after the death of Freddie Gray; the Boston Globe’s award-winning coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and manhunt; the St Louis Post-Dispatch’s forensic, and visually powerful (and also award-winning) coverage of the death of Michael Brown and furious protests for justice in Ferguson. There’s little wonder there’s some camaraderie among these city papers. In April, the Boston Globe sent lunch to the Baltimore Sun’s newsroom, a way of paying forward another act of generosity when in April 2013, the Chicago Tribune bought the Globe pizzas during the bombing coverage.

A letter from the Tribune to the Globe read: “We can’t buy you lost sleep, so at least let us pick up lunch.”

In each of these papers: heart-breaking, personal stories, rendered powerfully whether a national audience was watching or not.

We were.

The Post and Courier’s approach can be felt in the op-ed pages, too. A Thursday editorial read: “A shared revulsion for the killer’s inhumanity—and for the persisting poison of racism that apparently sparked his barbaric deed—unites us. A shared commitment for a better, more understanding future drives us.”

Taken from: 

Charleston’s Hometown Newspaper Is Putting Awful Cable News to Shame

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Charleston’s Hometown Newspaper Is Putting Awful Cable News to Shame

Finally, Conservatives Begin To Back Away From the Confederate Flag

by UlrichLompdh Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The death of nine innocent worshippers may achieve what decades of civil rights activism failed to do: Force South Carolina to remove the Confederate battle flag from grounds of its capitol building.

The Confederate battle flag flew over the capitol dome in Columbia, S.C., from 1962, when the legislature hoisted it as a symbol of defiance against integration, to 2000, when huge protests convinced state lawmakers to move it elsewhere. But it didn’t go far: The flag has flown over a Confederate soldiers’ memorial on the capitol grounds ever since.

The shooting in Charleston is leading to new calls to take down the Confederate flag for good, including one from the mayor of Columbia:

Now we’ve also seen some tentative hints that figures on the right may actually be willing to let that happen:

Nikki Haley

The South Carolina governor infamously called a non-issue during her re-election campaign last year because she “had not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag” during calls with business leaders. She also rejected at least one previous call by the NAACP to remove the flag.

But during an interview on Friday with Reuters, Haley seemed open to re-examining the deal that moved the Confederate flag to its current spot

“If they want to have this conversation again, they will,” Haley said of the state legislature. “They had it 15 years ago. They came to a consensus, that’s where it was. I think they’ll have another conversation, and we’ll bring people together.”

Lindsey Graham

Many people, including us, blasted the South Carolina senator and Republican presidential candidate when he told CNN on Friday morning that the flag is “part of who we are” in his state. But he also said he was open to changing the capitol’s awkward compromise on the flag.

“It’s time for people in South Carolina to revisit that decision,” he said. “It would be fine with me.”

During the 2012 GOP primaries, Graham called the use of the flag at the Confederate War Memorial a “bipartisan” solution and advised candidates to avoid the topic altogether. “Any candidate who brought that up wouldn’t be doing themselves any favors,” he said to The Hill.

The National Review

Writers at the conservative magazine—which firmly backed the South’s mantra of states’ rights during the civil rights era—debated the use of the flag on Thursday. Executive Editor Reihan Salam came out firmly against it:

It could be that the Confederate battle flag has come to mean something entirely different in 2015 than it did in the mid-1950s, when it was closely tied to resistance to federal desegregation efforts. But is its value such that we ought to continue giving it quasi-official status, even when doing so alienates the descendants of enslaved southerners, who have just as much claim to deciding which symbols ought to represent southern heritage as the descendants of Confederate veterans? I don’t believe so.

Others were more skeptical: Ian Tuttle argued that “objections to the flag are not raised in good faith” but rather for political gain. But even he then acknowledged that the flag can cause serious harm and offense.

One can recognize, understand, and sympathize with the revulsion symbols of the Confederacy occasion in some quarters, particularly among black Americans — and a compromise should be possible. If reducing the visibility of these symbols would offer relief to those genuinely hurt, and would remove an object of contention keeping persons of different races from cooperating to advance true racial justice, that is something supporters of Confederate symbols should be able to do.

Charlie Baker

The pro-choice, pro-marriage equality Massachusetts governor is hardly an arch-conservative, but his experience on Thursday shows how the shock of the shooting may be acting on politicians. Baker told Boston’s WGBH early on Thursday afternoon that while he was against the flag personally, it was a “tradition” of South Carolina. “My view on stuff like this is that South Carolinians can make their own call,” he said.

Within hours, Baker was backtracking hard. “What were you thinking?” was the message he received from friends, he told the Boston Globe that evening. “I just want to be clear: I abhor the symbolism and the history of that flag as much as anybody, and I am more than cognizant of the fact that literally millions of Americans died over what it represents in the Civil War,” he said. “I think they should take the flag down.”

View original article – 

Finally, Conservatives Begin To Back Away From the Confederate Flag

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Finally, Conservatives Begin To Back Away From the Confederate Flag

Boston’s airport is going green(ish)

by MercedeCoburn Posted on May 4, 2015

Boston’s airport is going green(ish)

By on 4 May 2015commentsShare

Boston’s Logan International Airport has decided to go green, an ambitious task given that the airport generated about 1.3 billion pounds of climate-changing carbon dioxide in 2013 alone. Here’s the scoop from the The Boston Globe:

The airport plans to cut its carbon emissions 40 percent and energy consumption by 25 percent below 2012 levels by 2020. Officials also plan to curb the amount of waste produced by passengers by 2 percent every year by 2030, reduce water use by 1 percent every year over the next 10 years, and increase the recycling rate by 60 percent by the end of the decade.

Well great! But there’s just one problem: The airplanes. A round-trip ticket from Boston to Seattle, for example, comes with a 1.68-metric-ton CO2 price tag. So an airport saying it’s going to clean up its act is kind of like an elementary school bully saying he’s going to keep stealing your money but won’t shove you into lockers anymore. It’s like, thanks, man, but you’re still kind of a dick.

Logan released a 40-page report that, according to The Globe, lacks specifics on how it plans to meet its goals but does point out some low-hanging fruit. It can, for example, ask that planes use just one engine while taxiing around aimlessly, as planes are wont to do. This sounds good, but it also begs the question: if planes only need one engine to torture their victims — er, passengers — this way, why don’t they already do this all the time?! 

Airport officials also touted their new “environmentally friendly” rental car center, which has cut shuttle bus trips down from 100 per hour to 30 per hour. But let’s be honest: There’s nothing green about a place that hands out cars to loads of people, who will undoubtedly drive around the city in the most inefficient and infuriating way possible.

Nonetheless, one of the report’s authors, Brenda Enos, assistant director of capital and environmental programs at Massport, had this to say: “For the first time, we have actual goals and measurements against those metrics. I think it holds our feet to the fire.”

Psst! Climate change was already holding your feet to the fire. Case in point: In addition to cutting emissions, airport officials are also planning for sea level rise. From the Globe:

With sea levels expected to rise 2 feet to 6 feet by the end of the century — and as much as an additional 5 feet during the heaviest storms — airport officials plan to spend $9 million over the next five years on flood doors and barriers, coastal management, and portable pumps to keep the airport running in the event of a major storm surge. Within 10 years, they plan to spend millions more to move all critical equipment and upgrade systems to be able to withstand the worst storms.

Well, that sounds like a very sensible thing to do. Come to think of it, all of this sounds pretty sensible, which is why I’m not going to pat Logan on the back for this. Airports are where we go to participate in one of humankind’s greatest achievements — flight — but they’re also shameless hubs of pollution, waste, consumerism, and all around misery. So this non-specific, 40-page report is important — but also way overdue.

Source:
Logan Airport drafts climate change plan

, The Boston Globe.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

sponsored post

Think you could hack it as a farmer? Read this first

Before you go buying a farm, there are a few things you need to consider.

Get Grist in your inbox

Visit site:

Boston’s airport is going green(ish)

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Boston’s airport is going green(ish)

Elizabeth Warren: “I Don’t Support the Death Penalty” for Boston Marathon Bomber

by GiuseppeBenjami Posted on April 9, 2015

Mother Jones

On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said she is opposed to sentencing Dzohkhar Tsarnaev to death, one day after the Boston Marathon bomber was found guilty on all 30 charges related to his involvement in the deadly 2013 attack.

Speaking on CBS This Morning, Warren said, “Nothing is ever going to make those who were injured whole…My heart goes out to the families here, but I don’t support the death penalty.” “I think he should spend his life in jail, no possibility of parole,” she said. “He should die in prison.”

“The alternative to the death penalty—it’s not as if you set this guy free. He’s put away…he’s not someone who is able to keep sucking up a lot of energy. The families need their chance to move on.”

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker (R), on the other hand, supports putting Tsarnaev to death.

Watch the full video here:

View original article:

Elizabeth Warren: “I Don’t Support the Death Penalty” for Boston Marathon Bomber

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Elizabeth Warren: “I Don’t Support the Death Penalty” for Boston Marathon Bomber

The Feds Are Investigating 106 Colleges for Mishandling Sexual Assault. Is Yours One of Them?

by BrianneJessep Posted on April 8, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last May, the Department of Education released a list of 55 colleges and universities under investigation for possible Title IX violations for mishandling sexual-assault cases. As of April 1, the number has grown to 106 institutions, according to new data requested by Mother Jones.

The DOE provided the updated list Monday, a day after the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism published its report on the widely discredited Rolling Stone article about sexual assault at the University of Virginia. The controversy around the piece has served as a reminder of the ongoing national debate about how colleges and universities should handle sexual-assault allegations. Recent research shows that 1 in 5 women in undergraduate programs experience sexual assault, even though just 1 percent of assailants are punished.

UVA has been on the federal radar since June 2011, joining five other Virginia area schools under investigation. Meanwhile, several schools have agreed to make changes in how they handle sexual-misconduct complaints following the federal probes:

In 2011, before the DOE made its list of institutions public, the Office for Civil Rights looked into complaints of a sexually hostile environment at Yale, in part due to an October 2010 incident in which fraternity pledges chanted “sexually aggressive comments” outside the campus’ Women’s Center. Yale agreed to alter its policies in June 2012.
Both the Department of Justice and the DOE investigated procedures at the University of Montana-Missoula, once described as the nation’s “rape capital.” (Between January 2008 and May 2012, Missoula police received more than 350 sexual-assault reports.) The university agreed to make changes in May 2013.
Last May, the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights found that at the Virginia Military Institute, “female cadets were exposed to a sexually hostile environment” and that the institute violated Title IX for requiring pregnant and parenting cadets to leave the school.
The DOE’s Office for Civil Rights found that Harvard Law School failed to “appropriately respond” to two sexual-assault complaints, including one complaint that was dismissed more than a year after the university took up the case. The law school agreed to make changes in December 2014 as part of a university-wide overhaul of its policy for handling sexual-assault and harassment cases. A group of Harvard law professors objected to the tougher policy in a Boston Globe op-ed, noting that the procedures for deciding cases were “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.”

Here’s the most recent list of schools under federal investigation:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1717119-106-universities-colleges-title-ix-investigation.js”,
width: 630,
height: 450,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1717119-106-universities-colleges-title-ix-investigation”
);

106 Universities, Colleges Title IX Investigation Department of Education (PDF)

106 Universities, Colleges Title IX Investigation Department of Education (Text)

See the original article here – 

The Feds Are Investigating 106 Colleges for Mishandling Sexual Assault. Is Yours One of Them?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Feds Are Investigating 106 Colleges for Mishandling Sexual Assault. Is Yours One of Them?

Climate Change Is Baking Alaska

by SherrylKilburn Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This article originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this winter, Monica Zappa packed up her crew of Alaskan sled dogs and headed south, in search of snow. “We haven’t been able to train where we live for two months,” she told me.

Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, which Zappa calls home, has been practically tropical this winter. Rick Thoman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Alaska, has been dumbfounded. “Homer, Alaska, keeps setting record after record, and I keep looking at the data like, Has the temperature sensor gone out or something?“

Something does seem to be going on in Alaska. Last fall, a skipjack tuna, which is more likely to be found in the Galápagos than near a glacier, was caught about 150 miles southeast of Anchorage, not far from the Kenai. This past weekend, race organizers had to truck in snow to the ceremonial Iditarod start line in Anchorage. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska tweeted a photo of one of the piles of snow with the hashtag #wemakeitwork.

Read: Freak floods flattened Eagle, Alaska. One man’s race against the water.

But it’s unclear how long that will be possible. Alaska is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the country—a canary in our climate coal mine. A new report shows that warming in Alaska, along with the rest of the Arctic, is accelerating as the loss of snow and ice cover begins to set off a feedback loop of further warming. Warming in wintertime has been the most dramatic—more than 6 degrees in the past 50 years. And this is just a fraction of the warming that’s expected to come over just the next few decades.

Of course, it’s not just Alaska. Last month was the most extreme February on record in the Lower 48, and it marked the first time that two large sections of territory (more than 30 percent of the country each) experienced both exceptional cold and exceptional warmth in the same month, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All-time records were set for the coldest month in dozens of Eastern cities, with Boston racking up more snow than the peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada. A single January snowstorm in Boston produced more snow than Anchorage has seen all winter. The discrepancy set off some friendly banter recently between the Anchorage, Boston, and San Francisco offices of the National Weather Service.

The terminus of Bear Glacier in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park in 2002 (above) and 2007 (below). USGS

USGS

Alaska is at the front lines of climate change. This year’s Iditarod has been rerouted—twice—due to the warm weather. The race traditionally starts in Anchorage, which has had near-record low snowfall so far this winter. The city was without a single significant snowstorm between October and late January, so race organizers decided to move the start from the Anchorage area 360 miles north to Fairbanks. But when the Chena River, which was supposed to be part of the new route’s first few miles, failed to sufficiently freeze, the starting point had to move again, to another location in Fairbanks.

On Monday, Zappa and her dogs set out on the 1,000-mile race across Alaska as one of 78 mushers in this year’s Iditarod. A burst of cold and snow are in the forecast this week, but for most of the winter, the weather across the interior of the state has also been abnormally warm. To train, many teams of dogs and their owners had to travel, often “outside”—away from Alaska. Zappa ended up going to the mountains of Wyoming.

Continue Reading »

Originally from:

Climate Change Is Baking Alaska

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Omega, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Climate Change Is Baking Alaska

Climate-denying scientist got piles of money from fossil fuel interests

by CarlaI75evbgsb Posted on February 23, 2015

Climate-denying scientist got piles of money from fossil fuel interests

By on 23 Feb 2015commentsShare

Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon has long been a favorite among the climate-denier crowd. He’s an aerospace engineer who works part-time for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and publishes papers that try to poke holes in the scientific consensus on climate change. But now information in newly released documents is casting serious doubt on his credibility, as The New York Times reports:

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

The bundle of documents, released by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center, gives a fresh reminder how the climate-denial industry functions, throwing huge sums at researchers whose work challenges the vast majority of climate science and claims we’re not on course for dangerous global warming.

Soon’s work tries to show that global warming is attributable to the sun, not humans. He has denounced the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore for overstating the threat our current fossil fuel consumption poses to the climate. And his work, it turns out, has been funded almost entirely by businesses and groups that don’t want governments to take action fighting climate change, including the ExxonMobil Foundation, the American Petroleum Institute, Southern Company, the Texaco Foundation, and the Koch-affiliated Donors’ Trust.

Soon’s affiliation with Harvard and the Smithsonian is prized by the conservative politicians and pundits who cite his work, while really pissing off the environmental community. Suzanne Goldenberg elaborates at The Guardian:

In the relatively small universe of climate denial Soon, with his Harvard-Smithsonian credentials, was a sought after commodity. He was cited admiringly by Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who famously called global warming a hoax. He was called to testify when Republicans in the Kansas state legislature tried to block measures promoting wind and solar power. The Heartland Institute, a hub of climate denial, gave Soon a courage award.

Soon did not enjoy such recognition from the scientific community. There were no grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation or the other institutions which were funding his colleagues at the Center for Astrophysics. According to the documents, his work was funded almost entirely by the fossil fuel lobby.

The newly released documents contain emails between Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian staff who assisted Soon, and Soon’s funders. In the emails, Soon’s research is framed as a sort of trade — the research is referred to as “deliverables.” His funding contracts specified, in some cases, that fossil fuel companies be allowed to review and give input on his work before he publish it, or that the source of his funding be kept secret.

Soon has denied that his funding influences his conclusions. But it certainly keeps his conclusions coming, even though the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which researches climate change, described Soon’s findings to The New York Times as “almost pointless” to the scientific community. The opinion of the scientific community, however, has proven not to matter much when it comes to sowing doubt among voters and policymakers — in that, the climate change deniers who capitalize on Soon’s findings have been very successful.

These new disclosures have lead some to point out that both research institutions and journals are too lax about declaring their researchers’ conflicts of interest. It remains to be seen how Harvard-Smithsonian and the journals that published Soon’s work will respond to the documents, which, because the Smithsonian is a government agency, were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. Will Harvard-Smithsonian drop Soon? Will the journal articles be retracted?

Meanwhile, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is calling for a different sort of action. “For years, fossil fuel interests and front groups have attacked climate scientists and legislation to cut carbon pollution using junk science and debunked arguments,” he told The Boston Globe. So Markey is launching an investigation and asking coal and oil companies to reveal their role in funding research related to climate change.

We’re sure they’ll do that right away.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

More here:  

Climate-denying scientist got piles of money from fossil fuel interests

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, Radius, Smith's, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Climate-denying scientist got piles of money from fossil fuel interests

Bill Nye Slams Bill Belichick: "What He Said Didn’t Make Any Sense"

by EmiliaSchwindt Posted on January 25, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Let me start by saying, I don’t know anything about football. I’m from Los Angeles. We don’t have a football team. I went to NYU where the most popular sporting event is the Spring production of Damn Yankees. Up until very recently I thought football was soccer but with players who didn’t have feet, instead their legs ended with sort of rounded nubs—”balls,” if you will—and I thought it was so awful that millions of Americans get together every Sunday—which is the Lord’s day, by the way—to force disabled folk to compete in some sort of blood sport. It’s not that though. It turns out it’s the real life version of NFL Blitz, which it turns out isn’t just a video game. It’s based on a real thing. Anyway, what am I talking about?

Oh yeah! #Deflategate! The Patriots! (Why are they called “the Patriots”? I get that it’s about the American Revolution and Massachusetts played a key role in that but come on, we’re all patriots here, FOX News. Even the Bengals fans.) I don’t like the Patriots because they’re from Boston and Boston is the home of the worst NBA team in the whole wide world, the Celtics, who had the audacity to beat my Los Angeles Lakers a couple of times in the 1980s. Also, the Red Sox! They’re pretty awful! And Boston is a very cold city, at least in the winter. A not-so-long ago history of racism, Boston also has, let’s not forget. And New England clam chowder is garbage compared to Manhattan clam chowder. So, I say this just to be transparent. I don’t think I personally want the Patriots to win the Super Bowl. Maybe I do. The Seahawks don’t sound great. Pate Carroll is apparently a 9/11 truther, which is a turnoff.

Let’s veer this ramble towards the news: #Deflategate! Bill Belichick says he didn’t do it. It wasn’t him. It was Mr Blue in the Library with the piano wire. Or, something. He has a scientific explanation for why the balls were tested to be under-inflated.

“We simulated a game-day situation, in terms of the preparation of the footballs, and where the footballs were at various points in time during the day or night. … I would say that our preparation process for the footballs is what we do —I can’t speak for anybody else — and that process raises the PSI approximately one pound,” Belichick said. “That process of creating a tackiness, a texture — a right feel, whatever that feel is, whatever that feel is. It’s a sensation for the quarterback. What’s the right feel — that process elevates the PSI one pound, based on what our study showed. Which was multiple balls, multiple examples in the process, as we would do for a game.”

I don’t know what any of that really means. It reads like gibberish to me. I, like so many Republican politicians, am not a scientist. Bill Nye is though and he says it’s gibberish too:

“What he said didn’t make any sense…Rubbing the football, I don’t think, can change the pressure.”

And that’s the news. Goodnight and good luck.

P.S. One of the things I was confused about was how deflated balls would give an advantage to a football team, because presumably it would make them less aerodynamic, but as my colleague Tim McDonnell notes, it’s about “grippiness.”

Visit link: 

Bill Nye Slams Bill Belichick: "What He Said Didn’t Make Any Sense"

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Prepara, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bill Nye Slams Bill Belichick: "What He Said Didn’t Make Any Sense"

What Are the Odds Your City Will Have a White Christmas?

by Shayna9349 Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
The lighter the shade of blue, the higher the chance of a White Christmas. NOAA/NCDC

This story originally appeared in CityLab and is published here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Those determined to have a White Christmas should grab crampons and a bottle of scotch and prepare for a tough slog. Many places in the lower 48 with a lock on holiday snow are located in rugged, altitudinous climes—the bony ridge of the Sierra Nevada, for instance, and the wind-burned peaks of the Rockies.

That much is clear in this delightful NOAA map plotting probabilities across the US for a White Christmas, defined here as a December 25 with more than an inch of snow on the ground. Based on three decades of climate normals from the National Climatic Data Center, the graphic shows a stark geographic divide when it comes to unwrapping presents in snow-globe conditions: A region of zero to 10 percent probability curves from Washington State through coastal California and then explodes in the deep South and Southeast. Parts of the Midwest also are likely to be snowless, with places like Kansas, Missouri, and lower Illinois having only an 11 to 25 percent chance of a White Christmas.

New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., have piddling shots at this charming weather, though their brethren higher on the East Coast fare better: Boston and Providence each have a 41 to 50 percent chance. Chicago racks a (considering its frosty reputation) low-sounding 41 to 50 percent chance, and Buffalo, home to sudden crashing currents of lake-effect snow, takes it up to 51 to 60 percent.

Aside from the West’s mountain ranges, NOAA says the best-performing powder points for December 25 are Maine, upstate New York, Minnesota, the highlands of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and almost “anywhere in Idaho.” But even these crystal-crusted locales could shake off the holiday snow this year, the agency says: “While the map shows the climatological probability that a snow depth of at least one inch will be observed on December 25, the actual conditions this year may vary widely from these probabilities because the weather patterns present will determine the snow on the ground or snowfall on Christmas day.”

Here’s another version of the map that’s less smooth, but clearer at delineating regional probabilities:

NOAA/NCDC

View the original here:

What Are the Odds Your City Will Have a White Christmas?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What Are the Odds Your City Will Have a White Christmas?