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Chris Christie: Parents Should Have "Choice" on Vaccines

by EdwinFortin Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update, February 2, 2015, 12:20 p.m.: In 2009, Christie wrote a letter in which he appeared to support the theory that autism may be linked to vaccinations. An excerpt from the letter, provided to MSNBC, below:

“I have met with families affected by autism from across the state and have been struck by their incredible grace and courage. Many of these families have expressed their concern over New Jersey’s highest-in-the nation vaccine mandates. I stand with them now, and will stand with them as their governor in their fight for greater parental involvement in vaccination decisions that affect their children.”

Update, February 2, 2015, 10:30 a.m.: Gov. Christie’s office released a statement amending his previous comments to reporters, saying there is “no question kids should be vaccinated.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called for a “balanced” approach to childhood vaccinations, telling reporters on Monday that it’s important to provide parents a “measure of choice” in their decisions.

“Mary Pat and I have had our children vaccinated and we think that it’s an important part of being sure we protect their health and the public health,” Christie said during a press conference in Cambridge, England, where he is traveling on a trade mission. “I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.”

“Not every vaccine is created equal and not every type of disease is as great a public health threat as others,” he added.

Christie’s comments come a day after President Obama urged parents to vaccinate their children in the midst of a widening measles outbreak that started in Disneyland. The highly contagious disease has since spread to 14 states with at least 102 cases reported, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I understand that there are families that, in some cases, are concerned about the effect of vaccinations,” Obama said in an interview with NBC Sunday. “The science is, you know, pretty indisputable. We’ve looked at this again and again. There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren’t reasons to not.”

The rise in parents who choose not to have their children fully immunized has been cited as one reason for a growing number of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks in recent years.

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Chris Christie: Parents Should Have "Choice" on Vaccines

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Elizabeth Warren’s Latest Comment About Running For President Is the Most Cryptic Yet

by FrankieReeder Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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With 106 weeks until the next presidential election, speculating about a potential Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) candidacy is like going on a long car ride with a six-year-old. “Are you running?” No. “How about now?” No. “Now?” No. “Now?” No. “What about now?” No. “Are you running?” No. “Are you running?” exasperated sigh “Aha!”

But Warren does continue to do the things people who are considering a run for president tend to do—flying to Iowa to rally the troops on behalf of Rep. Bruce Braley, for instance, and going on tour to promote a campaign-style book. Her latest venture, a sit-down interview in the next issue of People magazine, isn’t going to do much to quiet the speculation, even as she once more downplayed the prospect of a run:

Supporters are already lining up to back an “Elizabeth Warren for President” campaign in 2016. But is the freshman senator from Massachusetts herself on board with a run for the White House? Warren wrinkles her nose.

“I don’t think so,” she tells PEOPLE in an interview conducted at Warren’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, home for this week’s issue. “If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in the last five years, it’s don’t be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.”

She just doesn’t see the door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue being one of them. Not yet, anyway. “Right now,” Warren says, “I’m focused on figuring out what else I can do from this spot” in the U.S. Senate.

“Amazing doors”; “I don’t think”; “right now”—what does it all mean? Warren’s not really saying anything we haven’t heard from her before. But after then-Sen. Barack Obama’s furious denials about running for president eight years ago, no one’s ready to take “no” for an answer. At least not yet, anyway.

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Elizabeth Warren’s Latest Comment About Running For President Is the Most Cryptic Yet

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"The Troll Slayer": Don’t Miss This Fascinating Profile of Mary Beard

by MildredRandell Posted on August 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here is a partial list of things for which the British historian Mary Beard has gained reverence and notoriety:

Positing that Pompeiians had bad breath, based on tartar levels on their fossilized teeth.
Theorizing that Romans didn’t smile, since Latin lacks words for anything resembling one.
Being the world’s foremost scholar on how Romans pooped.
Going on television without wearing makeup or dying her gray hair.
Retweeting a message she got from a 20-year-old calling her a “filthy old slut.”
On 9/11: suggesting that on some level, the United States “had it coming.”
Disclosing that she was raped when she was 20 in an essay on rape in ancient Rome.

You can read all about it in Rebecca Mead’s excellent new New Yorker profile on the endlessly fascinating Cambridge don. It opens on a lecture that Beard gave earlier this year at the British Museum, titled “Oh Do Shut Up, Dear!,” on the long literary history of men keeping women quiet, from the Odyssey‘s Penelope ordered upstairs to her weaving by her son—”Speech will be the business of men,” he says—to the death threats, rape threats, and general nastiness that Beard and other outspoken women get online. (“I’m going to cut off your head and rape it,” read one of her tweet mentions.) For her part, Beard does not subscribe to the “don’t feed the trolls” school of thought when it comes to dealing with online assailants. She engages, both publicly and privately, often with surprising results:

She has discovered that, quite often, she receives not only an apology from them but also a poignant explanation…After a “Question Time” viewer wrote to her that she was “evil,” further correspondence revealed that he was mostly upset because he wanted to move to Spain and didn’t understand the bureaucracy. “It took two minutes on Google to discover the reciprocal health-care agreement, so I sent it to him,” she says. “Now when I have a bit of Internet trouble, I get an e-mail from him saying, ‘Mary, are you all right? I was worried about you.'”

Fun stuff. And when you’re done with Mead’s piece, check out Beard’s latest book, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up.

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"The Troll Slayer": Don’t Miss This Fascinating Profile of Mary Beard

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Dark Snow Is Accelerating Glacier Melting From the Arctic to the Himalayas

by DomingoPollard Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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

When American geologist Ulyana Horodyskyj set up a mini weather station at 5,800 meters on Mount Himlung, on the Nepal-Tibet border, she looked east toward Everest and was shocked. The world’s highest glacier, Khumbu, was turning visibly darker as particles of fine dust, blown by fierce winds, settled on the bright, fresh snow. “One-week-old snow was turning black and brown before my eyes,” she said.

The problem was even worse on the nearby Ngozumpa glacier, which snakes down from Cho Oyu—the world’s sixth-highest mountain. There, Horodyskyj found that so much dust had been blown on to the surface that the ability of the ice to reflect sunlight, a process known as albedo, dropped 20 percent in a single month. The dust that was darkening the brilliant whiteness of the snow was heating up in the strong sun and melting the snow and ice, she said.

The phenomenon of “dark snow” is being recorded from the Himalayas to the Arctic as increasing amounts of dust from bare soil, soot from fires, and ultrafine particles of “black carbon” from industry and diesel engines are being whipped up and deposited sometimes thousands of miles away. The result, say scientists, is a significant dimming of the brightness of the world’s snow and icefields, leading to a longer melt season, which in turn creates feedback where more solar heat is absorbed and the melting accelerates.

In a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of French government meteorologists has reported that the Arctic ice cap, which is thought to have lost an average of 12.9 billion tonnes of ice a year between 1992 and 2010 due to general warming, may be losing an extra 27 billion tonnes a year just because of dust, potentially adding several centimeters of sea-level rise by 2100. Satellite measurements, say the authors, show that in the last 10 years the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet has considerably darkened during the melt season, which in some areas is now between 6 and 11 days longer per decade than it was 40 years ago. As glaciers retreat and the snow cover disappears earlier in the year, so larger areas of bare soil are uncovered, which increases the dust erosion, scientists suggest.

Research indicates that the Arctic’s albedo may be declining much faster than was estimated only a few years ago. Earlier this year a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that declining Arctic albedo between 1979 and 2011 constituted 25 percent of the heating effect from carbon dioxide over the same time.

According to Danish glaciologist Jason Box, who heads the Dark Snow project to measure the effect of dust and other darkening agents on Greenland’s ice sheet, Arctic ice sheet reflectivity has been at a near record low for much of 2014. Even a minor decrease in the brightness of the ice sheet can double the average yearly rate of ice loss, seen from 1992 to 2010.

“Low reflectivity heats the snow more than normal. A dark snow cover will thus melt earlier and more intensely. A positive feedback exists for snow in which, once melting begins, the surface gets yet darker due to increased water content,” says Box on his blog. Both human-created and natural air pollutants are darkening the ice, say other scientists.

Nearly invisible particles of “black carbon” resulting from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels from diesel engines are being swept thousands of miles from industrial centers in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia, as is dust from Africa and the Middle East, where dust storms are becoming bigger as the land dries out, with increasingly long and deep droughts. Earlier this year dust from the Sahara was swept north for several thousands miles, smothered Britain and reached Norway.

According to Kaitlin Keegan, a researcher at Dartmouth College, the record melting in 2012 of Greenland’s northeastern ice sheet was largely a result of forest fires in Siberia and the United States.

Any reduction in albedo is a disaster, says Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Oceans Physics Group at Cambridge University.

“Replacing an ice-covered surface, where the albedo may be 70 percent in summer, by an open-water surface with albedo less than 10 percent, causes more radiation to be absorbed by the Earth, causing an acceleration of warming,” he says. “I have calculated that the albedo change from the disappearance of the last of the summer ice in 2012 was the equivalent to the effect of all the extra carbon dioxide that we have added to the atmosphere in the last 25 years.”

Ulyana Horodyskyj, who is planning to return to the Himalayas to continue monitoring dust pollution at altitude, said she had been surprised by how bad it was.

“This is mostly manmade pollution,” she said. “Governments must act, and people must become more aware of what is happening. It needs to be looked at properly.”

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Dark Snow Is Accelerating Glacier Melting From the Arctic to the Himalayas

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Why Are Republicans Shooting Themselves in the Foot With a Health Care Bill?

by Lavon5225vx Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore points me to The Hill today, which reports that House Republicans plan to draft a genuine Obamacare replacement bill later this year:

For years, Republicans have promised a “repeal and replace” strategy on ObamaCare, but have never coalesced behind one plan. President Obama has repeatedly mocked the GOP for not delivering an alternative.

Eric Cantor intends to move a repeal-and-replace bill before the midterm elections in November, according to a source familiar with the situation. He broached the issue at the House GOP retreat in Cambridge, Md., late last week.

“I think it is very likely that we’re going to have it before the election, we’re going to give the people — or at least we are going to try to give the people — a clear distinction of who we are versus who the Democrats are,” Florida Rep. Tom Rooney (R) said.

I’m genuinely baffled by this. Why bother? Republicans have spent years screaming “Repeal and Replace!” without ever offering up a replacement, and it’s worked fine. Sure, it invites mockery from folks like me, but has that ever done them any harm? Not that I can see.

On the flip side, any actual bill will be divisive within their own caucus and provide a rich target for Democrats at the same time. When it’s all just hazy smoke, Dems have nothing to get a handle on. Once there’s actual legislative language, all they have to do is find the least popular bits, twist them into granny-killing death panels, and go to town.

If there were an actual chance of passing this bill, it might be worth it. But there’s not, and as near as I can tell, it’s literally 100 percent downside and no upside. What on earth is the point?

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Why Are Republicans Shooting Themselves in the Foot With a Health Care Bill?

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Plants will reach point where they couldn’t possibly take another bite of our CO2

by Florencepb7 Posted on December 17, 2013

Plants will reach point where they couldn’t possibly take another bite of our CO2

By

John Upton

Plants love carbon dioxide. It’s their oxygen. That’s why forests, meadows, and the like are called carbon sinks — they help draw a fraction of our CO2 emissions back out of the atmosphere and into the soil.

But we can’t expect plants to clean up after us forever.

After running computer simulations, European and Japanese scientists concluded that plants that haven’t been bulldozed, poisoned, burnt up, or attacked by invasive pests will continue to absorb more carbon as atmospheric carbon levels rise. But they found that found that rising temperatures could eventually prevent vegetation from absorbing any more of our CO2 pollution.

That’s because heat waves dry out plants’ water reserves and put so much stress on vegetation that it can start releasing more carbon dioxide than it absorbs. As an example, one of the researchers, Andrew Friend of Cambridge, points to a 2003 heat wave in Europe during which “the amount of CO2 produced was sufficient to reverse the effect of four years of net ecosystem carbon sequestration.”

It appears that plants will hit the CO2 saturation point once the globe warms by about 4 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial times, or 7.4 Fahrenheit. Which is kind of a terrifying number. Although the Earth has warmed a little less than 1 degree C so far, and although world leaders aim to cap warming at 2 degrees C, projections based on our current fuel-burning practices point to warming eventually peaking at about 4 degrees C — or more.

The conclusions of Friend and his colleagues, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that should we hit that 4 C point, carbon dioxide levels could start to really climb as Earth’s plants release more carbon than they absorb.

So there’s one more reason to try to not reach that point. World leaders, listen up!

PNASThe green on this map shows areas where the world’s plants will suck carbon out of the atmosphere — until global temperatures rise more than 4 degrees Celsius. Then we’re in trouble. (Click to embiggen.)


Source
Four degree rise will end vegetation ‘carbon sink’ (University of Cambridge press release), PhysOrg
Carbon residence time dominates uncertainty in terrestrial vegetation responses to future climate and atmospheric CO2, PNAS

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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EPA chief: Stop saying environmental regs kill jobs

by Jill Tsai Posted on July 31, 2013

EPA chief: Stop saying environmental regs kill jobs

By Claire Thompson

U.S. EPA

Gina McCarthy takes the oath of office, with Carol Browner and Bob Perciasepe.

Tuesday, in her first speech as EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy got real with a crowd at Harvard Law School, the AP reports:

“Can we stop talking about environmental regulations killing jobs? Please, at least for today,” said McCarthy, referring to one of the favorite talking points of Republicans and industry groups.

“Let’s talk about this as an opportunity of a lifetime, because there are too many lifetimes at stake,” she said of efforts to address global warming.

The GOP has resorted to calling pretty much every Obama plan, especially those related to the climate, “job-killing.” McCarthy hammered home the emptiness of that claim. The Hill relays what she said:

The truth is cutting carbon pollution will spark business innovation, resulting in cleaner forms of American-made energy …

Right now, state and local communities — as well as industry, universities, and other non-profits — have been piloting projects, advancing policies, and developing best practices that follow the same basic blueprint: combining environmental and economic interests for combined maximum benefit. These on-the-ground efforts are the future. It’s a chance to harness the American entrepreneur spirit, developing new technologies and creating new jobs, while at the same time reducing carbon pollution to help our children and their children.

By appointing McCarthy, who pushed through tougher air-pollution regulations while at the head of EPA’s office of air quality, Obama signaled that he’s serious about using his executive power to cut carbon emissions. She warned him that she wouldn’t have an easy time getting Senate confirmation, The New York Times reports:

“Why would you want me?” Ms. McCarthy said she asked the president when he offered her the top job. “Do you realize the rules I’ve done over the past three or four years?” …

The president told Ms. McCarthy that his environmental and presidential legacy would be incomplete without a serious effort to address climate change.

She was right: Winning confirmation was an arduous process. But now that she’s in, she is “pumped” about the new job. More from the Times:

[S]he said the agency would play a crucial role in dealing with climate change, both in writing the rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants and in helping communities adapt to the inevitable changes wrought by a warming planet.

She also said the agency had to do a better job of explaining its mission to hostile constituencies, including Congress and the agriculture, mining and utility industries. …

“I spend a lot of time protecting what we are doing rather than thinking about what we should be doing.”

McCarthy’s trip to Cambridge for her Harvard speech is the first of many public appearances she’ll be making over the coming weeks, part of a big push by the Obama administration and other Democrats to promote Obama’s climate plan. Politico reports:

Starting [this] week, McCarthy will begin traveling around the country to discuss the importance of acting on climate change. The White House official said her schedule includes speeches, media events and meetings with outside groups — all of which will be promoted heavily on social media. And the official added that McCarthy will begin meeting with states soon to discuss the agency’s pending climate regulations.

It’s nice to see Democrats going on the offensive for climate. If you happen to belong to the 80 percent of voters under 35 who support the president’s climate plan, you can launch your own promotion effort, too — maybe start by convincing your cranky uncle that emissions regulations don’t kill jobs.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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The shells of ocean animals are already dissolving in acidic seas

by Myrna Posted on November 26, 2012

The shells of ocean animals are already dissolving in acidic seas

By Philip Bump

Several times over the past months we’ve noted the anticipated effects of ocean acidification. As the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content increases, some of it mixes with ocean water, forming carbonic acid, lowering the pH of ocean water. Even a slightly more acidic ocean could be enormously damaging to sea creatures, because it also means less of the mineral aragonite that some sea creatures use to form their shells.

National Geographic

We just didn’t really expect it would happen this fast. From New Scientist:

In a small patch of the Southern Ocean, the shells of sea snails are dissolving. The finding is the first evidence that marine life is already suffering as a result of man-made ocean acidification.

“This is actually happening now,” says Geraint Tarling of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. He and colleagues captured free-swimming sea snails called pteropods from the Southern Ocean in early 2008 and found under an electron microscope that the outer layers of their hard shells bore signs of unusual corrosion. …

He visited the Southern Ocean near South Georgia where deep water wells up to the surface. This water is naturally low in aragonite, meaning the surface waters it supplies are naturally somewhat low in the mineral — although not so much so that it would normally be a problem. Add in the effect of ocean acidification, however, and Tarling found that the mineral was dangerously sparse at the surface.

“It’s of concern that they can see it today,” says Toby Tyrrell of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK.

The state of the world: It is of concern that a terrible thing we expected in the future can be seen today.

How do we save these sea creatures? The way we save ourselves.

The only way to stop ocean acidification is to reduce our CO2 emissions, Tyrrell says. It has been suggested that we could add megatonnes of lime to the ocean to balance the extra acidity. However, Tyrrell says this is “probably not practical” because the amounts involved — and thus the costs — are enormous.

If only there were some animal on Earth that we felt was worth such an expenditure.

Source

Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean acid, New Scientist

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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