Mother Jones
View original:
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
The story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Earth’s oceans have never been this far beyond the bounds of normal.
New data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that Earth’s oceans reached a level last month not seen since humans have been keeping comprehensive records. Global ocean temperatures in August 2014 warmed to “the largest departure from average for any month on record” according to a NOAA statement. The previous record was set just two months ago, in June 2014.
Records date back to 1880, though there’s ample evidence that the new record hasn’t been matched in much longer than that.
Climate scientists took the news with a sense of foreboding:
+ this is certainly what AGW looks like – a record hot summer globally (& yes, a few spots cooler than normal) pic.twitter.com/2eDAg49yLl
— Jonathan Overpeck (@TucsonPeck)
@TucsonPeck @EricHolthaus I remember being in grad school seeing these 20 year projections and thinking they looked scary…and here we are.
— Peter deMenocal (@PdeMenocal)
The NOAA data also showed the temperature of the Earth as a whole hit a new all-time August record last month, confirming similar results earlier this week from NASA and the Japanese Meteorological Agency, which use slightly different ways of crunching the numbers.
Additionally, the combined temperature of June, July, and August was also unprecedented in historical records. According to the JMA, four of the last five months have now been record-breaking for that particular month. (July was No. 2, just a hair behind the super-charged El Niño year of 1998.) The eastern United States is among the only land areas on Earth still running below normal for 2014, a legacy of the polar vortex outbreaks of earlier this year.
Later Thursday morning, NOAA expanded on the implications of the new records in a conference call, saying that on its current pace—and with the help of a newly resurgent El Niño—2014 is poised to become the warmest year ever measured.
“If the next four months rank among the five warmest on record, 2014 will be the warmest on record for the globe,” said Jake Crouch of the National Climatic Data Center.
The warming effect of El Niño, which boosts temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean, appears to have begun finally kicking into gear over the last week or so. In a separate announcement Thursday, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society declared that “borderline El Niño conditions have now returned in both ocean and atmosphere.” The El Niño is expected to persist until at least March 2015, affecting a range of weather patterns around the globe over the coming months.
Should 2014 become the new warmest year, a lingering El Niño means the record may not last long.
“Having an El Niño would increase the chances of 2015 at least starting out much warmer than average, and approaching record or near record warmth,” said Crouch.
The news came just days before a planned march in New York City, which organizers expect to be the largest ever mass demonstration on global warming in the world. More than 100,000 people are expected to attend, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.
Link to original:
Mother Jones
The battle over Texas textbooks is raging once again. On Tuesday, hundreds of citizens turned out for the first public hearing on the controversial social-science materials now under review as part of the state’s contentious once-in-a-decade textbook adoption process. During the all-day proceedings, activists and historians pointed out numerous factual errors and complained that the books promoted tea party ideology while mocking affirmative action and downplaying the science linking human activity to climate change. “They are full of biases that are either outside the established mainstream scholarship, or just plain wrong,” Jacqueline Jones, who chairs the history department at the University of Texas-Austin, said from the podium. “It can lead to a great deal of confusion in the reader.”
Other speakers raised concerns about the treatment of religion, especially the tendency of some books to play up the role of Christianity in our nation’s founding. Kathleen Wellman, a professor of history Southern Methodist University, noted with dismay that a popular civics text was filled with references to Moses and claimed that the biblical prophet had inspired American democracy. If the draft texts are adopted as is, she argued, Texas children could grow up “believing that Moses was the first American.” Conservatives, meanwhile, complained that the books gave too much space to liberal figures such as Hillary Clinton.
It’s a high-stakes debate. Because Texas has one of the nation’s largest public school systems and some of the most rigid textbook requirements, publishers have traditionally tailored textbooks they sell nationwide to the Lone Star market.
See original article here:
Texas’ New Public School Textbooks Promote Climate Change Denial and Downplay Segregation
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Up until now, the records set by the stunning 2014 Eastern Pacific hurricane season have been mostly academic. The storms have been strong and numerous, but they’ve been out at sea off the west coast of Mexico, and haven’t caused much damage.
That changed today, however, with Hurricane Odile—a Category 3 monster that slammed Cabo San Luca early Monday morning, only slightly weaker than its peak Category 4 strength. According to the National Hurricane Center, Odile tied a 1967 storm for the distinction of being the “the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the satellite era in the state of Baja California Sur.” Capital Weather Gang’s Jason Samenow adds that Odile’s “size, strength, and track is a worst case scenario for this region.”
At landfall, the storm had maximum sustained winds speeds of 125 miles per hour. It seems likely that it was the strongest storm on record to strike the posh resort of Cabo San Lucas: The aforementioned 1967 storm, Hurricane Olivia, took quite a different route across the Baja peninsula. It did not strengthen to its peak until it was already in the Gulf of California, between Baja and the Mexican mainland. Samenow quotes Brian McNoldy, an expert on tropical weather for Capital Weather Gang, who observes of Odile that “specifically in Cabo San Lucas, it was the most intense landfall.”
The result? Here’s a firsthand account from a storm chaser, Josh Morgerman, who was seeking refuge in a hotel:
At maybe midnight… BOOM!!!!! The entire glass wall of the lobby EXPLODED– with glass, pieces of building, everything flying to the other end of the lobby. Like an explosion in an action movie. A hotel worker and I ducked under the reception counter– I physically grabbed his head and pushed it under the counter. Glass was everywhere– my leg gashed– blood. We crawled into the office– me, the worker, and the manager– but the ceiling started to lift up. After five minutes of debate– breathing hard like three trapped animals– we made a run for it– went running like HELL across the lobby– which is now basically just OUTSIDE– and made it to the stairwell and an interior hallway. Two nice women dressed my wound….
Here’s an image of tourists huddling in a hotel stairwell:
Tourists take refuge from Hurricane Odile in a concrete resort stairwell. Victor R. Caviano/AP
As the Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters points out, if there is one more Category 3 or higher hurricane this year in the Eastern Pacific, it will tie the all-time record of eight such major hurricanes in one season, set in 1992. And there’s still roughly a third of the season to go.
Here’s what Odile looked like yesterday, shortly before landfall:
Hurricane Odile on September 4. NASA.
Visit site –
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
So who’s worse when it comes to ignoring and denying science, the political left or the political right?
For a long time, those wishing to claim that both sides are equally bad—we’re all biased, just in different directions—have relied upon two key issues in making their case: Vaccines and genetically modified foods, or GMOs. The suggestion is that these are basically the liberal equivalent of evolution denial or global warming denial. Skeptic magazine founding publisher Michael Shermer, for instance, prominently cited resistance to GMOs in a Scientific American article last year entitled “The Liberals’ War on Science.” As for vaccines? In a recent segment entitled “An Outbreak of Liberal Idiocy,” no less than The Daily Show suggested that vaccine denial is a left-wing scourge:
There’s just one problem: Commentators seem to just assume, without evidence, that anti-science beliefs on these two issues are predominantly a liberal phenomenon. But that assumption hasn’t been subjected to nearly enough scrutiny, especially in light of high profile vaccine-skeptic conservatives like Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann. The GMO issue is also politically suspicious: It is inherently conservative, in the purest sense of the word, to resist technological changes to the nature of food production (or anything else, for that matter).
And sure enough, the evidence just doesn’t support the idea that vaccine denial is some special left-wing fixation—and it’s barely any kinder to received wisdom on the issue of GMOs. I will demonstrate as much below, but first, let’s remember why this matters.
It is very clear that there are certain major issues where there is only one correct scientific answer, and political conservatives are much more likely to deny that answer than are liberals or moderates. Conservatives have also been shown to trust scientists less than liberals or moderates do. So no wonder they also reject their most important (if sometimes inconvenient) conclusions more often.
Here are the top two hits (but by no means the only examples) of conservative science denial, followed by some hard data on public attitudes about vaccines and GMOs:
Climate change. Here, the undeniable reality is that humans are causing global warming, and polls have repeatedly shown that it is political conservatives and Republicans who deny this fact about the world. According to recent data from the Yale and George Mason projects on climate change communication, for instance, 75 percent of liberal Democrats, but only 22 percent of conservative Republicans, accept the reality that humans are causing climate change—an over 50-point difference! Myriad other polls and studies have found something similar.
Evolution. Here, the undeniable reality is that humans share a common ancestry with the rest of life on Earth, and that the diversity of life that we witness all around us is the result of an evolutionary process. And here again, those on the right deny this reality much more than do those on the left (although notably, the gap is not as wide as it is on the climate issue). According to a late 2013 Pew study, 67 percent of Democrats, but only 43 percent of Republicans, agree that “humans and other living things have evolved over time.” That’s a 24-point difference. Indeed, based on these data, 48 percent of Republicans (compared to just 27 percent of Democrats) think “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” meaning that the GOP today is very nearly a majority creationist party.
That’s a seriously big deal, given that Young Earth Creationism embraces many other kinds of science denial besides the mere rejection of evolution. Rejection of the age of the Earth, for instance, and accordingly, of large swaths of physics and geology. It is a deeply anti-science ideology that extends far beyond one’s views about any particular scientific issue.
So it is very natural to ask whether there is really anything parallel to this rejectionism on the modern American left, and to try to adduce examples. However, the vaccine and GMO examples don’t cut it. To show as much, let’s examine them in turn.
Vaccines. Here, the undeniable reality is that childhood vaccines are safe and do not cause autism. So do liberals deny this fact more frequently than conservatives?
Recent research suggests the answer to that question is “no.” In a 2013 paper published in PLOS One, for instance, Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues surveyed a representative sample of 1001 Americans about their ideological beliefs and their views on contentious science topics. That included vaccines, where they used a five item questionnaire to assess people’s views, including items like “I believe that vaccines are a safe and reliable way to help avert the spread of preventable diseases” and “I believe that vaccines have negative side effects that outweigh the benefits of vaccination for children.”
The study did not find that people on the left were more likely to oppose or distrust vaccines. Rather, it found a highly nuanced result. The researchers examined two related but distinct contributors to right-wing ideology: self-identification as a political conservative and support for the free market. It found that while the former was related to somewhat more vaccine support, the latter was related to somewhat more vaccine opposition. According to Lewandowsky, the two opposing forces “virtually cancel overall.”
Other studies have found similar results. In a 2009 paper, Yale’s Dan Kahan and his colleagues found that the conservative ideological values of “hierarchy” and “individualism” were both linked to greater opposition to the HPV vaccine in particular. In a paper from earlier this year, meanwhile, Kahan found that the idea of a link between the political left and the belief that vaccines in general are dangerous “lacks any factual basis.” In fact, if anything, he found a small increase in belief in vaccine risks as one moved to the right of the political spectrum.
If you’d prefer to examine the patterns of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, meanwhile, those also seem politically diverse. We are having a horrible year for measles, for instance, with 18 outbreaks and 592 cases, more than double the total in any previous year since 2001. And the 21 states that have seen cases and outbreaks run the political gamut; they include California and Massachusetts, but also Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, and Ohio (home to a large outbreak in the Amish community, a group of people that can hardly be called “liberal”). Last year, meanwhile, there was a measles outbreak clustered around a Texas megachurch.
Mennonite girls at a health clinic offering vaccinations following a large measles outbreak this year in the Amish community in Ohio. Tom E. Puskar/AP
When it comes to the right and vaccines, there’s also evidence like this:
I am being proven right about massive vaccinations—the doctors lied. Save our children & their future.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
I’m not against vaccinations for your children, I’m against them in 1 massive dose.Spread them out over a period of time & autism will drop!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
So in sum, the evidence that vaccine opposition is somehow specially tied to left-wing beliefs is just lacking. Rather, the largest factor here, according to Lewandowsky’s research, is conspiratorial beliefs, which are hard to categorize as either left wing or right wing in nature.
Genetically modified foods. Now let’s move on to the GMO issue. Here, it is less obvious what a clear-cut anti-science belief would actually be, but perhaps the most obvious case is the belief that genetically modified foods are harmful if consumed by humans. This position has been rejected by the board of American Association for the Advancement of Science, which assures us that “crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe.” So do liberals disproportionately believe wrong things about genetically modified foods?
Lewandowsky’s paper also examined GM beliefs, once again using a five point scale that included items like “I believe that genetically engineered foods have already damaged the environment” and “Genetic modification of foods is a safe and reliable technology.” And the researchers found that “opposition to GM foods was not associated with worldview constructs.”
“This result is striking,” the researchers went on to say, “in light of reports in the media that have linked opposition to GM foods with the political Left.”
Is this dude a left winger? justasc/Shutterstock
Lewandowsky et al aren’t the only ones. For instance, an independent analysis of data from the General Social Survey by the Discover magazine blogger Razib Khan also found no real left-right difference in views about GMOs.
Still, given just how striking these results are, and how contrary to what people assume, I sought to verify them by examining yet another poll. So with much help from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, which supplied an abundance of data, I looked into the details behind a January 2013 CBS News poll that asked a variety of questions about GMOs using a representative national sample of 1,052 Americans.
For the most part, the results support Lewandowsky and Khan. GMO concern appears largely spread across the spectrum in this poll, and while it is somewhat stronger among Democrats (and, as we’ll see, especially strong on the far left), it is also very strong among Republicans and independents. For instance, the poll found that all three groups overwhelmingly support the labeling of foods containing GM ingredients (an idea the American Association for the Advancement of Science rejects): 90 percent of Republicans, 94 percent of Democrats, and 95 percent of independents were in favor.
Getting closer to a purely scientific issue, respondents were asked, “How concerned are you about genetically modified or genetically engineered food—Very concerned, somewhat concerned, not too concerned or not at all concerned?” Seventy-one percent of Republicans, 80 percent of Democrats, and 75 percent of independents said they were either “very” or “somewhat” concerned.
What’s more, those who did profess this level of concern then went on to answer a second question, in which they were asked more precisely what they were worried about. Twenty-five percent of concerned Republicans, 29 percent of concerned Democrats, and 25 percent of concerned independents answered “not safe to eat.” Meanwhile, 33 percent of concerned Republicans, 39 percent of concerned Democrats, and 37 percent of concerned independents answered “cause health problems.” (These are the clear-cut science deniers.)
So while there might be slightly more concern about GM foods among Democrats, overall concern is broad and appears substantially non-ideological in nature—which makes sense if you think about the concerns as being motivated by people’s fears of consuming something that is supposedly icky or unnatural. Indeed, when asked in another survey question whether they would eat “genetically modified or genetically engineered fish,” 74 percent of Republicans, 73 percent of Democrats, and 71 percent of independents said “no.”
However, there is one important qualification. Although Democrats, Republicans, and independents do not look all that different on GMOs, it turns out that if you split Democrats and Republicans up into different ideological groups, you can discern more left-right differentiation on the issue (even as worries remain spread across the spectrum). The CBS News poll did just that. In addition to their party affiliation, people were also asked whether they self-identified as “very liberal,” “somewhat liberal,” “moderate,” “somewhat conservative,” and “very conservative.” When you break it down this way, 92 percent of “very liberal” respondents were either “somewhat” or “very” concerned about GMOs, compared with only 71 percent of “very conservative” respondents. (Those who were “somewhat liberal,” “moderate,” and “somewhat conservative” look pretty similar; their percentages are 79, 75, and 74, respectively.)
However, it is important to note that people who are “very liberal” are also the smallest ideological group in the survey by far (6 percent). There were more than twice as many “very conservative” respondents (13 percent), and since the survey was nationally representative, we should expect something similar for the United States as a whole.
Such, then, are the data. They do not support for the idea that vaccine denial is a special left-wing cause. As for GMOs, while resistance may be strongest on the far left, worries on this issue are quite prominent across the spectrum as well.
In neither case are these beliefs a mirror image, on the left, of climate change or evolution denial. And as for other issues that are sometimes cited as examples of left-wing science denial, such as fracking and nuclear power? Those examples are problematic, too (see here for my thinking on these subjects).
In the end, maybe the best way to think about the politics of science denial is this: There are two major, separate types of science denial out there. One is clearly right wing and is driven by conservative activists, think tanks, media outlets like Fox News, and politicians. It is widely adhered to in the conservative movement, and it is highly politically relevant because conservatives (and Republicans) take their views on these issues as motivation to try to affect policy. This describes the situation on climate change, and on the teaching of evolution (and numerous other topics, like contraception the relationship between abortion and health).
This type of science denial, institutionalized within a major party and its activist base, has little parallel on the modern American left or within the Democratic Party. However, there’s another kind of science denial, which may have many important consequences but is not driven by any one party. Its various fixations may at times appear more left wing, but are found across the political spectrum. Denialism about vaccines and GMOs fits more neatly into this latter category.
That’s not to exonerate any kind of science denial. Nor is it to deny that there are liberals or leftists out there who hold unscientific beliefs—the polls above clearly capture such people. Nonetheless, it is to say that modern conservative science denial remains a unique phenomenon.
So why, then, do people so readily assume that vaccine and GMO denial are fundamentally left-wing causes? I suspect because those of us who live in liberal, largely bi-coastal cities meet vastly more liberals than conservatives; and thus, we are far more likely to actually encounter liberal or left-wing people who hold these beliefs.
However, unlike pollsters, we aren’t sampling the whole country in a statistically reliable way through our experiences. Science, though, is all about putting aside beliefs and anecdotes in the face of data.
See the article here:
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
John Tesvich slices open oysters on the deck of his boat, the “Croatian Pride”. Tim McDonnell/Climate Desk
John Tesvich is a fourth-generation oyster farmer in Empire, a tiny Gulf Coast enclave south of New Orleans. He’s spent his life working in the rich oyster beds here, the most productive in the nation, and has weathered his share of storms: During Hurricane Katrina, his house ended up under 17 feet of water. But last week, as he navigated his 40-foot oyster boat out into open water, he admitted that the turmoil this region has faced in the last decade was beginning to wear him down.
“A lot has changed over the years,” he said. “It seems like one crisis after another sometimes.”
One crisis was particularly damaging to Tesvich’s industry: The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The fourth anniversary of the busted undersea well’s sealing (after it gushed crude into the Gulf for nearly five months) is coming up next week, and Tesvich, who also chairs the oyster industry’s main statewide lobbying group, says his crop is still struggling to rebound.
Tesvich got some good news last week, when a federal judge in New Orleans found that BP’s “willful misconduct” and “gross negligence” had been the principle causes of the spill, a ruling that could eventually force BP to pay billions for ecological restoration in the Gulf. But for oystermen here, whose day-to-day income depends on these reefs, those dollars still seem very far away.
Continue reading here:
The Gulf Is Still So Far From Recovering. Just Ask This Oyster Farmer.
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria’s bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read “Stop fracking with our water” and “Chevron go home.” Bulgaria’s parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.
Follow this link:
How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A big reason for opposition to bike lanes is that, according to the rules of traffic engineering, they lead to car congestion. The metric determining this outcome (known as “level of service”) is quite complicated, but its underlying logic is simple: less road space for automobiles means more delay at intersections. Progressive cities have pushed back against this conventional belief—California, in particular, has led the charge against level of service—but it remains an obstacle to bike lanes (and multi-modal streets more broadly) across the country.
But the general wisdom doesn’t tell the whole story here. On the contrary, smart street design can eliminate many of the traffic problems anticipated by alternative mode elements like bike lanes. A new report on protected bike lanes released by the New York City Department of Transportation offers a great example of how rider safety can be increased even while car speed is maintained.
Originally from –
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Right now, swirling south of the Baja California peninsula, is a monster hurricane named Marie. Currently a Category 4 storm with 145 mile per hour maximum sustained winds, yesterday the storm was a full fledged Category 5, with 160 mile per hour winds. That makes Marie the first Category 5 in the Eastern Pacific hurricane basin so far this year—but there have been at least three other Category 4 storms so far, and one Category 3 to boot.
By any measure, these numbers are pretty striking.
According to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, the average Eastern Pacific hurricane season runs from May 15 through the end of November, and sees 15.4 total named storms, including 8.4 hurricanes, and 3.9 major hurricanes (Category 3 and greater). This year, by contrast, has already seen 13 storms, including 8 hurricanes, and 5 major hurricanes! And there are still fully 3 months to go.
In fact, for 2014, the Climate Prediction Center forecast “3 to 6” major hurricanes in the East Pacific. We’re already there, but we’re only halfway through the season! Just for comparison, in the jaw-dropping 2005 Atlantic hurricane season—the season featuring Katrina, Rita, and Wilma—there were a total of 7 major hurricanes.
Moreover, all this activity has been accompanied by numerous hurricane records. Back in May, Category 4 Hurricane Amanda was the strongest May storm ever seen in the basin. And just weeks later, Category 4 Hurricane Cristina set another new record, becoming the “earliest 2nd major hurricane formation” in the basin.
Now, the National Weather Service office in San Diego adds yet another record for Marie:
#Hurricane Marie is the earliest fifth category 4 hurricane in the eastern Pacific for any year. #cawx pic.twitter.com/S4BcD2ccaC
— NWS San Diego (@NWSSanDiego)
Note, though, that this record would appear to include Category 4 Hurricane Genevieve, which seems questionable. Genevieve was a truly rare storm that started in the Eastern Pacific as a tropical storm, and then tracked all the way across the Pacific from east to west, only attaining Category 4 strength in the Central Pacific region west of Hawaii, before then crossing the international dateline and becoming classified as a typhoon.
But with or without Genevieve, we’re still talking about a ton of strong hurricane activity. So what’s going on here? Note that even as the Eastern Pacific has been gangbusters, the Atlantic basin, where hurricanes tend to threaten the United States, has been pretty quiet. That’s no coincidence, explains Weather Underground blogger Jeff Masters by email:
…hurricane activity in the Epac East Pacific and the Atlantic are usually anti-correlated—when one is very active, the other is usually quiet. This occurs because when sinking air occurs over one ocean basin, there must be compensating rising air somewhere—typically over the neighboring ocean basin. Large-scale rising air helps encourage thunderstorm updrafts and thus tropical storm formation. Since ocean temperatures are much warmer than average over the Epac and near average over the Atlantic, the atmosphere over the Epac has tended to have more rising air this season than the Atlantic. Warm waters heat the air above it and make the air more buoyant, causing rising motion.
Right now, there are two major questions: Just how many more records will the 2014 Northeast Pacific Hurricane season set? And will one of those be a new record strongest hurricane ever recorded in the basin?
The current strongest storm, recorded in 1997, was Category 5 Hurricane Linda, which had maximum sustained winds of 184 miles per hour and a minimum central pressure of 902 millibars.
As for Marie: While the storm is far out at sea and unlikely to directly threaten any major land areas, it is kicking up huge waves that may be felt as far away as Los Angeles. Eastern Pacific hurricanes occasionally strike Mexico, and on rare occasions travel west far enough to menace the Hawaiian islands.
Originally posted here:
There Have Been 5—Yes, 5!—Monster Hurricanes in the Eastern Pacific This Year
Mother Jones
Angry. Worried. Frustrated. Anxious.
Such are some of the words that Australian climate scientists use to express their feelings about the dysfunctional climate debate (which, in Australia, has recently seen the repealing of a carbon tax, a chief objective of the current Liberal Party prime minister Tony Abbott). Their writings appear on a new website, entitled “Is This How You Feel?,” run by Joe Duggan, a master’s student in science communication at the Australian National University’s Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. Reached by email, Duggan explained that he “wanted to give scientists the chance to step away from the dry data and clinical prose that laypeople find so hard to engage with.”
Here are some particularly striking emotional expressions from the researchers, expressions that the climate “skeptic” blogger Anthony Watts has said make him want to “hurl”:
I feel a maelstrom of emotions.
Life would be so much simpler if climate change didn’t exist.
I am infuriated. Infuriated we are destroying our planet.
I often feel like shouting…But would that really help? I feel like they don’t listen anyway. After all, we’ve been shouting for years.
It makes me feel sick.
I feel betrayed by our leaders who show no leadership and who place ideology above evidence, willing to say anything to peddle their agendas.
We have so much to lose.
And, perhaps most memorable of all:
I see a group of people sitting in a boat, happily waving, taking pictures on the way, not knowing that this boat is floating right into a powerful and deadly waterfall.
You can read all of the letters here. People often allege that scientists can’t communicate, but as these letters show, that’s not really true.
When they’re actually speaking or writing in the language that they use with other scientists, then yes, scientists can seem incomprehensible. But when they’re speaking simply as people, freed up to express emotions, they share thoughts and feelings that we can all instantly understand.
“This is not the only way to communicate climate change, but it is one way,” says Duggan. “We need to kill apathy through death by a thousand cuts. Maybe this can be one cut.”
Visit site:
These Climate Scientists Are Telling You What They Really Think
Libros
