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The future looks a lot hotter and wetter, says science

by WinifreKJKO Posted on April 28, 2015

The future looks a lot hotter and wetter, says science

By on 28 Apr 2015commentsShare

Here’s something you don’t hear climate scientists say very often:

“The bottom line is that things are not that complicated.”

That’s Reto Knutti, head of the Climate Physics Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, speaking with The New York Times. And that warm feeling inside of you is the satisfaction of knowing that you’re about to understand some science!

Take a moment to savor that feeling. Knutti is a climate scientist, after all, so we know that whatever he says next is going to be a huge downer:

“You make the world a degree or two warmer, and there will be more hot days. There will be more moisture in the atmosphere, so that must come down somewhere.”

Wow, dude — that’s not science, that’s poetry. (Except that it is science, and the subject of a new paper that Knutti and his colleague Erich M. Fischer published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change.)

Using global climate models to simulate past and future warming scenarios, the duo set out to understand how anthropogenic climate change has and will continue to increase extreme heat and precipitation events — the hotter days and wetter air that Knutti was talking about.

Here’s what they found: Compared to a world where the industrial revolution never happened, today’s warming of about 1.5 degree Fahrenheit is responsible for a 22 percent increase in the frequency of extreme precipitation events and — more dramatically — a four- to five-fold increase in the frequency of 1-in-1,000 day extreme heat events.

Projecting forward, they found that with warming kept under 3 degrees Fahrenheit, heat extremes could be 14 times more frequent than they were in pre-industrial times — which sounds bad, but not as bad as the 62-fold increase we could see if warming surpasses 5 degrees. Precipitation extremes, meanwhile, won’t increase quite as much. With 3 to 4 degrees of warming, what were 1-in-30 year events could be happening more like once every 10 or 20 years by the end of the century.

If you’re having some deja vu, it’s probably because scientists already knew about this unfortunate tie between global warming and extreme weather — but this is one of the first global forecasts predicting how these extreme events will change by the end of the century, says the Times.

All that being said — we all know better than to attribute any single weather event to climate change, right? Climate change just increases the likelihood of an event. Here’s how the Knutti and Fischer put it:

In a broader context, the approach here is reminiscent of medical studies, where it is not possible to attribute a single fatality from lung cancer to smoking. Instead, a comparison of the lung-cancer-related mortality rate in smokers with the rate in non-smokers may allow attribution of the excess mortality to smoking. Likewise, no single weather event exclusively results from anthropogenic influence in a deterministic sense but arises from complex interactions of atmospheric dynamics, local boundary layer and land-surface interaction and potentially anomalous sea-ice and ocean conditions.

Damn. I guess it’s still pretty complicated.

Source:
New Study Links Weather Extremes to Global Warming

, The New York Times.

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The future looks a lot hotter and wetter, says science

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Politician Tasked With Oil Industry Oversight Gets a Paycheck From Big Oil

by GingerL03dib Posted on April 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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The BP oil spill turned five years old on Monday, and as my colleague Tim McDonnell reported, we’re still paying the price: There’s as much as 26 million gallons of crude oil still on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. But the story of the Deepwater Horizon wasn’t just about environmental devastation—it was also a story about regulation.

In Louisiana, where many politicians rely on oil and gas companies to fill their campaign coffers (and keep their constituents employed), environmental consequences often take a back seat to business concerns. But sometimes, things go even further. Take the case of Republican state Sen. Robert Adley—the vice-chair of the committee on environmental quality and the chair of the transportation committee (which oversees levees)—who played a leading role in trying to stop a local levee board from suing oil companies for damages related to coastal erosion. As Tyler Bridges reported for the Louisiana investigative news site The Lens, Adley doesn’t just go to bat for oil companies—he works for them as a paid consultant. He even launched his own oil company while serving as a state representative, and he didn’t cut ties to the company until nine years into his stint in the senate:

“He has carried a lot of legislation for the oil and gas industry over the years,” said Don Briggs, the industry association’s president. “I’ve never seen him carry one that he didn’t truly believe was the right thing to do.”

Adley’s numerous ties to the oil and gas industry have led critics to say he is the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse.

…

Adley said calls that he should recuse himself from the issue because of his industry ties are “un-American” and “outrageous.”

“It’s what I know,” Adley said. “Is it wrong to have someone dealing with legislation they know?”

For the time being, at least, voters in northwest Louisiana have decided that the answer is no.

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Politician Tasked With Oil Industry Oversight Gets a Paycheck From Big Oil

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Meet the New Endocrine-Disrupting Plastic Chemical, Same as the Old One

by ElvaYXZOzq Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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By now, most people know about the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA), which behaves like estrogen in our bodies and has been linked to a range of health problems, including cancer, birth defects, and irregular brain development in kids. Like other endocrine-disrupting chemicals, BPA seems to cause hormonal damage at extremely low levels. In a 2014 story, my colleague Mariah Blake brought home an unsettling point: The chemical compounds that manufacturers have been scrambling to use in place of BPA might be just as bad.

And now a new paper, published on the peer-reviewed Environmental Health Perspectives, examines the science around two common chemicals used in “BPA-Free” packaging: BPS and BPF. The authors looked at 32 studies and concluded that “based on the current literature, BPS and BPF are as hormonally active as BPA, and have endocrine-disrupting effects.” In other words, the cure may be just as bad as the disease.

It’s not clear how widely these substitutes are being used, because manufacturers aren’t required to disclose what they put in packaging. But there’s evidence that BPS is quite common. BPA, for example, is widely used in paper receipts to make them more durable; and in a 2014 study, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency tested paper receipts from 19 facilities, and found that nine contained BPA and nine contained BPS. The researchers concluded that BPS is “being used as a common alternative to BPA in thermal paper applications, and in comparable concentrations.”

Because “BPS has also been found to be an endocrine active chemical,” the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency urges the state’s businesses to shift to electronic receipts. I’ve taken on a similar strategy—I’m even phasing out my beloved canned craft beer, because cans used by the food and beverage industries tend to be lined with BPA. Unlike the businessman in The Graduate, I’ve got two words, not one—at least until the chemical industry can prove it can create a genuinely safe BPA substitute: Avoid plastics.

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Meet the New Endocrine-Disrupting Plastic Chemical, Same as the Old One

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Apple Is About to Shell Out $850 Million for Solar Energy

by VZCKarrysmxzwku Posted on February 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a massive new investment by the company in solar energy: an $850 million installation that will cover 1,300 acres in Monterey County, California. Apple is partnering with First Solar—the nation’s biggest utility-scale installer—on the project, which will produce enough power to supply 60,000 Californian homes, Cook said.

According to a press release from First Solar, Apple will receive 130 megawatts from the project under a 25-year deal, which the release describes as the largest such agreement ever.

Cook called it Apple’s “biggest, boldest and most ambitious” energy project to date, designed to offset the electricity needs of Apple’s new campus, the futuristic circular building designed by Norman Foster, and all of Apple’s California retail stores. “We know at Apple that climate change is real,” he said.

Cook made the announcement during a Goldman Sachs technology conference, and First Solar’s stocks shot up this afternoon on the news:

Apple has already made huge commitments to solar. The Guardian reported last year that the company planned to use solar power to manufacture its new “sapphire” screens for the iPhone 6 at a factory in Arizona. Last year, Climate Desk joined the Guardian during a press visit to the biggest solar field then in Apple’s portfolio. The Maiden, North Carolina, facility has 55,000 solar panels that track the sun across a nearly 100-acre field, offsetting the electricity sucked up by Apple’s data center across the road:

Apple’s new investment continues the startling growth of solar in America, which my colleague Tim McDonnell has reported on previously: By 2016, solar is projected to be as cheap or cheaper than electricity from the conventional grid in every state except three. Over the past decade, the amount of solar power produced in the United States has grown 139,000 percent.

In another portion of Cook’s appearance, the CEO boasted about the ways Apple’s new iWatch could help improve health by reminding you when you’ve become too sedentary:

Creepy, or cool?

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Apple Is About to Shell Out $850 Million for Solar Energy

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

by EmiliaSchwindt Posted on January 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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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.”

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

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A Majority of Cop Killers Have Been White

by Aracely82H Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

As officials continue to investigate Saturday’s tragic killing of two NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, details have surfaced about the suspect, 28 year old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who allegedly shot a woman in Baltimore before traveling to New York. Anti-police posts he appears to have published on social media sites prior to the killings have lead many to connect his crime to protests that occurred in previous weeks, and some commenters have cast blame on officials including New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Attorney General Eric Holder, and President Obama, all of whom have condemned the violence. (Read my colleague Kevin Drum’s response to that.)

But, while every killing of an officer is a tragedy, it is worth noting, as my colleague Shane Bauer reported in the context of another story, assaults and felony killings of police officers in the US are down sharply over the past two decades. Attention has also been focused on Brinsley’s race, but FBI data shows that, though African Americans are arrested and incarcerated at a higher rate than whites, the majority of assailants who feloniously killed police officers in the past year were white.

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A Majority of Cop Killers Have Been White

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This Anti-Gay Candidate’s Message Is Bigger in Moscow Than Massachusetts

by Beau96Refnvx Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Even though he’s running to be the governor of Massachusetts, Scott Lively makes no secret of his extreme anti-gay views. The evangelical pastor, who’s being sued by gay-rights groups for his involvement in Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, has gotten flack on the campaign trail for his beliefs, even encountering some raucous booing at a gubernatorial forum earlier in the year.

Read more: Meet the American pastor behind Uganda’s anti-gay crackdown

Lively knows that his focus on traditional values makes him an unpopular choice in the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. “The only way Scott Lively is going to become governor of Massachusetts is by a miracle of God,” he told MassLive last month.

While Lively’s views can’t find much domestic audience, they play well in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Lively’s anti-gay zeal is on display in Sodom, a new documentary that aired on Russian television last month, to much acclaim. The film was produced by famously anti-gay TV host Arkady Mamontov, who once implied that the Chelyabinsk meteorite explosion was caused by the gay rights movement. The film aired on Rossiya-1, Russia’s main government-funded TV channel.

“For American homosexuals, this man, Scott Lively, is public enemy number one,” intones the film’s narrator. On camera, Lively speaks about the gay “agenda,” which seeks “anti-discrimination policy” in the name of ultimate “societal conquest.” Lively insists that “The average American is not in favor of homosexuality. But they are afraid to speak publicly about it, because the gays have so much power and they can do harm to those people.”

Lively brings the film’s producers to the headquarters of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, DC. Set against a dramatic soundtrack, Lively paces outside. “This organization, instead of focusing on the true needs of people around the world, they are trying to declare that homosexuality is a human right,” Lively says. “They spend vast amounts of money to promote this agenda around the world instead of defending genuine human rights.”

This is just the latest entry on Lively’s anti-gay résumé, as my colleague Mariah Blake has reported. In 1995, Lively coauthored The Pink Swastika, a book that argues that gay Nazis inspired the Holocaust because Judaism forbids homosexuality. In 2007, Lively went on a 50-city tour of Russia and other ex-Soviet republics to warn of the “homosexual agenda.” In 2009, he gave a five-hour presentation on Ugandan national television calling homosexuality a disease and claiming that gays aggressively recruit children.

It’s unclear if Lively’s segment in this film was shot before he declared his candidacy for governor in September 2013. Yet it’s a revealing comment on the state of American (and Russian) politics that a candidate can find more traction for his extreme anti-gay views in Moscow than Mattapan.

Take a look at the video below. (The Lively segment starts at 8:17; he arrives at HRC at 12:00.)

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This Anti-Gay Candidate’s Message Is Bigger in Moscow Than Massachusetts

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How Monsanto Crashed SXSW—and Brought the Drama to My Panel

by KDXRickeygvwipk Posted on October 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Let’s face it: While panels at conferences can be fun, interesting, even provocative, rarely do they provide drama, intrigue, or surprise. On Wednesday at South by Southwest Eco in Austin, my colleague Kiera Butler and I sat on a panel that counts as a genuine exception. And it had nothing to do with our own oratorical skills or those of our excellent co-panelists, author and agriculture researcher Raj Patel and Texas A&M cotton breeder Jane Dever.

So here’s what happened: Our session, entitled, “GMOs Real Talk: The Hype, the Hope, the Science,” proceeded as you might expect. I thought we had a pretty robust discussion of the potential and pitfalls of biotechnology in contributing to global food security going forward. Then, at the very end of the hour, during the Q&A session, a SXSW Eco staffer took the mic and dropped a bombshell: She alleged that the GMO seed/pesticide giant Monsanto had sponsored several earlier panels—paying the travel expenses of the participants—without disclosing it to the organizers.

The standing-room-only crowd—which had greeted our biotech-skeptical discussion warmly—erupted in guffaws and gasps. Soon after, Monsanto online-engagement specialist Janice Person bravely took the mic. The room took on the electric charge of a public confrontation in the mythical Old West: the accused party straining to calm a pitchfork-bearing mob. She assured the highly skeptical room that the company had no intention to mislead the organizers and just wanted to participate in the discussion. And thus our panel ended, in glorious chaos. Later, Person expanded her thoughts into this blog post and told me via email that “we regret if there was a misunderstanding,” and “it was certainly not something we tried to hide.”

But I, too, was surprised. While we were preparing our SXSW Eco panel, we had a participant drop out late in the process. I wanted to find a replacement who would cogently defend the industry—I like to be on panels with the frisson of controversy, the energy of open debate. If I had known the Eco conference would be chockfull of Monsanto people, I would have tried to snag one to join us on stage. But when I glanced over the program, the “Farming to Feed 9 Billion” certainly didn’t catch my eye. Moderated by Tim McDonald, former director of community at Huffington Post, it featured three farmers, none of whom listed any Monsanto affiliation.

In a later email, McDonald described for me how the panel came to be: “A friend of mine…who works for Monsanto asked me if I would be interested” in pitching an SXSW Eco panel, he wrote. “I told her if they would cover my travel and work on getting the panelists, I would be happy to organize and moderate the panel.”

As it happens, I attended that panel, which took place Monday. At the start, the moderator, McDonald, announced that Monsanto had paid for his and the other panelists travel expenses, but promised an open dialogue all the same. I somehow missed his saying that, but I did note on Twitter that several Monsanto-affiliated folks were enthusiastically live-tweeting the discussion, which I frankly found rather vague and diffuse. Apparently, McDonald’s disclosure from the stage was the first indication of Monsanto’s involvement that the conference’s organizers got. And judging from the SXSW Eco staffer’s announcement at our panel, they were none too pleased with the lack of transparency. (I’ve reached out to SXSW Eco for comment; I’ll update when I hear back.)

In the end, Monsanto’s SXSW Eco kerfuffle takes its place in the annals of awkward corporate PR maneuvers, alongside the company’s ill-starred attempt to pay experts to participate in an “an exciting video series” on the “topics of food, food chains and sustainability” as part of sponsored content for the publisher Condé Nast.

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How Monsanto Crashed SXSW—and Brought the Drama to My Panel

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Here’s What We Saw on the Ferguson Livestreams Last Night

by KristiaOquinn Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The situation in Ferguson continued to deteriorate Monday night. The curfew imposed by Gov. Jay Nixon was lifted Monday as he called in the National Guard to help police the area. We kept tabs on the livestreams coming from Moustafa Hussein at Argus Radio (embedded below) and Tim Pool at Vice News (rewatch the feed here). See below for more updates as events unfolded.

Updates:

1:06 a.m. CDT, Argus: Hussein and other media are gathered in the designated press area outside the protest area, waiting for updates. We’re signing off for the night, but check back in the morning for more updates.

12:45 a.m. CDT, Argus: Hussein and his colleague are turned away at another entry point to the protest area. There appears to be a lot of confusion over where journalists and protestors can and can’t go. As the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery tweeted earlier:

12:15 a.m. CDT, Argus: “Something is happening in the neighborhood and they’re keeping media completely away from it,” Hussein says. “Every time we get to the street that officers told us to go to, we’re being told to go to another area.”

11:53 p.m. CDT, Vice: Vice’s Tim Pool trying to get into press area but can’t find his credential. Officer: “Credentials.” Pool: “I lost it when I was getting shot at.” Officer: “Well you’re not getting through.” (Officer rips off “PRESS” decal on Pool’s vest) “This doesn’t mean shit.”

11:52 p.m. CDT, Argus: Police officers appear to arrest several protesters. One officer tells the Argus reporter that all media needs to go up 2.5 miles back to the press area near the Target store, apologizing for the inconvenience. “We don’t get told much,” the officer says. Meanwhile:

11:45 p.m. CDT, Argus: Police repeatedly tell protesters: “Everyone on the Ferguson-Market parking lot needs to leave immediately or you will be subject to arrest, with the exception of credentialed media. Do it now. Or you will be subject to arrest.” Moments later, a line of police officers proceeds down the street, holding up their weapons:

11:41 p.m. CDT, Vice: Tim Pool, Vice News reporter, to officer: “Are there live shots?” Officer: “Yes. Bad guys shot. We didn’t shoot.”

11:30 p.m. CDT, Argus: Police ask media to shut off the lights on their cameras.

11 p.m. CDT, Vice: Police begin deploying smoke, tear gas, and flash bang grenades. Vice reporter Tim Pool, who is filming the feed, says he was hit in the leg by a rubber bullet.

10:40 CDT, Argus: Police rush in and grab two protesters, one a woman who can be heard saying she is trying to get home.

10:20 CDT, Argus: Protest leaders are able to calm an increasingly tense situation by moving media and protesters out of the street and onto the sidewalk after police give indications they might move on the crowd.

10pm CDT, Argus: Antonio French, a local alderman, can be seen trying to calm down several aggressive protesters, and keeping media from getting too close to police. The police have also deployed, on and off, a noise device to try and disperse the crowd. Read our interview with French here.

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Here’s What We Saw on the Ferguson Livestreams Last Night

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MAP: Is Your State Ready for Climate Disasters?

by dwsfwa Posted on November 12, 2013

Mother Jones

Tim McDonnell/Climate Desk

Whether it’s wildfires in the West, drought in the Midwest, or sea level rise on the Eastern seaboard, chances are good your state is in for its own breed of climate-related disasters. Every state is required to file a State Hazard Mitigation Plan with FEMA, which lays out risks for that state and its protocols for handling catastrophe. But as a new analysis from Columbia University’s Center for Climate Change Law reveals, many states’ plans do not take climate change into account.

Michael Gerrard, the Center’s director, said his team combed through all 50 reports to see how accurately and comprehensively climate change was taken into consideration, if at all, and grouped them into four ranked categories:

  1. No discussion of climate change or inaccurate discussion of climate change.
  2. Minimal mention of climate change related issues.
  3. Accurate but limited discussion of climate change and/or brief discussion with acknowledgement of need for future inclusion.
  4. Thorough discussion of climate change impacts on hazards and climate adaptation actions.

While FEMA itself acknowledged this summer that climate change could increase areas at risk from flooding by 45 percent overt the next century, states are not required to discuss climate change in their mitigation plans. The Columbia analysis didn’t take into account climate planning outside the scope of the mitigation plans, like state-level greenhouse gas limits or renewable energy incentives. And as my colleague Kate Sheppard reported, some government officials have avoided using climate science terminology even in plans that implicitly address climate risks; states that didn’t use terms like “climate change” and “global warming” in their mitigation plans were docked points in Columbia’s ranking algorithm.

Gerrard said he wasn’t surprised to find more attention paid to climate change in coastal states like Alaska and New York that are closest to the front lines. But he was surprised to find that a plurality of states landed in the least-prepared category, suggesting a need, he said, for better communication of non-coastal risks like drought and heat waves.

“We had hoped that more of the states would have dealt with climate change in a more forthright way,” he said.

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MAP: Is Your State Ready for Climate Disasters?

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