Tag Archives: columbia

Turns out solar power is the only thing Americans can agree on.

by JoeannSloan Posted on October 4, 2016

According to a paper released Tuesday by James Hansen, formerly of NASA and now at Columbia University*, the landmark Paris Agreement is solid C-minus work — but when it comes to climate commitments, mediocrity is criminal. Slacker countries making only modest emissions reductions will lock future generations into dangerous levels of climate change.

The average global temperature is already 1 to 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels, according to Hansen’s group. That’s on par with the Earth’s climate 115,000 years ago, when the seas were 20 feet higher than they are today.

Unless we phase out fossil fuels entirely in the next few years, Hansen told reporters on Monday, future generations will have to achieve “negative emissions” by actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. Seeing as we don’t even know if that’s possible, that’d be a helluva task for our progeny.

Hansen and his coauthors’ work, which is undergoing peer review, supports a lawsuit brought by 21 young people against the U.S. government. It charges our lawmakers with not protecting the “life, liberty, and property” of future citizens by allowing fossil fuel interests to keep polluting.

But a solution is possible, Hansen explained, if we commit to a fee on carbon pollution and more investment in renewable energy.

*Correction: This story originally referred to Hansen as a former NASA director. He was director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

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Turns out solar power is the only thing Americans can agree on.

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Police in India kill four people protesting state-run coal mine.

by Florenc9053 Posted on October 3, 2016

According to a paper released Tuesday by James Hansen, formerly of NASA and now at Columbia University*, the landmark Paris Agreement is solid C-minus work — but when it comes to climate commitments, mediocrity is criminal. Slacker countries making only modest emissions reductions will lock future generations into dangerous levels of climate change.

The average global temperature is already 1 to 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels, according to Hansen’s group. That’s on par with the Earth’s climate 115,000 years ago, when the seas were 20 feet higher than they are today.

Unless we phase out fossil fuels entirely in the next few years, Hansen told reporters on Monday, future generations will have to achieve “negative emissions” by actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. Seeing as we don’t even know if that’s possible, that’d be a helluva task for our progeny.

Hansen and his coauthors’ work, which is undergoing peer review, supports a lawsuit brought by 21 young people against the U.S. government. It charges our lawmakers with not protecting the “life, liberty, and property” of future citizens by allowing fossil fuel interests to keep polluting.

But a solution is possible, Hansen explained, if we commit to a fee on carbon pollution and more investment in renewable energy.

*Correction: This story originally referred to Hansen as a former NASA director. He was director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

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Police in India kill four people protesting state-run coal mine.

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That Time Scientists Discovered a Planet Called "Vulcan"

by FranchescaTimmon Posted on October 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Live long and prosper. NBC Television via Wikimedia Commons

It’s not often you hear a scientist praise the virtues of failure, but this week’s guest on the Inquiring Minds podcast is no ordinary scientist.

Stuart Firestein, who previously wrote a book about the value of ignorance, tells host Indre Viskontas that “science is really about the stuff we don’t know.” The professor and former chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University explains that failure is often what leads to new discoveries.

To illustrate his point, Firestein describes the discovery of two new planets. The first, Neptune, was found in 1846 when scientists noticed that Uranus’ orbit wasn’t where it was supposed to be according to Isaac Newton’s laws of motion. As Firestein says, Uranus was “wobbling around” and hadn’t gone as far as scientists had expected. At first, it seemed like there must be something wrong with Newtonian physics. But eventually, scientists came up with a better explanation: There must be another planet invisible to telescopes whose gravitational pull was causing the “perturbations” in Uranus’ orbit. Using calculations, those scientists found Neptune, proving Newton was right all along.

“In that case, the failure led to a new discovery,” Firestein says.

The planet Neptune NASA

But a contradictory case soon led to a far different result. A few years later, scientists began to notice a “funny wobble” in Mercury’s orbit, too. Naturally, some thought there must be another new planet that, like Neptune, was causing the shakiness. They named this mysterious planet Vulcan. As it turned out, however, Vulcan didn’t exist. Mercury’s orbit could actually be explained by Einstein’s theory of relativity, which contains a different description of gravity than Newton’s laws. In other words, perhaps Newton really wasn’t quite right all along. But scientists’ efforts to apply his laws helped them vastly improve their understanding of our solar system.

That’s a story that is repeated over and over in science, according to Firestein. “It’s imperfection,” he says, “that is often the source of unexpected discoveries and creativity.”

The same principle applies to other disciplines. Firestein describes a 1996 study in which some participants were exposed to phrases associated with old age, while others received neutral words. After reading the lines, each participant walked down a hallway, and the results were telling. Those who read the words associated with old age—such as “Florida” and “bingo”—walked slower than those who read neutral phrases or ones associated with youth, Firestein says.

But there was just one problem. When researchers in Belgium tried to repeat the study, they weren’t able to replicate the results. Since the phrases in the Belgian study were given in French, rather than in English, Firestein says, the experiment was not a direct replication of the original. So was it a failure? Not according to Firestein.

In fact, he says, an example like this actually “increases our knowledge” because it can prompt scientists to examine variables and nuances that can be “very, very subtle.”

To Firestein, science is a study in trial and error. “Science is a process,” he says. “It never stops.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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That Time Scientists Discovered a Planet Called "Vulcan"

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The New Supreme Court Term: Cheerleading Uniforms, Bad Banks, and a Little Girl and Her Dog

by cheribrunton41 Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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The last few Supreme Court terms were blockbusters, featuring a historic gay marriage decision, critical abortion and contraception cases, Obamacare cliffhangers, and a ruling on racial preferences in college admissions. The new term, which begins Monday and runs through the end of June, will be different. Instead of culture wars and political jousting, there will be cases involving cheerleading uniforms, patents for incontinence products, banks behaving badly, and a goldendoodle named Wonder.

The unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February and the failure of the Senate to confirm a replacement have left an eight-member court that seems to be shying away from big political questions and hot-button issues that might produce unsatisfying 4-4 votes. But as veteran Supreme Court litigator Tom Goldstein quipped recently at a DC panel discussion on the court, “There are plenty of boring, important cases out there.”

Even in its reduced state, the court can’t entirely avoid some critical conflicts in need of resolution. For instance, a number of its cases this term involve race in the justice system and elsewhere, at a particularly timely moment when many parts of the country are suffering from deep unrest over the role of race in law enforcement.

One of the first cases slated for oral arguments this term is Buck v. Davis, a case that raises a serious question about how race has infected the “machinery of death.” In 1997, Duane Buck was sentenced to death in Texas after his own lawyer introduced an expert witness who testified that Buck was more likely to commit violent crimes in the future because he was black. Potential for future danger is a critical component juries must consider in issuing a death sentence in Texas.

Texas has conceding that such testimony was unconstitutional, but it has continued to press for Buck’s execution nonetheless. The high court will have to decide whether the case presents extraordinary enough circumstances to justify reopening his sentencing. A ruling against Buck would send a disturbing signal to the justice system that there’s virtually no amount of racial discrimination that could prompt the court to overturn a death sentence tainted by bias.

In Pena-Rodriguez v. Colorado, the court will also take up the issue of racial bias on juries. By law, jury deliberations can’t be used to help a defendant appeal a negative sentence. But in this case, one of the jurors, who convicted Miguel Pena-Rodriguez of misdemeanor charges related to groping a young woman, insisted during the deliberations that he didn’t believe the defendant or his alibi witness because they were Mexican. Pena-Rodriguez is seeking a new trial on the basis of the juror’s behavior, and the question before the court is whether there can be exceptions to jury deliberation confidentiality in the interest of granting defendants their Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

In what almost looks like deliberate scheduling, the court’s biggest racial discrimination case on the docket so far will be argued on Election Day (perhaps in the hope that reporters will be too busy to notice). The city of Miami has filed two cases against Bank of America and Wells Fargo for allegedly targeting minorities with predatory loans that contributed to the city’s foreclosure crisis. The city argues that such discriminatory lending and the resulting loan defaults left the city with diminished tax revenues and huge bills for cleaning up the mess left behind in blighted neighborhoods. The question for the court is whether Congress, in the Fair Housing Act, intended for municipalities, or only individuals, to sue to combat lending discrimination. The lower court sided with Miami, but if the high court disagrees, cities deeply affected by the foreclosure crisis will lose this particular avenue for holding banks accountable.

The only case on the docket close to a culture warrior entry this term is Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Pauley. A Michigan church applied for a grant from Missouri’s Scrap Tire Grant program for assistance resurfacing a playground at its preschool with a safer, rubber top made of old tires. While the church’s grant proposal was well rated, the state ultimately turned it down because the state constitution prohibits direct aid to a church. The church sued, with help from a legion of lawyers fresh off the gay marriage battles. They argue that Missouri’s prohibition, originally conceived as part of an anti-Catholic movement, violates the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, especially when the money was going to a purely secular use.

While this might have been an easy win for the church before the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who was on the court when the justices took the case in January, the remaining eight-members might not be quite so well-disposed to rule in its favor. Forcing taxpayers to underwrite improvements to church property is in direct conflict with some of the court’s earlier rulings. Critics see a ruling for the church as a slippery-slope sort of argument, leading to compulsory government support of religion, which the Founders deeply opposed. In a sign of how much the court might already have been deadlocked on this case, it still hasn’t been scheduled for oral arguments.

Justice Samuel Alito suggested last spring that the court could use a justice with some experience in patent and intellectual property law. The court proved him right on Thursday, choosing to take up a case on whether disparaging terms can be trademarked. Lee v. Tam involves The Slants, an Asian American dance band that tried to trademark its name. Because some consider the name a slur, the US Patent and Trademark Office rejected the trademark application. The Slants sued and prevailed in the lower court, which found the trademark ban unconstitutional. The most obvious beneficiary of a Supreme Court ruling in the band’s favor, however, would be the Washington Redskins. Last year, a federal judge ordered the patent office to revoke the federal trademark registrations for the team after they were challenged in court by Native Americans who find the NFL team name offensive. A win for The Slants would be a win for the Redskins, too.

And then there are the cheerleading uniforms, which lawyers have called the “most vexing, unresolved question in copyright law.” At issue in Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands is whether a design in a cheerleading uniform can be copyrighted, or whether it’s simply part of the overall uniform, which cannot be copyrighted. The case could have a big impact, of all places, in Hollywood, where intellectual-property fights over movie costume knockoffs are legion. But it also has implications for people who like to dress up as Batman at comic-cons, Civil War reenactors, and 3-D printer aficionados, who rely on creative tweaks to other people’s designs that might become inaccessible to them should those clothing designs become copyrighted.

There’s still hope for some more compelling cases to come before the court between now and next June. On the horizon is the transgender bathroom issue—a case involving a Virginia school board’s decision to ban transgender kids from using the bathroom of their choosing that the court could to hear this term. Also on the docket but not yet scheduled for arguments is a case regarding the constitutionality of North Carolina’s draconian plan to restrict voting. The law has been put on hold until after the election, but the court eventually will have to decide it on the merits.

There’s also the pending Wisconsin “John Doe” case, a political blockbuster involving allegations of criminal campaign finance violations by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican. The state Supreme Court ultimately stopped the investigation into the alleged violations after several judges refused to recuse themselves from the proceedings, despite having benefited from outside election spending by many of the same groups that were accused of illegal coordination with Walker’s campaign. Documents leaked this month to the Guardian gave credence to the allegations against Walker. The Supreme Court could decide as soon as Monday whether to take up the question of the judges’ recusal.

In the meantime, until the court decides what to do with those more controversial cases, the most media-friendly case of the term could be Fry v. Napoleon Community Schools, a case that shows how public officials can be blind to the optics of their decisions. In 2009, when Ehlena Fry was five years old, Michigan school officials banned her from bringing her goldendoodle therapy dog, Wonder, to class with her. Fry suffers from cerebral palsy, and the dog gave her some measure of independence by opening doors and helping her take off her coat, get out of chairs, and pick up pencils. Fry’s family sued, alleging violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The school district fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that the family needed to exhaust other remedies before relying on the ADA for relief. Even if the school officials ultimately win this case, they have already lost in the court of public opinion. Just watch this video to see why:

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The New Supreme Court Term: Cheerleading Uniforms, Bad Banks, and a Little Girl and Her Dog

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The Eco-Friendly Reason Rio’s Olympic Medalists Didn’t Get Flowers

by radiomeciurilive Posted on August 23, 2016

The Olympic Games are held every four years, and although the medals change, the award ceremonies are usually very similar.

Olympic medalists typically receive a bouquet in addition to their medal, but flowers werestrangely absent from the podium in Rio. Why? Turns out it was part of the Rio Olympic Committee’s efforts to make the massive event more eco-friendly.

Flowers are not very sustainable, said Christy Nicolay, the executive producer of the victory ceremonies, told the New York Times. We give it to an athlete, and very often they just throw it away.

Even those of us who aren’t Olympic athletes know this to be a painful reality of life. We get flowers for special occasions or perhaps simply cut them from our own gardens to bright up the house, but it seems they wither and die almost instantly.

Like any crop, growing flowers is a resource-intensive process. “Seventy percent of the cut flowers sold in the U.S. are imported from Latin America,” reported Diane MacEachern for Care2. “Though the hot climate is just what the flowers need, those constant high temperatures are also conducive to bugs and disease. Consequently, growers in Columbia, Ecuador and many other countries rely on pesticides that have long been banned in the U.S. to produce flowers worth selling in international markets.”

Related: Why Buying Local Flowers Is Just As Important As Buying Local Food

With all that in mind, Rio’s decision to nix the bouquets seems very noble…until you hear about what they gave athletes as a replacement souvenir.

Those who managed to finish in the top three of their events at this years Summer Games receivedsmall sculptures of the Rio 2016 logo,designed in three dimensions for the first time in history. It’s said that the figurines can double as a display stand for the medal. Sadly, the sculptures were made ofresin, polyresin and PVCnot exactly the most eco-friendly materials. It remains to be seen whether future Olympic host cities will follow this example.

While the athletes are far less likely to toss their sculpture in the trash, it’s worth noting that fresh flowers and plants were still used to decorate the podiumsI wonder, where did they end up?

Related: 5 Simple Ways To Recycle Your Fresh Cut Flowers

Image Credit: Thinkstock

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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The Eco-Friendly Reason Rio’s Olympic Medalists Didn’t Get Flowers

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Is the Louisiana Flooding More Devastating Than Hurricane Sandy?

by BeckySoria Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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The relief effort in Louisiana is ramping up after 10 days of monumental flooding. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama will visit Baton Rouge to survey the damage and find out how the federal government can help. The Red Cross has repeatedly described the flooding as “the worst natural disaster to strike the United States” since Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012.

But for those who aren’t on the ground in Louisiana, it can be difficult to understand what that really means. Here are some numbers that compare the two disasters.

Deaths and damaged homes: Thirteen people have died and about 60,000 homes have been damaged in the flooding that began in Louisiana on August 12. As of Friday, the Obama administration listed 20 parishes in the state as disaster areas, making federal funding available to assist those communities. Hurricane Sandy had a bigger death toll, claiming 72 lives in the United States and damaging 200,000 homes. But that storm hit a much wider swath of land, including metropolitan centers like New York City, whose population is nearly double that of the entire state of Louisiana.

People in shelters: When you compare the storms in terms of the numbers of people in shelters, the situation is similar.

“The Red Cross has mobilized our largest sheltering and feeding effort since Superstorm Sandy with the flooding in Louisiana,” said Molly Dalton, a spokeswoman for the humanitarian organization. “It’s the largest volume of people in need of emergency shelter in the last four years…In addition, FEMA has reported really high numbers of people registering for emergency assistance, which is another indicator we’re going by.”

About five days after Hurricane Sandy, she said, the Red Cross had 11,000 people in 250 shelters across 16 states. One week into that relief effort, it had about 7,000 people in shelters, “and we’re seeing about the same over the last week” in Louisiana, Dalton said on Friday. “Thursday night we had 3,900 people in 28 shelters, but at the peak of the response we had 10,000 people in 50 shelters in Louisiana. So it’s going down, but there are still a lot of people in shelters.” Sunday night, the Red Cross had nearly 3,000 people in 19 shelters across the state.

Looking at the big picture, the Red Cross and partners have provided more than 40,000 overnight stays since flooding began in Louisiana. That compares with 74,000 overnight stays during the entire relief effort for Hurricane Sandy, and 3.8 million overnight stays for Hurricane Katrina victims who where spread across 27 states.

“It’s not possible to estimate the full impact of the Louisiana floods this early in the response, and every disaster is different, so it would be difficult to make any comparison to past disasters,” another Red Cross spokesperson told Mother Jones on Monday. “But we do know that this is going to be a massive response.”

Meals served: “So far in Louisiana in the first week, we’ve served 158,000 meals, and if you look at the same point in Sandy, we had served 164 thousand,” Dalton said Friday. “So as far as what we’re seeing then and what we’re seeing now, it’s very, very similar.”

It’s important to remember, she said, that Hurricane Sandy struck many more states, stretching from New England as far south as the District of Columbia. “This is just one area of Louisiana,” she added. “So if you look at it that way…it’s a very devastating disaster.”

At the peak of the deluge, Louisiana was hit by 6.9 trillion gallons of rain between August 8 and August 14, or roughly 10.4 million Olympic-size swimming pools‘ worth of water. The flooding is receding now, particularly in the northern reaches of the state, though some areas in the south will take longer to dry out, says Gavin Phillips, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “It’s going down everywhere now,” he says. “There’s nothing worsening at this point.”

The Red Cross estimates the relief effort in Louisiana could cost at least $30 million, though that number may grow as relief workers learn more about the scope of the disaster. As of Monday, the humanitarian organization had received about $7.8 million in donations and pledges.

While Hurricane Sandy and the recent Louisiana flooding were devastating, they pale in comparison to Louisiana’s other famous disaster, Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast 10 years ago, killing at least 1,833 people.

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Is the Louisiana Flooding More Devastating Than Hurricane Sandy?

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American Women Are Still Dying in Childbirth at Alarming Rates

by RUDKobyalnb Posted on August 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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In dramatic contrast to the rest of the developed world, the rate of women dying because of complications with pregnancy or childbirth rose in the United States by 27 percent between 2000 and 2014. During the same time period, according to a study that will be published in the September issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 157 other countries reported a decrease in their maternal mortality rates.

Maternal mortality is defined as death while pregnant or within 42 days of being pregnant because of causes related to that pregnancy. The report covers 50 states and the District of Columbia, but researchers described the lack of comprehensive data surrounding maternal mortality as an “international embarrassment.” The lead researcher, editor-in-chief of Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, with researchers from Boston University, and Stanford University, pointed to a lack of funding as reason for delays in compiling the data, but their conclusion was clear: “There is a need to redouble efforts to prevent maternal deaths and improve maternity care for the 4 million U.S. women giving birth each year.”

The nationwide rates are troubling, but Texas, whose maternal mortality rate doubled over two years, is the state with the sharpest increase. From 2006 to 2010, the maternal mortality rate stayed relatively steady in the state, at about 18 deaths per 100,000 live births. But in 2011, the rate there jumped to 33, and then to 35.8 in 2014. Texas has been at the center of a heated debate around women’s health that included a Supreme Court battle over restriction to abortion access in the state, and in 2013 the Legislature created a task force to study maternal mortality and morbidity. Its first report is set to be released in two weeks. While the state is separately analyzed in this report, the authors do not identify a specific reason for the increase, although they did speculate.

“There were some changes in the provision of women’s health services in Texas from 2011 to 2015, including the closing of several women’s health clinics,” the authors write. “Still, in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a 2-year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely. A future study will examine Texas data by race–ethnicity and detailed causes of death to better understand this unusual finding.”

The “changes in the provision of women’s health services” in Texas began in September 2011, when the state’s family planning budget was cut by two-thirds. Programs that provided prenatal care for low-income women were deeply affected, and the move also excluded clinics that provide abortion services from the funding. And in 2013, Texas passed HB 2, an anti-abortion omnibus bill that set off a domino effect of restrictions that drained half the state’s clinics of resources, ultimately shuttering them.

More recently, Texas awarded $1.6 million in funding for the Healthy Texas Women program to the Heidi Group, an anti-abortion organization. Only the Harris County Public Health Department received more money from the fund, but just barely—it was awarded $1.7 million.

Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, told the Dallas Morning News that the department considered the issue “a complex problem.”

“We’re aware of the numbers and want to see a decrease in this trend, and that’s why the task force is closely reviewing these cases and will make recommendations,” Williams said.

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American Women Are Still Dying in Childbirth at Alarming Rates

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The Supreme Court Abortion Ruling Could Soon Take Down Laws in These 8 States

by JurgenCorones Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a press call on Thursday, Planned Parenthood announced a campaign to work toward the repeal of abortion restrictions in eight states across the country, in light of the Supreme Court’s historic ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.

The ruling, announced on Monday, found that two types of abortion clinic restrictions in Texas—a law requiring abortion providers to have local hospital admitting privileges and a rule requiring clinics to meet the strict infrastructure standards of outpatient surgery centers—were unconstitutional because they caused an undue burden on abortion access.

Planned Parenthood announced on Thursday that it was planning to seek repeals of Texas-style restrictions in seven other states: Missouri, Virginia, Florida, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Planned Parenthood also announced that they would begin work toward repealing abortion restrictions in Texas beyond those struck down this week by the Supreme Court.

Missouri and Tennessee each have both of the Texas-style restrictions on the books: an admitting-privileges law and facility infrastructure requirements. In Missouri, the admitting-privileges law led to the closure of an abortion clinic in Columbia, leaving the state with just one clinic. In Tennessee, both laws are being challenged in the courts. The rest of the states on Planned Parenthood’s list each have laws requiring structural standards comparable to those of surgical centers, though the law specifics vary by state.

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The Supreme Court Abortion Ruling Could Soon Take Down Laws in These 8 States

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There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

by mtibkz48 Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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The number of transgender Americans may be twice as big as we thought. According to a new analysis of state and federal data, an estimated 1.4 million adults in the United States, or 0.6 percent of the total population, do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

The analysis by the Williams Institute at UCLA comes as policymakers increasingly consider questions of transgender rights in schools, workplaces, and the military.

Previously, the most widely accepted estimate suggested 0.3 percent of American adults were transgender. That figure came from a smaller analysis by the Williams Institute in 2011, based on a health survey in Massachusetts and a survey about tobacco use among LGBT people in California. The new analysis draws on a much bigger set of data from 19 states that have since started asking about gender identity in questionnaires about health risk behaviors run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers also used Census Bureau data to estimate the transgender populations in the 31 other states.

Williams Institute

The study’s authors say their analysis is the first in the United States to estimate the transgender population in each state. Hawaii, California, Georgia, and New Mexico had the biggest percentages of adults who identified as transgender, at 0.8 percent each. North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota had the smallest percentages, at about 0.3 percent each. Young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 were most likely to identify as transgender (0.7 percent), compared with 0.6 percent of those between the ages of 25 and 64 and 0.6 percent of adults older than 64.

The District of Columbia had a far higher rate of transgender identity than any state in the study, at an estimated 2.8 percent of adults.

The Census Bureau does not ask about gender identity in its population count, so we still don’t know exactly how many Americans identify as transgender. In May, Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona introduced a bill that would require federal agencies to include questions about gender identity in national demographic surveys.

“The findings from this study are critical to current policy discussions that impact transgender people,” says Jody Herman, one of the study’s authors. “Policy debates on access to bathrooms, discrimination, and a host of other issues should rely on the best data available to assess potential impacts, including how many people may be affected.”

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There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

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30 million dead trees could make California wildfires even worse

by ShoshanBeavers Posted on June 23, 2016

30 million dead trees could make California wildfires even worse

By on Jun 23, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

With drought and climate change conspiring to push California’s summer wildfire season into premature overdrive, the state’s lead wildfire agency has acquired a multimillion dollar arsenal to help it cope with unprecedented numbers of dying trees.

California recently bought $6 million worth of chippers, mobile sawmills, portable incinerators, and other equipment to help its firefighters remove some of the nearly 30 million trees that now stand dead across the state, killed by drought and insects.

The equipment is being used as parched southern California landscapes explode in the types of summertime flames that wouldn’t normally be expected until August. Grasses that fattened up following winter storms in central and northern California are expected to fuel major blazes in the weeks ahead.

“The more time that goes by, the drier the fuels are going to become,” said Tom Rolinski, a U.S. Forest Service meteorologist who forecasts fire conditions in southern California. “As this summer unfolds and we get into the August and September timeframes, the fuels are going to be that much drier, and we’re probably going to see more intense fires.”

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, normally called CAL FIRE, which is charged with protecting tens of millions of acres of mostly private land, responded to about 250 fires last week — an unusually large number for mid-June.

On Tuesday, CAL FIRE was working with other agencies to try to contain two major blazes in southern California as firefighters in other Southwestern states also battled big fires amid record-breaking heat.

The fires are being fueled by droughts exacerbated by warming temperatures, which scientists have linked to climate change and to the natural whims of the weather.

“Warming causes fuels to be drier than they would otherwise be,” said Park Williams, who researches ecology and climate change at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Whether that corresponds to a large area burned for California this year will depend on human activities and individual weather events.”

Even as firefighters in California toil to battle the extraordinary blazes, they’re being forced to deal with another extraordinary phenomenon: the widespread dying of trees.

About 30 million trees across the state are estimated to have died, succumbing to attacks by beetles because of the weakening effects of drought.

“It’s the drought that sort of sets it off, and then it lets the beetles get out of hand,” said Roger Bales, a professor at the University of California, Merced.

Gov. Jerry Brown declared an emergency in the fall because of the unprecedented die-offs, helping to free up funds needed to remove and dispose of some of them. CAL FIRE hired hundreds of seasonal workers early this year to help remove dead trees and clear out other potential fuel for fires.

While ecologists value dead trees as natural assets that provide holes and logs needed by wildlife, firefighters view them as safety hazards that can crash down on roads, power lines, and homes, and that could potentially fuel bigger blazes.

The “scale of this tree die-off is unprecedented in modern history,” Brown’s emergency declaration stated, worsening wildfire risks and erosion threats and creating “life safety risks from falling trees.”

A group of ecologists formally objected to the emergency declaration, arguing in a letter to Brown that dead trees are natural and necessary parts of Californian landscapes. They pointed to a growing body of research downplaying the wildfire hazards posed by trees killed by beetles.

Dead pines photographed during an aerial survey last year in Los Padres National Forest.U.S. Forest Service

One of those ecologists, Chad Hanson, director of a small California nonprofit, says he agrees that dead trees that pose falling hazards should be removed. But he said trunks should be left on the ground to provide habitat instead of being incinerated or removed. “Once you fell the trees, they’re no longer a hazard,” he said.

Summertime fires in California cause less property damage than the fires that are fanned by dry Santa Ana winds in the fall and winter, but they sap more firefighting resources, research published last year showed.

“We were really trying to figure out how fires will change in southern California in the future,” said James Randerson, a University of California, Irvine earth scientist who contributed to the study. “What we realized early on is that there are two distinct fire types.”

While the effects of climate change on Santa Ana winds fires remain riddled with uncertainty, scientists are generally convinced that the parching effects of global warming will lead to bigger, longer, and more damaging summertime blazes in California — if they aren’t already doing so.

That suggests the intense and early summer fire seasons in this and other recent drought-stricken years may have been less an aberration and more a bellwether of something that CAL FIRE officials frequently describe as a “new normal” for firefighters.

With more greenhouse gas pollution piling into the atmosphere daily, continuing to warm the planet toward a 2 degrees F increase from preindustrial times, and with warmer weather exacerbating droughts, mass tree die-offs could become routine features of Western landscapes.

Not only would that eliminate or shrink some forests, driving them northward or uphill toward cooler climates, it could also force increasingly overworked firefighting agencies to juggle the additional routine task of managing dead trees.

CAL FIRE is focusing its tree removal efforts in areas where most trees have died and where the dead trees pose the most immediate dangers.

“We’re focused on high hazard areas with the greatest threat to life safety and critical infrastructure,” CAL FIRE spokeswoman Janet Upton said. “There are literally hundreds of thousands of acres, and growing, affected by the unprecedented scope and magnitude of tree mortality.”

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30 million dead trees could make California wildfires even worse

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