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More trouble in Paradise: Camp Fire region braces for floods and mudslides

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Northern California faces a new threat in the aftermath of the disastrous Camp Fire: Weather forecasters are growing more confident that downpours, which could bring flash floods and mudslides, are headed for the fragile, scorched terrain.

On Monday night, the National Weather Service issued flash-flood watches for recent burn areas, in preparation for a series of heavy rainfall events arriving between Wednesday and Friday.

The forecast prompted an escalation of ongoing search and recovery efforts in Paradise, with fears that the rains could wash away the remains of fire victims, reducing the chances of families of the hundreds of residents still listed as missing finding closure.

Kory Honea, the sheriff of Butte County, told the Associated Press that the looming rains means that it’s within the “realm of possibility” that officials might never be able to determine the fire’s exact death toll.

As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 79 people are known to have died, 699 are still unaccounted for, and more than 40,000 displaced. The Camp Fire is already one of the deadliest U.S. disasters of any kind in the 21st century. It is the deadliest U.S. fire in 100 years, and the sixth-deadliest worldwide in that same timespan, according to numbers compiled by meteorologist Jeff Masters. The 17,148 buildings destroyed in and around the town of Paradise are nearly equal to all those lost in each of the other top-10 most destructive fires in California history, combined.

Current forecasts call for as much as six inches of rain near Paradise — about as much as the region gets in an average November — arriving in the span of just a few days. That kind of a deluge would not only frustrate recovery efforts, but it could also spawn mudslides and flash floods by turning the newly barren soil into a roiling, debris-filled torrent. That the still-burning fire that started this whole mess could be extinguished in the process is almost an afterthought.

Survivors’ stories are still emerging two weeks after a wall of flames burned through Paradise in mere hours. While the cause of the fire is yet to be officially determined, it’s nearly certain that climate change played a crucial role in how quickly it grew and spread.

It’s worth noting that climate change is likely playing a role in intensifying heavy rainfall in California, too. More rain can fall in a shorter period of time in a warmer atmosphere that’s becoming more efficient at evaporation. In California, most heavy rainstorms, including those in the forecast this week, come via such atmospheric rivers — tropical conveyor belts of moisture streaming directly ashore — and these are growing wider and more intense as the planet heats up.

The fact that two of the extremes of climate change — drier and hotter droughts, and wetter and wider floods — are manifesting as part of the same disaster is a sign of the urgency of the crisis. The Camp Fire is the latest example of the compound, complex tragedy of climate change.

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More trouble in Paradise: Camp Fire region braces for floods and mudslides

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Mathematics Minus Fear – Lawrence Potter

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Mathematics Minus Fear

How to Make Math Fun and Beneficial to Your Everyday Life

Lawrence Potter

Genre: Mathematics

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: September 4, 2012

Publisher: Pegasus Books

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


Forget your classroom nightmares and discover how numbers can enhance and illuminate your world! How can math help you bet on horses or win in Vegas? What’s the foolproof way to solve Sudoku? How can probability teach you to calculate your chances of survival in Russian roulette? In this irreverent and entertaining guide to mathematics, Lawrence Potter takes the fear out of everything from long division to percentages. Using fascinating puzzles and surprising examples, he shows us how math is connected with the world we encounter every day, from how the VAT works to why weather forecasts are wrong, from winning at Monopoly to improving your mental arithmetic. Along the way you’ll also discover who invented numbers, whether animals can count, and what nuns have to do with multiplication. “Does for numbers what Eats, Shoots & Leaves did for punctuation.” — The Times Educational Supplement  “If you follow this eloquently written book you will be equipped to cope with all manner of challenges, such as splitting a restaurant bill, filling in a tax return, or understanding the compound interest on your bank statement.” — The Daily Telegraph  Lawrence Potter attended Oxford University and graduated with a degree in classics before becoming an adventurous mathematics teacher in Romania and Rwanda. He is the author of This May Help You Understand the World and lives in London.

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Mathematics Minus Fear – Lawrence Potter

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Here’s a new way to keep cattle burps from toasting the planet

The gas is almost greener

Here’s a new way to keep cattle burps from toasting the planet

Shutterstock

Telling cows to eat more slowly and avoid cola won’t do much to curb their incessant belching. But the Dutch company DSM has developed a more bovine-appropriate solution for the climate-wrecking problem of cattle gassiness.

Staff scientists and academic researchers funded by the company have developed a powder that can be mixed in with cattle feed, interfering with the microorganisms that produce methane. Newsweek reports:

“In trials we’ve managed to reduce methane emissions by up to 60 percent,” says Petra Simic, a biochemist who directs DSM’s cow-methane efforts. “We have solid proof of concept that our compound does what it’s supposed to do. What we’re working on now is figuring out the best way of mixing it into the cow’s feed.”

They are also testing the feed’s safety. Without a guarantee that it’s completely safe for their animals, virtually no farmer would agree to use the additive. Perhaps more important, the scientists are working to make sure the milk and beef will taste the same as the regular variety—if they don’t, it will never sell.

Meanwhile, scientists elsewhere are experimenting with vaccines to help reduce methane emissions from cattle.

This is an important field of research. Livestock emit about a third of the greenhouse gases from the U.S. agricultural sector. Holding down levels of methane that bubble out of cattle orifices could help hold down global temperatures.


Source
Putting an End to Gassy Cows, Newsweek

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

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Here’s a new way to keep cattle burps from toasting the planet

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Lara Logan Admits Her Benghazi Report Was a Mistake

Mother Jones

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Lara Logan appeared on This Morning a few hours ago to admit that she had been misled by Dylan Davies, a security manager who told her a dramatic story two weeks ago about his actions on the night of the Benghazi attacks last year. Logan made Davies the centerpiece of a 60 Minutes segment about Benghazi, and shortly after it aired we learned that an after-action “incident report” contradicted Davies’ on-air account. Today, Norah O’Donnell asked the question that’s been on my mind ever since:

O’DONNELL: Last Thursday, The Washington Post ran a report that questioned the central parts of what Davies had told you. They cited this incident report right after the attack that he gave to Blue Mountain, the security firm that he worked for. He told them that he never made it to the compound, that he was at his villa there. Did you know about that report, that incident report?

LOGAN: No, we did not know about that incident report before we did our story. When The Washington Post story came out, he denied it. He said that he never wrote it, had nothing to do with it. And that he told the FBI the same story as he told us. But as we now know, that is not the case.

So here’s what we know. Davies never told Logan about the incident report. He never told the co-author of his memoir about the incident report. When the content of the report was revealed, he invented an entirely implausible story about lying to his supervisor in the report because he respected him so highly and didn’t want him to know that he’d disobeyed orders not to approach the compound. And yet, in a story that should have set off all sorts of alarms in the first place, this still didn’t set off any alarms for Logan. She continued to defend Davies and her reporting until news emerged yesterday that the incident report matched what Davies had told the FBI in a debriefing shortly after the attack.

In her report, Logan also failed to mention that Davies’ book about Benghazi is being published by a sister corporation of CBS, one that specializes in right-wing nonfiction. “We killed ourselves not to allow politics into this report,” Logan told the New York Times, but somehow that little tidbit about Davies’ publisher was inadvertently left out of her 60 Minutes segment.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but it was clear from the moment the segment aired that Logan was heavily invested in a Benghazi narrative of some kind. I’m not even sure what it is, but Davies was an iffy source from the start, and the other two folks she interviewed were well-known Benghazi critics who had told their stories many times before. They had nothing new or very interesting to say, and there were lots of reasons to be skeptical about their accounts. But Logan never mentioned any of that. She just offered them up as unimpeachable sources.

Something isn’t right here. This wasn’t a deeply reported segment that took a year to prepare. Nor was it the product of a neutral reporter. CBS needs to investigate what happened, and they need to do it with the same thoroughness that they investigated Dan Rather and Mary Mapes five years ago when they got snookered on the George Bush National Guard story that they obviously wanted to believe just a little bit too badly. Something like that seems to have happened here too.

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Lara Logan Admits Her Benghazi Report Was a Mistake

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