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Here’s how Obama is preparing the country for climate change
looks like rain
Here’s how Obama is preparing the country for climate change
The good news is that President Barack Obama wants the nation to do a better job of bracing itself for the wild changes afoot in the weather. The better news it that he realizes that bolstering infrastructure and reimagining how we design our cities and electrical grids are among the best ways of doing that.
“Working together, we can take some common-sense steps to make sure that America’s infrastructure is safer, stronger and more resilient for future generations,” Obama said on Wednesday. Here are some of the steps his administration is taking:
A nearly $1 billion competition, announced last month, will provide funds to help communities recover and rebuild following disasters. Technical details of the competition were outlined on Wednesday, indicating that many of the 67 communities affected by recent disasters could receive funds to support risk assessment and planning efforts. A smaller number of those communities will be selected to receive additional money to design and implement novel ideas for minimizing future risks.
The Department of Interior will spend $10 million on a training program that will help tribes prepare for climate change.
The Department of Agriculture announced $236 million worth of funding to improve rural electric infrastructure using smart grid technology in eight states.
A 3-D mapping program will be developed to help identify and manage risks of flooding, storm surges, landslides, coastal erosion, and water supply shortfalls. The program will be funded with $13.1 million.
FEMA has established a task force to figure out ways of better protecting disaster-affected communities from future disasters.
FEMA will release guidelines that call on states to consider climate variability in planning efforts.
Houston, Colorado, NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory will work together on pilot projects geared toward preparing for climate change.
NOAA is making changes that will require greater consideration of climate change in the management of coastal areas.
At least 25 communities will receive EPA funding to help them use urban forests and rooftop gardens to better manage stormwater.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines that will help public health departments assess local health risks associated with climate change.
Kenneth Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, told The Washington Post that state and local officials are beginning to calculate how much it will cost to prepare for more intense and frequent storms, rising seas, and changing temperatures. “People are scared,” he said. “They’re just starting to put a price tag on how much it costs to adapt, and they’re going to need help from Washington.” At least that help is starting to come.
Source
FACT SHEET: Taking Action to Support State, Local, and Tribal Leaders as They Prepare Communities for the Impacts of Climate Change, White House
Obama takes steps to make roads, bridges more resilient to climate change impact, The Washington Post
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 how Obama is preparing the country for climate change
Wasting water in California will now cost you $500
Wasting water in California will now cost you $500
Here’s a list of things that could now get you fined up to $500 a day in California, where a multi-year drought is sucking reservoirs and snowpacks dry:
Spraying so much water on your lawn or garden that excess water flows onto non-planted areas, walkways, parking lots, or neighboring property.
Washing your car with a hose that doesn’t have an automatic shut-off device.
Spraying water on a driveway, a sidewalk, asphalt, or any other hard surface.
Using fresh water in a water fountain — unless the water recirculates.
Those stern emergency regulations were adopted Tuesday by a unanimous vote of the State Water Resources Control Board – part of an effort to crack down on the profligate use of water during critically lean times.
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) asked the state’s residents to voluntarily conserve water in January, but they didn’t. Rather, as the San Jose Mercury News reports, “a new state survey released Tuesday showed that water use in May rose by 1 percent this year, compared with a 2011-2013 May average.”
Californians use more water on their gardens and lawns than they use inside their homes, as shown in the following chart from a document prepared for the board members ahead of Tuesday’s vote. So the new rules focus on outdoor use.
Extreme drought is now affecting 80 percent of the Golden State. Some 400,000 acres of farmland could be fallowed due to water shortages, and water customers in the hardest-hit communities are having their daily water supplies capped at less than 50 gallons per person.
The California Landscape Contractors Association sees an upside, though. It expects that the threats of fines could convince Californians to hire its members to replace thirsty nonnative plants in their gardens with drought-hardy alternatives. “If the runoff prohibition is enforced at the local level, we expect it to result in a multitude of landscape retrofits in the coming months,” association executive Larry Rohlfes told the water board in a letter dated Monday, one of a large stack of letters sent by various groups and residents in support of the new rules. “The water efficient landscapes that result will help the state’s long-term conservation efforts — in addition to helping the state deal with a hopefully short-term drought emergency.”
Source
Proposed text of emergency regulations, State Water Resources Control Board
California Drought: Conservation efforts failing despite pleas to save water, San Jose Mercury News
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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Bowe Bergdahl, Then and Now
Mother Jones
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Speaking of Bowe Bergdahl, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt have a fascinating piece in the New York Times that just went up. They got hold of a detailed report that was written two months after Bergdahl walked off, and what makes it interesting is that it’s based on extensive contemporaneous interviews. This allows us to compare what people are saying now with what they were saying back then. For example, there’s this:
A classified military report detailing the Army’s investigation into the disappearance of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in June 2009 says that he had wandered away from assigned areas before — both at a training range in California and at his remote outpost in Afghanistan — and then returned, according to people briefed on it.
….Whether Sergeant Bergdahl was a deserter who never intended to come back, or simply slipped away for a short adventure amid an environment of lax security and discipline and then was captured is one of many unanswered questions about his disappearance. The issue is murky, the report said, in light of Sergeant Bergdahl’s previous episodes of walking off.
And this:
The report is said to contain no mention of Sergeant Bergdahl having left behind a letter in his tent that explicitly said he was deserting and explaining his disillusionment, as a retired senior military official briefed on the investigation at the time told The New York Times this week. Asked about what appeared to be a disconnect, the retired officer insisted that he remembered reading a field report discussing the existence of such a letter in the early days of the search and was unable to explain why it is not mentioned in the final investigative report.
And this:
Its portrayal of him as a soldier is said to be positive, with quotes from both commanders and squadmates — apparently including some of the men now criticizing him — describing him as punctual, always in the correct uniform and asking good questions. It quotes colleagues as saying that he expressed some boredom and frustration that they were not “kicking down doors” more to go after insurgents who were destroying schools.
And this:
The report is also said to contain no mention of any alleged intercepts of radio or cellphone traffic indicating that Sergeant Bergdahl was asking villagers if anyone spoke English and trying to get in touch with the Taliban, as two former squadmates told CNN this week in separate interviews that they remembered hearing about from a translator who received the report.
The moral of this story is simple: memories can change, and once you’ve taken sides you’re likely to embellish things considerably. The stuff that Bergdahl’s critics are saying today may be accurate, or it may be a product of anger growing out of control over the passage of time. We really need to wait before rushing to judgment.
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Teenagers Are No Longer the Scary Delinquents of 30 Years Ago
Mother Jones
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Sarah Kliff says today’s teenagers are “the best-behaved generation on record”:
The Centers for Disease Control released a monster report last week on the state of Americans’ health. The 511-page report makes one thing abundantly clear: teens are behaving better right now than pretty much any other time since the federal government began collecting data.
The teen birth rate is at an all-time low….High school seniors are drinking less, smoking less, and barely using cocaine….
And, of course, the rate of violent crime has plummeted among teenagers, as Dick Mendel documents here. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’d suggest that all of this is at least partially the result of the end of leaded gasoline in America.
What’s happening today isn’t an aberration. Teenagers from the mid-60s through the mid-90s were the aberration. We managed to convince ourselves during that era that something had gone permanently wrong, but it wasn’t so. The ultra-violent gangs and reckless behavior that became so widespread simply wasn’t normal, any more than expecting teenagers to sit around in kumbaya circles would be normal. Nor had anything gone fundamentally wrong with our culture. It was the result of defective brain development caused by early exposure to lead.
I’ll never be able to prove this. No one ever will. The data is simply not rich enough, and it never will be. Nevertheless, what evidence we do have sure points in this direction. And here’s why it’s important. Even if we never clean up another microgram of lead, we’ve nonetheless cleaned up most of the lead that we poisoned our atmosphere with in the postwar years. So if the lead hypothesis is true, it means that our default fear of teenagers—beaten into us during the scary lead years—is no longer accurate. They simply aren’t as dangerous or as reckless as they used to be, and that isn’t going to change. We don’t need to be as frightened of them as we used to be. In the same way that we have to get over economic fears rooted in the 70s or the Great Depression that are no longer meaningful, we need to get over our widespread fear of teenagers that’s no longer meaningful either.
Today’s teenagers have grown up with more or less normal brain development. Some will be nice kids, some will become gang leaders. That’s always the case. But speaking generally, if you meet a group of teenagers today, they’re no more likely to be especially scary than they were in the 40s or 50s. They’re just teenagers. It’s probably going to take a while for everyone to adjust to this, but the time to start is now. Decently behaved teenagers are here to stay.
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Teenagers Are No Longer the Scary Delinquents of 30 Years Ago
The Truth About Bug Spray
Mother Jones
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John W. Tomac
If you’re planning on spending time outdoors this summer, you’ll find that the insect repellent aisle of your local pharmacy offers a dazzling array of options to protect you from hungry bugs. Hardcore DEET-based sprays like Off! Deep Woods ($6.79 for 6 oz.) promise to ward off ticks, mosquitoes, flies, chiggers, and gnats for an entire day. Other products—such as Avon Skin So Soft Bug Guard Plus ($6.99 for 4 oz.)—contain sunscreen in addition to insect repellent. There are plenty of plant-based potions—Aromaflage ($30 for 8 ml) claims that its proprietary blend of “citrus fruit, warm cedarwood, and silken vanilla” makes for “a sophisticated, uplifting fragrance that also repels insects.” So do any of them get the job done? And do they cause problems for more than just bugs?
What’s the big deal? I can handle a few mosquito bites.
Scientists believe that mosquitoes choose their human victims by the scent of the bacteria on our skin and in our sweat. Because our bacterial communities vary, some of us are more prone to bites than others. To anyone who has scratched herself silly after a camping trip, the importance of an effective repellent is obvious. But even if you’re lucky enough to be unappetizing to mosquitoes, there’s another reason to choose your bug defense carefully: Insect-borne illnesses are on the rise, and some can be serious, even deadly. Lyme disease, which is transmitted by deer ticks, causes debilitating symptoms in more than 20,000 people every year. In 2013, 2,374 people in 48 states contracted the mosquito-borne disease West Nile virus, and 114 of them died. As climate change intensifies, public health experts expect that more breeds of mosquito will thrive in the United States. As a result, they predict an uptick in West Nile and other insect-borne illnesses, such as yellow fever. Since 2001, Florida, Hawaii, and Texas have had outbreaks of dengue, another mosquito-borne disease that had been considered eliminated in the United States since 1945.
What should I look for in a repellent?
Good question. Despite massive industry lobbying, sunscreen manufacturers must now state clearly on the packaging how well and how long a product works. Repellent companies, however, are hardly required to follow any rules at all. In 2013, when the health watchdog Environmental Working Group analyzed various repellents, researchers found that manufacturers’ claims about how long products last varied widely—even with the same active ingredient in the same concentrations. Some manufacturers claimed that their products were waterproof, even though—beachgoers beware—they did not offer proof. Others boasted exotic active ingredients—like clove oil and lemongrass oil—that have not been adequately tested and may contain high concentrations of allergens. “There should be a way for consumers to compare products,” says EWG senior scientist David Andrews. “And right now, there is really not.”
Doesn’t the government have some basic rules about what they can put on the labels?
Not really. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency drafted a label template that tells consumers what kinds of insects a product protects against and how often it needs to be reapplied. But it’s completely voluntary. What’s more, the graphic will only apply to repellents that you apply to your skin, not wristbands, patches, candles, sonic devices, or any other products that claim to deter bugs.
So do those wristbands work?
Not as well as skin-applied repellents. In 2011, Australian medical entomologist Cameron Webb tested mosquito repellent wristbands and found them much less effective than skin-applied products containing DEET; they only offered protection in a very small area around the wrist. “There is no product—candles, fans, coils, patches, or anything else—that I am aware of that provides comparable protection to a DEET skin-based repellent,” he says. “Even if they work a little bit, they’re not going to protect all of your exposed skin.” Spatial products such as candles, coils, and smoke do drive away bugs, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that they “have not yet been adequately evaluated in peer-reviewed studies for their efficacy in preventing vectorborne disease.”
Wait, isn’t DEET toxic?
No. In the ’80s, there were reports of children having seizures after using DEET-based products, but the exact cause of the seizures was never determined. Subsequent studies have found virtually no health risks associated with the ingredient at the concentrations found in commercial repellents.
Anything else I should steer clear of?
EWG suggests skipping products with plant-based active ingredients, even though they sound greener; the EPA does not require registration of these substances, and no one knows how safe or effective they are. The CDC recommends avoiding combined sunscreen-repellents because sunscreen requires much more frequent application than repellent—and the effect of overapplication of repellent hasn’t been well studied. And don’t trust label claims about how long a product can last. That’s determined by the percentage of its active ingredients—but without any way to compare, consumers are left to trial and error.
So what does work? For the best protection against both mosquitoes and ticks, the CDC recommends products containing DEET. For just mosquitoes, the agency also approves of products with the active ingredients picaridin (the active ingredient in most Avon Skin So Soft products), IR3535, and oil of lemon eucalyptus—which, despite its natural-sounding name, is actually a synthetic formulation. EWG found all three of these ingredients to be just as effective as DEET. “You don’t really want to mess around with a product that might or might not work,” says Webb, the Australian entomologist. “Where insect-borne diseases are concerned, it only takes one bite.” And as for the sheer itchy misery of being a mosquito’s idea of a five-star restaurant? Well, you probably don’t want to mess around with that, either.
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Is the World’s Most Powerful Military Defenseless Against Big Tobacco?
Mother Jones
Suppose you wanted to quit drinking, but all the AA meetings in your town were held in the back of a bar with $2 well drinks?
That’s basically the conundrum the US military faces when it comes to regulating tobacco. Smoking is a drain on the force, physically and financially, and over the years the brass has implemented all sorts of efforts to get soldiers and sailors to avoid it, with some success. But every time military officials make a move to stop offering cheap cigarettes to their personnel, they get shot down by the tobacco industry’s allies in Congress. In the latest skirmish, earlier this month, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee launched a preemptive strike to prevent the Navy from ending tobacco sales on Navy and Marine bases and ships.
By age, education, demographics, and circumstances (high-stress situations interspersed with long periods of boredom), soldiers are an ideal market for tobacco products, which have historically been sold on military installations and ships for as little as half of what civilians pay. For decades, tobacco lobbyists have worked with friendly legislators to maintain the cheap supply. In the early 1990s, for instance, the industry jumped into action after the commander of the USS Roosevelt declared his ship smoke-free. Two Democratic members of the House Armed Services Committee introduced an amendment to the defense funding bill requiring all ships to sell cigarettes, and the Navy caved.
In 2007, researcher Ruth Malone and her colleagues at the University of California-San Francisco published a study in the journal Tobacco Control detailing no less than seven failed attempts since 1985 by members of Congress and military officials to raise the price of military tobacco products to civilian levels. And while the Pentagon eventually succeeded in narrowing the price gap, military stores are still exempt from the hefty state and local tobacco taxes levied to discourage smoking. In a 2011 study comparing cigarette pricing on and off base, another research team determined that Marlboro Reds, which cost an average of $6.73 a pack at the local Walmart, went for just $4.99 at military installations. “The industry and its allies repeatedly argued—particularly in communications to service members—that raising commissary prices constituted an ‘erosion of benefits,'” wrote Malone et al.
The “benefits” argument, as well as the notion that it violates a soldier’s rights to have to buy smokes from an outside retailer, invariably arises whenever there’s talk of new military smoking policies. Consider the latest episode. On March 14, Jonathan Woodson and Jessica Wright, high-level Pentagon officials for health and personnel affairs, sent a memo to all of the military branches laying out some of tobacco’s downsides—diseases and fatalities, absenteeism, steep health costs, and the fact that wounded warriors who smoke tend to heal poorly. “Although we stopped distributing cigarettes to Service members as part of their rations, we continue to permit, if not encourage, tobacco use,” they explained. “The prominence of tobacco in military retail outlets and permission for smoking breaks while on duty sustain the perception that we are not serious about reducing the use of tobacco.”
Two weeks later, after military newspapers reported that the Navy was considering a ban on tobacco sales, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), who enlisted in the Marines after the 9/11 attacks, wrote a letter to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus opposing any such move. It would be an intrusion on “personal decision-making,” he said, and besides, the Navy and the Marines have bigger priorities. In early April, after a group of Democratic senators encouraged Mabus to take action, Hunter and two GOP colleagues, Reps. Richard Hudson (N.C.) and Tom Rooney (Fla.), wrote to the leaders of the House Appropriations Committee: “Given the current fiscal climate, the strain on the Navy to conduct global operations, the impending reduction to the size of the fleet and personnel, recent efforts to restrict access to tobacco products is a frivolous abdication of more urgent matters of national security.”
On May 7, as the House Armed Services Committee marked up the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, Rep. Hunter introduced an amendment forbidding any new military policy that “would limit, restrict, or ban the sale of any legal product category” currently for sale on bases or ships—the committee approved the amendment 53 to 9. (The Senate Armed Services Committee debates the defense bill this week.) “We sleep in the dirt for this country. We get shot at for this country. But we can’t have a cigarette if we want to for this country, because that’s unhealthy,” Hunter told his fellow committee members after San Diego-area Democrat Rep. Susan Davis opposed his amendment. (See video below.) “Well, I’ll tell you what. If you want to make us all healthy, then let’s outlaw war, because war is really dangerous.”
War is indeed dangerous, but cigarettes kill far more soldiers and citizens than war does. It’s not even close. More than 480,000 Americans die from smoking and secondhand smoke exposure every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—more than died on the battlefields of World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined.
The odds are particularly grim for military veterans, who make up about a quarter of the adult male population and smoke at significantly higher rates than nonveterans. In the 2007-2010 National Health Interview Survey, 36 percent of male vets ages 45 to 54 said they were current smokers, compared with 24 percent of men in that age range who never served.
Many of those vets got hooked as young men in the service. While less than 20 percent of civilians smoke, a 2011 military survey reported smoking rates of 24 percent for Navy personnel and 31 percent for Marines. (In addition, 32 percent of Marines said they used smokeless tobacco.) A 2009 Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee report requested by the military notes that smoking rates for soldiers returning from war zones are about 50 percent higher than rates for non-deployed personnel.
All of this puffing amounts to a massive medical bill, not just for the men and women dying horrible deaths from cancer and heart disease and emphysema, but for the taxpayers, too. In his letter to the Navy, Hunter noted that banning tobacco sales would mean a loss of profits for the Military Exchange Command. In reality, cigarettes are a net loss for the military. For every dollar of profit from selling tobacco to personnel, according to data from a 1996 Inspector General’s report, the Pentagon spent more than nine dollars on healthcare and lost productivity. And that doesn’t factor in veterans’ medical costs. In 2008 alone, according to the IOM, the VA shelled out $5 billion to treat vets for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which primarily afflicts smokers. “Tobacco use costs the DOD an estimated $1.6 billion annually in medical costs and lost work time,” Pentagon spokeswoman Joy Crabaugh told me in an email. “We estimate 175,000 current active duty service members will die from smoking unless we can help them quit.”
“The health care costs are astounding,” added Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who served in Vietnam, when asked about the issue recently. “Now, the dollars are one thing, but the health of your people, I don’t know if you put a price tag on that.”
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Is the World’s Most Powerful Military Defenseless Against Big Tobacco?
Bullying Victims Are Twice as Likely to Bring a Weapon to School
Mother Jones
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A new study based on a survey of more than 15,000 American high school students found that victims of bullying are nearly twice as likely to carry guns and other weapons at school. An estimated 200,000 victims of bullying bring weapons to school over the course of a month, according to the authors’ analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control’s 2011 Youth Risk Surveillance System Survey. That’s a substantial portion of the estimated 750,000 high school students who bring weapons to school every month.
The study, presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies, found that 20 percent of participating students reported being victims of bullying, and that those teens were substantially more likely to carry weapons if they had experienced one or more “risk factors.” These included feeling unsafe at school, having property stolen or damaged, having been in a fight in the past year, or having been threatened or injured by a weapon. Among bullying victims experiencing all four of those factors, 72 percent had brought a weapon to school in the past month and 63 percent had carried a gun. Those victims were, according to the study’s authors, nearly 50 times more likely to carry a weapon in school as students who weren’t bullied.
For years, anti-bullying groups have drawn a connection between bullying and school shootings. The Department of Health and Human Services’s Stopbullying.gov website reports that the perpetrators of 12 of 15 school shootings in the 1990s had a history of being bullied. Witnesses of a 2013 shooting at Sparks Middle School in Nevada recall the 12-year-old shooter telling a group of students, “You guys ruined my life, so I’m going to ruin yours.”
However, focusing too much on bullying as a cause of school shootings may distract from other important factors, such as mental health and access to weapons. A Washington Post article last year summed up this critique: “We all want to find a simple motivation when children go to school intending to do harm, but the problem in blaming school shootings on ‘bullying’ is that it lets us off the hook too easily.”
Furthermore, there’s the question of correlation versus causation. The new study shows that students who are severely bullied are more likely to carry weapons, but it doesn’t show that students carry weapons because they have been bullied. It’s possible that carrying weapons precipitates rather than prevents conflict. The survey also didn’t ask if the students identified themselves as bullies, and since some students are both victims and bullies, one can’t assume that students are carrying weapons solely for protection.
Andrew Adesman, a co-author of the study and the chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York, recognizes these limitations. “We really don’t know the chronology here,” he explains. “We don’t know entirely whether the weapons carrying was purely defensive versus aggressive behavior.” But, he says, “Common sense suggests that kids who have weapons plan to use them if or when they need to.”
Adesman hopes that the study helps teachers identify students who may be carrying weapons. “If you can identify which kids are more severely victimized by these four risk factors—if a kid’s not coming to school and the teachers inquire and it turns out it’s because of safety concerns—that’s something that right there is one identifiable, possibly actionable red flag,” he says.
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Bullying Victims Are Twice as Likely to Bring a Weapon to School
Fearless teenage fish don’t run from climate change, death
Smells like teen spirit
Fearless teenage fish don’t run from climate change, death
Watch out, these hooligans will win a game of chicken or literally die trying.
When we were teens, we rebelled by stealing printer paper from the school library and staying out 15 minutes past curfew. Damselfish, however, really take that burn-the-world attitude to the next level.
A new study out this week in Nature Climate Change suggests that instead of making the fish scared for their very lives, ocean acidification lulls the little buggers into a false sense of security. Rather than being frightened by the smell of predators, the juvenile damselfish subjects of the experiment were more likely to be attracted, leading researchers to say: Dang it, teenagers! Didn’t we warn you about the lionfish in the cool leather jacket?
Researchers gathered fish from sites near seafloor CO2 vents off of Papua New Guinea, where the water is already more acidic than the rest of the ocean — though the researchers predict that the rest of the ocean could hit similar levels by 2100. The four species studied, common varieties of reef-dwelling damselfish and cardinalfish, were placed in tanks that were filled with various streams of water, some straight seawater, others conditioned to smell like predators.
Instead of being damselfish in distress, the CO2-habituated fish spent up to 90 percent of their time in the predator-stinking stream. In contrast, the control fish pretty much only hung out in the undoctored water like little goody-two-shoes. Other experiments involved chasing the fish around with a pencil, then seeing how quickly they emerged from a safe hiding spot; again, most of the acid-head fish just rolled their eyes.
So moody. Thinking of getting its septum pierced.
Basically, scientists think the increased CO2 is messing with the fish neurotransmitters needed to make sound decisions. If the same effect is present in other juvenile fish, the problem could quickly compound: Increased fearlessness may lead to increased predation of different species, which could take a real toll on future fish populations throughout the ecosystem. From The Economist:
Experimental studies have previously shown that carbon dioxide-induced behavior increases mortality in fish newly settled at a reef by fivefold. As the three sites studied were small, Dr Munday and his team believe that fish who were casualties of their own rash behavior could have been easily replaced. … But as ocean acidification increases, reefs will not be able to recruit new inhabitants from unaffected areas so easily.
Great. Adding dumb teenage fish to the list of ways climate change and its evil twin ocean acidification are messing up the ocean: Fish anxiety, blindness, and bodily dissolution, plus possible total ecosystem collapse. Just no one give those fish a Twitter account, or they’ll probably start sending terrorist threats to airlines.
Source
Rebels without a cause?, The Economist
Ocean Acidification Could Make Fish Lose Their Fear Of Predators, Study Finds, ThinkProgress
Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.
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Animal Planet Star Was Warned He Was Breaking the Law
Mother Jones
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This morning, I appeared on CNN’s New Day to discuss my investigation into Animal Planet’s hit reality TV show, Call of the Wildman. (Watch the interview above). My story detailed a cavalier culture of animal treatment on the set of the show, produced by New York’s Sharp Entertainment, including the improper drugging of a zebra and the placement of bats—a protected species in Texas—inside a Houston hair salon to be “rescued” by the show’s star, Ernie Brown Jr., a.k.a. Turtleman. Dan Adler, a senior vice president with the production company, represented the program for the first time in public since the story broke on Tuesday.
Most notable was Adler’s insistence that nothing whatsoever occurred on COTWM sets that could be described as improper: “The idea that there is a culture of neglect or abuse on the show is completely false,” he said. “So many shows out there kill animals for sport or for money. This show is about saving them.” Adler also said that Sharp’s own internal investigation, prompted by a former staffer last May, failed to find anything questionable with production practices.
But at the same time, new evidence is emerging of another case involving legally dubious production activities. In a letter sent in August 2013, Kentucky wildlife officials warned Brown that he was breaking the law.
The letter, made available to Mother Jones, was sent by legal counsel for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, after officials saw footage of Turtleman catching a deer in a consignment store on YouTube—despite the fact that that’s against Kentucky law, according to department spokesman Mark Marraccini.
Addressed to Ernie Brown Jr., the letter states that, “Our regulation…prohibits a NWCO Nuisance Wildlife Control Operator from taking white-tailed deer unless specifically authorized by the Commissioner.” The letter also says Turtleman’s actions breached another state law governing animal welfare, which entails the risk of “criminal citation.”
Also, state law…makes it illegal for any person to take, pursue, or attempt to take or pursue, or otherwise molest an elk, deer, wild turkey, or bear in a manner contrary to the Department’s regulations. Such action may result in the revocation of your NWCO permit…for a minimum of three years and/or a criminal citation.
Mother Jones has filed an open records request with the department to see responses from Turtleman, Sharp Entertainment, or Animal Planet to the department’s letter. We have also approached producers for comment on the incident, with no response. Sharp has previously told Mother Jones that all animals were handled legally by licensed wildlife personnel while on set.
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The deer episode questioned by Kentucky officials involves a buck laying waste to a store, where it has somehow become stranded. Turtleman and his team attempt to corner and chase the deer, and then tackle it to the ground by its antlers, but not before havoc breaks out and crockery crashes to the floor:
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