Tag Archives: europe

What Happens When an Eclipse Hits the World’s Most Solar-Powered Country?

by KittyU90zfgqpe Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

On March 20, Europe will experience a total solar eclipse for a few hours in the morning. The last time an eclipse of this scale happened in Europe was in 1999. Back then, Germany got less than 1 percent of its power from solar energy. Today, Germany is the world’s most solar-dependent country, drawing nearly 7 percent of its electricity from the sun. So when the passing moon blots out the sun, will the country’s lights go out too?

Over the last couple months, that question has gotten plenty of attention in the German media. In September, Der Spiegel reported that some power companies were afraid the eclipse would leave the power grid “dangerously unstable.” In February, the business weekly Wirtschafts Woche warned that factories could suddenly lose power if electric supply doesn’t keep pace with demand.

Still, the view among most energy experts is that the eclipse will come and go with no noticeable effect for consumers. That’s because the country’s utility companies have spent months preparing for what is essentially an unprecedented test of the futuristic German grid, which is a model for clean energy advocates in the United States.

“Some of the hype ahead of the eclipse served to focus minds,” said Andreas Kramer, a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam. Power companies “relish the upcoming opportunity to show how they can handle that challenge professionally.”

So what’s the big deal, exactly? The sun goes down every night, of course, and Germany is quite accustomed to cloudy days (it gets about as much sunshine as Alaska). The difference with a solar eclipse is the speed at which sunlight will disappear from, and then return to, the power system. All electric grids operate on the fundamental principle that supply and demand must always be in perfect equilibrium, second-by-second. That dynamic becomes complicated when so much of your power comes from a source like solar, over which grid operators have zero control. And it’s especially tricky when the fluctuation is so rapid and extreme.

Typically, Germans can rely on coal-fired power plants to pick up the slack at night, when power demand is relatively low anyway. But those can take many hours to fire up, and the eclipse is expected to make solar output dip nearly three times faster than normal, according to a recent analysis by clean energy market research firm Opower.

“It’s fair to say that this is the most dramatic intersection ever between a solar eclipse and solar energy,” Opower analyst Barry Fischer said.

Generally speaking, a byproduct of the clean energy revolution is an increasing need to replace the old grid model—which relied almost exclusively on a small number of big, inflexible power plants—with a highly flexible suite of interconnected options. So the eclipse is a chance to test just how responsive and adaptive Germany’s new grid can be. The outcome will be a valuable lesson for US grid managers who are looking to a much more solar-heavy future.

Take a look at the bite the eclipse will take out of Germany’s solar production, according to Opower:

Opower

The exact change will depend the weather that day; if it’s already cloudy, the drop will be less drastic. (The current forecast for Munich—which is in Bavaria, the province with the most solar—is partly cloudy on that day.)

The temporary hole left by the eclipse will be filled by natural gas plants, which fire up relatively quickly, and possibly by the release of extra hydropower. And utilities have the option of communicating directly with heavy power-users—big manufacturing facilities, for instance—and asking them to slow down production for an hour to ease the burden. It’s a bit like an orchestra conductor calling on an array of instruments in real time to keep up a steady flow of music.

Moreover, Kramer pointed out that the eclipse won’t happen all at once; it’s not like flipping a switch. As the moon’s shadow moves across the country, the impact on solar will be phased in and out geographically.

A final option is energy storage, where solar power from the previous day could be kept in giant batteries and released during the eclipse. Utility-scale storage is still in its infancy, and it won’t be on the table next week. But a spokesperson for Germany’s solar energy trade association said that solution could be up and running in time for the next major eclipse…in 2048.

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What Happens When an Eclipse Hits the World’s Most Solar-Powered Country?

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These California Maximum-Security Prisoners Are Making an Album

by Abbie4262ahtj Posted on February 28, 2015

Mother Jones

Inmates at California’s New Folsom prison are slowly creating a sequel of sorts to Johnny Cash’s hit record, and if an early preview of one song is any indication, their mix of folk, soul, blues, and hip-hop may be worth the wait.

The Prison Music Project, the brainchild of Canada-born singer-songwriter Zoe Boekbinder, is a collaboration between artists on the outside and at least eight men currently or recently doing time at New Folsom, the maximum-security facility adjacent to the lockup where Cash recorded Live at Folsom Prison back in January 1968.

Boekbinder, a singer who mixes folk with pop, has released five albums of her own and toured all over Europe and North America. While volunteering in New Folsom’s art program from 2010 through 2014, she got the idea to set the men’s poetry and lyrics to music. She reached out for help from folk-rock icon Ani DiFranco, with whom she’d previously shared a stage. DiFranco agreed to produce the album—she’s like “my co-pilot,” Boekbinder says—helping envision how each song might sound and working out arrangements and instrumentation.

The inmates will sing on some tracks, Boekbinder on others. She’s also reaching out to additional musicians, but, “aside from the folks in prison, I don’t want any one artist, including me, to be featured,” she says. “I want it to be about the people these stories belong to.” She’s already managed to record some tracks inside New Folsom, but access can be dodgy—she’ll record others over the phone, if need be.

The songwriters, she says, focused on their experiences with foster care, drug-addicted parents, and gang violence—as well as their longing for home. In the blues-heartbreak “All Over Again” (listen below), 72-year-old Kenneth Blackburn sings of lost love and the skies outside his window. “A lot of his songs talk about death. His health is not good, so it’s a common theme in his music,” Boekbinder says.

And here’s a version of the song with Boekbinder singing. (Down below, you can also watch her perform it at the House of Blues in New Orleans.)

Another song, “Villain,” combines two poems by Nathen Jackson, a 40-year-old from Sacramento who was released last June. Incarcerated in 1997 for aggravated assault (Jackson says he was defending himself), he served two stints at New Folsom alongside lifers. “At level-four security,” he says, “violence happens. You’re surrounded by a bunch of individuals who have nothing to lose, they’re not going anywhere.” The prison’s art program put these men into a room together, working on poetry and critiquing each other’s writing. “It’s amazing work, and it’s the type of rehabilitative programs that we really need,” Jackson says, adding that it was the only positive part of his time.

Spoon Jackson in his cell. Courtesy of Spoon Jackson and Zoe Boekbinder

“Villian,” he says, describes the feeling of being isolated: “The people who are confined behind these walls are more than the crimes they were convicted of. We’re fathers, brothers and sons. We were children at one time. Until people actually understand that, they’ll still look at everyone behind bars as the stereotypical convict, like we’re no good and we don’t deserve to be rehabilitated.”

Another contributor, 57-year-old Stanley “Spoon” Jackson (no relation to Nathen), is serving life without parole for a murder conviction in the late 1970s. Before his transfer to New Folsom, he caught the attention of a poetry teacher at San Quentin State Prison, who helped him get published. He eventually became an award-winning poet, author, and playwright. He played Pozzo in a prison production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and was featured in “At Night I Fly,” a 2011 film that won Sweden’s prestigious Guldbagge Award for the year’s best documentary. Writing is “my niche, my bliss, my life,” Jackson says. (He’s now at yet another facility.) “It allows a huge part of me to be free, despite these bars.”

Boekbinder recently asked another prisoner, 30-year-old Gregory Gadlin, who wrote a song called “Monster,” how he felt about having her sing his words, despite her being from a different background. “I feel good about it, being able to give it to different audiences, in a different light, with your way of delivering it,” he said in the recorded phone call. Gadlin was released two years ago, but convicted of another crime—he’s now in a county jail, pending trial, and in the process of writing a new song, “Badd,” which takes the perspective of two women. “I’m so into music,” he told Boekbinder. “It doesn’t matter to me who it’s coming from, as long as the person, you, is giving it your all, being real about it, sincere.”

Proceeds from the Prison Music Project, Boekbinder says, will be donated to nonprofits involved with prison arts and re-entry programs. But she’s still trying to raise money to produce the album. It’s been a slow process. She’s aiming for a release date within two years, though. Filmmaker Alix Angelis is also on board, with the hope of turning the effort into a documentary.

One of the prisoners, Boekbinder told me, is set to be released next month after 13 years inside. She plans to meet him in Los Angeles and hook him up with a local gang-intervention group. He told her he wants to help forge a peace deal between the Bloods and Crips. (He’s a Blood). “But that’s a whole other story.”

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These California Maximum-Security Prisoners Are Making an Album

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Eat Like A Mongolian, Not Like An American

by HectorSherry Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

The world, as a whole, is getting less hungry. Over the past two decades, the levels of undernutrition in developing countries from Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia have declined. Unfortunately, so has the quality of our diets.

That’s the main takeaway of a study published by The Lancet Global Health on Wednesday that looked at the dietary patterns across 187 countries—comprising about 89 percent of the global population—in 1990 and 2010. Check out the maps below, which break down eating habits by country on a scale of green (the healthiest) to red (the unhealthiest). The first map shows which countries are eating the most healthy foods like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, fish, nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and milk (see, for example, Chad, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Turkey). The second map shows which countries are eating the most unhealthy foods that are high in fat and salt, as well as sugary drinks, unprocessed red meats and processed meats (see the United States, Russia, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Brazil, among others).

Fumiaki Imamura et al / The Lancet Global Health

The next three maps show changes in dietary patterns from 1990 to 2010, again on a color scale, with green countries making healthy changes and red countries making unhealthy changes. Russia, Mongolia, Laos, and Paraguay are outpacing many other countries with their increase in nutritious foods, as the top map shows, while the second map reveals that Uganda, Vietnam, and Armenia are quickly finding a taste for fatty or sugary treats. And when it comes to overall dietary changes since 2010, shown in the last map, it seems that China, Angola, and Congo aren’t doing very well.

Fumiaki Imamura et al / The Lancet Global Health

A team of researchers made these maps by evaluating hundreds of national surveys about diets. Looking at the big picture, they found that people around the world are, on average, eating more nutritious foods than they did 20 years ago, but they’re also digging into more junk—much more junk. “Consumption of healthier foods and nutrients has modestly increased during the past two decades; however, consumption of unhealthy foods and nutrients has increased to a greater extent,” the researchers explained.

On average, older adults are eating better than younger adults, while women are eating better than men. There are also major differences regionally, depending on countries’ income levels. While people in the United States, Canada and western Europe are among the worst in the world for high consumption of unhealthy food, they’re eating less junk than they used to, which helps explain reductions in blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and cardiovascular mortality in these countries. By comparison, people in many developing countries eat relatively healthy diets, but they’re eating more junk than they did in the past.

These socioeconomic variations have ramifications for public health. International food programs usually focus on fighting hunger, but in nearly every region of the world, the researchers said, diet-related health problems due to undernutrition are now less common than those due to non-communicable chronic diseases, and the food we eat plays a role in causing many of these diseases. By 2020, nearly three-quarters of all deaths globally will be attributable to non-communicable chronic diseases, they said, adding that without major changes to diet quality, these diseases and obesity will become much more common among the world’s poor.

It’s unclear exactly why low-income countries are eating more unhealthy foods, but the reasons are probably varied. In northwest sub-Saharan Africa, the researchers said, food prices have increased and diet quality has worsened, perhaps due to economic liberalization and marketing of unhealthy foods to the region’s wealthiest people. Violent conflicts might also play a role in certain countries, by hindering food production and trade. “Our work should help to link the possible economic and political factors to actual diets,” they wrote, “and to assess determinants of the potential divergence in consumption of healthy foods in the poorest nations in the world.”

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Eat Like A Mongolian, Not Like An American

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Why Can’t Public Transit Be Free?

by Myrna Posted on February 12, 2015

The main goal of transportation that costs riders nothing—getting people out of their cars—can’t be achieved by eliminating fares. Alessandro Colle/Shutterstock About 500 subway riders in Stockholm have an ingenious scheme to avoid paying fares. The group calls itself Planka.nu (rough translation: “dodge the fare now”), and they’ve banded together because getting caught free-riding comes with a steep $120 penalty. Here’s how it works: Each member pays about $12 in monthly dues—which beats paying for a $35 weekly pass—and the resulting pool of cash more than covers any fines members incur. As an informal insurance group, Planka.nu has proven both successful and financially solvent. “We could build a Berlin Wall in the metro stations,” a spokesperson for Stockholm’s public-transit system told The New York Times. “They would still try to find ways to dodge.” These Swedes’ strategy might seem like classic corner-cutting, but there’s a dreamy political tint to their actions. Like similar groups before them—Paris’s Métro-cheating “fraudster mutuals,” for example—they argue that public transportation should be free, just like education, parks, and libraries (and health care, in some parts of Europe). Planka.nu in particular laments the superiority of the car in what it calls “the current traffic hierarchy.” “The pure act of putting oneself behind the wheel seems, for almost everyone, to lead to egotistic behavior,” the group writes in one online manifesto. “We are confident that one is not born a motorist, but rather becomes one.” These fare-dodging collectives’ egalitarian dream happens to align with some hopes of U.S. policy makers. There’s an intuitive, consequentialist argument that making public transit free would get drivers off the road and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. In the U.S., where government subsidies cover between 57 and 89 percent of operating costs for buses and 29 to 89 percent of those for rail, many public-transit systems are quite affordable, costing in most cases less than $2, on average. If it might make transit more accessible to the masses and in the process reduce traffic and greenhouse-gas emissions, why not go all the way and make transportation free? Read the rest at The Atlantic. Original article:  Why Can’t Public Transit Be Free? ; ; ;

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Why Can’t Public Transit Be Free?

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Greek Charm Offensive Is Charming No One So Far

by DortheaBlackmor Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is apparently on a “charm offensive” to persuade his European counterparts—i.e., the Germans—to allow Greece to end its brutal austerity program and spend more money. The Germans, so far, are not charmed:

After a meeting in Berlin on Thursday with his German counterpart, Wolfgang Schaeuble, the two sides could not even agree on whether they had “agreed to disagree.” Schaeuble said they did. Varoufakis said they didn’t get that far. “We did not reach an agreement; it was never on the cards,” he said. “We didn’t even agree to disagree from where I’m standing.”

That’s not very promising, is it? Overall, though, my takeaway from this story is that the new Greek government, after winning office based on a very hardnosed platform of vilifying its European creditors, has decided in practice to adopt a fairly conciliatory negotiating strategy. The Times says that Varoufakis has “backed away from the party’s pledges to negotiate a debt write-down” and is instead merely seeking “a compromise that would benefit Greece and its creditors.”

So it’s sort of a good-cop-bad-cop routine: prime minister Alexis Tsipras stays in Athens and continues to insist that Greece won’t buckle under to European threats, while Varoufakis makes the rounds of finance ministries and tries to make nice.

Still, keep in mind something I mentioned a few days ago: “backing down” from demands to reduce Greece’s enormous debt doesn’t mean much, because the issue of the debt write-down has always been a bit of a charade. It’s an easy thing to demagogue, but everyone understands privately that Greece will never pay it all back. At this point, then, Greek debt is less a measure of what Greece actually owes other people than it is a crude means of political control: whenever Greece needs to roll over its debt, it’s an opportunity for Germany to hold out until they approve of Greece’s spending plans. This effectively gives them control of Greece’s budget, and they’ve insisted on huge spending cuts and a future path toward big budget surpluses.

And that’s what Varoufakis really cares about. Not the debt, which is basically just a symbol at this point, but control over Greece’s budget. He wants to reverse the austerity and increase spending, which he thinks will boost Greece’s economy and allow it to get back into growth mode. What’s more, he’s arguing—none too subtly, as it happens—that this is something important to all of Europe, not just Greece. After all, Greek unemployment is currently at 26 percent, and youth unemployment is nearly 50 percent. This is dangerous territory for any country. Here’s Varoufakis:

“Germany must and can be proud that Nazism has been eradicated here, but it’s one of history’s most cruel ironies that Nazism is rearing its ugly head in Greece, a country which put up such a fine struggle against it,” Varoufakis said. He was referring to Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party, which came third in January’s elections and has 17 seats in the Parliament sworn in Thursday.

Translation: the Greek public won’t put up with this stuff forever. You may think Syriza is a radical far-left party, but there are worse things than far left parties. If we don’t get relief soon, the far right will be up to bat next. And that’s something nobody wants to risk.

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Greek Charm Offensive Is Charming No One So Far

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Now BP and Shell will consider the cost of climate change when doing business

by MakaylaLeonski Posted on February 6, 2015

Now BP and Shell will consider the cost of climate change when doing business

By on 6 Feb 2015commentsShare

BP will support a shareholder resolution calling on the company to release information about how climate change could affect its business. It’s the second big win for climate-conscious investors this year: Shell agreed to support a similar resolution last week.

Both the Shell and BP resolutions were submitted by a coalition of activist investor groups representing more than 150 major shareholders in Europe and America, including the U.K.’s Environment Agency and the Church of England, for a combined $300 billion in assets.

The resolution asked Shell and BP to reduce emissions, to invest in renewables, to provide transparency about bonuses that reward “climate-harming activities,” and to test how their business models would hold up if governments were to take action to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. These steps are good business, the resolution argues, “given the recognised risks and opportunities associated with climate change.”

Analyses suggest that in order to stay below the 2 degree level, much of the fossil fuel in the ground will have to stay there — including all of the oil remaining in the Arctic, which both Shell and BP are hoping to tap. If governments take more stringent action to confront climate change, these resources could end up stranded, despite the high value oil companies place on them. That’s led some, like U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, to suggest that investors in extractive industries should worry about a “carbon bubble.”

“Climate change is a major business risk,” said James Thornton, CEO of ClientEarth, one of the investor groups behind the push, when the resolutions were filed last month. “BP and Shell hold our financial and environmental future in their hands. They must do more to face the risks of climate change. Investors can help them by voting for these shareholder resolutions.”

JJ Traynor, Shell’s executive vice president of investor relations, sent a letter on Jan. 29 to shareholders in the company urging them to support the resolution. And yesterday, Reuters reported that a spokesperson for BP said his company would also support the resolution. “We consider the resolution to be non-confrontational, and it gives us the opportunity to demonstrate our current actions and build on our existing disclosures in this area,” the spokesperson said in an email.

Elspeth Owens, a representative of ClientEarth, called BP’s decision “great news” and said that the victory “confirms the potential of shareholder engagement.”

Both oil companies rank among the largest, by revenue, in the world. Investor activists withdrew a similar resolution filed with ExxonMobil last year after the company agreed to publish publicly a report on how future regulations, like carbon pricing, could affect its bottom line. (If you’re curious, ExxonMobil more or less said regulations won’t affect that bottom line much at all, really, because regulations aren’t actually coming. Ben Adler summarized the company’s position thusly: “Governments will allow us to keep extracting and burning fossil fuels because the economy.”)

As for BP and Shell, both resolutions still have to be voted on by their shareholders. BP will recommend that its investors support the resolution at a meeting on April 16. Shell, meanwhile, is encouraging shareholders to vote for the resolution at its annual general meeting in May.

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Now BP and Shell will consider the cost of climate change when doing business

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China’s Toxic Air Could Kill a Population the Size of Orlando

by Myrna Posted on February 6, 2015

The country’s pollution could contribute to 257,000 deaths over the next decade. If nothing is done to slash the levels of toxic smog in China’s air, some 257,000 Chinese people could die over the next decade from pollution-related diseases, according to a new study released this week by Peking University and Greenpeace. That really is a lot of people; it’s roughly equal to the population of Orlando, Fla., or Buffalo, N.Y. The researchers analyzed the 2013 levels of what’s known as PM2.5 pollutants—tiny airborne particles billowing from China’s coal production and industry. They projected the number of “premature deaths”—from diseases like heart disease and lung cancer—that could occur over the next 10 years if 2013′s level of pollution persists over the long term. At the top of the list of China’s most polluted cities, toxic air in the industrial hub of Shijiazhuang could be responsible for as many as 137 premature deaths per 100,000 people. The team found the average across the country’s 31 populous provincial capitals was staggering: The report comes amid renewed attention on China’s smog crisis. Another Greenpeace study released earlier this month revealed that 90 percent of Chinese cities that report their air pollution levels are failing to meet China’s own national standards, despite the government’s self-declared “war on pollution,” which includes measures to curtail coal use in big cities like Beijing, and to limit heavy industries. If China met those standards, says Greenpeace in this latest report, nearly half of the premature deaths could be avoided. The research is also notable because it was conducted jointly by China’s best known and most prestigious university, Peking University (known locally as Beida), and Greenpeace, the international environmental advocacy group that has had a long and complicated relationship with China’s authoritarian officials. The study was widely reported by state-run media, in another sign China’s censors are loosening some restrictions around environmental reporting in the country in the face of intense public pressure for transparency. The report adds to the growing amount of literature about the deadly impacts of the country’s smog. An article that appeared in the The Lancet last year said that air pollution caused 350,000 to 500,000 premature deaths a year. An earlier Lancet study reported that air pollution caused 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010 alone. More:  China’s Toxic Air Could Kill a Population the Size of Orlando ; ; ;

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China’s Toxic Air Could Kill a Population the Size of Orlando

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It Is the 100th Anniversary of the WWI Christmas Truce

by TedPmuzswto Posted on December 25, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Go to war and every politician will thank you, and they’ll continue to do so—with monuments and statues, war museums and military cemeteries—long after you’re dead. But who thanks those who refused to fight, even in wars that most people later realized were tragic mistakes? Consider the 2003 invasion of Iraq, now widely recognized as igniting an ongoing disaster. America’s politicians still praise Iraq War veterans to the skies, but what senator has a kind word to say about the hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched and demonstrated before the invasion was even launched to try to stop our soldiers from risking their lives in the first place?

What brings all this to mind is an apparently heartening exception to the rule of celebrating war-makers and ignoring peacemakers. A European rather than an American example, it turns out to be not quite as simple as it first appears. Let me explain.

December 25th will be the 100th anniversary of the famous Christmas Truce of the First World War. You probably know the story: after five months of unparalleled industrial-scale slaughter, fighting on the Western Front came to a spontaneous halt. British and German soldiers stopped shooting at each other and emerged into the no-man’s-land between their muddy trenches in France and Belgium to exchange food and gifts.

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It Is the 100th Anniversary of the WWI Christmas Truce

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This Little History Lesson Should Terrify Vladimir Putin

by Donekola Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why did the Soviet Union lose control of its satellite states behind the Iron Curtain in 1989? Lots of reasons, but the proximate cause was a disastrous war in Afghanistan; plummeting oil prices; and a resulting economic crisis. Here is Yegor Gaidar:

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms. As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.

The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust….Instead of implementing actual reforms, the Soviet Union started to borrow money from abroad while its international credit rating was still strong. It borrowed heavily from 1985 to 1988, but in 1989 the Soviet economy stalled completely. The money was suddenly gone. The Soviet Union tried to create a consortium of 300 banks to provide a large loan for the Soviet Union in 1989, but was informed that only five of them would participate and, as a result, the loan would be twenty times smaller than needed.

The Soviet Union then received a final warning from the Deutsche Bank and from its international partners that the funds would never come from commercial sources. Instead, if the Soviet Union urgently needed the money, it would have to start negotiations directly with Western governments about so-called politically motivated credits. In 1985 the idea that the Soviet Union would begin bargaining for money in exchange for political concessions would have sounded absolutely preposterous to the Soviet leadership. In 1989 it became a reality, and Gorbachev understood the need for at least $100 billion from the West to prop up the oil-dependent Soviet economy.

….Government-to-government loans were bound to come with a number of rigid conditions. For instance, if the Soviet military crushed Solidarity Party demonstrations in Warsaw, the Soviet Union would not have received the desperately needed $100 billion from the West….The only option left for the Soviet elites was to begin immediate negotiations about the conditions of surrender. Gorbachev did not have to inform President George H. W. Bush at the Malta Summit in 1989 that the threat of force to support the communist regimes in Eastern Europe would not be employed. This was already evident at the time. Six weeks after the talks, no communist regime in Eastern Europe remained.

This sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? War, sanctions, an oil crash, and finally bankruptcy. And while history may not repeat itself, it sure does rhyme sometimes: 25 years later Vladimir Putin has managed to back himself into a situation surprisingly similar to the one that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the final victory of the West—the very event that’s motivated almost everything he’s done over the past few years. This is either ironic or chilling, depending on your perspective.

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This Little History Lesson Should Terrify Vladimir Putin

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We Fact Checked Aaron Sorkin’s Climate Science on “The Newsroom”

by DesmondPLZO Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

I watch too much TV drama, so I can say this with a degree of certainty: It’s rare that climate change comes up. (Television news programs also contain “tepid” coverage, in general, according to watchdog group Media Matters). That’s why it was so weird/exciting for this climate reporter when global warming received its very own subplot on Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama The Newsroom over the last two episodes.

First, a little context: Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill) is the show’s once daffy news producer whose role this season seems exclusively designed to reverse earlier charges of sexism against Sorkin. She’s now good at her job! During a convoluted scene on a train from Boston to New York, Maggie overhears and records a top EPA official talking shit on the phone about President Obama to another journalist, off-the-record. Even though that agreement of confidentiality doesn’t extend to the other Amtrak passengers, she eventually tells the official she won’t use his juicy Obama-dissing quotes. So impressed by her ethics, the official, Richard Westbrook (Paul Lieberstein), rewards her with a scoop: an embargoed EPA report. WHOA! WHAT A SCOOOOOP! (For the uninitiated, while a heads-up about a study is great to get a jump on your competition, reports are circulated and embargoed all the time). Anyway… Maggie also gets an exclusive interview with the official, the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA (WHAT A GET!) and in the most recent episode, she produces a segment for host Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) about the report’s dire warnings.

The scene is odd for a number of reasons. The Newsroom packages its drama based on last year’s events, and at that time, the news that the world was approaching 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had been publicly anticipated for weeks. So, not a scoop in any way, or anything that anyone following the science didn’t already know.

But putting that aside, let’s take a look at Sorkin’s “facts”, as presented in the episode. How do they measure up? Let’s go line-by-line through the scene above.

In the weird parallel universe of The Newsroom, I’m not sure when these “latest measurements” were meant to have been taken. But he’s right. We covered this at the time: The world passed that 400 ppm threshold for the first meaningful way in May 2013, when the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide was higher than at any time in human history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The measurements are indeed taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii; you can follow what’s known as the “Keeling Curve”—a measurement of atmospheric concentration of CO2—on Twitter, naturally, thanks to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Depends what you’re defining as catastrophic failure, I suppose. Say you were born last year, when I assume this episode was meant to be set. If we follow along current emissions trends, the planet will be 3.96°F-8.64°F (2.2°C–4.8°C) hotter than preindustrial times by your retirement. (You can type your birth year into this cool interactive, driven by data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to check how hot it will be when you’re old). That’s above temperatures recommended to be in the supposedly “safe” zone by the IPCC, and could definitely result in a variety of “catastrophes” and “failures”. As deaths increase due to things like extreme weather, droughts and wildfires, this statement seems true enough when applied to individual episodes of calamity, which will surely increase. (The number of annual deaths in the UK due to heat, for example, is predicted to rise by 257 per cent by 2050.) The EPA official is right, in one sense. But it’s also arguable that deaths are already and will continue to be linked to climate change events. The line in the script infers the failure of the planet as a whole, which I think is artful flourish to illustrate just how glum this fellow is feeling.

Yup. That’s what the science says. The last time the atmosphere clocked 400 ppm it was 3 million years ago—the “Mid-Pliocene”—when sea levels were as much as 80 feet higher than today (see this 2007 research paper authored by a group led by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University.) I’d probably add an “around” or “about” before the “80 feet higher” in the above statement; the studies leave a margin of error. But this statement checks out.

His point is sound, but I’d like to see the writers’ sourcing—these numbers seem to date to around the late 1990s. According to a more recent 2011 NOAA report, 55 percent of the world’s population lives within 50 miles of the coast. The UN has a slightly different number: Over 40 percent of the world’s population, or 3.1 billion, lives within 60 miles of the “ocean or sea in about 150 coastal and island nations.” In the US, 39 percent of the nation’s population lived in counties directly on the shoreline in 2010.

That seems right.

There’s consensus amongst 97 percent of climate scientists that global warming is happening and that’s it’s a manmade disaster. And I’ve heard climate scientists use this analogy before. (For what it’s worth, there are other things that can influence the boiling point of water, including altitude.)

He’s talking about the “carbon budget”, and again this is sound, despite Newsman Will’s growing anguish at a pretty devastating interview. The 565 gigaton number was popularized by Bill McKibben in a 2012 Rolling Stone article that Newsroom writers seem to have read. The number is “derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades” (done by financial analysis firm Carbon Tracker) and is what we can add into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have a reasonable chance of success of staying below that safe two degrees warming threshold. Our grumpy scientist is so despondent because, yes, 2,795 is the number of gigatons of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves in the hands of fossil-fuel companies and petrostates. In short, it’s the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn, writes McKibben. Carbon Tracker says 80 percent of these assets need to remain unburned.

All of these things are predicted by the IPCC—I mean, not the permanent darkness thing, I don’t think that’s meant to be scientific. But yes, as we reported in May this year, Europe faces freshwater shortages; Asia can expect more severe flooding from extreme storms; North America will see increased heat waves and wildfires, which can cause death and damage to ecosystems and property. Especially in poor countries, diminished crop yields will likely lead to increased malnutrition, which already affects nearly 900 million people worldwide.

So, in all, well done Newsroom. Informative, accurate, if a little heavy-handed on the doom and gloom.

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We Fact Checked Aaron Sorkin’s Climate Science on “The Newsroom”

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