Tag Archives: explainers

How Hobby Lobby Undermined The Very Idea of a Corporation

by AidenLoche Posted on July 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s one more reason to worry about the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed the arts and crafts chain to block insurance coverage of contraception for female employees because of the owners’ religious objections: It could screw up corporate law.

This gets complicated, but bear with us. Basically, what you need to know is that if you and some friends start a company that makes a lot of money, you’ll be rich, but if it incurs a lot of debt and fails, you won’t be left to pay its bills. The Supreme Court affirmed this arrangement in a 2001 case, Cedric Kushner Promotions vs. Don King:

linguistically speaking, the employee and the corporation are different “persons,” even where the employee is the corporation’s sole owner. After all, incorporation’s basic purpose is to create a distinct legal entity, with legal rights, obligations, powers, and privileges different from those of the natural individuals who created it, who own it, or whom it employs.

More MoJo coverage of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.


Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy: The Company’s Retirement Plan Invests in Contraception Manufacturers


The 8 Best Lines From Ginsburg’s Dissent


Why the Decision Is the New Bush v. Gore


How Obama Can Make Sure Hobby Lobby’s Female Employees Are Covered


Hobby Lobby Funded Disgraced Fundamentalist Christian Leader Accused of Harassing Dozens of Women

That separation is what legal and business scholars call the “corporate veil,” and it’s fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it’s in question. By letting Hobby Lobby’s owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.

“If religious shareholders can do it, why can’t creditors and government regulators pierce the corporate veil in the other direction?” Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, asked in an email.

That’s a question raised by 44 other law professors, who filed a friends-of-the-court brief that implored the Court to reject Hobby Lobby’s argument and hold the veil in place. Here’s what they argued:

Allowing a corporation, through either shareholder vote or board resolution, to take on and assert the religious beliefs of its shareholders in order to avoid having to comply with a generally-applicable law with a secular purpose is fundamentally at odds with the entire concept of incorporation. Creating such an unprecedented and idiosyncratic tear in the corporate veil would also carry with it unintended consequences, many of which are not easily foreseen.

In his opinion for Hobby Lobby, Justice Samuel Alito’s insisted the decision should be narrowly applied to the peculiarities of the case. But as my colleague Pat Caldwell writes, the logic of the argument is likely to invite a tide of new lawsuits, all with their own unintended consequences.

Small wonder, then, that despite congressional Republicans defending the Hobby Lobby decision as a victory for American business against the nanny state, the US Chamber of Commerce—the country’s main big business lobby—was quiet on the issue. Even more telling: Despite a record tide of friends-of-the-court briefs, not one Fortune 500 weighed in on the case. In fact, as David H. Gans at Slate pointed out in March, about the only sizeable business-friendly groups that did file briefs with the court were the US Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Both sided against Hobby Lobby.

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How Hobby Lobby Undermined The Very Idea of a Corporation

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Has Venezuela Turned Into a War Zone? (Updated)

by duhhumavug Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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This post has been updated.

Student protesters have filled the streets of many Venezuelan cities for the last two weeks to express their dissatisfaction with the socialist government, the deteriorating economy, and the violence that plagues the country. In the past few days the situation has worsened, as crackdowns from the National Guard and attacks from paramilitary groups have left at least six people dead so far.

Who are the protesters? Venezuela’s opposition party is unified by the desire to end the reign of “chavismo,” the socialist system devised by Hugo Chávez, and continued, albeit less handily, by his successor, Nicolás Maduro. The emergent leader of the protests is Leopoldo López, a Harvard-educated descendent of Simón Bolívar, and the former mayor of a Caracas municipality. He turned himself over to government forces after Maduro publicly demanded his arrest; López has called for more protests from prison. Also prominent in the opposition is María Corina Machado, a congresswoman in the National Assembly.

The protests started in the western border city of San Cristóbal, where students took to the streets on February 2 to express discontent with rampant crime. The forceful reaction of the authorities prompted other students in other cities to protest in solidarity. The protesters are largely from the middle class.

Maduro’s leadership has proved ineffective, and the economic policies he inherited from Chávez, including the nationalization of many industries, have wreaked havoc on the Venezuelan economy; these days, people are struggling to find the bare necessities. The scarcity index has reached an astonishing 28 percent, meaning that toilet paper, flour, and other basics simply might not be in stock. Maduro has threatened to raise gas prices, which were kept artificially low for 15 years because increasing them is politically disastrous. Inflation has more than doubled in the past year. Finally, the insanely high homicide rate, 39 deaths per 100,000 people in 2013, has many Venezuelans fed up with the status quo.

How is the government responding? Maduro, who narrowly beat opposition candidate Henrique Capriles in the election after Chávez’s March 2013 death, has swiftly cracked down on broadcast media coverage of the protests. The Colombian channel NTN24, which was covering the violence in the streets, has been taken off the air. Maduro expelled the CNN team today by revoking their press credentials.

Reports of paramilitary groups (known as colectivos), riding around on motorcycles and terrorizing protesters and civilians “tend to be exaggerated,” said David Smilde, a University of Georgia sociologist and senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America who returned from Venezuela yesterday. Though it is surely happening (with low quality video evidence to back it up), “that phenomenon appeals to the middle class’s worst nightmare of having these armed poor people on motorcycles.”

“The bigger problem,” Smilde continued, “is actually the government troops. The National Guard is the one that is doing the most violence, shooting on protesters and buildings. They tend to be very unprofessional. They don’t think in terms of civilian policing, so they will often fire on people who are fleeing. These are people who are 20 to 22 years old and oftentimes they end up being violent. I don’t think it’s necessarily state policy to repress voters. But the state could definitely make it clearer that there should be no violence.”

In a dramatic video, armed men reportedly from SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence agency, stormed the opposition party HQ. Reports have also surfaced of detainees being beaten, and the Human Rights Watch has called for the international community to condemn the violence against protesters and journalists.

How serious is the crisis? While some residents of Venezuela’s biggest cities, like Caracas, San Cristóbal, Mérida, Valencia, and Maracaibo decry the “war zone” in the streets, for many in Venezuela, life continues as normal. “From the outside it always looks like the whole country’s in flames, but of course life goes on and most things are up and running,” Smilde said.

However, San Cristóbal appears to be headed toward more dramatic confrontation. The Andean college town of 650,000, situated near the border with Colombia, has been heavily barricaded by opposition protesters. The government has cut off internet service to the city. Government paratroopers are on the way. And the opposition isn’t backing down, said Juan Nagel, editor of the blog Caracas Chronicles.

What’s going to happen next? So far it seems like the protests have not achieved support from the poor, who long have identified as chavistas. As Capriles, still the opposition’s biggest name, told The Economist, “For the protests to be successful, they must include the poor.”

Capriles has urged protesters to gather tomorrow en masse, and march peacefully. From prison, López passed a note to his wife, calling for more protests, a message that rapidly spread through social networks. “Tomorrow will tell what the future’s going to be,” Smilde said. If the turnout is huge and violence breaks out, Venezuela may be headed for prolonged unrest. If not, he said, things may “fizzle out.”

UPDATE: Saturday, February 22, 6:30 p.m. ET (Benjy Hansen-Bundy): Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets today, some to protest Maduro’s government, others to support it. The AFP reported at least 50,000 opposition protesters marching in the streets of the Sucre neighborhood of Caracas. A pro-government rally, also in the capital, marched “against fascism.” Though today’s protests were largely peaceful, Al Jazeera has reported at least eight deaths and more than 100 injuries since the protests began on February 4.

Leopoldo López Miguel Gutierrez/EFE/ZUMA

Boris Vergara/Xinhua/ZUMA

Boris Vergara/Xinhua/ZUMA

Boris Vergara/Xinhua/ZUMA

Nicolás Maduro Venezuela’s Presidency/Xinhua/ZUMA

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Has Venezuela Turned Into a War Zone? (Updated)

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4 Reasons You Should Worry About Another Sandy

by Stephanj0r Posted on October 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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One year ago, when Superstorm Sandy devastated much of New Jersey and New York City, the event sparked an intense national discussion about an issue that had gone mysteriously un-discussed during the presidential campaign: climate change. According to research by media scholar Max Boykoff of the University of Colorado, there was actually more media coverage of climate change in leading U.S. newspapers following Sandy than there was following the recent release of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report.

Why? According to NASA researchers, Sandy’s particular track made it a 1-in-700 year storm event. It was, to put it mildly, meteorologically suspicious.

So now, with a year’s distance and a lot of thought and debate, what can we say about climate change and Sandy—and hurricanes in general? A lot, as it turns out. Here’s what we know:

1. Sea level rise is making hurricanes more damaging—and Sandy is just the beginning. The most direct and undeniable way that global warming worsened Sandy is through sea level rise. According to climate researcher Ben Strauss of Climate Central, sea level in New York harbor is 15 inches higher today than it was in 1880, and of those 15 inches, eight are due to global warming’s influence (the melting of land-based ice, and the thermal expansion of seawater as it warms). And that matters: For every inch of sea level rise, an estimated 6,000 additional people were impacted by Sandy who wouldn’t have been otherwise. That’s why Strauss told me last year, in the wake of the storm, that there is “100 percent certainty that sea level rise made this worse. Period.”

And what’s true for Sandy is true for every hurricane that makes landfall. While numerous other factors, such as the tidal cycle, also affect the size of a given storm’s surge, global warming is now a measurable part of the total impact. And the more seas rise in the future, the worse the impact gets—and the more likely future Sandys become. “Coastal communities are facing a looming sea level rise crisis, one that will manifest itself as increased frequency of Sandy-like inundation disasters in the coming decades along the mid-Atlantic and elsewhere,” as a recent American Meteorological Society report put it. In fact, a recent analysis by Mother Jones, using data from Climate Central and the National Climate Assessment, finds that by the end of the century the chance of Sandy-level flooding in Lower Manhattan in any given year increases to 50 percent.

2011’s Hurricane Irene caused widespread flooding damage due to heavy rains in New England. Jim Greenhill/Flickr

2. Hurricane rainfall will also be more damaging in the future due to global warming. The principal flooding damage from Sandy came through its storm surge, not its heavy rains. But in other devastating storms, that won’t necessarily be the case. Hurricanes are, at minimum, a triple threat, and can damage lives and property through rainfall, through storm surge, and due to their powerful winds.

We can say with some confidence that global warming is generating more rainfall in storms like Sandy. The reason is simple: Warmer air holds more water vapor, due to basic physics. “For 1 degree Fahrenheit, it’s something like 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere,” as climate scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research has put it.

Extreme precipitation events in the US are already on the rise, and this trend, like sea level rise, is expected to continue in the future. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, by the end of the 21st century we should expect a roughly 20-percent increase in hurricane rainfall.

3. Hurricanes may also be more intense in the future. A knottier issue involves whether the average hurricane is already more intense (in other words, having higher wind speeds) than it was in the past due to global warming—or whether it will be in the future. This is the question that gets the most press attention, even as it also remains among the hardest to answer.

2005’s Hurricane Wilma, the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. NASA/Wikimedia Commons

If you want to go with the conservative (and somewhat dated) scientific view, then the latest IPCC assessment says there is “low confidence” that hurricanes have already gotten more intense due to global warming. The IPCC also says it is “more likely than not” that this will occur by the second half of this century, at least in two major basins that have a lot of hurricanes—the North Atlantic and the Western North Pacific (where they’re called typhoons).

The IPCC, however, has a cutoff date and as a result, cannot always cite the most cutting-edge research. That includes one recent paper suggesting that hurricanes are already more intense, as the global population of storms has shifted towards more Category 4 and 5 storms, and proportionately less Category 1 and Category 2 storms. This issue remains heavily debated within the scientific community, however.

4. Will there be more hurricane left turns into New Jersey? But where things get really scientifically tricky is the matter of storm paths. One of the reasons that Sandy was so devastating is that it, in effect, swung left and slammed into the US East Coast. That’s exceedingly rare behavior for an Atlantic hurricane. By the time they reach the mid-latitudes, most of these storms “recurve” to the northeast, a path that often ensures that they miss land.

That pattern was interrupted in the case of Sandy, however, by what is called a “blocking” event: A ridge of high pressure over Greenland that drove the storm westward, leading to this devastating track:

The bizarre track of Superstorm Sandy. Cyclonebiskit/Wikimedia Commons

So will such atmospheric blocks become more likely in the future?

Officially, the IPCC says no. Or rather, in scientist speak: “there is medium confidence that the frequency of Northern and Southern Hemisphere blocking will not increase, while trends in blocking intensity and persistence remain uncertain.” However, a number of researchers disagree with this assessment, most notably Jennifer Francis of Rutgers, who argues that the rapid warming of the Arctic is leading to a more loopy jet stream and, thus, more blocking patterns. This, too, is likely to be a hotly debated issue in the coming years.

So we already know global warming is making hurricanes more dangerous, through sea level rise and rainfall if nothing else. We don’t know everything, yet: But we know more than enough to be worried.

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4 Reasons You Should Worry About Another Sandy

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Nebraska Court Decides 16-Year-Old Is Too Immature for an Abortion, But Motherhood’s Okay

by pwbqczv Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a 16-year-old could not get the abortion she wanted because she “was not mature enough to make the decision herself.” The Court’s ability to force the teen, a ward of the state known only as Anonymous 5, to carry her unwanted child to term is a direct result of the state’s 2011 parental consent law that requires minors seeking an abortion to get parental approval.

But Nebraska is not unique: similar rulings could happen in most other states across the country. Laws that mandate parental involvement in teens’ abortions offer anti-choice judges new opportunities to limit abortion access. And while it is unclear whether such parental involvement legislation affects minors’ abortion rates in general, Sharon Camp, former president and CEO of Guttmacher Institute, wrote in an article for RH Reality Check that such mandates can put teens at risk of physical violence or abuse and “result in teens’ delaying abortions until later in pregnancy, when they carry a greater risk of complications and are also more expensive to obtain.” The case of the Nebraska teen also shows that parental involvement legislation overlooks wards of the state, leaving pregnant young adults who have no legal parents at the behest of the court system.

Here’s a map of parental consent laws across the United States:

According to Guttmacher, “only two states and the District of Columbia explicitly allow” all minors to consent to their own abortions. On the other hand, a whopping 39 states require some kind of parental involvement in a minor’s decision to have an abortion.

There are two major types of legislation mandating parental involvement in their child’s decision to have an abortion: Parental consent and parental notification laws. Parental consent laws mandate that a minor who has decided to get an abortion first get the OK from either one or both of her parents (or her legal guardian). Parental notification laws, on the other hand, require that a parent or legal guardian be notified of a child’s decision to get an abortion, either by the minor herself or by her doctor. Eight states, including Nebraska, mandate a notarized statement of consent from a parent before the abortion is performed. And in Arkansas, the Governor recently signed a law making it a crime to assist a minor in obtaining an abortion without her parent’s consent, “even if the abortion was performed in a state where parental consent is not required.”

Almost all states with parental involvement laws include some exceptions to the rules. Many states allow exceptions in medical emergencies or in cases of abuse, assault, incest, or neglect. Only a handful of states extend their consent or notification laws to other adult relatives, like grandparents.

But one exception in particular has increased the role of the courts in the personal decision-making of teens. As a result of a Supreme Court ruling that parents cannot have complete veto power in determining whether their child gets an abortion, almost all states offer a “judicial bypass” to their parental involvement laws. The bypass allows minors to go to the courts to waive their state’s involvement laws; but in effect moves the power to veto a teen’s abortion from her family to the courts.

And here is where the Nebraska case comes in. In this case, the biological parents of Anonymous 5 had previously been stripped of their legal parental rights after physically abusing their daughter and, as a result, the pregnant teen had no legal parents and was instead a ward of the state. With no parent to consent to her abortion, she was forced to ask permission from the courts, who then denied her request, essentially finding her mature enough to carry a baby she doesn’t want but too immature to consent to her own abortion. Instead of offering an alternative to parental consent, the courts serve as just another barrier between teens—especially wards of the state—and access to safe abortion services.

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Nebraska Court Decides 16-Year-Old Is Too Immature for an Abortion, But Motherhood’s Okay

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15 Things You Should Know About the Coal Industry’s Plan to Ship Its Product to China

by Joan Rivera Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

After spending years trying and failing to win a global climate treaty, environmental activists have finally changed tactics. Instead pouring all their efforts into passing doomed legislation, they’re picking big symbolic battles with the fossil fuel industry.

The campaign to derail the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s tar sands is just the start. On the West Coast, environmentalists have mounted a similar attack on the coal industry, which wants to reverse its steep national decline by exporting millions of tons coal to China. Green groups believe they can prevent the shipments (and keep the coal in the ground) by stopping the construction of huge new coal export terminals at ports in Oregon and Washington. “Based on our back-of-the-envelope calculation, the burning of this exported coal could have a larger climate impact than all of the oil pumped through the Keystone pipeline,” says Kimberly Larson, a spokeswoman for the Sierra Club’s Power Past Coal campaign.

Here’s what you need to know about the biggest climate change fight that you’ve probably never heard of:

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15 Things You Should Know About the Coal Industry’s Plan to Ship Its Product to China

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Did Climate Change Worsen the Colorado Floods?

by Larry Daichea Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last Thursday, as torrential rains turned into floods that washed away homes, roads, and bridges in Boulder, Colorado, and the surrounding region, the local National Weather Service forecast office went ahead and said what we were all thinking. It put it like this:

MAJOR FLOODING/FLASH FLOODING EVENT UNDERWAY AT THIS TIME WITH BIBLICAL RAINFALL AMOUNTS REPORTED IN MANY AREAS IN/NEAR THE FOOTHILLS.

The word “biblical” certainly captures the almost preternatural scale of the Colorado floods, and the rainfall that caused them. Indeed, according to climate scientist Martin Hoerling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “this single event has now made the calendar year (2013) the single wettest year on record for Boulder.”

But does that mean that climate change is involved? Although suggestive, broken records alone do not constitute definitive proof that humanity’s fingerprints have been left on a particular weather disaster. On the other hand, climate scientists say with considerable confidence that a hotter planet will feature more extreme rain events, much like this one.

So what can actually be said about the Colorado floods in a climate context?

Just how extreme was this event? First off, it’s important to get a sense of how out-of-the-ordinary these floods—which have killed eight people and left hundreds unaccounted for—really were. That’s not difficult; superlatives have hardly been lacking to describe the event. Remarking on the “epic deluge,” meteorologist Jeff Masters, co-founder of the popular Weather Underground site, had this to say:

According to the National Weather Service, Boulder’s total 3-day rainfall as of Thursday night was 12.30″. Based on data from the NWS Precipitation Frequency Data Server, this was a greater than 1-in-1000 year rainfall event. The city’s previous record rainfall for any month, going back to 1897, was 9.59″, set in May 1995. Some other rainfall totals through Thursday night include 14.60″ at Eldorado Springs, 11.88″ at Aurora, and 9.08″ at Colorado Springs. These are the sort of rains one expects on the coast in a tropical storm, not in the interior of North America!

So what caused such a deluge? That the rains were reminiscent of a tropical storm gives a hint as to how this occurred. What fell over Colorado last week was, in significant part, tropical moisture, pulled up all the way up to the Rockies from the Mexican coast by a confluence of atmospheric events. Furthermore, the rainfall on the Front Range was exacerbated by a so-called atmospheric “blocking pattern,” which produced a situation of stuck weather, in which one pattern (unending rain) persisted for a long period of time. “We had this giant cutoff low sitting over Salt Lake City, dredging up a continuous stream of tropical moisture,” explains Minnesota meteorologist Paul Douglas, who is founder of the Media Logic Group and has been frequently outspoken about the reality of climate change from a Republican political perspective.

Satellite imagery showing tropical moisture being pulled from the coast of Mexico up to Colorado. Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

And here’s the first possible climate linkage: The idea that the jet stream has been altered as a result of climate change, leading to more stuck weather and more blocking patterns, is a serious one, and one that has also been brought up in relation to the odd behavior of Superstorm Sandy. “I’ve noticed since last September, since the record ice loss in the Arctic, that the jet stream has been misbehaving, more blocking patterns in general over the northern hemisphere,” says Douglas.

He’s not the only one: Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University has led the scientific charge when it comes to the connection between Arctic sea ice loss and mid-latitude weather extremes (for further explanation, see here). And while the issue remains debated, it’s certainly possible that global warming is making blocking patterns, like the one that helped produce the Colorado floods, more likely to occur on average.

Doesn’t climate change produce more extreme rainfall, period? The idea that there will be more extreme rainfall, in general, in a warming world is very well established scientifically at this point. “The science about future increases of extreme rainfall is very solid, just because we have a good understanding of the physics of it,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist and statistician with Climate Central and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Warmer air is going to hold more moisture,” Tebaldi continues, “so when something happens, there is going to be more available water to precipitate on us.”

If you want to get your inner nerd on about why this is the case, the answer is the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which states that as atmospheric temperatures increase, the amount of water vapor that the air can contain increases exponentially. For a good explanation, see here.

How much extra water vapor are we talking about here? “For 1 degree Fahrenheit, it’s something like 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere,” explains climate scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (which itself happens to be in Boulder). That extra water vapor, according to Trenberth, helps fuel and strengthen storms, even as it also gives them an added moisture supply, meaning that the net effect on increased rainfall may be 5 to 10 percent. For Trenberth, that would therefore mean that climate change contributed somewhat to the Colorado floods, but that’s very different from saying that it caused the entire event. “You can’t blame this thing on climate change,” he says.

Martin Hoerling of NOAA comes to a similar conclusion. “Global warming has led to an increase in the atmosphere’s water holding capacity, and empirical studies indicate a few percent of increase in water vapor to date,” he comments by email. That means that the majority of the moisture over Colorado was there not due to global warming per se, but simply because of the aforementioned atmospheric circulation patterns.

Are extreme rainfall events increasing, as predicted? Absolutely. NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center keeps extensive data on weather extremes, and has found that since the 1970s, there has been an uptick in one-day extreme precipitation events:

Extremes in U.S. one-day precipitation, 1910-2012 National Climatic Data Center

An increasing trend in extreme rains is also supported by the recently leaked draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report. The draft says that it is “very likely” that central North America has already seen a trend toward more extreme precipitation events and that there is “medium confidence” that humans have contributed to this change. In the future, moreover, this trend is expected to continue. According to the IPCC draft, “in a warmer world, extreme precipitation events over most of the mid-latitude land masses and over wet tropical regions will very likely be more intense and more frequent by the end of this century.”

In this sense, the Colorado Floods are consistent with the general picture of what we’ve been seeing, and what we would expect to see, under climate change. That doesn’t make them directly caused by climate change, but it does put them in context.

What about Colorado’s climate future in particular? The future precipitation forecast for Colorado itself is less certain. The U.S. National Climate Assessment, which is currently in draft form, includes regional projections for how temperature and rainfall changes are expected to affect different parts of the United States. The report includes Colorado in the country’s Southwest region, which overall has seen a 12 percent increase in heavy precipitation since the year 1958 (considerably less than some other regions). Going forward, the southern part of the Southwest region, including states like Arizona and New Mexico, is actually expected to see a decrease in precipitation. But the picture isn’t as clear for Colorado; according to the National Assessment draft, projections aren’t in agreement with each other. However, even in areas where average rainfall is expected to decline, the percentage of overall precipitation falling in extreme downpour events is expected to increase. In other words, the shift remains towards more extremes.

And now for the really tough question: Did global warming in any way “cause” this event? So far, we’ve established that the Colorado floods are consistent with expected climate trends: more extreme rains (pretty certainly), and possibly more blocking patterns (still a new and debated issue). And we’ve also suggested that rainfall in this particular event may have been amplified, somewhat, by climate change.

But causation? That’s a very different, much knottier issue, as Kevin Trenberth’s remark above (“You can’t blame this thing on climate change”) makes clear. In fact, Trenberth himself has argued prominently that “no events are ’caused by climate change’ or global warming, but all events have a contribution.” The issue is further complicated by a large gap between how scientists understand the word “cause,” and how the lay public does.

“Correlation,” an XKCD comic.

Ordinarily, we think about “cause” in a simple sense in which one thing fully brings about another. Thus, I tripped and fell, and this caused me to have a bump on my head. But in the atmosphere, it’s hardly so simple. As we’ve seen, the Colorado floods were partially caused by moisture from the tropics, partly caused by a blocking pattern that held one weather system in place for an extended period of time, and perhaps also partly caused by past wildfires that increased the risk of runoff (to name just a few partial causes). The cognitive linguist George Lakoff has introduced the distinction between “direct causation” and “systemic causation” to help us tackle this sort of problem. The latter form of causation is not direct; rather, it is diffuse, partial, and usually captured in statistical relationships. But it is no less real for this reason, or less amenable to scientific analysis.

In the past, scientists have demonstrated, for a few individual events, that global warming made them more likely to occur in a statistical sense. That includes the 2003 heat wave in France, and a particularly devastating UK flood in 2000. (For an explanation, see here.) More recently, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the UK Met Office released a landmark study on 2012’s extreme weather events, and whether climate change was involved, finding a role in some of them but not others. For instance, climate change was found to have made July 2012’s heat wave in the U.S. as much as four times more likely to occur, and increased the likelihood of the US’s anomalous March-May 2012 warmth by as much as 12 times. But no role was found for the 2012 US drought.

Not surprisingly, such an analysis has not yet been performed for the 2013 Colorado floods, but it surely will be. And what will be the result? That’s unclear. “With precipitation events it’s much harder than with heat waves,” explains Claudia Tebaldi, “because of these two aspects that combine, the thermodynamic and the dynamic.” The thermodynamic is the easy part: There’s more moisture, due to a warmer atmosphere. There’s physics on that. But the dynamics—whether, in a world without global warming, the atmospheric flow that created this event would still have occurred…well, that’s extraordinarily difficult to unravel.

So what’s the bottom line? With every extreme weather event nowadays, from Superstorm Sandy to the Colorado floods, there’s a strong inclination to link it to climate change. But once you get into the details, the word “link” becomes far too vague: Each event is different, and the ways in which it may or may not relate to a changing climate are also varied. Partial contributions may be present—global warming exacerbated Sandy’s storm surge through sea level rise, and probably contributed to some percentage of the rainfall over Colorado—and individual events may be consistent with larger trends. But ultimate “causal” connections remain difficult to establish and, according to Trenberth, the very attempt itself may be missing the point.

The real question is: Why would we expect it to be otherwise? When you conduct a massive experiment with only one planet as your test subject—or as scientists would put it, an experiment with an N of 1—this is the situation you create. And the proper way of thinking about that situation is clear: Even when you can’t be definitive, you can definitely be worried.

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Did Climate Change Worsen the Colorado Floods?

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Are Chemical Weapons Reason Enough to Go to War?

by Abraham Lowe Posted on August 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Obama administration has moved a fifth destroyer containing cruise missiles into the Mediterranean Sea and seems prepared to take limited punitive military action against Syria for the Bashar al-Assad regime’s presumed use of chemical weapons. The White House is expected to declassify evidence today that will show that Assad’s forces launched a poisonous gas attack against civilians earlier this month, killing as many as 1,300. A year ago, President Obama set a “red line,” noting that the use of chemical weapons would be unacceptable in the Syrian civil war that has raged for over two years and killed over 100,000 people. But with Britain refusing to lend support for a retaliatory strike, some members of Congress are wondering whether the use of chemical weapons is an automatic rationale for America to go to war. Here’s a backgrounder on these nasty weapons, who has them, what they do to the body, and how the United States has in the past responded to their use.

What is a chemical weapon?

Experts generally categorize chemical weapons based on their biological effects. According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, chemical weapons include nerve agents, choking agents, blister agents such as mustard gas, blood agents, chemicals that cause psychotic disorders, and riot-control agents, such as tear gas. Also included are defoliants such as Agent Orange, which was used by the United States in Vietnam.

Under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention (more on that below), it’s perfectly fine for countries to deploy tear gas against domestic protesters so long as it’s not used as a weapon of war. But as Slate points out, riot-control agents can still be deadly in enclosed spaces. According to Physicians for Human Rights, the main chemical weapons doctors watch out for these days are VX, sarin, and tabun—all nerve agents—and BZ and mustard gas.

What do these chemicals do to people?
Chemical weapons wreak havoc on the body, but are not always lethal. Nerve and choking agents hit hardest. When you inhale a choking agent—such as chlorine gas, which was used extensively during World War I—it forces fluid into your lungs, and that basically drowns you. Nerve agents can kill within minutes (in the case of VX), and cause twitching and seizures prior to death. Symptoms of mustard gas include skin blistering, burning eyes, abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, and swelling of the respiratory tract that can seal the victim’s airway. They take two to 24 hours to appear and are not usually lethal if adequate healthcare is available.

Which chemical agent was used in Syria?
Sarin, allegedly. When absorbed through the skin, sarin attacks the nervous system and can kill a person in 5 to 10 minutes. It was developed in 1938 in Nazi Germany and was allegedly tested on people in concentration camps. Sarin was the gas used a deadly 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway by an extremist cult. (See timeline below.)

How are survivors of the Syrian attack being treated?
Tim Shenk, a spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, which operates six hospitals and four health centers in the north of Syria, says that the main drug used to treat neurotoxic symptoms is atropine. The group sent approximately 1,600 vials of the drug to field hospitals in Damascus about six months ago. Those were used in the recent incident, and Doctors Without Borders is now sending 15,000 additional vials to facilities in that area. If atropine is injected within one hour of exposure, it can be highly effective—but in Syria, there wasn’t enough atropine to treat everyone, and not all patients made it to the hospital in time.

Why are chemical weapons considered worse than, say, bombing women and children?

“Unfortunately, there are no international laws against war itself,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, tells Mother Jones. “But there are rules about how wars can and cannot be conducted…Holding the line against further chemical weapons use is in the interests of the United States and international security, because chemical weapons produce horrible, indiscriminate effects, especially against civilians, and because the erosion of the taboo against chemical weapons can lead to further, more significant use of these or other mass destruction weapons in the future.” Chemical weapons also evoke the horrors of World War I and the Holocaust.

But writer Paul Waldman sees international hypocrisy on the subject. “Getting killed by mustard gas is surely awful,” he writes in The American Prospect. “But so is getting blown up by a bomb. Using one against your enemies gets you branded a war criminal, but using the other doesn’t.” Steve Johnson, a visiting fellow at the UK’s Cranfield University and an expert on chemical warfare, said in an interview, “I can understand why chemical warfare feels emotive to us—it is insidious, there is no shelter, it is particularly effective on the young, elderly, and frail, and can be a violent and excruciating death.” He adds, “When one breaks it down ethically though, it seems impossible to say that it is more acceptable to kill 100 people with explosives than with nerve agent.”

Does the United States usually intervene when chemical weapons are used?
Far from it. “As far as I know,” the Arms Control Association’s Kimball says, “this would be among the first instances when a state’s use of chemical weapons would have prompted military action by the US or by others.” And Foreign Policy reported this week that unearthed CIA documents show that the United States gave the location of Iranian troops to Iraq in 1988, fully aware that Saddam Hussein’s regime was planning to attack Iran with chemical weapons—including sarin.

Here are some of the most notable recent uses of chemical weapons by governments and terrorist groups.

1st Lt. Matthew Chau, commander of Border Team 3, 25th Infantry Division, patrols Halabja, Iraq. Buried in the village cemetery are many victims of the 1988 chemical weapons attack, ordered by Saddam Hussein. Wikimedia

1980s, Iran: During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein’s regime uses nerve gas, including sarin, and mustard gas in Iran, killing up to 20,000 soldiers. The United States was complicit, according to recently released CIA documents.

1988, Halabja, Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s regime unleashed mustard gas on a town overtaken by Kurdish rebels at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, killing about 5,000 civilians.

1989, Tbilisi, Georgia: Russian security agents allegedly use a World War I-era gas against protesters. About 4,000 people seek hospitalization.

1994, Matsumoto, Japan: Aum Shinrikyo, a cult obsessed with the idea of apocalypse, released sarin at several sites, killing seven people and injuring more than 200.

1995, Tokyo, Japan: Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas on the subway, killing at least 12 people and injuring more than 5,500.

Are chemical weapons allowed under international law?
Nope. In 1925, following the large-scale use of nerve gas, tear gas and other deadly agents during World War I, countries signed a Geneva protocol prohibiting the use of gas as a method of warfare on the grounds that it has been “justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world.” Using chemical weapons is a war crime under the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). A legally binding arms-control treaty on chemical weapons, the Chemical Weapons Convention, was drafted in 1992. Its signatories agreed to not use or produce chemical weapons, and to destroy their remaining stockpiles. Since 1997, when the treaty went into effect, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has inspected more than 2,600 chemical weapons sites declared under the treaty. Here’s a map showing which countries have not yet signed and/or ratified the treaty, or ratified it only in the last five years:

Who still has chemical weapons?
As of February 2013, Albania, India, Iraq, Libya, the Russian Federation, and the United States still have declared chemical weapons stockpiles. (This doesn’t count the 5 countries that have not signed nor ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, or nations that may have secret stockpiles.) Since 1997, at least 80 percent of the world’s stockpiles have been destroyed—the United States and Russia have been dragging their feet, according to Cranefield University’s Steve Johnson. Thirteen countries, including China, the UK, the United States, Iraq, and France also have declared existing chemical weapons production facilities—but of those 70 total declared facilities, 64 have been destroyed or converted for peaceful purposes. All have been inactivated.

Which nations support US military intervention on the basis of a chemical weapons attack?

British Prime Minister David Cameron pledged his support for a US strike against Syria, but he was rebuffed by Parliament, including members of his own Conservative Party. The UN Security Council meeting on the topic ended in a stalemate, without authorization for military intervention. Russia passionately opposes intervention, as it blames Syrian rebels for the chemical attacks. France could turn out to be the crucial backer for Obama, as President Francois Hollande has expressed his support, and is not bound by parliament’s vote.

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Are Chemical Weapons Reason Enough to Go to War?

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Is Global Warming Really Slowing Down?

by Ludmillamet Posted on August 28, 2013

Mother Jones

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Chances are you’ve heard people say that global warming has “stopped,” “paused,” or hit a “slowdown.” It’s a favorite talking point of political conservatives like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who recently declared that there has been “no recorded warming since 1998.” Climate skeptics frequently use these arguments to cast doubt on climate science and to downplay the urgency of addressing global warming. Last year, for instance, Fox News pronounced global warming “over.”

Scientists disagree. It’s true that they also acknowledge the slowdown: A new paper just out in the prestigious journal Nature, for instance, cites the “hiatus in global warming” and seeks to explain it with reference to changes in the tropical Pacific. The recently leaked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, too, cites an “observed reduction in surface warming.” But scientists say the slowdown is only temporary—a result of naturally induced climate variability that will soon tip back in the other direction—and that more human-caused global warming is on the way.

So who’s right? Here’s what you need to know about the slowdown, why it’s happening, and why the threat of global warming is still very real:

Have temperatures really stopped rising? Not exactly. First, “global warming” never meant that temperatures increase relentlessly, year after year—it’s more complicated than that.

Globally averaged surface temperatures, by decade (includes combined land and sea surface temperatures) World Meteorological Organization

“There’s always more than one thing going on in the climate system,” explains climate researcher Jerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. There are really hot years and there are less hot years. But since the 1950s, each successive decade has been hotter than the last, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and the 2000s were the warmest decade “since the start of modern measurements in 1850.”

Okay, so it’s clearly misleading to say the planet has stopped warming. What’s actually going on? It’s pretty nuanced: According to the leaked IPCC draft report, the rate of warming at the planet’s surface (technically, the “global mean surface temperature”) is lower over the last 15 years, kind of like a car easing off the accelerator. The draft states that the rate of surface warming from 1998-2012 was 0.05 degrees Celsius per decade. But over the entire period from 1951 to 2012, it was 0.12 degrees Celsius per decade. (Keep in mind that not every aspect of the climate system necessarily reflects this “slowdown”: Arctic sea ice, for instance, hit a record low in 2007 and then another record low in 2012.)

How significant is the surface temperature slowdown in the context of global warming as a whole? The slowdown is certainly big enough to measure—or else we wouldn’t be discussing it—but not a huge deal in the context of the climate system. That’s because surface temperature itself, while a useful measurement, only captures a small part of what’s actually happening to the planet.

Visualization of where excess heat trapped within the climate system ends up Skeptical Science/Wikimedia Commons

At present, the Earth has an “energy imbalance“—because of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, more heat is arriving from the sun than is escaping back into space again—and that heat simply has to go somewhere. The question is where. When people think about global warming, they often think about air temperature—where the slowdown is most pronounced—but the truth is that only a tiny percentage of the excess heat actually ends up in the atmosphere. The biggest heat “sink,” by far, is the world ocean. Ninety-three percent of the planet’s excess energy gets swallowed up by the blue, according to the IPCC.

Other repositories of heat—glaciers, ice sheets, the land, the atmosphere—all play a much smaller role. So if one of these changes a little, that doesn’t shift the big picture much. “What is being talked about is a small fraction of the energy changing a bit,” explains Michael MacCracken, chief scientist at the Climate Institute and a former Clinton administration climate science official.

The increase in global ocean heat content from 1955-2010, from Levitus et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 2012. S. Levitus.

Indeed, the oceans—the elephant in the climate system, so to speak—are still warming up. Recent data on the warming of the ocean, published by oceanographer Sydney Levitus of the University of Maryland and his colleagues, suggest an increase in heat content in both the surface layer and also between 700-2,000 meters of depth. “The important thing in terms of climate change is that the world ocean has continued to store heat,” says Levitus. The amount of heat, by the way, is staggering: If the heat stored in the oceans from 1955 to 2010 were all to suddenly go to the atmosphere (which, thankfully, would never happen), Levitus and his colleagues estimate that would translate into a 65-degree Fahrenheit temperature increase!

So what is causing the surface temperature slowdown? Scientists point to multiple causes, including more heat going into the deeper oceans, a recent minimum in solar activity, and more volcanic activity. All of these phenomena could contribute to a temporary slowdown in global warming. “It may very well be that the best explanation is that there is some combination of things that has led to this slowdown,” explains Anthony Broccoli, a climate researcher at Rutgers University.

What is the role of the Pacific Ocean? Perhaps the leading explanation for the slowdown is that the oceans, and particularly the vast Pacific, are storing more heat at depth. That’s the upshot of the new Nature study, and also much other recent work. “Global warming is alive and well,” explains NCAR researcher Kevin Trenberth, “but about 30 percent of the heat is going deeper into the ocean.”

Indeed, Trenberth and climate modeler Jerry Meehl of NCAR recently published a paper that used a climate modeling approach to study global warming “hiatus decades.” They found that in their simulation, such periods not only occur, but when they do, the deep ocean warms up more than either the ocean’s upper layer, or surface air temperatures.

The Pacific Ocean showing La Niña-like conditions in 2007, featuring cooler tropical surface waters. NASA Earth Observatory/Wikimedia Commons

Scientists think they understand the mechanism here: It’s a slow and naturally occurring fluctuation that’s sometimes called the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation. In one phase of the oscillation, La Niña-like conditions exist in the Pacific, as cool deep water rises to the ocean surface, displacing warmer surface waters, which in turn get buried deeper in the ocean. This process—sometimes called “upwelling”—warms the deep ocean, but simultaneously cools the overlying atmosphere.

In other words, the world’s oceans keep getting warmer, but a temporary cooling of the surface of the Pacific is constraining global surface temperatures—for the time being, anyway.

“You might think of the atmosphere as the tail, and the ocean being the dog, as far as heat is concerned,” explains Rutgers’ Broccoli. “Although the tail may wag around a little, what it’s really doing is following the dog.”

What about volcanoes? Scientists seem increasingly convinced that the oceans are the chief factor behind the slowdown. But there may be other contributing causes as well. One of them is volcanoes—smaller, tropical volcanoes in particular.

The eruption of the volcano Tavurvur in Papua New Guinea in 2009. Small tropical volcanic eruptions are probably one factor behind the recent global warming slowdown. Taro Taylor/Wikimedia Commons

It has long been known that dramatic volcanic eruptions, like that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, have a global cooling effect. They do this by injecting sulfur particles, often called sulfate aerosols, directly into the stratosphere, where they reflect sunlight away from the planet. “Volcanoes are basically attenuating the light between you and the sun,” explains Susan Solomon, a former IPCC co-chair and a climate researcher at MIT.

What’s new is the finding that smaller volcanoes, cumulatively, can have a significant influence on global temperatures. In a 2011 paper in Science, Solomon and her colleagues found that smaller volcanic activity has ticked up recently, and is “reducing the recent global warming that would otherwise have occurred.”

“What I think is very clear is that there has been a big increase in the aerosol loading of the stratosphere from volcanoes that we did not think were energetic or explosive enough,” says Solomon. She doesn’t think that’s enough to explain the slowdown in its entirety, but she does see it as a contributing factor.

What about the sun? And water vapor? At least two more possible contributing factors also arise in scientific conversation. There’s the role of the sun: It too goes through cycles, and from 2005 to 2010, there was “an unusually long solar minimum,” Broccoli says. That may have also lessened global warming a bit. Finally, for reasons that scientists don’t yet understand, the stratosphere seems to have contained less water vapor in the 2000s than it did during the 1990s. Water vapor enhances the greenhouse effect—like carbon dioxide, it’s a greenhouse gas.

Does all of this mean that climate models are wrong? One leading skeptic charge is that the global warming slowdown undermines our trust in the climate models that researchers use to project future temperatures—after all, skeptics say, the models missed the slowdown. And it’s true that climate models have not always adequately included some of the factors discussed above, many of which are naturally occurring and hard to predict. Take volcanoes, for instance. “We don’t try to model volcanoes, we observe them,” Solomon says. “That’s not something you try to predict, ’cause it’s not predictable.”

However, scientists are constantly updating their models based on new data—and one upshot of the new Nature paper is that if recent trends in the Pacific are properly taken into account, climate models can capture the global warming slowdown.

What about claims that the climate is less sensitive than we thought to greenhouse gas emissions? “Climate sensitivity” is a somewhat odd measure—it refers to the amount of warming that would occur once the planet adjusts to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Various estimates and ranges are often given for the climate sensitivity, and in the leaked IPCC draft report, it is from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. The lower end of the range was adjusted downwards in the draft report, based on new research—but as of now, most scientists don’t think that the slowdown is any indication that the climate system is less sensitive to human influence than previously thought. Rather, they think the slowdown is the result of temporary, natural variations that may soon subside.

“I don’t think we’ve seen anything that represents a paradigm shift in terms of our understanding of climate sensitivity,” Broccoli says.

Does this mean I can worry less about global warming? That’s probably not a good idea. If anything, the fact that the most cited causes of the slowdown are thought to be natural suggests that they’ll end eventually—whereupon global warming will snap back again, and perhaps more intensely than before. After all, the major non-natural factor in the system, human greenhouse gas emissions, will still be there. Or as the new Nature paper puts it: “the recent cooling of the tropical Pacific and hence the current hiatus are probably due to natural internal variability…If so, the hiatus is temporary, and global warming will return when the tropical Pacific swings back to a warm state.”

The IPCC, in its leaked report, acknowledges the global warming slowdown and also cites a 95 percent probability that humans are causing global warming. If the world’s definitive source on climate science doesn’t see any contradiction there…then you probably shouldn’t either.

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Is Global Warming Really Slowing Down?

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Valley Fever, Explained

by trasze2aja Posted on August 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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Cases of an illness known as valley fever have increased dramatically over the past decade. So what is it exactly? And who’s at risk? We went to California’s Central Valley to find out—watch the video above, then read this handy FAQ.

What is it? Coccidioidomycosis—commonly known as valley fever—is a fungal disease. Its spores live in the soil. If the soil becomes dry and dusty, people and animals can breathe it in, allowing the spores to grow inside their bodies.

What does valley fever feel like? It depends. Some people who get valley fever don’t have any symptoms at all; in others the disease resembles a cold or flu. Some develop a pneumonia-like condition from the fungus in their lungs. In rare cases, the fungus disseminates and can even attack the brain. According to the CDC more than 40 percent of people who become ill from valley fever may require hospital visits; the average cost of that visit is $50,000. Between 1990 and 2008 there were 3,089 reported deaths from valley fever, though some public health experts suspect that it was an underlying cause of many more deaths.

Who’s at risk? People who live in or travel to the southwestern United States—where the disease is endemic—are at risk. Within that area, working outdoors—at construction sites, archaeological digs, and other places that involve undisturbed soil—also seems to be a risk factor (though plenty of people who don’t have outdoor jobs—for example, this little girl—also get valley fever). Prisons have been hard hit; 18 inmates in California’s Central Valley have died of valley fever in the past few years, and many more have become ill. The state of California recently ordered the transfer of 2,500 prisoners out of two Central Valley prisons with high incidence of the disease; many of the prisoners set to transfer are black and Filipino, two ethnic groups that seem to be disproportionately affected by the dangerous disseminated form of valley fever. Women in their third trimester of pregnancy and people with compromised immune systems are also at higher-than-normal risk.

How is valley fever diagnosed? That’s one of the problems: In chest x-rays, valley fever is very hard to distinguish from pneumonia or even lung cancer—the fungal masses in patients’ lungs look almost identical to tumors, says Dr. Michael Peterson, chief of medicine at UCSF-Fresno. If doctors suspect valley fever, they can order a blood or sputum (phlegm) test, but outside of the endemic areas many doctors aren’t familiar with the disease. That makes it particularly hard for people who contract the disease while traveling to the southwest to get appropriate care. One small company manufactures a simple and quick skin test, but it’s not widely available yet since the company says it can’t afford the FDA’s marketing fee; Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who recently formed a valley fever task force, says he plans to petition the FDA to waive the fee.

Which states have the most cases of valley fever? In general, southwestern states:

Tasneem Raja

How common is it? Increasingly common:

Tasneem Raja

Why is valley fever increasing so quickly? One theory is that climate change is playing a role: As the weather gets hotter and drier, soil gets dustier—which means it’s easier for people and animals to breathe in the fungus. Some people believe that the rise is related to the population boom in the southwest: The increase in cases has occurred in the last decade, during which time millions of people have flocked to that part of the country. Not only are there more people to get sick, there’s also more construction, meaning that workers are moving around the previously undisturbed soil where valley fever spores seem to thrive. Antje Lauer, a microbiologist at California State University-Bakersfield, theorizes that the spores might do especially well in burrows where rodents have stored seeds.

Basically all of my fruits and vegetables are grown in California’s Central Valley. Am I going to get valley fever from my next salad? Probably not. Valley fever spores seem to prefer soil that hasn’t been cultivated, explains Lauer. She theorizes “that in agricultural soils, where there is a lot of additional organic matter from manure or scientific chemical or fertilizer being put into the soil, that the diversity of microorganisms goes up, because the diversity of certain nutrients goes up, and then valley fever fungus can’t compete any more.”

What can be done to prevent valley fever? The short answer: if you live in the Southwest, not much. People who work outdoors can wear special masks to limit their exposures, but for the rest of the population, it’s hard to avoid. As UCSF’s Peterson put it, “The only thing you can really do is in days where there are windstorms, there’s lots of dust in the air, do not go out and do heavy exertion, those kinds of things. Otherwise, it’s in the air.”

Where can I learn more about valley fever? The Reporting on Health Collaborative has a great valley fever series about the communities that have been hardest hit by the disease; the CDC has up-to-date information on incidence, risk factors, diagnosis, and treatment.

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Valley Fever, Explained

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5 Surprising Genetically Modified Foods

by Leon51tt8 Posted on August 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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GE rice may soon be approved for human consumption. Photo illustration/Photos from IRRI, WIkimedia Commons

By now, you’ve likely heard about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the controversy over whether they’re the answer to world hunger or the devil incarnate. But for right now, let’s leave aside that debate and turn to a more basic question: When you go to the supermarket, do you know which foods are most likely to be—or contain ingredients that are—genetically engineered? A handy FAQ:

So what exactly are genetically modified organisms?
GMOs are plants or animals that have undergone a process wherein scientists alter their genes with DNA from different species of living organisms, bacteria, or viruses to get desired traits such as resistance to disease or tolerance of pesticides.

But haven’t farmers been selectively breeding crops to get larger harvests for centuries? How is this any different?
Over at Grist, Nathanael Johnson has a great answer to this question—but in a nutshell: Yes, farmers throughout history have been raising their plants to achieve certain desired traits such as improved taste, yield, or disease resistance. But this kind of breeding still relies on the natural reproductive processes of the organisms, where as genetic engineering involves the addition of foreign genes that would not occur in nature.

Am I eating GMOs?
Probably. Since several common ingredients like corn starch and soy protein are predominantly derived from genetically modified crops, it’s pretty hard to avoid GM foods altogether. In fact, GMOs are present in 60 to 70 percent of foods on US supermarket shelves, according to Bill Freese at the Center for Food Safety; the vast majority of processed foods contain GMOs. One major exception is fresh fruits and veggies. The only GM produce you’re likely to find is the Hawaiian papaya, a small amount of zucchini and squash, and some sweet corn. No meat, fish, and poultry products approved for direct human consumption are bioengineered at this point, though most of the feed for livestock and fish is derived from GM corn, alfalfa, and other biotech grains. Only organic varieties of these animal products are guaranteed GMO-free feed.

So what are some examples of food that are genetically modified?
1. Papayas: In the 1990s, Hawaiian papaya trees were plagued by the ringspot virus which decimated nearly half the crop in the state. In 1998, scientists developed a transgenic fruit called Rainbow papaya, which is resistant to the virus. Now 77 percent of the crop grown in Hawaii is genetically engineered (GE).

2. Milk: RGBH, or recombinant bovine growth hormone, is a GE variation on a naturally occurring hormone injected into dairy cows to increase milk production. It is banned for milk destined for human consumption in the European Union, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Many milk brands that are rGBH-free label their milk as such, but as much as 40 percent of our dairy products, including ice cream and cheese, contains the hormone.

3. Corn on the cob: While 90 percent of corn grown in the United States is genetically modified, most of that crop is used for animal feed or ethanol and much of the rest ends up in processed foods. Sweet corn—the stuff that you steam or grill on the barbecue and eat on the cob—was GMO-free until last year when Monsanto rolled out its first GE harvest of sweet corn. While consumers successfully petitioned Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s to not carry the variety, Walmart has begun stocking the shelves with it without any label.

4. Squash and zucchini: While the majority of squashes on the market are not GE, approximately 25,000 acres of crookneck, straightneck, and zucchinis have been bioengineered to be virus resistant.

5. “All natural” foods: Be wary of this label if you’re trying to avoid GE foods. Right now there is no strict definition of what constitutes a natural food. This could be changing soon as federal court judges recently requested the Food and Drug Administration to determine whether the term can be used to describe foods containing GMOs to help resolve pending class action suits against General Mills, Campbell Soup Co., and the tortilla manufacturer Gruma Corp.

Are there any foods I’ve heard might be genetically modified—but actually aren’t?
1. Potatoes: In 1995, Monsanto introduced genetically modified potatoes for human consumption, but after pressure from consumers, McDonald’s and several other major fast food chains told their French fry suppliers to stop growing GE potatoes. The crop has since been removed from the market.

2. Seedless watermelon: While it would seem plausible that a fruit that produces no seeds has been bioengineered, the seedless watermelon is a hybrid of two separate breeds. It has been nicknamed the “mule of the watermelon world.”

3. Salmon: Currently no meat, fish, or egg products are genetically engineered, though a company called Aqua Bounty has an application in with the FDA to approve its GE salmon.

4. Soy milk: While 93 percent of soy grown in the United States is genetically engineered, most major brands of soy milk are GMO-free. Silk, the best-selling soy milk brand in the country, joined the Non-GMO Project in 2010. Many popular tofu brands in the United States also sell GMO-free tofu products.*

5. Rice: A staple food for nearly half the world’s population, there are currently no varieties of GM rice approved for human consumption. However, that could soon change. A genetically modified variety called golden rice being developed in the Philippines has been altered to include beta-carotene, a source of vitamin A. Backers are lauding it as a way to alleviate nutrient deficiency for the populations in developing countries.

How about organic foods?
Since the late ’90s, USDA organic standards have prohibited any genetically modified ingredients. Originally, the agency tried to include GE foods under the organic umbrella, but it backed down in 2002 after a massive public outcry to save organic standards.

How long have I been eating GE food?
Scientists conducted the first GE food trials the late 1980s, and in 1994, a biotech company called Calgene released the first GMO approved for human consumption: the “Flavr Savr tomato,” designed to stay ripe on the vine longer without getting squishy. The product, which Monsanto eventually picked up, flopped, but it paved the way for others: Biotech companies have made billions since with GE corn, soy bean, cotton, and canola.

Aren’t food companies required to let me know whether their products contain GMOs?
Not in the United States. Sixty-four developing and developed countries require GMO food labeling, according to Freese at the Center for Food Safety. You may have heard about the recent string of “Right to Know” bills in state assemblies across the country. The bills are aimed to require food companies to label any products that contain genetically modified organisms. Connecticut and Maine recently passed laws that would require food manufacturers to reveal GE ingredients on product packaging, but those laws won’t go into effect until other states adopt similar measures. Americans overwhelmingly support such laws, with poll after poll showing that over 90 percent of respondents support mandatory labeling. Biotech companies and the food industry say that such labeling would be expensive and pointless since genetically engineered foods have been declared safe for human consumption.

So if the food is safe, what’s all the fuss about them?
First off, not everyone agrees that GMOs are safe to eat, especially over the long term. The European Union remains decidedly skeptical, with very few approved GE crops grown on the continent and mandatory labeling in place for products that contain GMOs. Some scientists fear that GMOs could cause allergies in humans. Others point to the environmental consequences of the farming of GE crops.

How do GMOs affect the environment?
One word: Pesticides. Hundreds of millions of extra pounds of pesticides. The six biggest producers of GE seeds—Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow Agrosciences, BASF, Bayer, and Pioneer (DuPont)—are also the biggest producers of chemical herbicides and insecticides. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops, for example, are genetically engineered to be immune to herbicide so that farmers can destroy weeds without killing their cash crops. But the process has spawned Roundup resistant weeds, leading farmers to apply greater and greater doses of the chemical or even resort to more toxic methods to battle back the superweeds.

Where can I learn more about GMOs?
Mother Jones‘ Tom Philpott writes critically about GMOs often. In this 2011 Scientific American piece, Brendan Borrell lays out the pro-GMO case very well. Grist‘s Nathanael Johnson has written several posts that clarify the basic science behind GE crops, and a New York Times Room for Debate from 2009 offers a pretty good synopsis of the controversy. Food policy wonks might enjoy perusing the Food and Agriculture Organization’s page on biotechnology in agriculture; if you’re looking for a more entertaining way to educate yourself, a documentary called GMO OMG opens in select theaters this fall.

Clarification: Previously this story stated most tofu sold in the United States is GMO-free. While the top-selling US tofu brand Nasoya and many other major manufacturers in the US have items verified by the Non-GMO Project, this doesn’t necessarily encompass all tofu products.

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5 Surprising Genetically Modified Foods

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