Tag Archives: fall

Kids’ Outdoor Adventure Book – Stacy Tornio & Ken Keffer

by Myrna Posted on April 2, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Kids’ Outdoor Adventure Book

448 Great Things to Do in Nature Before You Grow Up

Stacy Tornio & Ken Keffer

Genre: Nature

Price: $0.99

Publish Date: April 2, 2013

Publisher: Falcon Guides

Seller: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group


Nature is a destination, but you don’t have to travel anywhere to find it. Just open the door and step outside. A fun, hands on approach to getting involved in nature,  The Kids' Outdoor Adventure Book  is a year-round how-to activity guidebook for getting kids outdoors and exploring nature, be it catching fireflies in the cool summer evenings; making birdfeeders in the fall from peanut butter, pine cones, and seed; building a snowman in 3 feet of fresh winter snow; or playing duck, duck, goose with friends in a meadow on a warm spring day.  The Kids' Outdoor Adventure Book  includes 448 things to do in nature for kids of all ages–more than one activity for every single day of the year. Each of the year's four seasons includes fifty checklist items, fifty challenge items, three each of projects, destinations, garden recipes, and outdoor games. Throughout the book, you'll also find fascinating facts, useful tips and tricks, and plenty of additional resources to turn to. Complete with whimsical, vibrant illustrations, this book is a must for parents and their kids.

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Kids’ Outdoor Adventure Book – Stacy Tornio & Ken Keffer

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Kids Are Killing a Lot Fewer Cops These Days

by Porter0892 Posted on January 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Let’s end the day with some good news. As you all know, violent crime began falling after leaded gasoline began its phaseout in the mid-70s. And because lead affects the brain development of infants and toddlers, the fall in crime began with the youngest kids. In the mid-80s, only young children were showing signs of reduced violence. By the mid-90s, everyone under 20 started to show effects. By the mid-aughts everyone under 30 was starting to get less violent.

In other words, the first cohort to benefit from reduced lead was juveniles. Kids born in the late-70s showed only small improvements because lead had been only slightly reduced during their childhood. Kids born in the late-80s showed more improvement because ambient lead had decreased quite a bit during their childhood. Kids born in the late-90s showed yet more improvement, etc.

Rick Nevin has sent me a new chart that shows this vividly:

In the early 90s, young people between the age of 18-24 killed an average of 33 police officers per year. By 2015 that was down to 4. For juveniles under the age of 18, the number was zero.

Kids just aren’t as dangerous as they used to be, and that’s likely to be a permanent change. As time passes, this will affect older and older generations as the cohort born in the late-80s (when most lead was gone) grows up. How much better does news get?

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Kids Are Killing a Lot Fewer Cops These Days

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Another Native-led pipeline battle bubbles up in New Jersey.

by stefanberry Posted on December 27, 2016

This year was chock-full of superlatives — and not the good kind — thanks to a sweltering El Niño on top of decades of climate change:

1. The longest streak of record-breaking months, from May 2015 to August 2016. It was the hottest January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, and September since we began collecting data 137 years ago, according to NOAA.

2. The largest coral bleaching event ever observed. As much as 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef experienced record-breaking bleaching over the Southern Hemisphere summer, which also wreaked havoc to reefs across the Pacific in the longest-running global bleaching event ever observed.

3. The Arctic is getting really hot. Alaska saw its hottest year ever, with temperatures an average of 6 degrees F above normal. Arctic sea ice cover took a nosedive to a new low this fall, as temperatures at the North Pole reached an insane seasonal high nearly 50 degrees above average. Reminder: There is no sun in the Arctic in December.

4. The first year we spent entirely above 400 ppm. After the biggest monthly jump in atmospheric CO2 levels from February 2015 to February 2016, those levels stayed high for all of 2016.

5. The hottest year. Pending an extreme plunge in global temperatures in the next few days, 2016 will almost certainly be the warmest year humans have ever spent on the Earth’s surface.

Even if it weren’t the hottest year yet, context matters more than year-to-year comparisons. The last five years have been the hottest five on record. The last 16 years contain 15 of the hottest years on record. We are living in unprecedented times.

See?

NOAA

More – 

Another Native-led pipeline battle bubbles up in New Jersey.

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Two of the year’s biggest stories were about vulnerable people demanding safe drinking water.

by FPOLincoln Posted on December 27, 2016

This year was chock-full of superlatives — and not the good kind — thanks to a sweltering El Niño on top of decades of climate change:

1. The longest streak of record-breaking months, from May 2015 to August 2016. It was the hottest January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, and September since we began collecting data 137 years ago, according to NOAA.

2. The largest coral bleaching event ever observed. As much as 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef experienced record-breaking bleaching over the Southern Hemisphere summer, which also wreaked havoc to reefs across the Pacific in the longest-running global bleaching event ever observed.

3. The Arctic is getting really hot. Alaska saw its hottest year ever, with temperatures an average of 6 degrees F above normal. Arctic sea ice cover took a nosedive to a new low this fall, as temperatures at the North Pole reached an insane seasonal high nearly 50 degrees above average. Reminder: There is no sun in the Arctic in December.

4. The first year we spent entirely above 400 ppm. After the biggest monthly jump in atmospheric CO2 levels from February 2015 to February 2016, those levels stayed high for all of 2016.

5. The hottest year. Pending an extreme plunge in global temperatures in the next few days, 2016 will almost certainly be the warmest year humans have ever spent on the Earth’s surface.

Even if it weren’t the hottest year yet, context matters more than year-to-year comparisons. The last five years have been the hottest five on record. The last 16 years contain 15 of the hottest years on record. We are living in unprecedented times.

See?

NOAA

Read this article – 

Two of the year’s biggest stories were about vulnerable people demanding safe drinking water.

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California is not playing around with climate action.

by KishaLeatherman Posted on December 27, 2016

This year was chock-full of superlatives — and not the good kind — thanks to a sweltering El Niño on top of decades of climate change:

1. The longest streak of record-breaking months, from May 2015 to August 2016. It was the hottest January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, and September since we began collecting data 137 years ago, according to NOAA.

2. The largest coral bleaching event ever observed. As much as 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef experienced record-breaking bleaching over the Southern Hemisphere summer, which also wreaked havoc to reefs across the Pacific in the longest-running global bleaching event ever observed.

3. The Arctic is getting really hot. Alaska saw its hottest year ever, with temperatures an average of 6 degrees F above normal. Arctic sea ice cover took a nosedive to a new low this fall, as temperatures at the North Pole reached an insane seasonal high nearly 50 degrees above average. Reminder: There is no sun in the Arctic in December.

4. The first year we spent entirely above 400 ppm. After the biggest monthly jump in atmospheric CO2 levels from February 2015 to February 2016, those levels stayed high for all of 2016.

5. The hottest year. Pending an extreme plunge in global temperatures in the next few days, 2016 will almost certainly be the warmest year humans have ever spent on the Earth’s surface.

Even if it weren’t the hottest year yet, context matters more than year-to-year comparisons. The last five years have been the hottest five on record. The last 16 years contain 15 of the hottest years on record. We are living in unprecedented times.

See?

NOAA

From: 

California is not playing around with climate action.

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Here Is Your Morning Donald

by kaseytrenerry06 Posted on October 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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One of Donald Trump’s favorite words is “strong.” He came out “strongly” against the Iraq War. Vets who are “strong” don’t get PTSD. We have to be strong against ISIS, strong on law-and-order, strong against illegal immigrants, and strong on guns. On Wednesday, he even preemptively insisted he’d eventually be strong on an issue he knew nothing about:

I’m gonna take a very strong look at it and I will come very strongly one way or the other. I will have an opinion.

Trump was in Nevada and was asked about the nuclear waste facility being built at Yucca Mountain. He actually admitted he knew nothing about it, but then said that once he did know something—BOOM! He’d be strong. Very strong.

In other Trump news, we learn that back during his bankruptcy days, Trump’s own lawyers always met with him in pairs. Why?

In other words, Trump lied to his own lawyers so routinely that they had to have backup whenever they met with him. His. Own. Lawyers.

Elsewhere, we learn that Asian-Americans really, really don’t like Trump. This is from the Fall 2016 National Asian American Survey, released yesterday:

Trump is losing to the rest of the field by ratios of 2:1 all the way up to a staggering 10:1, with an average of 4:1 against him. That’s bad, but I’m not sure it’s strongly bad. He needs to up his game. I don’t think he’s insulted Asian-Americans lately,1 but if he did he could probably drive his support down to 15 percent or even lower. Come on, Donald.

1But then again, maybe he has. It’s hard to keep up.

Originally posted here:  

Here Is Your Morning Donald

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Are giant suction cups the key to cheap wind power?

by bileteaviononline Posted on July 26, 2016

Suckers

Are giant suction cups the key to cheap wind power?

By on Jul 26, 2016Share

The coolest new innovation in offshore wind energy right now is, essentially, a giant toilet plunger. Put enough of these plungers together and they could help power Detroit, Chicago, and the other metropolises of the Midwest.

Lake Erie Energy Development and Fred Olsen Renewables, a European energy company, plan on building a wind installation with the help of these toilet plungers, aiming for six 50-foot high turbines in Lake Erie, seven miles off the coast of Cleveland.

Putting wind turbines in the Great Lakes instead of on Midwestern farmland makes plenty of sense. Compared to farmland, underwater land is cheap. There’s also more wind on the water, because there are no inconvenient trees or buildings in the way. The Great Lakes are freshwater, so mechanical parts won’t wear down as fast as they would in the ocean’s saltwater. And big cities surround the Great Lakes, which makes it easy to connect a new installation to a pre-existing power plant.

The toilet plunger method (more formally known as the “Mono Bucket”) is an example of how a technological game-changer can often be incredibly low tech. Imagine a bunch of giant plungers in a lake. When the plungers descend, the water trapped in the bottom is pushed out, creating a vacuum. The vacuum pulls the plunger down to the lake bed and anchors it. This provides a solid base for a wind turbine and takes much less time than the standard method of using pile drivers to push concrete-filled steel pipes into the ground. It’s also less environmentally destructive.

This “Icebreaker” project  — a nod to the ice floes that dot Lake Erie in the winter — is expected to generate 20 megawatts by the fall of 2018. But the potential for expanding this project is enormous. The Great Lakes have one-fifth of the country’s impressive but unused offshore wind energy, a mind-boggling 700 gigawatts, enough to power as many as 525 million households, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s nearly four times as much energy as U.S. households currently use.

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Are giant suction cups the key to cheap wind power?

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Donald Trump Has to Reassure Supporters That He’ll Win Arizona

by weask Posted on June 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Saturday afternoon in Phoenix, Donald Trump did something no Republican nominee has had to do two decades: He promised to win Arizona.

He also promised to win Connecticut, said he would do “unbelievably well with the Mexicans,” and promised to solve “all of our problems” if elected president. But less than one month after he secured enough delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination, Trump’s usual bombast was surrounded by signs of his campaign’s own mortality.

For one thing, there was the fact that he was even appearing in Phoenix at all. Arizona was a strong state for Trump in the presidential primary, but it is an unusual place for a candidate to spend much time after winning the nomination. The state hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential year since 1996. No Democrats hold statewide office here, and Mitt Romney won the state by more than 10 points in 2012. If Arizona were to become a battleground state, it would most likely signify a landslide. But Clinton leads Trump in Real Clear Politics‘ polling average of the state, and Trump’s rally on Saturday, at the Phoenix Memorial Coliseum—known locally as the “Madhouse on McDowell”—seemed to belie the state’s deep-red reputation. Trump told the crowd he was “up big in the state,” but then said it was “a very important state” and he would win it in the fall. Speaking a short while earlier, former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who joined was joined at the event by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, drew a cheer from the crowd when she promised to “keep Arizona red.” They just might; but the biggest story was that it even needed to be said.

Throughout the event, Trump projected an air of confidence—”I feel like a supermodel except times 10,” he said of his media saturation—but there were signs that all was not going so swell with his campaign. He mocked a Politico story that quoted a Trump adviser suggesting Trump would consider giving up his presidential bid for the right amount of money. According to the story, Trump might accept a $150 million buyout. To hoots from the crowd, Trump boasted that he wouldn’t accept five times that much—but, he conceded, if they offered him $5 billion, he’d be foolish not to consider it. In the build-up to his grand entrance, one surrogate after another had engaged the audience in a call and response. The question was “Who’s the nominee?” After the week he’d had, it was starting to feel a little less than rhetorical.

In his most audacious promise, Trump recalled how he had won victory after victory in northeastern blue states during the Republican primary. His strong showings were a sign, he suggested, that he could compete and win in places like Connecticut in the general election. (A cynical person might note that Republican primaries are usually won by Republicans.) But Hartford will have to wait for another time; for now, he’s just trying to win Arizona.

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Donald Trump Has to Reassure Supporters That He’ll Win Arizona

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Watch John Oliver Dismantle the Stupid Way the Media Covers Every Scientific Study

by Magaret56Z Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Does coffee cause cancer—or help prevent it? What about red wine? These are some of the vital questions that scientists have long struggled to answer, with journalists by their side to misreport the findings.

For the media, scientific studies can be a great source of stories: Someone else does all the work on reaching a conclusion that appears to directly affect something your audience cares about (often their health). What’s more, that conclusion comes with a shiny gloss of indisputable factuality: “This isn’t just some made-up nonsense—it’s science! It must be true.” We’ve all seen how scientific conclusions that were carefully vetted by other scientists can be reduced or distorted beyond recognition for the sake of TV ratings or story clicks. I’m sure I’ve done it myself.

The systemic failure of science communication by mass media is the topic of John Oliver’s latest diatribe, and he really nails it. There are a variety of problems all mashed together:

  1. Journalists often don’t take the time, or have the skills, to actually read through, comprehend, and translate scientific findings that can be very technical. After all, scientific papers are written for other scientists, not for the general public, so it takes a certain amount of training and effort to unpack what they mean. But that’s, like, hard and boring, and it’s not as if your audience will know any better if you screw it up.
  2. Journalists like big, bold conclusions: “X Thing Cures Cancer!” Scientists don’t work like that. Most peer-reviewed papers focus on very narrow problems and wade far into the weeds of complicated scientific debates. That doesn’t mean studies are all too esoteric to be be useful (although some undoubtedly are). It means that scientists draw their overarching conclusions about the universe based on a broad reading of entire bodies of literature, not individual studies. Single studies rarely yield revolutions; instead, our understanding evolves slowly through tedious, piecemeal work. Scientists want to understand the forest; journalists often just want to show you, dear reader, this one REALLY AWESOME IMPORTANT tree they just found. Those conflicting interests can lead to misleading reporting.
  3. Not all studies are created equal; some contain a variety of inadequacies that should give you pause about the conclusions. But journalists often do a poor job of reporting on these inadequacies, either because they don’t do enough reporting to know the inadequacies exist or because reporting them would undermine the big, bold conclusion the reporter wants to tell you about. Some studies have extremely small samples sizes. Some relied on rats or monkeys or whatever, but the journalist doesn’t explain that the conclusion might not be the same for humans. Actual studies that were published in peer-reviewed journals are often given equal air time to “studies” that some activist/lobbying group/bozo in his garage threw together. Some studies lack important context or conflict with preexisting science—something that journalists often fail to point out.

All these failures lead to confusion and erode the public’s trust in scientists. As Oliver points out, bad reporting about scientific research on the health effects of smoking was a major tool of the tobacco industry in its fight against smoking regulations. The same kind of thing happens all the time now with climate change research. See, for example, the so-called global warming “hiatus.” Over the last couple of years there has been a healthy debate in the scientific community about whether global warming slowed down over the last decade, and if so, why. In part because of sloppy reporting, the debate was misrepresented by climate change deniers as evidence that global warming doesn’t exist at all—which was never what climate scientists were arguing. (That debate is ongoing; Scientific American has a good update on the latest.)

The important thing to remember is that any one individual study isn’t worth very much and can never really “prove” anything. It’s not as if Charles Darwin wrote one study about evolution and rested his case at that. It took years of additional research by other scientists to validate his theory. In fact, as Oliver notes, the intense public pressure for scientists to come up with big, bold discoveries actually undermines a very important step in the scientific method: reproducing the results of other scientists. Replicating someone else’s study is a good way to find out if the original was a fluke or a genuine finding. Recall the scandal from the fall when dozens of psychology papers were found to fail a reproducibility test, thus casting serious doubt on their conclusions. That kind of fact-checking doesn’t happen enough—a trend some observers have called a “crisis of credibility”.

As a general rule (one that I’m sure to have broken as much as anyone), journalists should avoid making too big a stink about individual studies, at least without serving them with a very large grain of salt. Kudos to Oliver for reminding us why that’s important.

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Watch John Oliver Dismantle the Stupid Way the Media Covers Every Scientific Study

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After New York Win, Clinton Campaign Says Sanders’ Attacks Help Republicans

by KrystleLaughlin Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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After a decisive victory in New York on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign called on Bernie Sanders to strike a more positive tone in the final two months of the primary contest, hinting that the senator from Vermont should ultimately leave the race gracefully without damaging the party’s chances of winning in the fall. As an example for how Sanders should conduct his campaign, a Clinton aide pointed to how the then-Sen. Clinton helped unite the party behind Barack Obama in 2008.

Speaking with reporters after Clinton’s victory rally in Manhattan Tuesday night, Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri called on Sanders to run a more positive, issue-based campaign. “He needs to decide as he closes out the Democratic primary, if he is going to continue on the destructive path that he started down in the New York primary where he is making personal character attacks against her that mimic the attacks that Republicans make and aid Republicans, or if he is going to end this primary the way that he promised to run—the kind of campaign he said he would run—that was focused on issues,” she said. “There’s no question that Sen. Sanders, that the behavior of him and his campaign has been destructive.”

Palmieri pointed to Sanders’ recent comment that Clinton is not qualified to be president—a remark Sanders quickly walked back—as well as his assertion in the last debate that he questioned her judgment. She also noted that the Sanders campaign on Monday accused the Clinton campaign of campaign finance violations.

Palmieri cited Clinton’s own example in the 2008 primary against Obama as a guide for Sanders. Because Clinton stayed in that race until June, she said the Clinton team respects Sanders’ decision to see the race through to the end. But, she noted, Clinton did not contest Obama’s win at the Democratic National Convention in Denver that year.

Palmieri did not note the nasty tone of the 2008 contest. “I think she set a gold standard for how people who don’t end up with the nomination, who lose in that effort, should come together and help the party,” she said. “Given the primary that they went through, where they both went all the way to the end, very hard fought, to come and ask to play that role and be the person to who says, ‘By acclamation, I say this party stands behind this nominee and he’s going to be our next president’…that’s what we have seen happen before. We think that can happen again.”

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After New York Win, Clinton Campaign Says Sanders’ Attacks Help Republicans

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