Tag Archives: gene

Congress Might Actually Pass a Bill to Address VA Problems

by WillieKwan Posted on July 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Since I’ve been griping for a long time about Congress being unable to pass so much as a Mother’s Day resolution these days, it’s only fair to highlight the possibility of actual progress on something:

House and Senate negotiators have reached a tentative agreement to deal with the long-term needs of the struggling Department of Veterans Affairs and plan to unveil their proposal Monday.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), who lead the Senate and House Veterans’ Affairs committees, continued negotiating over the weekend. Aides said they “made significant progress” on legislation to overhaul the VA and provide funding to hire more doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals. Sanders and Miller are scheduled to discuss their plan Monday afternoon.

We don’t have all the details yet, and the bill hasn’t actually passed or anything. There’s still plenty of time for tea partiers to throw their usual tantrum. And there’s also plenty of time for the House GOP leadership to respond to the tantrum by crawling back into its cave and killing the whole thing. It’ll be President Obama’s fault, of course, probably for attending a fundraiser, or maybe for sneezing at the wrong time.

But maybe not! Maybe they really will pass this thing. It would provide vets with more flexibility to see doctors outside the VA system, which is a bit of a Band-Aid—but probably a necessary one—and it provides additional funding for regions that have seen a big influx of veterans. On the flip side, I don’t get the sense that the bill will really do much to fix the culture of the VA, which becomes a political cause célèbre every few years as we discover that all the same things we yelled about the time before are still true. But I guess that’s inevitable in a political culture with the attention span of a newt.

All things considered, it would be a good sign if this bill passed. The VA, after all, isn’t an inherently partisan issue. Just the opposite, since both parties support vets about equally and both should, in theory, be more interested in helping vets than in prolonging chaos for political reasons.

In other words, if there’s anything that’s amenable to a basically technocratic solution and bipartisan support, this is it. In a way, it’s a test of whether our political system is completely broken or just mostly broken. “Mostly” would be something of a relief.

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Congress Might Actually Pass a Bill to Address VA Problems

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The Science Behind the World’s Greatest Athletes

by MervinValenti Posted on July 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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At the 1964 Winter Olympics, Eero Mäntyranta won the 15 kilometer cross-country skiing competition by a whopping 40 seconds—a margin of victory that has never been equaled. That same year, he won the 30 kilometer race by a full minute. So what made this legendary Finnish skier such a success?

According to sports journalist David Epstein, Mäntyranta became the “greatest endurance athlete” of his generation in part because of a single mutation to his erythropoietin receptor (EPOR) gene, which helps regulate the production of red blood cells. Remember Lance Armstrong’s blood doping scandal? It turns out that because of his DNA, Mäntyranta had a similar advantage over his competition—but without ingesting or injecting a single cell. Mäntyranta “produced about 50 percent more oxygen-carrying red blood cells than a normal person,” explains Epstein on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “So he essentially was naturally what…Lance Armstrong was through doping technology.”

Epstein says Mäntyranta’s EPOR mutation is the clearest example of a “sports gene”—a single genetic variant that has the ability to turn someone into a superior athlete. But these genes are rare. More often, says Epstein (whose recent book is also called The Sports Gene), “we’re talking about networks of genes and suites of traits that make people better suited to some sports than others.”

Saying that some people are “better suited” than others sounds a lot like the idea that some of us are born more talented. But in recent years, much of the sports community has embraced the notion that achievement in athletics is attributable largely to logging 10,000 hours (or so) of dedicated training. The “10,000 hour” rule also permeates education in other domains, such as music and chess, where complex skills need to be developed. But with athletes like Mäntyranta in the competition, can this status quo idea possibly still hold true? And what, exactly, is the scientific recipe for building an elite athlete?

Here are a few of the key factors that Epstein lays out:

Start with the right genes. Mäntyranta’s EPOR mutation isn’t the only gene variant that can make or break an athletic career. On chromosome two of the human genome, there is a gene that codes for a protein called myostatin. (Myo meaning “muscle,” and statin meaning “to halt.”) For most people, this gene does exactly what its name suggests—it stops the production of muscles. But in rare cases, says Epstein, “someone has a mutant version, and it basically doesn’t tell their muscles to stop growing on time, and they end up being really, really muscle-bound.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, explains Epstein, the first adult determined to have this mutation was a professional sprinter. But it’s been detected in young children, as well. In 1999, for instance, a bouncing baby boy with seemingly superhuman strength was born in Germany. Unlike his roly-poly peers, this baby was ripped. The muscle mass in his lower limbs was off one end of the charts, while his limited body fat was off the other end.

When this “Superbaby” was tested for the presence of myostatin, none was detected in his blood. And other babies with similar mutations have begun to pop up, including Liam Hoekstra, who apparently could do a difficult gymnast move called the iron cross by the time he was 5 months old and could do a pull-up at eight months.

But if one gene can have such a significant effect, what other gene variants might be combined in a person to optimize athletic performance?

In his book, Epstein cites Alun G. Williams and Jonathan P. Folland, scientists in England who are studying 23 gene variants strongly linked to athletic endurance. The chance that any single individual currently on the planet has all 23 variants is incredibly small—less than one in a quadrillion (one thousand million million). The most any one of us can hope for is about 16 of these 23. The chance of having none of these variants, or very few of them, is also extremely small. Most of us have some but not too many. The end result? We need to train to build up endurance.

But genetics can also make a big difference when it comes to that training. “No two people respond to the medicine of training the same way because of differences in their genes,” says Epstein. “And so it’s turning out that the talent of trainability—the ability to get more biological adaptation out of your one hour of training than the next guy or the next girl—is really the most important kind of talent.”

But if we can’t change our genes, what can we do to become better athletes?

Learn to to predict the future. When it comes to professional baseball, says Epstein, “keep your eye on the ball” is useless advice. That’s because Major League pitches take far less than half a second to reach the plate—they’re simply moving faster than the eye can track. What batters are actually keeping track of is a specific pattern of movements that the pitcher is making.

Ted Williams in 1957, on his way to the Major League batting title. AP

The ability to predict where the ball will go based on how the pitcher releases it is the real talent of an all-star hitter. That’s why Mariano Rivera could strike out batter after batter with one pitch: a 90+ mile-per-hour cut fastball whose final destination was very difficult to predict. With just a subtle difference in how much pressure he put on the ball with two of his fingers, he could alter its course dramatically.

That’s also why no amount of trips to the batting cage will turn you into a slugger like Albert Pujols or Ted Williams. “We’ve only just realized that pitching machines are totally worthless for baseball practice,” explains Epstein, “because they don’t teach you to read body movements the way that you need to.”

Putting this idea to the test, softball pitcher Jennie Finch struck out Pujols and other Major League batters during the 2004 Pepsi All-Star Softball Game—her windup and delivery confounded their ability to predict where the pitch will go, despite the fact that she threw a bigger ball.

To understand how complex skills like hitting a small projectile traveling at speeds of over 90 miles per hour are performed, consider a famous study in which chess players of different levels were given a few seconds to study a chess board. What separated the experts from the amateurs was the fact that grand masters could memorize the location of pieces on the board after looking at it for just three seconds. At first, it seemed as though they had superhuman memory skills. But when the scientists asked them to memorize the placement of pieces on a board that didn’t conform to the rules of the game, they were no better than novices. In other words, what grand masters have actually developed is the ability to organize the board into meaningful units in their mind’s eye—what psychologists call “chunks”—that they can then easily recall.

Major League Baseball players can’t hit Jennie Finch’s pitches. C5813/Wikimedia Commons

We all use chunking to remember complex things: “If I gave you 20 random words right now, you’d have a lot of trouble repeating them back to me,” explains Epstein. “But, if I gave you a 20-word meaningful sentence, you might be able to repeat it back to me or very closely.” Why? Because “you’ve learned a system of grammar and groups of words and phrases that you can break down into meaningful chunks. So, you don’t have to…rely on your working memory.” And, adds Epstein, “it turns out sports works in a very similar way.”

So it’s not that MLB players have superhuman reflexes; instead, over the course of many years of training, they learn to “read” a pitcher’s upper body movements and predict where the ball will end up. “It’s really this kind of cognitive expertise that they’ve learned that allows them to look as if they’re reacting faster than is humanly possible,” says Epstein. “They are judging the field—their version of the chess board—and seeing what’s going to come in the future.”

Sample many sports in childhood—don’t specialize too early. As every parent knows, elite athleticism comes at a high price in the US, with many coaches pressuring talented children to start specialized practice immediately—often to the exclusion of other sports and activities. “AAU basketball has a second graders’ national championships now,” notes Epstein. “This is like kids who are over-hand heaving a ball at a 10-foot rim. They’ve convinced parents it’s like an important part of the scouting pipeline and their kids will get behind if they don’t go.”

Epstein argues that this push towards specialization—which he attributes to the popularization of the 10,000 hours rule—has been a “disaster.”

“There’s now a pretty strong body of evidence that we’ve over-specialized kids too early, and it actually makes them worse athletes,” he says. What Epstein is getting at is that there seems to be a critical “sampling period” before puberty, during which many eventual professional athletes play a variety of sports. Hyper-specialization makes it harder for kids to find the sport that is best suited to their biology. As an example for parents to follow, Epstein points to two-time NBA most valuable player Steve Nash, who didn’t start playing basketball until he was 12 or 13.

Grow up in a small town. The trend towards hyper-specialization might even explain why professional athletes come disproportionately from small towns, far away from elite training programs, instead of from major metropolises. If you’re from a city with a population of more than 5 million people, you’re actually less likely than the average Joe to make it to the NBA. If you come from a town of 50,000 to 99,000 people, your chances are 11 times greater than average of making it to the NFL or the NBA. These towns “are vastly over-represented for producing elite athletes,” says Epstein, “because they’re big enough to have a team, and small enough to avoid all of the hyper-specialization that the 10,000 hours has caused.”

Take a scientist’s approach to your own training. Ultimately, as scientists learn more about the biology of athletic prowess and the skills we need to excel at specific activities, what’s becoming clear is that training needs to be more individualized. Given the highly variable nature of our genes, what can you do to make sure that you’re using those training hours most effectively? Think like a scientist: test and retest your assumptions constantly.

“In studies of kids who go on to become elite, whether it’s in chess, sports or music,” says Epstein, “they tend to more often exhibit that self-regulatory behavior where they’re almost taking a scientist’s view of themselves…and continually evaluating and evaluating. And they better figure out what works for them.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion with skeptical pediatrician Clay Jones.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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The Science Behind the World’s Greatest Athletes

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Friday Cat Blogging – 25 July 2014

by RobertaRosenbau Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Say hello to Mozart, the latest addition to the Drum family menagerie. One of my mother’s neighbors found him wandering around, so naturally he ended up at my mother’s house. He’s a very sociable cat and appears to be very pleased with his choice of home. To celebrate his appearance, today you get two catblogging photos: one that shows his whole body and one that’s a close-up of his face. Enjoy.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 25 July 2014

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Gruber: "It Was Just a Mistake"

by HungLvksmm Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why did Jonathan Gruber tell an audience in 2012 that states which failed to set up Obamacare exchanges would be depriving their residents of federal subsidies? Jonathan Cohn caught up with Gruber this morning and got an answer:

I honestly don’t remember why I said that. I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake.

….There are few people who worked as closely with Obama administration and Congress as I did, and at no point was it ever even implied that there’d be differential tax credits based on whether the states set up their own exchange. And that was the basis of all the modeling I did, and that was the basis of any sensible analysis of this law that’s been done by any expert, left and right.

I didn’t assume every state would set up its own exchanges but I assumed that subsidies would be available in every state. It was never contemplated by anybody who modeled or worked on this law that availability of subsides would be conditional of who ran the exchanges.

So there you have it: Gruber screwed up. More importantly, as he points out, he’s performed immense amounts of technical modeling of Obamacare, and all of his models assumed that everyone would get subsidies even though not every state would set up its own exchange. As Cohn says, this was pretty much the unanimous belief of everyone involved:

As I’ve written before, I had literally hundreds of conversations with the people writing health care legislation in 2009 and 2010, including quite a few with Gruber. Like other journalists who were following the process closely, I never heard any of them suggest subsidies would not be available in states where officials decided not to operate their own marketplaces—a big deal that, surely, would have come up in conversation.

Kudos to Peter Suderman and his sleuths for uncovering this and getting everyone to talk about it for a day. It’s a news cycle win for conservatives. But restricting subsidies to state exchanges just flatly wasn’t part of Congress’s intent. There’s simply no way to rewrite history to make it seem like it was.

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Gruber: "It Was Just a Mistake"

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The Great Third-Pound Burger Ripoff

by EmmaJyylkepeom Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is from a New York Times Magazine piece about America’s innumeracy problem:

One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, when the A&W restaurant chain released a new hamburger to rival the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. With a third-pound of beef, the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. A lavish A&W television and radio marketing campaign cited these benefits. Yet instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “â…&#147;,” led them astray.

Are Americans really innumerate compared to other countries? Perhaps: Author Elizabeth Green says that American adults did pretty poorly in a 2012 international test of numeracy. The rest of her piece is all about how we could teach math better if we really put our minds to it, but unfortunately, after inventing all the best methods for teaching math we gave up, leaving it to the Japanese to perfect them. I don’t know whether or not this is a fair summary of the current state of play in math ed.

Still, the A&W anecdote was too good to check, and too good not to pass along. If it’s not true, it should be.

UPDATE: Elizabeth Green tweets that her source for this anecdote is Threshold Resistance by Alfred Taubman, who owned A&W in the 80s. Here’s the relevant passage, after Taubman has called in Yankelovich, Skelly and White to figure out what was wrong with their burger:

Well, it turned out that customers preferred the taste of our fresh beef over traditional fast-food hockey pucks. Hands down, we had a better product. But there was a serious problem. More than half of the participants in the Yankelovich focus groups questioned the price of our burger. “Why,” they asked, “should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s? You’re overcharging us.” Honestly. People thought a third of a pound was less than a quarter of a pound. After all, three is less than four!

So there you go.

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The Great Third-Pound Burger Ripoff

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Lots of Americans Think Obamacare Has Benefited Nobody

by BeatrisPerrett Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent points us to an interesting new CNN poll about Obamacare. It asks the usual question about favoring or opposing the law, with the usual results. The basic question shows that Obamacare is unpopular by 40-59 percent, but when you add in the folks who “oppose” it only because they wish it were more liberal, it flips to 57-38 percent. In other words, if you confine yourself to garden variety conservative opposition to Obamacare, there’s not nearly as much as most polls suggest.

But then there’s another question: Has Obamacare helped you or your family personally? About 18 percent say yes. How about other families? Do you think Obamacare has helped anyone at all?

And guess what: A huge majority of Republicans and conservatives don’t think the law has helped anybody in this country.

Among all Americans, the poll finds that 18 percent say the law has made them and their families better off….Meanwhile, 44 percent say the law hasn’t helped anybody — a lot, but still a minority.

Crucially, an astonishing 72 percent of Republicans, and 64 percent of conservatives, say the law hasn’t helped anyone. (Only one percent of Republicans say the law has helped them!) By contrast, 57 percent of moderates say the law has helped them or others. Independents are evenly divided.

Perhaps these numbers among Republicans and conservatives only capture generalized antipathy towards the law. Or perhaps they reflect the belief that Obamacare can’t be helping anyone, even its beneficiaries, since dependency on Big Gummint can only be self-destructive. Either way, the findings again underscore the degree to which Republicans and conservatives inhabit a separate intellectual universe about it.

Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m a little more dismayed by the news that even a large number of moderates and independents don’t think Obamacare has helped anyone. In a way, that’s more disturbing than the dumb—but predictable—knee-jerk Republican view that automatically produces a “no” whenever the question relates to something positive about Obamacare.

I guess the lesson is that liberals still haven’t done a very good job of promoting the benefits of Obamacare. Maybe that’s an impossible task since, after all, it’s not as if you can expect the media to run endless identical stories about local folks who finally got health insurance. Still, it’s a funny thing. If you passed a law that gave cars to 10 million poor Americans, pretty much everyone would agree that some people benefited from the program. But if you pass a law that gives health insurance to 10 million poor Americans, lots of people think it’s just a gigantic illusion that’s helped no one. What’s more, the number of people who believe this has increased since last year’s rollout.

Why? Certainly not because they think health insurance is worthless. Just try taking away theirs and you’ll find out exactly how non-worthless they consider it. Is it because they don’t think Obamacare policies are “real” health insurance? Or that all these people had health insurance before and the whole thing is just a scam? Or what? It’s a peculiar view that deserves a follow-up.

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Lots of Americans Think Obamacare Has Benefited Nobody

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Contact: Gene Ween Grows Up

by NydiaI55htoavia Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ween co-founder Aaron Freeman in Brooklyn. Jacob Blickenstaff


Puss n Boots


Holly Williams


Ben Watt


Joe Henry


Gabriel Kahane


Jolie Holland


Rodney Crowell


Jill Sobule


Benmont Tench


Leyla McCalla


Keith & Tex


Declan O’Rourke


Michael Daves

As Gene Ween, Aaron Freeman was the co-leader of the long-lived alternative cult band Ween, which he started with friend Mickey Melchiondo (a.k.a. Dean Ween) when they were middle-school students in New Hope, Pennsylvania. In 2012, after more than 25 years of recording and touring, Freeman left the group as part of his effort to get sober.

Freeman, out this week, is his first album of original songs since leaving the band. It is an openly biographical and personal album that nonetheless utilizes Ween’s ability to inhabit numerous styles and eras of pop music. The musical reference points of post-Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney (“All The Way to China”), Donovan (“Black Bush”), and Cat Stevens (“Golden Monkey”) indicate inspirations that helped carry Freeman through his escape from addiction. I photographed him in Brooklyn, and we spoke again by phone from his home in Woodstock, New York. The following is in his words.

Going through the Ween breakup was really tough. Getting sober was a whole different thing. So there were two levels of it.

For me it’s a lot of patience, because I honestly didn’t know whether I was going to write again. When I write, it always kind of happens all in about a three- or four-week period, where I’ll just go into the zone. A lot of musicians talk about that. I think Bruce Springsteen said that no matter what’s going on in your life, it’s important to keep that one little radar up, because you don’t know when the universe is going to hit you with stuff to write. I really stuck to that concept, and I just waited, and waited, and waited. I would write little things, and record them on the voice memo on my iPhone, little scattered ideas. Then it came.

Last summer I was just sitting around, doing my thing, and then all of a sudden I picked up my guitar and boom! The obvious thing would be to put pressure on yourself, like, “Is this record going to be good? It’s the follow-up to 27 years of Ween, and now I’m doing this—what if it sucks?” When I finally got to the point where my subconscious could free itself of that, and it took a while, the songs started coming. I’d go into my room—the typical fucking artist thing—and scream and play my guitar, then come out six hours later, frazzled hair, not showered. My wife and son would look at me like, “Oh hey, he’s out. Do you want any food?” And I’d be like, “Aaaagh, gotta go back in!” That’s how I worked.

I’m thinking, “If I get one song, at this point in my life, that’ll be fucking amazing for me and my journey.” That one concept led to a whole record. I’m really proud of it, and really grateful I wrote it. It’s stripped down, no bells and whistles to it. I just wanted to go in, pay attention to the songs, get ’em on tape, and then move on.

No matter what goes on, I’ve written the songs that I love. They’re not very complex. I like to keep the words simple so they’re not too identifiable, and so they’ll last longer. I’d like to think that a kid could listen to it, or a bunch of old bums gathered around a trash can fire keeping themselves warm, they would both fully get it.

One of the things I’ve wanted for years, especially during the last five or so years of Ween, was more honesty. For me, it wasn’t getting sincere. We’d just put on our token songs that were kind of goofy, like “My Own Bare Hands.” Toward the end, it was just kind of…mundane. It would distract from the best parts of Mickey’s and my music.

This record is very autobiographical, it’s like a journal for me of things that I was really into in the last year or so… spiritual things and severe, gut-wrenching love songs.

That first song, “Covert Discretion,” is absolutely typical of me. There’s always been a whole bipolar thing going on with me: I’m pretty shy, or soft spoken, and then there’s the other part. A friend who does astrology told me, “You’re a Pisces, you’re totally water, and then you’ve got this fire planet.” A lot of stuff at the end of Ween was just brutal. I have to write about that stuff, or else I feel like I’m not being honest. If this is a song that calls for fucking brutal honesty, then the most important thing is to do that, and take it so far over the edge. That’s what people love about Ween, they love the honesty and not being scared to go there.

I was susceptible to hard-core addiction because my personality is that way. I think a lot of addicts, serious addicts, have that. They go full throttle and then they are coming down and they are trying to deal with it in a quiet way. It’s typical: I was either fuckin’ naked with a cowboy hat on looking for cocaine all night or I was just completely quiet in my room. And that’s a scary way to be.

The most wonderful thing about recovery is that you learn to maintain a steady way of being. There is always stimulus, whether it’s positive or negative. Buddhist philosophy really dives deep in to that: You sit with it, you meditate on it, and you let it pass. It is really difficult because you’ve never done that before. In the early stages of recovery, I’d have to go up to my room and just sit there in so much fuckin’ agony and just wait, recognize it, and let it pass. I had this mantra: Just be accountable. I wanted to be accountable for more than a week. It seems so simple, but it’s easier said than done.

In rock music, you don’t have to be accountable for anything! Laughs. It didn’t matter as long as I got on stage. For many years, I was fooling myself into thinking that I was going to lock myself away in my dressing room and help myself, and I never did because deep down I wanted to party just like everyone else was.

I think if this album sounds more derivative in certain ways it was because I was more clear-minded. I leaned on music that I loved. There’s a lot of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, XTC, and David Bowie—the things that I hold dear. The whole point of this record was to chill the fuck out. For some reason something made me want to record doubled vocals on almost the entire album, which is awesome. I’ve always had this weird desire to conquer and make perfect double vocals. To get spiritual on you, I really let the universe dictate how this whole thing was going to turn out.

If the music sounds like something I’m influenced by, I accept that and try to make it as sincere and honorable as it can. If it’s going to sound like John Lennon, I’m going to fucking make it sound like John Lennon. I’ll never say, “Oh, this kind of sounds like a Lennon song, so I better make it sound different.” That’s not the way I look at music. I consider myself as kind of a vessel of all these beautiful things that I’ve always heard, and I let it go through me. Of course, it always has my stamp on it, my creativity, but it honors what I love.

Fortunately, I’ve had the ability to never think too much about where I’m going. In Ween, my thing has always been: It doesn’t matter what kind of song it is or where it goes as long as it’s a good song. That’s what Mickey and I always adhered to.

The foremost thing is just writing music, and I’ve been very lucky to have 25 years of that under my belt. The Ween audience is very loyal and they’re great. I want to keep making music for them. I don’t want a big, bombastic career. I’ve been through that. If people want to come, they come. If they don’t, they don’t. I want to do great live shows, because I love performing, and I hope to write songs and maybe have other people pick them up, and make a living off of doing that.

But we’ll see. I have to pay the bills. When I lost Ween and decided to get sober, I had to embrace the fact that my income was going to be a tenth of what it was, but it was still worth it. I really believe if you do the right thing and you make yourself accountable and available, then good things will happen.

Aaron Freeman Jacob Blickenstaff

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Contact: Gene Ween Grows Up

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Report: The Effects of Climate Change Are Occurring in Real-Time All Over the United States

by WilliamMLXG Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Climate change has moved from distant threat to present-day danger, and no American will be left unscathed, according to a landmark report due to be unveiled Tuesday.

The National Climate Assessment, a 1,300-page report compiled by 300 leading scientists and experts, is meant to be the definitive account of the effects of climate change on the United States. It will be formally released at a White House event and is expected to drive the remaining two years of President Obama’s environmental agenda.

The findings are expected to guide Obama as he rolls out the next and most ambitious phase of his climate change plan in June—a proposal to cut emissions from the current generation of power plants, America’s largest single source of carbon pollution.

The White House is believed to be organizing a number of events over the coming week to give the report greater exposure.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” a draft version of the report says. The evidence is visible everywhere from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, the report continues.

“Americans are noticing changes all around them. Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours, though in many regions there are longer dry spells in between.”

The final wording was under review by the White House but the basic gist remained unchanged, scientists who worked on the report said.

On Sunday the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said the world needed to try harder to combat climate change. At a meeting of UN member states in Abu Dhabi before a climate change summit in New York City on September 23, Ban said: “I am asking them to announce bold commitments and actions that will catalyze the transformative change we need. If we do not take urgent action, all our plans for increased global prosperity and security will be undone.”

Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan University and vice-chair of the NCA advisory committee, said the US report would be unequivocal that the effects of climate change were occurring in real-time and were evident in every region of the country.

“One major take-home message is that just about every place in the country has observed that the climate has changed,” he told the Guardian. “It is here and happening, and we are not cherry-picking or fear-mongering.”

The draft report notes that average temperature in the United States has increased by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, with more than 80 percent of that rise since 1980. The last decade was the hottest on record in the US.

Temperatures are projected to rise another 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the next few decades, the report says. In northern latitudes such as Alaska, temperatures are rising even faster.

“There is no question our climate is changing,” said Don Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois and a lead author of the assessment. “It is changing at a factor of 10 times more than naturally.”

Record-breaking heat—even at night—is expected to produce more drought and fuel larger and more frequent wildfires in the Southwest, the report says. The Northeast, Midwest, and Great Plains states will see an increase in heavy downpours and a greater risk of flooding.

“Parts of the country are getting wetter, parts are getting drier. All areas are getting hotter,” said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change at the US Geological Survey. “The changes are not the same everywhere.”

Those living on the Atlantic seaboard, Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska who have weathered the effects of sea level rise and storm surges can expect to see more. Residents of coastal cities, especially in Florida—where there is already frequent flooding during rainstorms—can expect to see more. So can people living in inland cities sited on rivers.

Some changes are already having a measurable effect on food production and public health, the report will say.

John Balbus, senior adviser at the National Institute of Environmental Health Science and a lead author of the NCA report, said rising temperatures increased the risk of heat stroke and heat-related deaths.

Eugene Takle, convening lead author of the agriculture chapter of the NCA report and director of the climate science program at Iowa State University, said heat waves and changes in rainfall had resulted in a leveling off in wheat and corn production and would eventually cause declines.

In California, warmer winters have made it difficult to grow cherries. In the Midwest, wetter springs have delayed planting. Invasive vines such as kudzu have spread northward, from the South to the Canadian border.

Some of the effects on agriculture, such as a longer growing season, are positive. But Takle said: “By mid-century and beyond the overall impacts will be increasingly negative on most crops and livestock.”

The assessments are the American equivalent of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. This year’s report for the first time looks at what the United States has done to fight climate change or protect people from its consequences in the future.

Under an act of Congress the reports were supposed to be produced every four years, but no report was produced during George W Bush’s presidency.

More here – 

Report: The Effects of Climate Change Are Occurring in Real-Time All Over the United States

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Get off my lawn! Organic farmers just can’t get along with GMO-growing neighbors

by vserko45 Posted on March 5, 2014

Get off my lawn! Organic farmers just can’t get along with GMO-growing neighbors

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Another day, another bunch of old, white guys complaining about their neighbors screwing up their property – except this time, it’s quite warranted.

A new survey from Food & Water Watch has found that over 80 percent of organic farmers across the country are worried about how genetically modified crops in nearby fields are affecting their own. These farmers have incurred significant financial losses due to GMO contamination and the measures taken in attempts to prevent it.

It turns out that keeping organic crops and GMOs sufficiently separate is not cheap. To create a “buffer zone” around their fields, as required by USDA organic standards, the farmers surveyed said they set aside a median of five acres at a median cost of $2,500 per year. In some instances, the cost was more than $20,000 per year.

Organic farmers have also begun to delay planting, so that their crops won’t pollinate at the same time as neighboring GMOs and risk having their gene pool sullied. This results in further losses of about $5,300 a year for corn crops, and $3,300 for soybeans.

And even with these precautions, one-third of farmers are still seeing problems caused by GMO contamination, with more than half of them reporting that they’ve had crops rejected by buyers because of it. The median cost of each rejected load, which contains approximately 1,000 bushels, is $4,500.

To the typical organic farmer, these losses are no heirloom fingerling potatoes. They’re a significant percentage of their incomes.

It’s not all about the Benjamins, either. Animosity between organic and conventional farmers has noticeably mounted. The report notes:

The survey asked farmers if they had any non-monetary costs from the threat of GMO contamination. Several responses described strain between GMO and non-GMO farmers. One farmer wrote that, “…every time I walk into the local co-op they grit their teeth.” Others wrote that “conventional farming neighbors do not respect us,” that non-organic “neighbors feel that our farm is a thorn in their sides or a nuisance,” and that they “are considered to be a problem to them because we are not GMO like the rest of them.” Some relationships have gotten so strained that “neighbors get bent out of shape” when approached about GMO issues, and “some neighbors will no longer tell us what they plant.”

Food & Water Watch was inspired to conduct its survey after sustainable agriculture advocates across the country were disappointed by a 2012 report on the same topic from a USDA biotech advisory committee. That group, which was heavily loaded with Big Ag interests, declined to make any policy recommendations that would help stop GMO contamination of non-GMO fields and was widely attacked by organic farming groups.

“Can’t we all just get along?” is proving to be an unrealistic approach for an increasingly divided farming sector. Here’s hoping the USDA catches on to that soon.

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Get off my lawn! Organic farmers just can’t get along with GMO-growing neighbors

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The Best Oscar of Last Night Was the Screenplay Award for "Her"

by EllaBlocker Posted on March 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today presents a blogging problem: The news cycle is devoted almost entirely to events in Ukraine—as it should be—and I’ve already probably said more about this than I should. I don’t have any special expertise in the area, and I really hate the phenomenon of instant expertise that takes hold of pundits everywhere whenever something like this happens. I’m keenly aware of all the big underlying issues—Russia’s long cultural ties to Ukraine; the eastward spread of NATO and the EU; anti-Russian sentiment in Kiev; the weakness of Russia’s military; Putin’s one-note thuggishness; Ukraine’s endemic corruption and its internal fights over who gets to profit from the Russian gas trade; etc. etc.—and also keenly aware that a bare knowledge of all this stuff doesn’t really make me worth reading on the subject. For what it’s worth, I’ve already made a prediction that Putin will stop at Crimea because (a) the Russian army doesn’t have the strength to do much more, and (b) Putin isn’t willing to pay the price both in military and diplomatic terms for a broader intervention in eastern Ukraine. But I could be wildly wrong. Who knows?

So then, what should I write about today? I’m not sure, though I imagine that I’ll end up writing more about Ukraine despite everything I just said.

In the meantime, how about a nice Oscars thread? No? Oh come on. I’ll toss out a provocation to get everyone started: the best award of the night was the Best Original Screenplay win for Her. Not because it was my favorite movie of the year or anything, but because it was the first screenplay in ages that genuinely surprised me. Not in the sense of a last-minute twist that comes out of nowhere—that’s common enough—but in the sense of a narrative that shifted directions smoothly and naturally into something much more interesting than I thought it would be. The art of Hollywood screenwriting has deteriorated so badly that this doesn’t happen very often anymore. I won’t say more in case you haven’t seen the movie and still plan to, but feel free to discuss in comments.

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The Best Oscar of Last Night Was the Screenplay Award for "Her"

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