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The Deck Was Stacked for Trump in Nevada

by RosalindGriffith Posted on February 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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If any state was going to cement Donald Trump’s front-runner status in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, it’s fitting that Nevada should be the one to do the job.

Las Vegas dominates the state’s politics—more than 70 percent of the state population lives in the city or surrounding Clark County—and Trump is perfectly suited to the city’s glitz and bombast. His giant Trump Tower gleams right off the Vegas strip, standing apart from the clustered pack of casino resorts, where everyone can see his name from far and wide. This is a place that forgives sin in the name of fun, gravitates toward the newest shiny object, and is willing to look the other way at uncouth behavior. It’s a place where winning is everything.

And win he did. Trump was declared the victor of the Nevada Republican caucuses by TV networks shortly after caucus precincts began reporting results, with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz tussling over second place, just as they did three days ago in Trump’s win in the South Carolina primary. Rubio didn’t bother to stick around in the state to watch results, instead departing earlier Tuesday for the Super Tuesday states that will vote next week. John Kasich, who didn’t even campaign in Nevada this week, and Ben Carson were an afterthought, even if their decisions to stay in the race are taking a toll on Rubio and Cruz.

Nevada was the first contest without Jeb Bush, the candidate the media had once anointed as the front-runner, and who suspended his campaign after finishing fourth in South Carolina. Now there can be little doubt that Trump is the favorite to gain the nomination. He’s finished in a dominant first place in three of the four states that have voted so far, with three consecutive wins following a second-place showing in Iowa.

Nevada was supposed to be Rubio’s firewall, a state where he spent part of his childhood and one that has a sizable Latino population. Rubio did pick up a swath of endorsements from establishment Republicans once Bush dropped out, but actual Republican voters appear unswayed.

And really, Nevada was natural territory for Trump all along. Even apart from Las Vegas, the state’s Republican Party has more of a libertarian tinge than the national GOP, with voters who are more likely to forgive Trump’s past dalliances with socially liberal policies. Trump’s populist message and anti-trade refrains resonated well in the state hit hardest by the Great Recession and foreclosure crisis.

On Monday night, Trump held a rally at a casino arena just south of the Vegas strip, drawing a crowd that he said numbered 8,000. (By comparison, only 33,000 Republicans showed up to vote in the state’s caucuses in 2012.) Early in his stump speech, he brought up the leaked video of an executive at a Carrier air-conditioning plant announcing that the company would be moving manufacturing to Mexico, costing Indianapolis 1,400 jobs in the process. “It’s very sad,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing we’re going to do about it, unless we get very smart and tough.” Trump pledged that he’d impose a 35 percent tax on each air-conditioning unit the company tries to sell in the United States, drawing loud applause from his fans. “We’ve got to put our country back together,” he said. “It’s a mess.”

But the rally was a useful reminder of the violent tone Trump’s campaign has taken. “Get him the hell out,” Trump said when the evening’s first protester stood up in the crowd. No other presidential campaign needs a PSA before rallies begin warning audience members not to get physical with protesters, and to let security handle removing them from the venue.

Trump himself contradicted that advice, imagining a violent assault on another protester being led out by security. “We’re not allowed to punch back anymore,” he said. “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out in a stretcher, folks.” Trump himself sounded as if he wanted to hop down and help the crowd rough up the protesters, saying, “I’d like to punch him in the face.”

That outlook isn’t just how Trump approaches tussles with an unruly crowd; it’s the same tone he takes with foreign policy. “We’re gonna knock the hell out of them, folks,” Trump said of ISIS on Monday. He pledged to bring back waterboarding—and said this form of torture wasn’t sufficient. “I think it’s great,” he said, “but I don’t think we go far enough.”

Before Trump spoke, Joe Arpaio, the notoriously anti-immigrant sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, took the stage to warm applause from Trump’s crowd. He said he’d invited Hillary Clinton to swing by his infamous tent city jail, and that he’d “even give her a free pair of pink underwear,” referring to a tactic he’s used to emasculate prisoners in his care.

The coarse language Trump employs and associates with could hurt him in a general election. But for now, it’s just boosting his profile among fed-up Republican voters.

“We’re not going to be the dummies anymore, folks,” Trump said at his Monday rally, after the audience cheered his call to make Mexico pay to build a wall on the border. “We’re going to be the smart ones.”

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The Deck Was Stacked for Trump in Nevada

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Is China Really Killing Us?

by FFIShirleen Posted on February 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump insists that China, Japan, and Mexico are stealing our jobs. Are they? A lot of people sure believe it. Carrier recently announced they were moving a factory to Mexico, which produced a viral video of worker reaction that’s been viewed more than 3 million times in three days. It captured in a nutshell the fear of offshoring that Trump appeals to.

So how many jobs does the United States lose each year to offshoring? Surprisingly, nobody knows. The federal government doesn’t try to track this, and companies are reluctant to talk about it. Here’s a miscellaneous sampling of various estimates:

In a report for the year 2004, BLS estimated that out of 1 million layoffs, about 16,000 represented workers whose jobs were relocated outside the country.
The Hackett Group estimates that “business-services jobs in big American and European companies” were relocated at about the rate of 150,000 per year between 2002 and 2016.
Alan Blinder, an offshoring hawk, estimated in 2006 that “offshoring to date has cost fewer than a million American service jobs, maybe a lot fewer.” In other words, maybe around 50-100,000 jobs per year.
EPI estimates that offshoring to China “eliminated or displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs” between 2001 and 2013. That’s about 250,000 jobs per year.
Forrester estimates that 3.4 million service-sector jobs were lost to offshoring between 2003 and 2015. That comes to about 300,000 jobs per year.

So we have estimates for all jobs in 2004; business services jobs in both Europe and the US between 2002-16; total jobs through 2006; total jobs to China between 2001-13; and all service-sector jobs between 2003-15. If I had to put all this together and average the high and low estimates, my horseback guess is that maybe we’re losing a total of about 400,000 jobs per year to offshoring.

That’s about 0.3 percent of America’s 150 million jobs.

Now, this is plainly not the whole picture. Partly this is because there are lots of different things that can arguably be called “offshoring.” There’s the classic version, where you close down a plant in America and move it somewhere else. But there are also cases of brand new plants being built overseas. Is this offshoring, or is it a case of wanting to build stuff near a local market? Could be a bit of both. Then there are plant closures due to overseas competition. Technically, nothing is being offshored, but jobs are certainly being lost. And of course, all of these things contribute to pressure that keeps wages low.

Beyond that, offshoring can stand in for a host of other fears. Workers are scared of losing their jobs to automation; of equity buyouts from the Bain Capitals of the world; of losing the ability to work thanks to disability; or of being laid off and never finding a good job when the economy recovers.

In other words, 0.3 percent might not seem like much, but it stands in for a potentially much scarier number. That said, here’s the thing I’m a little puzzled by: Donald Trump’s schtick is nothing new. Anyone my age remembers this. In the 80s, it was Japan that was taking all our jobs and wrecking our economy. And it was no joke. There was real fear and real rage about this. Then, in the early 90s, it was Mexico and NAFTA. Later in the decade it was the Asian Tigers. (Remember them?) Now, for the last decade or so, it’s been China. American workers have been in a fever about losing their jobs to foreigners for more than 30 years.

And yet, we’re supposed to believe that this is the reason for all the blue-collar anger that’s come out of nowhere to power the Trump phenomenon. But it doesn’t add up. Very few workers are actually in danger of losing their jobs to offshoring. And even when you add in all the other stuff, the job market right now is actually in pretty solid shape. It’s not booming, but it’s not bad. True, there’s some evidence of permanent job loss from the Great Recession, but it’s a few percent of the workforce at most. It’s not enough to produce huge rallies for a blustering xenophobe. What’s more, the evidence from New Hampshire suggests that Trump is pulling support from nearly every demographic group: rich and poor, men and women, young and old, blue collar and white collar, dropouts and college grads, conservatives and moderates. They can’t all be in a state of hysteria about China and Mexico taking their jobs.

Just to be crystal clear: This isn’t a matter of wondering why cool logic doesn’t prevail among the electorate. What I’m wondering more about is this: what are the lived, ground-level issues that are galvanizing Trump’s supporters? The job market simply doesn’t seem to be in bad enough shape—or in different enough shape—to be responsible for a sea change in attitudes. So what is it?

The obvious response is that I’m an idiot. Middle-class incomes have been sluggish for decades, while CEOs and bankers have been raking in obscene paychecks. Wages flatlined completely about 15 years ago, and then plummeted during the Great Recession. Millions of people lost their jobs for frighteningly long periods during the recession; lost their houses; and lost their dignity. Maybe things are a bit better now, but not enough to make up for nearly a decade of misery. What’s changed, then, is simply that people have finally gotten fed up.

The other obvious response is that I’m an idiot. Everyone knows that “economic anxiety” is just a wink-wink-nudge-nudge code word for ordinary racism. That’s what binds together all of Trump’s most popular positions. His supporters don’t like Asians, don’t like Mexicans, don’t like Muslims, and don’t like blacks. “China is killing us” is just a clever way to appeal to that racism in the guise of economic insecurity. Ditto for building a wall, keeping out Muslims, and “not having time for all that PC stuff.”

Yet another obvious response is that I’m an idiot. Trump’s supporters aren’t reacting to their own lived experiences so much as they’re responding to the funhouse version they hear every day from Fox and Drudge and the radio blowhards—and the Republican candidates. If you listened to these guys, you too would think America was just one presidential term away from moral degeneration and economic collapse.

So…I don’t know. A cold look at economic time series data suggests that the economy and the job market are humming along fairly well. Polling data suggests that most people are pretty satisfied with their lives. China and Mexico aren’t really killing us. I’m not trying to naively pretend that everything is hunky dory and Nigerian princes are all showering us in wire transfers, but the truth is that the vast majority of Americans are in tolerably good financial shape right now. Of course, Republicans are doing their best to pretend otherwise, and Democrats are inexplicably willing to go along with their dour predictions of doom. Maybe that’s enough all by itself to explain the booming business in apocalyptic stories about economic anxiety. But I still think there’s something missing here. I’m just not sure what.

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Is China Really Killing Us?

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How Tom Brady and Deflategate Explain Donald Trump’s New Hampshire Appeal

by CliftonCastrejon Posted on February 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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New Hampshire voters are angry. They believe a corrupt and power-hungry band of millionaire and billionaire families are running America into the ground, led by a coddled, vindictive, and dictatorial leader who doesn’t share their values and won’t help them win again.

Which is why they think NFL commissioner Roger Goodell needs to go.

“I’d like to moon him,” said Roberto Cassotto of Hampton, New Hampshire, as he waited in line for a Donald Trump rally on Thursday in Portsmouth.

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How Tom Brady and Deflategate Explain Donald Trump’s New Hampshire Appeal

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Republicans Find New $1.7 Billion Iran Chew Toy

by MelbaSeale Posted on January 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest appeasement of Iran from the capitulator-in-chief:

A deal that sent $1.7 billion in U.S. funds to Iran, announced alongside the freeing of five Americans from Iranian jails, has emerged as a new flashpoint amid a claim in Tehran that the transaction amounted to a ransom payment.

The U.S. Treasury Department wired the money to Iran around the same time its theocratic government allowed three American prisoners to fly out of Tehran on Sunday aboard a Dassault Falcon jet owned by the Swiss air force.

….Republican lawmakers are calling for an inquiry….“There’s no way the recent events occurred randomly,” said Rep. Mike Pompeo (R. Kan.), who wrote Secretary of State John Kerry this week to ask about the payment. “We will do our best to find out if this was in our interest.”

You know, I could almost believe that this was just a coincidence. If it were really a direct payoff, both sides would have taken more care to conceal it. At least, that’s how these things usually go.

But I suppose it probably was a payoff. We would have been forced to pay out the money eventually anyway, but I guess the Iranians wanted to feel like they got the better of the Great Satan or something. And now the Republicans have something new to hold an endless series of hearings about. Everybody wins!

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Republicans Find New $1.7 Billion Iran Chew Toy

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The 21st Century Sure Has Been a Great Time to Be a Corporation

by CatalinStapleto Posted on January 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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This is apropos of nothing in particular. I was just noodling around on something else and happened to run across this data, so here it is. The economic recovery of the Bush years might have been pretty anemic for most of us, but it was sure a great time for the corporate world: Between 2001 and 2006, pretax profits went up 3x and after-tax profits went up even more. These profits dipped during the Great Recession, of course, but they’ve fully recovered since then. All in all, since the start of the 21st century the income of ordinary folks has declined about 5 percent, but after-tax profits in the nonfinancial sector have gone up nearly 4x. Nice work, business titans!

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The 21st Century Sure Has Been a Great Time to Be a Corporation

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Ted Cruz Is Doing Great in Iowa

by MerlinAviles Posted on January 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I forgot to put up my weekly reminder of how Republicans are doing in the latest polls, so here it is today. Ol’ Ted is doing pretty well among the evangelical cornfields of Iowa, and he didn’t even have to root for the Hawkeyes in the Rose Bowl to do it. His scheme of waiting for either Trump or Carson to implode and then picking up their votes seems to have been pretty shrewd.

Of course, the winner of the last two Iowa caucuses were Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, and look where they are now. There’s still a bushel of campaigning left.

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Ted Cruz Is Doing Great in Iowa

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Ted Cruz Explains the Great Recession

by BennettR89 Posted on December 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jim Pethokoukis draws my attention to Ted Cruz’s theory of why the Great Recession was so great. Here is Joseph Lawler describing Cruz’s questioning of Fed chairman Janet Yellen yesterday:

Cruz began a round of questioning by stating that, in the summer of 2008, “the Federal Reserve told markets that it was shifting to a tighter monetary policy. This, in turn, set off a scramble for cash, which caused the dollar to soar, asset prices to collapse and the consumer price index to fall below zero, which set the stage for the financial crisis.”

….Yellen, although used to obscure or hostile questions from members of Congress, seemed taken off-guard. “I think the Fed responded pretty promptly in easing monetary policy to the pressures that were emerging,” she responded, saying that she wouldn’t blame the financial crisis on the Fed failing to lower rates during the meeting. She also noted that the Fed had lowered its target rate to zero by December.

I think you can argue that the Fed should have responded sooner and more forcefully to the events of 2008, but the problem with Cruz’s theory is that it just doesn’t make sense. Take a look at the chart on the right, which shows the Fed Funds target rate during the period in question. In April 2008, the Fed lowered its target rate to 2 percent. Then it waited until October to lower it again.

So the idea here is that if the Fed had acted, say, three months earlier, that would have saved the world. This ascribes super powers to Fed open market policy that I don’t think even Scott Sumner would buy. Monetary policy should certainly have been looser in 2008, but holding US rates steady for a few months too long just isn’t enough to turn an ordinary recession into the biggest global financial meltdown in nearly a century.

Cruz would like to blame the Fed, but they bear only a modest responsibility. Better culprits include underregulation of shadow banking; a housing bubble fueled partly by fraud and partly by Wall Street irresponsibility; excess systemic leverage; and Republican unwillingness to fight the recession with fiscal policy. Unfortunately, none of those fit Cruz’s agenda. So the Fed it is.

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Ted Cruz Explains the Great Recession

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These 18 Photos of Grizzly Bears Will Make You Want to Get in Your Car and Drive to Yellowstone Right Now

by JustineBallou Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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By the end of the year, the federal government will likely propose taking the grizzly bear off of the endangered species list. To some, this would mark an unprecedented victory: the resuscitation of perhaps the most iconic large mammal on the continent. In 1975, when it first gained endangered species protection, the grizzly bear population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the few areas grizzly bears still exist in the continental United States, dwindled to 130. Today, the population stands at around 750. But despite this resurgence, many scientists, conservationists, and indigenous people say taking away its protection could spell disaster for the species.

This latter camp includes award-winning wildlife photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen, who has lived in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on the edge of Great Teton National Park, since the 1970s. He has captured the return of the grizzlies to Greater Yellowstone with his lens for nearly a decade, since his most famous subject, the mother grizzly bear known as 399, first appeared in Teton Park. The bear quickly became a wildlife star, raising several sets of cubs in close proximity to popular tourist spots within Grand Teton National Park while almost never threatening humans.

Using 399 and her offspring as an entry point, Mangelsen and his longtime friend and journalist Todd Wilkinson explore the controversy surrounding grizzly bears and how humans should treat them in a gorgeous coffee table book, Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek: An Intimate Portrait of 399, that comprises Mangelsen’s photos of 399 and her family (some of which are included here), along with a narrative by Wilkinson.

Mengelsen and Wilkinson recently sat down with Mother Jones to talk about their experiences with 399, the threats she and other grizzlies face, and why we should care about what could happen if the US Fish and Wildlife Service takes away their Endangered Species Act protection.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Mother Jones: Tom, tell me about what it was like when 399 showed up in Grand Teton National Park near to where you live.

Thomas D. Mangelsen: : 399’s arrival was big news in 2006 because up until then grizzly bears hadn’t been seen in Teton Park. I had been there 27 years when she showed up, and I had never seen a grizzly bear in Teton Park, and I had seen very few grizzlies in Yellowstone.

I live on the edge of Teton Park, next to the Snake River, and in 2005 I awoke in the middle of the night because my dog was going crazy. I bolted up, adrenaline rushing, and I look up and I see this bear standing face-to-face thorough the glass, looking at Loup (my dog). I looked and I saw this big hump on his back or her back, and I said hmm, that’s not a black bear, that’s a grizzly bear. But because I had never seen one there (this was before 399 showed up) I still thought it had to be a black bear.

The following year, in 2006, I started hearing stories that a mother with three cubs had been seen a couple of times in Teton Park in Oxbow Bend, which is a famous overlook, and a great place in Teton Park for wildlife. I went up there later in the summer and I saw her and her three cubs feeding on a moose carcass. I didn’t think too much about it, I thought they will be gone soon because it’s turning into fall.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

She grew on me. I watched her a little later in the season chase elk calves in early June in the Willow Flats, which is near Oxbow Bend. She started drawing these crowds of people because she would come there every afternoon and she would play rope a dope with these herds of elk and their calves. She would be out there playing and nursing the calves, not paying attention to the elk, it looked like. Then these elk would come up closer to her to keep an eye on the predator, and all of a sudden she would bolt and run and chase them and split the herd. The elk would run into the willows and then 399 would just turn around and go back like a herd dog and pick off these elk calves.

I was excited because I knew immediately that it was a great opportunity for people to learn about bears and see them in a natural state. I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa over the years, and it was very similar to the Serengeti, seeing a lion or a cheetah chasing wildebeest.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: Grizzlies have been protected under the Endangered Species Act since the ’70s, but many are still shot every year. Why?

Todd Wilkinson: There is an elk hunt that’s been in Great Teton National Park, the only sanctioned big game hunt of its kind in the lower 48 in a national park, and that perennially puts bears at risk because elk are getting killed in the park, the grizzlies are feeding on the remains—the gut piles—and then hunters are bumbling into them. So every season that goes by with 399 and her 15 descendants, it’s a miracle in some ways that they remain alive, because she and her offspring are walking through these land mines.

TDM: In the national parks, you can’t leave a coke can on a picnic table—you would get a ticket—but you can leave these gut piles, and you cut the legs, limbs, heads, off and leave them in the field.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: Why would it be a bad idea to take away grizzly bears’ Endangered Species Act protection?

TW: The federal government is saying that bears have surpassed their carrying capacity and basically the ecosystem is bursting at the seams in terms of bear numbers, so they are pushing out.

In the book, we talk about a scientist named David Mattson, who is a veteran of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, the premier large mammal research unit in the world. He has advanced a counter narrative, which is that, as a result of declines in their four main food groups, grizzly bears are having to range wider to find their food.

One of those key foods is whitebark pine seeds. Within the last decade, the 18-million-acre whitebark pine forest ecosystem has collapsed—it’s functionally extinct as a reliable food source. Climate change has exacerbated insect infestation so we’re now getting two beetle reproductive cycles in the course of a single year when in the past we might get one.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

The second thing that’s happened is 25 or 30 years ago, someone introduced lake trout into Yellowstone Lake, and that has beaten back native cutthroat trout that spawn in the streams that come out of Yellowstone Lake. The bears seize upon the fish, it’s a great source of protein. Because cutthroat has been decimated that has impacted a huge number of bears, 60 to 80 bears.

And then on top of that, there is a third food source called the army cutworm moth (also known as the miller moth). They are treated as an agricultural pest, and so you have lots of pesticides thrown at the moths in farm country. Those moths migrate hundreds of miles to the high mountain talus slopes to drink the nectar of high mountain flowers. We know from climate change that those high alpine and subalpine areas are in danger, so if the flowers go away, what’s going to happen to the moths? Or if the moths get hammered by pesticides, they disappear. They are high fat sources, grizzlies eat tens of thousands of them in a sitting.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

As a result of bears losing those key foods and having to forage further, not only are females being forced to feed on carcasses, but they are also having negative encounters with cattle in the area—we have seen a spike in the number of encounters with livestock.

The one thing we know about climate change is that it is making the wild apron of ecosystems shrink. You have climate change that is asserting its impact on Greater Yellowstone at the same time you have record visitation to the national parks and a record inundation of lifestyle pilgrims moving to the ecosystem, pressing in on the outside edges. So you got this constricting ecosystem, and on top of it you have climate change. The future of grizzly bears is really uncertain.

TDM: People in the scientific community, private citizens, and conservationists are saying what’s the rush (to take away Endangered Species Act protection from the grizzly bears), let’s see how this plays out.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: What’s in store for 399 while we wait to see if grizzly bears’ protection is taken away?

TW: 399 is 19 years old. She’s been seen with male bears this summer, and so very likely when she comes out of the den late winter next year, she’ll have a new set of cubs as a 20-year-old mother.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

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These 18 Photos of Grizzly Bears Will Make You Want to Get in Your Car and Drive to Yellowstone Right Now

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Scientists Just Analyzed Dozens of Natural Disasters. Can You Guess Which Ones We Made Worse?

by GalenRasphdnbw Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Climate scientists are pretty good at figuring out the causes of long-term trends. We know that dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will make global temperatures rise over time. But pinning down the cause of any single weather event—a specific heat wave, hurricane, or drought—is much more challenging, since extreme things could still happen without global warming. That’s why scientists are so reluctant to say that any particular event happened “because of” climate change.

Nevertheless, there is a rapidly growing field of research that is attempting to improve this kind of one-off attribution. On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a dossier of 29 such studies, combing through some of 2014’s worst weather events across the globe to search for the fingerprints of man-made climate change.

The scientists, who represent a range of prominent research institutions, looked at California’s wildfire season; heat waves in Australia; drought in East Africa; flooding in Indonesia; hurricanes in Hawaii; and more. Their findings were as diverse as the events they examined, and they still tend to be framed as “Event X was made more likely because of climate change,” rather than the simpler but less accurate “Event X was caused by climate change.” Some events, such as Hawaii’s hurricanes, appear to have a strong relationship to man-made global warming. Others, such as extreme rainfall in the United Kingdom last winter, showed no link at all.

Generally speaking, temperature-related events were more closely aligned with climate change than precipitation-related events. Here are a few more examples:

Wildfire in California

A wildland firefighter works in California in 2014. Kari Greer/ZUMA

Over the last few years, as California has sunk deeper into an unprecedented drought, the wildfire season has essentially never ended. 2014 was bad; 2015 is worse; and the only good news is that this year’s strong El Niño could mean a wet winter and thus a less-bad fire season in 2016. The link between climate change and fire is pretty straightforward: Snowpack melts earlier, summers are hotter and drier, and boom, more fires. And sure enough, that appears to be what is happening in California.

In this study, scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used a combination of field observations and satellite data to quantify fires in California going back a few decades. They were interested not just in the size or number of actual fires, but a metric called “fire risk” that combines data on temperature, precipitation, and other factors. Then they combined the fire risk data with a computer model that assumes greenhouse gas emissions stay relatively high into the future. Unsurprisingly, the risk of fire shoots up over time.

In the charts below, from the study, the blue line shows year-to-year fire variability with the effects of climate change removed from the model. The red line uses the same fire data, but with the climate data put back in. In other words, the gap between the blue line and the red line is the effect of man-made global warming (KBDI is the fire risk index).

Yoon, et al.

You’ll notice that 2014 lands on a spot where the blue and red lines overlap. According to lead author Jin-Ho Yoon, “that means that according to this model, 2014’s fire season could have happened without human activities at all. It’s possible to have such an event.”

“But if we step back from this single event,” he said, “that’s relatively easier to say that the fire risk is increasing and easily attributable to climate change.”

Frigid Midwestern winter

Chicago during the 2013-2014 winter. edward stojakovic/Flickr

There’s nothing climate change deniers like Donald Trump and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) love more than a nice snowfall or cold winter to use as proof positive that global warming is a hoax engineered by China and Barbra Streisand. They got their chance a couple winters ago, when temperatures in the Great Lakes region between November 2013 to April 2014 were the lowest they’d been in decades.

But of course, one cold winter doesn’t prove or disprove anything. Again, scientists are looking for trends. And when climatologists from the University of Colorado looked back at the temperature record over the last 134 years, they found that the frigid Midwestern winter was incredibly rare, thanks to man-made climate change.

“While a winter comparable to 2013/14 would have been roughly a once-a-decade event in 1881…it has become roughly a once-in-a-thousand years event in 2014,” the study found. That change in probability is due to long-term increases in temperature. That’s probably good news for Midwesterners, as that extreme wintry weather caused billions of dollars in economic losses.

Droughts in Africa and the Middle East

Aleppo, Syria, has been devastated by a civil war that was exacerbated by drought. Ameer Alhalbi/ZUMA

Drought in the Middle East is a matter of vital concern to US national security, since the failure of crops can enflame pre-existing political tensions and contribute to violent conflict. This has already happened in Syria. Some research also exists linking Syria’s unprecedented drought to climate change, and that conclusion is generally supported by a couple studies in the NOAA report.

One study, focusing on Syria, combined observed rainfall data and climate modeling to show that the country’s lack of precipitation during the 2013-2014 rainy season was made about 45 percent more likely by climate change. Another study, looking more broadly at the Mediterranean and Middle East, found that at least one of the major drivers of drought in the region—sea surface temperatures in the western Pacific—was definitely amplified by global warming. Two other drivers, central Pacific sea surface temperatures and atmospheric conditions in the North Atlantic, did not appear to be influenced by climate change.

A third study focused on the Horn of Africa, which includes parts of countries such as Kenya and Somalia that also face high food insecurity and political instability. The rainy season that should have arrived in late 2013 was virtually nonexistent, leading to drought in early 2014 and widespread crops failures. That study failed to find a connection between climate change and the lack of rainfall, but it did blame global warming for higher temperatures and increased solar radiation that made the effects of the drought worse.

Studies like this will get better over time, Yoon said, as scientists get more practice and better data-gathering tools. Ultimately, the goal is to provide a real-time answer to the question of “Did this happen because of climate change?” Searching for the causes of particular events also helps scientists understand, and therefore predict, what types of events are likely to occur more or less often in the future. Then, hopefully, we take steps to prepare for them.

Continued – 

Scientists Just Analyzed Dozens of Natural Disasters. Can You Guess Which Ones We Made Worse?

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Sarcasm Turns Out to Be Great Creativity Tool. You’re Welcome.

by CollettStreet Posted on November 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new paper suggests that sarcasm is underrated:

Studies 1 and 2 found that both sarcasm expressers and recipients reported more conflict but also demonstrated enhanced creativity following a simulated sarcastic conversation or after recalling a sarcastic exchange.

Um, yeah. I remember that part. It’s why my boss once told me I had to give her a dollar every time I said something sarcastic. It was the best she could do since HR told her shock collars violated OSHA regulations. Anyway, onward:

Study 3 demonstrated that sarcasm’s effect on creativity for both parties was mediated by abstract thinking and generalizes across different forms of sarcasm. Finally, Study 4 found when participants expressed sarcasm toward or received sarcasm from a trusted other, creativity increased but conflict did not. We discuss sarcasm as a double-edged sword: despite its role in instigating conflict, it can also be a catalyst for creativity.

I would tell you more, but the abstract is all I have access to. Besides, I have a funny feeling that if I read the actual paper I’d find myself underwhelmed by the methodology. If you’re looking for a justification for your witty repartee—and aren’t we all?—maybe it’s best just to let things stand where they are.

Link:  

Sarcasm Turns Out to Be Great Creativity Tool. You’re Welcome.

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