Tag Archives: hughes

Remember that money Congress approved to rebuild Flint’s water system? Some of it is finally on the way.

by KrystleBaldwin Posted on March 20, 2017

According to the cover article in today’s issue of the journal Nature, the iconic reef off the coast of Australia suffered unprecedented coral die-off after last year’s record-breaking bleaching event. Now, as the Southern Hemisphere hits late summer temperatures, central and southern sections of the reef — areas which avoided the worst of last year’s bleaching — are in trouble.

“We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” coral researcher Terry Hughes told the New York Times. Hughes led the team that conducted aerial surveys to document the bleaching last year, as well as subsequent surveys to assess just how much of that bleaching turned into dying.

Bleached corals don’t always turn into dead corals — some are able to recover when temperatures drop. Er, if temperatures drop. If water temperatures stay high and corals stay bleached, they will eventually starve to death. Without coral building reefs, whole ecosystems may disappear, along with the food, tourism, and jobs they support.

Hughes and his coauthors found that even corals in pristine, protected water were likely to be suffering from heat stress, meaning the only thing left to do to protect corals is, you know, address climate change.

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Remember that money Congress approved to rebuild Flint’s water system? Some of it is finally on the way.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Remember that money Congress approved to rebuild Flint’s water system? Some of it is finally on the way.

Ranchers are reeling after wildfires swept through the Great Plains.

by Sybil0169hkc Posted on March 20, 2017

According to the cover article in today’s issue of the journal Nature, the iconic reef off the coast of Australia suffered unprecedented coral die-off after last year’s record-breaking bleaching event. Now, as the Southern Hemisphere hits late summer temperatures, central and southern sections of the reef — areas which avoided the worst of last year’s bleaching — are in trouble.

“We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” coral researcher Terry Hughes told the New York Times. Hughes led the team that conducted aerial surveys to document the bleaching last year, as well as subsequent surveys to assess just how much of that bleaching turned into dying.

Bleached corals don’t always turn into dead corals — some are able to recover when temperatures drop. Er, if temperatures drop. If water temperatures stay high and corals stay bleached, they will eventually starve to death. Without coral building reefs, whole ecosystems may disappear, along with the food, tourism, and jobs they support.

Hughes and his coauthors found that even corals in pristine, protected water were likely to be suffering from heat stress, meaning the only thing left to do to protect corals is, you know, address climate change.

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Ranchers are reeling after wildfires swept through the Great Plains.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ranchers are reeling after wildfires swept through the Great Plains.

The Great Barrier Reef Is in Far More Peril Than Previously Thought

by JacquelynHoughto Posted on March 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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The survival of the Great Barrier Reef hinges on urgent moves to cut global warming because nothing else will protect coral from the coming cycle of mass bleaching events, new research has found.

The study of three mass bleaching events on Australian reefs in 1998, 2002, and 2016 found coral was damaged by underwater heatwaves regardless of any local improvements to water quality or fishing controls.

The research, authored by 46 scientists and published in Nature, raises serious questions about Australia’s long-term conservation plan for its famous reef, which invests heavily in lifting water quality but is silent on climate-change action.

The researchers said the findings of their paper, Global Warming and Recurrent Mass Bleaching of Corals, applied to coral reefs worldwide.

Its publication comes the same day its lead author, Terry Hughes, is due to embark on an aerial survey to confirm the extent of another mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef.

It is the first mass bleaching to occur for a second consecutive year on the reef, which suffered its worst ever damage in 2016 when 22% of coral was killed off in a single hit.

The study, which was unable to take in the effects of the latest event, warned a fourth mass bleaching event “within the next decade or two” gave the badly damaged northern section of the reef a “slim” chance of ever recovering to its former state.

Hughes said the latest event, which was notable for having nothing to do with the warming effect of El Niño weather patterns, highlighted how research on mass bleaching, even when fast-tracked, was unable to keep pace with the reef’s current state.

“It broke my heart to see so many corals dying on northern reefs on the Great Barrier Reef in 2016,” Hughes said.

“With rising temperatures due to global warming, it’s only a matter of time before we see more of these events. A fourth event after only one year would be a major blow to the reef.”

Hughes said he hoped coming weeks would “cool off quickly and this year’s bleaching won’t be anything like last year.”

“The severity of the 2016 bleaching was off the chart.”

Hughes, the convener of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, said the study clearly showed the need for climate change action in Australia’s reef conservation plan.

He said it also showed the folly of Australian and Queensland government support for one of the world’s largest coalmines, Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine, which will export coal in ships through reef waters.

This was not only because of the carbon emissions from the coal, but also from dredging and marine traffic through the reef.

“In its weakened state, the reef cannot afford the Adani mine,” he said.

The publication of the research comes the same week as Queensland government officials meet with Unesco officials in Paris to appeal for more time to make good on conservation efforts to ward off an “in-danger” listing for the reef. It also coincides with a visit by the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, to India to lobby Adani to proceed with its mine plan.

The study found that 91% of coral on the reef had suffered from bleaching over the past two decades.

The researchers concluded that “local management of coral reef fisheries and water quality affords little, if any, resistance to recurrent severe bleaching events: even the most highly protected reefs and near-pristine areas are highly susceptible to severe heat stress.”

“On the remote northern Great Barrier Reef, hundreds of individual reefs were severely bleached in 2016 regardless of whether they were zoned as no-entry, no-fishing, or open to fishing, and irrespective of inshore–offshore differences in water quality.”

Likewise, past exposure to bleaching, or relative resistance among certain corals to minor bleaching, gave no protection in the face of severe heat stress, the study found.

Local protection of fish stocks and improved water quality “may, given enough time, improve the prospects for recovery.”

“However, bolstering resilience will become more challenging and less effective in coming decades because local interventions have had no discernible effect on resistance of corals to extreme heat stress, and, with the increasing frequency of severe bleaching events, the time for recovery is diminishing.

“Securing a future for coral reefs, including intensively managed ones such as the Great Barrier Reef, ultimately requires urgent and rapid action to reduce global warming.”

Bleaching comes when heat stress forces corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae, which leaves them stark white.

Prolonged heat stress will kill the corals, but death rates take at least six months to confirm.

The researchers said fast-growing coral took 10-15 years to fully recover while longer-lived corals “necessarily take many decades.”

This kind of “sustained absence of another severe bleaching event (or other significant disturbance) … is no longer realistic while global temperatures continue to rise,” they said.

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The Great Barrier Reef Is in Far More Peril Than Previously Thought

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Quote of the Day: There’s No Such Thing as Facts Anymore

by HuldaRivett Posted on December 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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One of the problems with Donald Trump’s habit of lying endlessly—aside from the fact that he does it in the first place—is that it affects everyone around him. By chance, today brought this all front and center. We start off with Trump himself:

This is a routine, garden-variety Trump lie. He obviously knows it’s untrue, but he doesn’t care. You see, for him it represents some kind of higher truth. Trump lackey Scottie Nell Hughes, in the course of explaining a different Trump lie, tells us how this works on the Diane Rehm show this morning:

People that say facts are facts, they’re not really facts….There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, as facts. And so Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd, a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some facts amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and there’s no facts to back it up.

Got that? These things the rest of us call lies are facts amongst him and his supporters. Senior lackey Kellyanne Conway agrees that truth in Trumpworld is a relative thing, but defends it more directly. If Trump says it, then by definition there must be something to it:

Finally, Corey Lewandowski tells us all to just get the hell over it:

This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.

Apparently we’ve got four years of this behavior ahead of us. Trump’s “facts” aren’t meant to be facts. They just represent a state of mind, or perhaps an aspiration of some kind. His supporters all get this. Now we’d all better get it too.

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Quote of the Day: There’s No Such Thing as Facts Anymore

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How Do You Stop an Attack Like the One in Nice? You Can’t.

by TukeEasterling Posted on July 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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One day after a terrorist attack killed at least 84 people in Nice, France, French authorities announced that the man who carried out the attacks had never been suspected of terrorist sympathies. So do intelligence agencies have any effective way to stop such isolated acts of terrorism?

“No,” says Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. “I wish there was a better answer than that, but there frankly isn’t.”

Prosecutors in Nice told the media on Friday that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the 31-year-old French citizen originally from Tunisia who carried out the attack, was “completely unknown to both France’s domestic and foreign intelligence officials.” That bucked the trend of recent terrorist strikes in Europe, including the Paris attacks last year and the Brussels bombings in March. The perpetrators of those attacks were connected to known jihadist networks, and intelligence officials were criticized in those cases for failing to pursue leads or carry out surveillance that may have caught the attackers before they struck.

But in the case of isolated individuals, Hughes says there’s little to be done. “At the end of the day, this really comes down to human intelligence,” he says. “You try to understand the group of people that are drawn to this and then you try to infiltrate as best you can.” If there isn’t anywhere to infiltrate, or the attacker has no previous signs of radicalization to alert authorities, attackers can simply pop up at any point with little warning.

The only real way to slow down such attacks may be to target propaganda from ISIS and other jihadi groups. ISIS is notoriously adept at churning out propaganda videos and flooding social media with sympathizers and recruiters. “Is that actually an important effect on would-be recruits?” Hughes asks. “Are they more likely to go mobilize to action than they have been in the past?”

He believes the answer is yes. “If you’re constantly being told to do what you can where you are, you’re constantly told in three different platforms on a daily, almost minute-by-minute basis, it’s going to have some level of effect on individuals who are already drawn to this,” he says. The more propaganda that’s available, he argues, the more people like Lahouaiej-Bouhlel may carry out “ISIS-inspired” attacks, deciding in the spur of the moment to act on their private thoughts.

That’s not only potentially harder to stop, but also psychologically harmful. Freelance attackers may use whatever methods or targets are at hand, and that seeming randomness, Hughes says, “shocks the system. We’re not just talking about airports. We’re also not just talking about small arms, which means you get more media coverage, which means inspiring the next individuals who want be copycats or who want to do more.”

The US government has made attempts to cut down on the flow of jihadi propaganda online. National security officials met with tech industry executives in January, and the White House held a summit in Washington a month later to try to generate cooperation between tech companies and security agencies. But efforts so far haven’t yielded much—one State Department anti-extremism program on Twitter called “Think Again, Turn Away” is a notorious punchline among terrorism experts—especially given ongoing tension between the two sides over encryption and other privacy issues. “It’s like you’ve been asked to partner up and dance with the bully at school who keeps trying to trip you in the hallways,” one of the White House summit participants told BuzzFeed.

Hughes is certain about one thing: Aggressive anti-Muslim responses only increase the likelihood of more attacks. Other terrorism analysts agree. “Unfortunately, the most likely reaction after the Nice attack is also the worst one: more vitriol and hostility toward French and European Muslims,” wrote Georgetown professor Daniel Byman for Slate on Friday. “That makes it harder for European security services to gain the cooperation of local communities and easier for ISIS to gain recruits and score victories.”

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How Do You Stop an Attack Like the One in Nice? You Can’t.

Posted in Casio, Citizen, Cyber, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Do You Stop an Attack Like the One in Nice? You Can’t.