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Here Are 58 Million Reasons to Care About California’s Drought

by LynwoodWingfiel Posted on December 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Researchers used laser-imaging technology mounted to a plane to map the tree health of California’s forests after four years of drought. They found that things may soon get a lot worse: Up to 58 million trees are near death, and further drought conditions could kill them, releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere, destroying ecosystems and ruining a vital aspect of California’s water system. Courtesy of Greg Asner

This story was originally published by Newsweek and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The past four years of punishing drought have badly hurt California’s forests. Rain was scarce, the days were too hot, and this year’s wildfire season was the worst anyone has seen in years, burning up nearly 10 million acres across the West. For the first time, a team of researchers has measured the severity of the blow the drought dealt the trees, uncovering potential future destruction in the process. The resulting paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a rich visual testament to just how much California needs its trees and how close the state is to losing 58 million of them.

A team at the Carnegie Institution for Science, led by ecologist Greg Asner, used a laser-guided imaging tool, more properly referred to as high-fidelity imaging spectroscopy (HiFIS), mounted on a plane to sweep over California, taking snapshots that revealed how much water content the forest canopy had lost over time. In these images, the trees that appear red and orange are severely depleted of water. Light trees, in shades of tan, are trees under “drought stress” resulting from this past year’s dry season. The trees colored in blue are “doing okay,” Asner says.

In this image of a section of the southern Sierra Nevada in northern California, the red trees are severely depleted of water and at risk of dying if drought conditions recur. The light-colored trees are showing drought stress, and the blue trees are “doing OK,” according to ecologist Greg Asner. Courtesy Greg Asner

In total, the team found that up to 58 million large trees, shown in red, have been heavily impacted by the drought. If the drought recurs, or if the El Niño keeps the heat turned up in the region, Asner says these trees will likely die. New tree growth would also be suppressed, leaving room for shrublands or grasslands to take over, destroying the current ecosystem of plants and animals entirely. That poses a host of new questions for wildlife management and conservation. “For example,” Asner says, “if we’re going to lose habitat, what does that mean for bear populations?”

Losing these trees also means unleashing a torrent of greenhouse gases. A significant amount of carbon is stored in tree trunks and would be released back into the atmosphere, adding to the state’s emissions, which contribute to climate change. Asner is currently working to calculate how much emissions the death of these trees could cause, but “it’s going to be substantial,” he says.

What’s more, a vital part of California’s water system would be lost. Forest soil acts as a sponge for the freshwater that melts off snowy mountains, holding the water and allowing it to “basically leak out” over time, “giving us that ability to have a more constant amount of water flowing out of the mountain system over the dry summer months,” says Asner. Forests’ ability to hold water is why, in part, they feel cool. Walking through scrubland, in contrast, is a hot experience, largely because its much drier soil does not hold water. If California loses those 58 million trees, the snowmelt and rainfall would pass through the landscapes they previously occupied without being trapped, becoming susceptible to quick evaporation, Asner explains. “We can expect that this critical water mediating service will be impacted.”

Another 888 million trees, or about 41,000 square miles of California forest, are drought-stressed. While not as urgently severe, stress is still dangerous. The dreaded bark beetle, which infests trees and almost always kills them, has been thriving in the warmer climate, Asner says, and these weakened trees are a prime target. “During drought, when trees are stressed, they’re more susceptible to infestation. The interaction between the bark beetle, the tree, and climate—we’re just figuring it out now.”

This image of Tejon Ranch in Southern California is an example of how terrain can spell life or death for trees in drought. Up on the mountain ridges, the soil dries out faster because water runs off, draining quickly, leaving many of the trees there under medium to severe drought stress. The gully in this picture is not a river—the blue hues are trees in good health because they’ve received the residual moisture that ran off the now-parched ridges. Courtesy Greg Asner

The three-dimensional renderings from the laser-mounted plane revealed a dappled landscape of tree health across the state. “The problem is geographically complex,” Asner says. “It’s not like the whole forest went down evenly in its water content.” For example, on steep terrain, where any water that might be available would quickly drain off, trees typically did worse. In valleys, where the water pools, trees are typically healthier.

This image of Sequoia National Park shows a mix of tree damage and tree health. “The giant sequoias are doing pretty well” and are mostly pictured in blue, Asner says, but the firs and pines in the forest are hurting and shown in lighter colors. Courtesy Greg Asner

Meanwhile, places where there are stressed or severely water-depleted trees are far more likely to be the sites of future wildfires. Asner hopes these maps will help California understand the “good, the bad, and the ugly” about the state of its forests and help agencies make informed decisions about where to put resources when it comes to anticipating wildfires next season—where to thin forests in places that are most likely to become tinderboxes, for example, especially the ones that butt up against places where people live. He also hopes it will help the state better plan its prescribed burns to revitalize patches of forest that can be saved.

With so much at stake, Asner says, “it’s important that we understand what we’re losing.”

Source: 

Here Are 58 Million Reasons to Care About California’s Drought

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America’s Most Useless Surveillance Program Is Finally (Almost) Over

by KimDunleazdkq Posted on November 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, the National Security Agency will have to shut down one of its controversial mass surveillance programs: the unlimited collection of the phone records of millions of Americans, known as bulk metadata collection.

That program allowed the NSA to collect information about citizens’ phone calls, including whom they were calling, when and where they made calls, and how long those calls lasted. While metadata collection doesn’t include what was said during those calls, the information can allow intelligence analysts to build up extensive profiles of an individual’s pattern of life. The New York Times first reported on the bulk metadata program, which was created under the Patriot Act, in late 2005, but it didn’t attract truly widespread outrage—or reform—until details of the program appeared in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013. A federal judge in Washington, DC, ordered the program to stop in a ruling issued later that year, but that didn’t happen until Congress passed a law this May that outlawed the bulk metadata program as of November 29. Under the new law, phone companies must now keep such records themselves, and intelligence agencies must seek permission from a federal judge to access specific data.

To its supporters, the program was a critical counterterrorism tool. “There is no other way that we know of to connect the dots…Taking the program off the table, from my perspective, is absolutely not the right thing to do,” said former NSA director Keith Alexander to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013. Michael Hayden, another former NSA chief, and former attorney general Michael Mukasey said in a joint op-ed that the reform law was “exquisitely crafted to hobble the gathering of electronic intelligence.” After the terrorist attacks in Paris two weeks ago, there was even a failed last-ditch effort to restart the bulk phone records program.

But privacy advocates say the record tells a different story. “That program hasn’t prevented or even contributed to preventing a single attack in the nearly 15 years that it’s been in operation,” says Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Think tank reports on the program have backed her up. “There does not appear to be a case in which…bulk phone records played an important role in stopping a terrorist attack,” wrote Marshall Erwin in a January 2014 report from the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank. His counterparts at the nonpartisan but liberal-leaning New America Foundation found the same thing in a study that was released in the same month as Erwin’s report. “Surveillance of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism,” wrote national security journalist Peter Bergen and three others in the New America study.

The government hasn’t provided much more compelling evidence. The study from New America noted that President Barack Obama once claimed bulk surveillance had stopped at least 50 terrorist plots, but Alexander eventually admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was actually only one such case, in which a San Diego cab driver had attempted to send money to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. Richard Leon, the federal judge who ruled the bulk metadata program illegal in 2013, wrote that there was an “utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics.”

Late last year, a trio of Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee—Oregon’s Ron Wyden, Colorado’s Mark Udall, and New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich—filed a brief in support of a lawsuit against bulk surveillance, saying they had “reviewed this surveillance extensively and have seen no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through means that caused far less harm to the privacy interests of millions of Americans.”

In fact, say privacy advocates, bulk surveillance can actually hurt intelligence rather than strengthen it. “Part of the problem is that the analysts were drowning in data,” Goitein says, citing the 9/11 Commission Report as evidence. “There was too much information, and the threats got lost in the noise. So more surveillance isn’t the answer.”

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America’s Most Useless Surveillance Program Is Finally (Almost) Over

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America’s Prison Population Is Falling, but Too Slowly to Undo Decades of Growth

by JoyDelong746 Posted on November 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s the good news: The number of prisoners in the United States dropped last year to its lowest point since 2005, a trend likely to continue following the release of about 6,000 inmates from federal prisons in the past few days.

And here’s the bad: The prison population still only dropped by 1 percent in 2014, to about 1.6 million. At this rate, we won’t return to the incarceration rate the country had in 1994, before tough new legislation sent the prison population soaring, until 2027, according to Matthew Friedman at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.

Momentum is growing in Washington to tackle criminal justice reform. A group of about 130 police chiefs and prosecutors last month called to reduce the prison population; President Obama is increasingly focusing on criminal justice reform; and presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle have come out with their own proposals, in a striking reversal of the “tough on crime” rhetoric of past decades.

Reform has already had some impact. The total US prison population fell by 15,400 people last year, its second largest decline in 35 years, according to data released by the Department of Justice.

Notably, the number of inmates in federal prisons fell for the second year in a row after several decades of steady growth. Although the Federal Bureau of Prisons housed only about 13 percent of all US prisoners at the end of last year, it is still the country’s largest prison system, followed by the state systems in Texas and California.

A closer look at the data reveals that the decline in the number of inmates comes largely from one side of the equation. There was a sharp drop in the number of people admitted to prison, but no meaningful change in the number of people released from prison.

“Reducing the number of admissions is unequivocally a positive development, but without significant changes in the number of releases, incarceration rates won’t return to comparatively reasonable levels for decades,” Friedman wrote.

A report by the Urban Institute think tank reached similar conclusions, finding that current and projected falls “will provide some relief to the bloated federal prison system” but are “not sufficient to relieve severe overcrowding.”

To substantively reduce the federal prison population, the Urban Institute researchers said, reform will have to focus on drug crimes. Half of male prisoners and 59 percent of female prisoners in the federal system were incarcerated for drug offenses as of September 2014, according to the DOJ.

“Cutting lengths of stay 50 percent for drug trafficking offenses would reduce the federal prison population 18 percent by 2023, compared with the baseline projection,” the researchers said. The Urban Institute created an interactive model that allows people to experiment with different formulas for reducing the federal prison population.

Fortunately for prison reform advocates, precedent is in no short supply. Twenty-four states reduced their prison populations last year, primarily by releasing more prisoners. Mississippi, historically one of the states with the highest incarceration rates, led the pack with a 14.5 percent reduction of its prison population, thanks to an extensive package of reforms that included shorter sentences for some drug crimes.

The federal government too is making moves in this direction. The Federal Sentencing Commission last year passed an amendment to cut sentences for many drug offenders, which culminated in the release of more than 6,000 federal prisoners since Friday. The commission said at the time that retroactive application of the new guidelines could make more than 40,000 prisoners eligible for sentence reductions.

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America’s Prison Population Is Falling, but Too Slowly to Undo Decades of Growth

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House Tea Partiers to the World: Burn, Baby, Burn.

by FredMccollum768 Posted on October 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Chaos, chaos, and chaos. Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s withdrawal from the speaker’s race has caused disarray—that is, greater disarray—within the House GOP conference. Hours after McCarthy’s announcement, there was no word of what comes next. Who might jump in? Would a caretaker candidate emerge? How long could Speaker John Boehner stay in the job? And, it seemed, the House tea partiers who had somewhat caused this crisis—they had succeeded in driving Boehner from the job and had deemed McCarthy insufficiently conservative—were yearning for more chaos. The House Freedom Caucus, the tea party GOPers, put out this statement:

Note that last sentence: “The next Speaker needs to yield back power to the membership for the sake of both the institution and the country.” In other words, we don’t want a speaker who is going to try to govern in a time of divided government; we don’t want a speaker who will endeavor to forge a compromise on behalf of the GOP conference and make the system work; and, as a government shutdown looms and a possible debt ceiling crisis approaches, we want a speaker who will step to the side and let the chaos reign. This is the congressional equivalent of “burn, baby, burn.”

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House Tea Partiers to the World: Burn, Baby, Burn.

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Your plane’s ETA is wrong, and it’s the climate’s fault

by MinnieCourtice Posted on July 13, 2015

Your plane’s ETA is wrong, and it’s the climate’s fault

By on 13 Jul 2015commentsShare

To most people, hopping on a plane from Hawaii to the East Coast and getting in way earlier than expected is just a stroke of luck — little more than an excuse for a self-congratulatory coffee from one of the 200 Starbucks lining the airport terminal. But to Hannah Barkley, a PhD student in oceanography at MIT who is about to put you to shame, it’s a scientific phenomenon worth investigating.

Barkley enjoyed one of these lucky trips on her way back from doing field work in Hawaii not too long ago. Back on campus, she asked Kris Karnauskas, a researcher in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Geology and Geophysics Department, why her flight was so off, and the two subsequently got lost in decades worth of wind speed data and flight times between Honolulu and major West Coast cities. Long story short: There’s a strong link between those lucky flights and fluctuations in climate.

In a paper published today in Nature Climate Change, Karnauskas, Barkley, and two of their colleagues report that about 88 percent of the variability in domestic flight times is linked to variability in atmospheric circulation. This is largely thanks to a combination of El Niño events — those annoyingly irregular bouts of high Pacific Ocean temperatures — and the so-called Arctic Oscillations — winds that circulate the North Pole, periodically confining the cold arctic air to the pole or letting it escape down to the mid-latitudes.

As the climate changes, both of these atmospheric factors will likely change, meaning the average length of a flight could change, too — which, in turn, could have a real impact on climate change. (Phew, that’s a lotta “change.”) Here’re the numbers from a press release:

According to the study, there are approximately 30,000 commercial flights per day in the U.S. If the total round–trip flying time changed by an average of one minute, the amount of time commercial jets would spend in the air would change by approximately 300,000 hours per year. This translates to approximately 1 billion gallons of jet fuel, which is approximately $3 billion in fuel cost, and 10 billion kilograms of CO2 emitted, per year.

“We already know that as you add CO2 to the atmosphere and the global mean temperature rises, the wind circulation changes as well—and in less obvious ways,” says Karnauskas.

Depending on whether that change is an increase or a decrease in average flight times, this could be good news or bad news for the rest of us, climactically speaking. Karnauskas eventually wants to look at all global flights, according to the press release. In the mean time, perhaps domestic airlines should take note:

In reflecting on the findings of this project and the simple question Barkley had initially asked, Karnauskas says one of the biggest surprises is that the airline industry doesn’t seem to be aware of the flight time patterns beyond the day-to-day.

“The airline industry keeps a close eye on the day-to-day weather patterns, but they don’t seem to be addressing cycles occurring over a year or longer,” he says. “They never say, ‘Dear customer, there’s an El Niño brewing, so we’ve lengthened your estimated flight duration by 30 minutes.’ I’ve never seen that.”

Maybe you haven’t noticed, Karnauskas, but we humans aren’t the best at planning for — or even acknowledging — climate variability.

Source:
Air Travel and Climate: A Potential New Feedback?

, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

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Your plane’s ETA is wrong, and it’s the climate’s fault

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7 Charts Explaining Baltimore’s Economic and Racial Struggles

by SoniaAlarcon Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of Baltimore’s upheaval, President Obama, among others, reminded the country that the city’s longstanding economic inequality was beneath the response to Freddie Gray’s death. “This is not new,” Obama said. “This has been going on for decades.”

In a new study published this week, a group of Harvard economists quantified Baltimore’s problem with economic mobility. Of the 100 largest counties in the country, they found, Baltimore was where children in low-income households faced the worst odds in terms of upward mobility, followed by Mencklenburg, North Carolina; Hillsborough, Florida; Orange, Florida; and Cook, Illinois.

Check out The Upshot‘s interactive map of the Harvard study findings.

That’s just one of many sobering measures of life for some in Baltimore, as the Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, and others have pointed out in recent days. Here are a few examples:

Life expectancy in 15 Baltimore neighborhoods, including the one where Freddie Gray lived, is shorter than in North Korea, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. In eight Baltimore neighborhoods, the life expectancy rate is worse than in Syria.

Christopher Ingraham/Wonkblog

Baltimore teens between 15 and 19 years old face poorer health conditions and a bleaker economic outlook than those in economically distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China, and South Africa, according to recent research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Teens in Baltimore, along with Johannesburg, saw the highest prevalence of sexual violence, substance abuse, depression, and PTSD. They were also most likely to report witnessing community violence.

Vocativ

In 2014, Baltimore—a city where the unemployment rate (8.1 percent) is nearly one and a half times than the national rate (5.5 percent)—had one of the largest gaps between the rich and poor in the country, according to the Brookings Institution. The typical Baltimore resident in the bottom fifth of earners made $13,588 in 2013, whereas those in top 5 percent made an average of $166,924 that year.

In 2010, Baltimore had Maryland’s highest rate of arrests for marijuana possession, and Maryland had one of the highest such arrest rates in the country, according to a 2013 report by the American Civil Liberties Union.

American Civil Liberties Union, 2010

Baltimore incarcerates a greater portion of its population than New York City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles County, according to the Justice Policy Institute. It also has one of the highest inmate populations in the country, according to the latest available Bureau of Justice Statistics data.

Justice Policy Institute

When it comes to income inequality between blacks and whites, Baltimore is not alone. As FiveThirtyEight reported, this racial disparity is common in cities where at least 10 percent of the population is black.

Ben Casselman/FiveThirtyEight

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7 Charts Explaining Baltimore’s Economic and Racial Struggles

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Is Obama Trolling Republicans Over Immigration?

by MabelISSrj Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Jonah Goldberg is unhappy with President Obama’s immigration order, but he’s not steaming mad about it. And I think this allows him to see some things a little more clearly than his fellow conservatives:

Maybe President Obama is just trolling?

….As Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution notes, Obama “could’ve done all this quietly, without making any announcement whatsoever.” After all, Obama has unilaterally reinterpreted and rewritten the law without nationally televised addresses before. But doing that wouldn’t let him pander to Latinos and, more important, that wouldn’t achieve his real goal: enraging Republicans.

As policy, King Obama’s edict is a mess, which may explain why Latinos are underwhelmed by it, according to the polls. But that’s not the yardstick Obama cares about most. The real goal is twofold: Cement Latinos into the Democratic coalition and force Republicans to overreact. He can’t achieve the first if he doesn’t succeed with the second. It remains to be seen if the Republicans will let themselves be trolled into helping him.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty certain that Obama did what he did because he really believes it’s the right thing to do. Goldberg just isn’t able to acknowledge that and retain his conservative cred. Still, somewhere in the Oval Office there was someone writing down pros and cons on a napkin, and I’ll bet that enraging the GOP caucus and wrecking their legislative agenda made it onto the list of pros. So far, it looks like it’s probably working. But if Republicans are smart, they’ll figure out some way to follow Goldberg’s advice and rein in their worst impulses. If they go nuts, they’re just playing into Obama’s hands.

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Is Obama Trolling Republicans Over Immigration?

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Congress Just Delayed New Funding to Help Rape Victims

by VivianOcasio Posted on September 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Last week, Congress once again delayed federal funding to help catch rapists.

Here’s the backstory. In March, President Barack Obama asked Congress to fund a new Justice Department program designed to help states and localities test backlogs of rape kits, which include DNA evidence taken after a sexual assault and are used to identify attackers. The funding would likely also go toward investigating and prosecuting rape cases.

There are over 100,000 untested kits sitting on shelves at police storage facilities around the country—some held for decades—partly because state and local governments lack the money to process them.

In May, the Republican-controlled House passed a massive spending bill for 2015 that included $41 million for the rape kit program, and a key committee in the Democratic-run Senate approved the same spending in June. But after a spat on the Senate floor over unrelated amendments Republicans wanted added to the bill, Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yanked the legislation. Consequently, Congress had to resort to a short-term spending bill to keep the government operating until mid-December. The House and Senate approved it last week, and Obama signed it Friday. Because it’s a stop-gap spending bill, the legislation continues government spending at current levels, leaving out most new funding—including the money for the rape kit processing program.

More partisan bickering this winter could cause lawmakers to fail to pass a full appropriations bill until February or March, according to experts on congressional procedure, forcing rape victims to wait another six months or so to see the program enacted. That is, if this spending bill does include the rape kit money. (Last Thursday, the Senate approved a separate House-passed bill reauthorizing an existing program designed to process backlogged DNA evidence from all sorts of crimes, including rape kits. But the existing funding, which was first authorized in 2004, has not been sufficient to clear the backlog—which is why advocates were pushing for the new money.)

“The slowdown in appropriating funds for the rape kit program is a classic example of how Congress’ legislative dysfunction blocks even the smallest of bipartisan initiatives,” says Sarah Binder, an expert on legislative politics at the Brookings Institution.

Spokesmen for both the House and Senate appropriations committees say they are confident that local jurisdictions won’t have to wait until next spring to get the federal money they need to process rape kits. They note the consensus on Capitol Hill is that Congress will pass an appropriations bill with the rape kit funding in mid-December. But Binder is less optimistic. If Republicans win the Senate in the midterm elections, she says, GOPers might block passage of a spending bill until they assume control of the Senate in January. At that point, Binder explains, Republicans may be tempted to “use those spending bills as leverage” to force Dems to accept Republican priorities. That could bring things to a halt in Congress and localities may have to wait longer until money is allocated for the rape kit program.

Meanwhile, local prosecutors are struggling to wade through their backlogs. Cuyahoga County, Ohio, has a backlog of 1,650 rape cases requiring investigation and the county won’t complete the probes until 2019, according to local county officials. “Our great hope from the federal money is that it would help counties like us…hire more investigators and advocates so we can speed that time line,” says Joe Frolick, the spokesman for Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty.

Kym Worthy, the county prosecutor in Wayne County, Michigan, plans to apply for a portion of the $41 million grant as soon as Congress approves the funding. “I’d like it to happen tomorrow,” she told Mother Jones in August. “Every day that goes by is another day that the victims have to wait for justice. This is the first grant of its kind where they really got what it takes.”

“So many of us—mayors, police chiefs, district attorneys, victim advocates, state legislators, and governors—are doing all we can to end the backlog,” Sarah Tofte, a prominent victim advocate, says. “Isn’t it time that Congress did?”

The Senate appropriations bill with the $41 million in new rape kit processing money died this summer partly because Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), wanted Democrats to allow them to add several unrelated amendments to the huge bill. One of those amendments, sponsored by McConnell, would have made it more difficult for the EPA to impose new rules on coal-fired power plants.

The federal government does not track the number of untested rape kits. That work has been left largely to advocates and journalists. The states with the largest known backlogs are Texas and Tennessee, which each have about 20,000 unprocessed kits in storage. Detroit has more than 11,000 unprocessed kits, and Memphis has over 12,000. Detroit recently tested 1,600 of its backlogged kits, helping the city identify 87 suspected serial rapists and leading to at least 14 convictions.

Here’s a look at the rape kit backlog around the country, via End the Backlog:

Map by AJ Vicens

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Congress Just Delayed New Funding to Help Rape Victims

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Drought Weighing You Down? Nope, It’s Lifting You Up

by VictoriaPethebr Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a odd piece of news: According to a study published Thursday in Science, the water loss due to this year’s drought has caused the entire western side of the United States to literally rise. After examining data from nearly 800 GPS stations across the country, researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that the area west of New Mexico has risen by an average of four millimeters this year. In the Sierra Nevadas and along California’s coast—two areas that have received far less precipitation this year than normal—the land rose 15 millimeters.

Adrian Borsa, a coauthor of the study, explained what’s happening: “The earth is an elastic material just like a block of rubber. If you put a water load on it, the earth deforms, if you take the water away, the earth will come back.” Using the GPS data, the researchers estimated that the Western United States has lost 62 trillion gallons of water to the atmosphere this year because of the drought. That’s enough water to cover the entire Western US in six inches of water.

The earth rising seems not only vaguely biblical, but also counterintuitive; one might expect the earth’s surface to fall if water is being taken from it. In fact, the ground is falling in some places: Some GPS stations in California had to be left out of the study because farmers are extracting so much groundwater that the ground is literally caving in. But this study didn’t examine the ground at a surface-level—it showed that the earth’s crust and mantle are responding elastically to the drought. So while some areas may be falling because of man-made changes at a local level, the West as a whole is rising.

As it turns out, the rise and fall of the earth due to water loss actually happens a little each year with the change of the seasons: Land is heavier in the winter and spring, and when water evaporates in the summer and fall, land is a little lighter. But the annual variation in California’s mountains is about 5 millimeters—not this year’s 15. The difference “sounds tiny,” said Borsa, but from a geological standpoint, “it’s a whopping signal” of the amount of water lost to the drought.

Contrary to most drought news these days, this rise of the West doesn’t have looming disastrous effects in and of itself: The researchers, for example, don’t think that this change will cause more extreme earthquakes.

But Borsa says that using GPS data on the rise of the earth could help regulators to understand how much water is being used in the West—particularly in California. California is the only Western state that doesn’t measure or regulate major groundwater use; if you can drill down to it, it’s all yours. A report produced for the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture estimated that California’s farmers will pump about 13 million acre-feet of groundwater this year—enough water to put a piece of land the size of Rhode Island 17 feet underwater.

With no regulatory system in place, though, it’s challenging for officials to know if these estimates are lining up with reality. “The extractions aren’t monitored, so no one really knows how to monitor the water supply,” says Borsa. Using GPS data “could be a great tool for water managers.”

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Drought Weighing You Down? Nope, It’s Lifting You Up

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The State Department Is Actively Trolling Terrorists on Twitter

by BlondellTregurt Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s one way the US government is trying to combat terrorism without the use of controversial explosions. A tiny portion of your tax dollars—just a few million dollars annually—is funding the State Department’s trolling of jihadists on Twitter.

One of the State Department’s official (and verified) Twitter accounts, called “Think AgainTurn Away” and going by the handle @ThinkAgain_DOS, is devoted to speaking “some truths about terrorism” online. If you follow the account, you’ll notice that this truth often manifests itself in the form of the State Department directly tweeting at Islamists and their supporters in English, and countering their beliefs.

This kind of thing isn’t unusual for the State Department. The Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications was established in 2010 to coordinate messaging to target violent extremism on the internet, especially that of Al Qaeda and affiliates. CSCC (an interagency center that is housed at State) initially focused on non-English online forums where the State Department saw jihadists attempting to recruit and raise money (message boards, comments on Al Jazeera Talk, etc.) Late last year, CSCC made a move into English-language websites, with the small team of analysts and microbloggers expanding their fight on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and elsewhere, under the banner of the US State Department. @ThinkAgain_DOS is just one of their tools in this digital-outreach turf war. (CSCC has used the phrase “Think again. Turn away” on other online posts.) Here’s a sample:

(Here is the context for the Al Qaeda-Assad oil accusations.)

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The State Department Is Actively Trolling Terrorists on Twitter

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The State Department Is Actively Trolling Terrorists on Twitter