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This Lawmaker Publicly Discussed Her Rape and Abortion. And Some Dude Laughed.

by ShelliMcWilliam Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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While speaking out against a proposed bill in Ohio that aims to ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, Rep. Teresa Fedor (D-Toledo) revealed on Wednesday she had been raped during her time in the military and chose to have an abortion.

“You don’t respect my reason, my rape, my abortion, and I guarantee you there are other women who should stand up with me and be courageous enough to speak that voice,” Fedor said before the state senate. “What you’re doing is so fundamentally inhuman, unconstitutional, and I’ve sat here too long.”

Her testimony comes just weeks after an Arizona lawmaker shared details about her own abortion, which she had after being sexually assaulted by a male relative when she was a young girl. In a later editorial for Cosmopolitan, Rep. Victoria Steele said that while she was glad to have spoken out and share her story during the legislative debate, she resented the fact that “women have to tell their deepest, darkest traumas in public” in order for lawmakers to grasp how dangerous such anti-abortion bills were to women and their health.

In Fedor’s case, not only did she feel she had to share her trauma with her colleagues, at one point she was forced to pause and address the fact a man appeared to be laughing at her while she spoke.

“I see people laughing and I don’t appreciate that,” she said. “And it happens to be a man who is laughing. But this is serious business right now and I’m speaking for all the women in the state of Ohio who didn’t get the opportunity to be in front of that committee and make this statement.”

Ohio’s House Bill 69 eventually passed with a 55-40 vote. The legislation now goes to the senate, and if passed, will make it a fifth-degree felony and result in up to $2,500 and possible jail time for doctors who perform the abortions.

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This Lawmaker Publicly Discussed Her Rape and Abortion. And Some Dude Laughed.

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We Have Some Good News For You About Marijuana

by SadieKneebone Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

When comparing seven commonly used recreational drugs, marijuana clocks in as by far the least dangerous, nearly 114 times safer than the most dangerous drug concluded in a new study—alcohol.

This is according to research recently published in Scientific Reports, which examined the exposure risks of heroin, meth, alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy, tobacco, and marijuana, by individuals. While previous studies have long suggested marijuana use poses a lesser mortality risk than alcohol—a point commonly cited in calls to increase legalization in more states—such a wide margin was not previously known.

In the new study, researchers also concluded that the deadly risks of alcohol have most likely been severely underestimated. Alcohol and tobacco (the fourth deadliest drug) are the only two substances in the study that are generally legal for adult use in the United States.

The findings come as more states appear to be coming around to the idea of marijuana legalization. Earlier this week, Alaska became the first red state to legalize pot, and Washington D.C. is preparing to do the same in just a few days. The recent passage of the $1.1 trillion federal spending bill marked a huge step towards ending the war on medical marijuana with the inclusion of an amendment preventing the Department of Justice from using funds to prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries.

Researchers behind the study said their results should encourage lawmakers to move away from the “current prohibition approach” under federal law, and opt for a more “strict regulatory approach” instead. The study also suggested a “risk management prioritization” that emphasizes a focus on alcohol and tobacco, rather than illicit drugs.

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We Have Some Good News For You About Marijuana

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Does Anyone Really Know What a Healthy Diet Is Anymore?

by ColemanKrauss Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

For several years now I’ve been following the controversy over whether the dietary guidelines that have developed over the the past 70 years might be all wrong. And I’ve become tentatively convinced that, in fact, they are wrong. For most people—not all!—salt isn’t a big killer; cholesterol isn’t harmful; and red meat and saturated fat are perfectly OK. Healthy, even. Sugar, on the other hand, really needs to be watched.

Before I go on, a great big caveat: I’m not even an educated amateur on this subject. I’ve read a fair amount about it, but I’ve never dived into it systematically. And the plain truth is that firm proof is hard to come by when it comes to diet. It’s really, really hard to conduct the kinds of experiments that would give us concrete proof that one diet is better than another, and the studies that have been done almost all have defects of some kind.

In other words, what follows are some thoughts I’ve gathered over the years, not a crusade to convince you I’m right. And it’s strictly about what’s healthy to eat, not what’s good for the planet. Take it for what it’s worth.

Salt is perhaps the most personal subject to me. My father had a stroke when I was a teenager, and his doctor told him he needed to watch his salt intake. Ever since then, I’ve watched mine too. As it happens, this wasn’t a big sacrifice: I don’t eat a lot of prepared foods, which are usually loaded with salt, and I’ve never felt the need to heavily salt my food.

Nevertheless, last year my doctor told me she was worried about my sodium level. I misunderstood at first, and figured that I needed to make additional efforts to cut back. But no. My serum sodium level was too low. What’s more, it turns out that most Americans consume a safe amount of sodium. The usual recommendation is to keep sodium intake below 2400 mg per day, but the bulk of the evidence suggests that twice this much is perfectly safe for people who don’t suffer from hypertension. (And even the recommendations for people with hypertension might be more restrictive than they need to be.)

Then there’s cholesterol. I guess I don’t have to say much about that: the evidence is now so overwhelming that even the U.S. government’s top nutrition panel announced a couple of weeks ago that dietary cholesterol was no longer a “nutrient of concern” in its latest guidelines. Go ahead and have an egg or three.

Finally, there’s saturated fat. The same nutrition panel that decided cholesterol is OK didn’t ease up its recommendations on saturated fat. But I’m increasingly skeptical of this too. Interestingly, Aaron Carroll is skeptical too:

As the guidelines have recommended cutting down on meat, especially red meat, this meant that many people began to increase their consumption of carbohydrates.

Decades later, it’s not hard to find evidence that this might have been a bad move. Many now believe that excessive carbohydrate consumption may be contributing to the obesity and diabetes epidemics. A Cochrane Review of all randomized controlled trials of reduced or modified dietary fat interventions found that replacing fat with carbohydrates does not protect even against cardiovascular problems, let alone death.

Interestingly, the new dietary recommendations may acknowledge this as well, dropping the recommendation to limit overall fat consumption in favor of a more refined recommendation to limit only saturated fat. Even that recommendation is hotly contested by some, though.

….It is frustrating enough when we over-read the results of epidemiologic studies and make the mistake of believing that correlation is the same as causation. It’s maddening, however, when we ignore the results of randomized controlled trials, which can prove causation, to continue down the wrong path. In reviewing the literature, it’s hard to come away with a sense that anyone knows for sure what diet should be recommended to all Americans.

Randomized trials are the gold standard of dietary studies, but as I said above, they’re really, really hard to conduct properly. You have to find a stable population of people. You have to pick half of them randomly and get them to change their diets. You have to trust them to actually do it. You have to follow them for years, not months. Virtually no trial can ever truly meet this standard.

Nonetheless, as Carroll says, the randomized trials we do have suggest that red meat and saturated fat have little effect on cardiovascular health—and might actually have a positive effect on cancer outcomes.

At the same time, increased consumption of sugars and carbohydrates might be actively bad for us. At the very least they contribute to obesity and diabetes, and there’s some evidence that they aren’t so great for your heart either.

So where does this leave us? As Carroll says, the literature as a whole suggests that we simply don’t know. We’ve been convinced of a lot of things for a long time, and it’s turned out that a lot of what we believed was never really backed by solid evidence in the first place. So now the dietary ship is turning. Slowly, but it’s turning.

For myself, I guess I continue to believe that the key is moderation. Try to eat more fresh food and fewer packaged meals. That said, there’s nothing wrong with salt or saturated fat or cholesterol or sugar. None of them need to be cut down to minuscule levels. You don’t need to limit yourself to two grams of salt or eliminate red meat from your diet. You can eat eggs and butter and steak if you want to. You should watch your sugar and carb intake, but only because so many of us consume truly huge quantities of both. In the end, all of these things are OK. They simply need to be consumed in moderation.1

Can I prove that? Nope. But it’s what I believe these days.

1Needless to say, none of this applies to people with specific conditions that require dietary restrictions. Listen to your doctor!

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Does Anyone Really Know What a Healthy Diet Is Anymore?

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Red Barns and White Barns: Why Rural Crime Skyrocketed in the Late 1800s

by ColumbusReilly Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Here’s a fascinating little anecdote about lead and crime from a recent paper by Rick Nevin. It shouldn’t be taken as proof of anything, but it’s certainly an intriguing little historical tidbit about the association between lead exposure and increases in crime rates.

Here’s the background. Homicides increased dramatically between 1900-11, but most of that appears to be the result of increased rural homicides, not urban homicides. If lead exposure is part of the reason, it would mean that rural areas were exposed to increasing levels of lead about 20 years earlier, around 1880 or so. But why? Nevin suggests that the answer to this question starts with another question: Why are barns red?

Professional painters in the 1800s prepared house paint by mixing linseed oil with white lead paste. About 90% of Americans lived in rural areas in the mid-1800s, and subsistence farmers could make linseed (flaxseed) oil, but few had access to white lead, so they mixed linseed oil with red rust to kill fungi that trapped moisture and increased wood decay. Red barns are still a tradition in most USA farming regions but white barns are the norm along the path of the old National Road. Why?

….The reason the red barn tradition never took root along that path is likely because the National Road made freight, including white lead, accessible to nearby farmers. USA lead output was a relatively stable 1000 to 2000 tons per year from 1801-1825, but lead output was 15,000 to 30,000 tons per year from the mid-1830s through the mid-1860s after the completion of the National Road.

….The first American patent for “ready-mixed” paint was filed in 1867; railroads built almost 120,000 track miles from 1850 to 1900; and Sears Roebuck and other mail-order catalogs combined volume buying, railroad transport, and rural free parcel post delivery to provide economical rural access to a wide variety of products in the 1890s.

The murder arrest rate in large cities was more than seven times the national homicide rate from 1900-1904 because lead paint in the 1870s was available in large cities but unavailable in most rural areas. The early-1900s convergence in rural and urban murder rates was presaged by a late-1800s convergence in rural and urban lead paint exposure.

In short, lead paint simply wasn’t available in most rural areas before the 1880s except in very narrow corridors with good transportation. You can see this in the prevalence of white barns along the National Road. Then, starting in the 1880s, revolutions in both rail transport and mail order distribution made economical lead paint available almost everywhere—including rural areas. A couple of decades later, homicide rates had skyrocketed in rural areas and had nearly caught up to urban murder rates.

By itself, of course, this would be merely speculative. What makes it more than this is that it adds to the wealth of other evidence that lead exposure in childhood leads to increased violence in adulthood. In the post-World War II era, lead exposure came mainly from automobile exhausts, but in the post-Civil War era it came mainly from the growth in the use of lead paint. And when lead paint became available in rural areas, farmers found it just as useful as everyone else. Given what we now know about the effects of lead, it should come as no surprise that a couple of decades later the murder rate in rural areas went up substantially.

There’s much more in the full paper, including another question: why did murder rates in St. Louis increase 10-fold from 1910 to 1916? Can you guess the answer? I’ll bet you can.

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Red Barns and White Barns: Why Rural Crime Skyrocketed in the Late 1800s

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Chart of the Day: Here’s Who’s Defaulting on Student Debt

by MarkoBurhop Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok passes along the chart on the right, which shows the default rate on student loans. What it shows is surprising at first glance: the highest default rates are among students with the lowest debt, not the highest.

But on second glance, this isn’t surprising at all. I’d suggest several good reasons to expect exactly this result:

The very lowest debt levels are associated with students who drop out after only a year or so. They have the worst of all worlds: only a high school diploma and a low-paying job, but student debt that’s fairly crushing for someone earning a low income.
The next tier of debt is likely associated with students at for-profit trade schools. These schools are notorious for high dropout rates and weak job prospects even for graduates.
The middle tier of debt levels is probably associated with graduates of community colleges and state universities. Graduates of these schools, in general, get lower-paying jobs than graduates of Harvard or Cal.
Conversely, high debt levels are associated with elite universities. Harvard and Cal probably have pretty high proportions of students who earn good incomes after graduation.
The highest debt levels are associated with advanced degrees. The $50,000+ debt levels probably belong mostly to doctors, lawyers, PhDs, and so forth, who command the highest pay upon graduation.

A commenter suggests yet another reason for high default levels at low levels of debt: it’s an artifact of “students” who are already deep in debt and are just looking for a way out: “The word is out if you have bad credit and are desperate for funds just go to a community college where tuition is low and borrow the maximum….Want the defaults to go down — stop lending to students that have a significant number of remedial courses their 1st and 2nd terms at a college where tuition is already low.”

If you’re likely to complete college, student loans are a good investment. But if you’re right on the cusp, you should think twice. There’s a good chance you’ll just end up dropping out and you’ll end up with a pile of student loans to pay back. If you’re in that position, think hard about attending a community college and keeping student loans to the minimum you can manage.

And try majoring in some field related to health care. Occupations in health care appear to have a pretty bright future.

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Chart of the Day: Here’s Who’s Defaulting on Student Debt

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Once Again: What’s the Deal With the Pretense That the Academy Awards Are Supposed to Last 3 Hours?

by EbonyCastles Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kelsey McKinney writes today about why Joan Rivers was left out of the “In Memoriam” segment at the Oscars last night:

The sequence, ultimately, only has so much room. Every year dozens of Academy Award nominees die, but there’s only room to memorialize about 30 of them in a show that almost always runs over time already.

Whoa. Hold on. The Academy Awards almost never run over time. They are, quite plainly, expected to last 3½ hours. For one thing, they always last 3½ hours.1 For another, there’s abundant evidence that show directors know exactly how long each bit is going to last. And there’s also the evidence of other awards shows, which demonstrates that directors can hit a scheduled end mark within a minute or two. Every time. So they know perfectly well that the Oscar telecast is going to last 3½ hours.

But for some reason, the publicly acknowledged length of the show is 3 hours. Why? I’ve asked this before. It can’t be too deep a secret since it’s so obviously planned this way and has been for years. But why?

1Actually this year they really did run long, a little over 3 hours and 35 minutes. But that’s unusual.

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Once Again: What’s the Deal With the Pretense That the Academy Awards Are Supposed to Last 3 Hours?

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Is It Fair to Keep Peppering Scott Walker With Gotcha Questions?

by MarlonCorones Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Lately Scott Walker has been asked:

Whether he agrees with Rudy Giuliani’s comment that President Obama doesn’t love America.
Whether he believes in evolution.
Whether he believes that Obama is a Christian.

Is this fair? Why is Walker being peppered with gotcha questions like this? Are Democrats getting the same treatment?

There are no Democrats running for president yet, so it’s hard to say what kind of questions they’re going to be asked. But if Hillary Clinton attends a fundraising dinner where, say, Michael Moore suggests that Dick Cheney should be tried as a war criminal, I’m pretty sure Hillary will be asked if she agrees. And asked and asked and asked.

As for the other stuff Walker is being asked about—evolution, climate change, Obama’s religion, etc.—there really is a good reason for getting someone like Walker on the record. He’s basically a tea party guy who’s trying to appear more mainstream than the other tea party guys, and everyone knows that there are certain issues that are tea party hot buttons. So you have to ask about them to take the measure of the man. Sure, they’re gotcha questions, but they have a legitimate purpose: to find out if Walker is a pure tea party creature or not. That’s a matter of real public interest.

Conservatives are complaining that Walker is facing a double standard. Maybe. We’ll find out when Hillary and the rest of the Democratic field start campaigning in earnest. But I’m curious. What kinds of similar questions would be gotchas for Democrats? Drivers licenses for undocumented workers? Support for single-payer healthcare? Those aren’t really the same, but I can’t come up with anything that is. It needs to be something that’s either conspiracy-theorish or else something where the liberal base conflicts with the scientific consensus, and I’m not sure what that is. GMO foods? Heritability of IQ? Whether George Bush stole the 2004 election by tampering with voting machines? I’m stretching here, but that’s because nothing really comes to mind.

Help me out. What kinds of Scott-Walkerish gotcha questions should reporters be saving up for Hillary?

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Is It Fair to Keep Peppering Scott Walker With Gotcha Questions?

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Sonny Smith’s Low-Key Garage Pop is Deceptively Smart

by SyreetaCharbonn Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sonny and the Sunsets
Talent Night at the Ashram
Polyvinyl

Seemingly adrift in a drowsy haze, the always-engaging Sonny Smith would make a fine magician, so adept is he at the art of misdirection. Like its predecessors, Antenna to the Afterworld and Longtime Companion, the winning Talent Night at the Ashram projects a laid-back, even apathetic vibe, but Smith’s low-key garage pop (brightened this time by thrift-shop synths) and aw-shucks singing are just the beginning of the story. This down-home philosopher is a thoughtful and compassionate observer of ordinary folks looking to make sense of life, as shown in such deceptively smart songs as “Alice Leaves for the Mountains”and “Icelene’s Loss.” While the seven-minute “Happy Carrot Health Food Store” will strain the patience of all but the most devoted fans, it’s a rare lapse for this charming man.

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Sonny Smith’s Low-Key Garage Pop is Deceptively Smart

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The Proofiness of Bill O’Reilly

by TysonGoldfarb Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week, after Mother Jones published an article by Daniel Schulman and me reporting on Bill O’Reilly’s mischaracterizations of his wartime reporting experience, the Fox News host replied with insult, denial, threatening rhetoric, and bombast.

Insult: He called me a “liar,” a “despicable guttersnipe,” and “garbage.”

Denial: Though the story included video of O’Reilly stating he had been “in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands,” O’Reilly insisted, “I never said I was on the Falklands island, ever.”

Threatening rhetoric: In one of his many comments to other reporters (while continuing to ignore the questions we sent him before publication), O’Reilly declared that I deserve “to be in the kill zone.”

Bombast: O’Reilly proclaimed, “Everything I said about my reportorial career—EVERYTHING—is accurate.”

And that was just in the first 24 hours. Eventually, O’Reilly added another element to his arsenal: proofiness.

After nearly a day of hurling invective, O’Reilly opened his cable show Friday night with a monologue that assailed me as a smear-meister. But he also tried to win the day by producing documents that, he asserted, showed how he had been unfairly tarred. “In what I consider to be a miracle,” he declared, “I found this CBS internal memo from 33 years ago praising my coverage” of a protest in Buenos Aires that happened just as the 1982 Falklands war ended.

Our article had pointed out that O’Reilly’s later accounts of this protest—which he called a “combat situation”—contained significant contradictions with the factual record. He has claimed that soldiers fired into the crowd, that “many” people were killed, and that “I was out there pretty much by myself because the other CBS correspondents were hiding in the hotel.” (The Mother Jones article said nothing about how O’Reilly covered the protest at the time.)

Yet O’Reilly’s dramatic account is disputed by media reports of the time and by other journalists who were there—including, CNN reported Sunday, seven CBS staffers who were in Buenos Aires at the time. (Former CBS News veteran Eric Engberg posted a particularly scathing recollection of O’Reilly’s short stint in Buenos Aires as a CBS News correspondent.)

So what did the “miracle” memo say? It apparently was from the CBS news desk in New York City, and the note expressed “thanks for a fine piece.” It showed, in other words, that O’Reilly covered the protest—which no one disputed—and it addressed none of the issues in question.

But wait, O’Reilly found another document in his basement—a letter he sent to a CBS News executive: “The crews were great…The riot had been very bad, we were gassed, shot at, and I had the best vantage point in which to report the story.” Again, the document showed what no one had disputed—that the protest turned ugly, and that police used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the crowd—but it provided no information backing up O’Reilly’s claim that soldiers gunned down civilians and “many” were killed.

“We have rock solid proof that David Corn smeared me,” O’Reilly concluded. Not really.

On Sunday, O’Reilly, speaking by phone, was a guest on Fox News’ MediaBuzz, which is hosted by the network’s in-house media reporter, Howard Kurtz, and he brandished a new piece of proof: a New York Times article. The story, by Richard Meislin, chronicled the protest, and O’Reilly read several paragraphs that described the violence in Buenos Aires. We cited this article in our story, and it does not say anything about soldiers shooting into the crowd, or anyone being killed. Its only reference to police or military violence is this one line: “One policeman pulled a pistol, firing five shots over the heads of fleeing demonstrators.” Nothing in the story matches O’Reilly’s description of soldiers mowing down protesters. (The Times dispatch did say, “Local news agencies said three buses had been set ablaze by demonstrators and another one fired upon.” It did not attribute those shots to soldiers or police, and the sentence suggests this violence was committed by protesters.)

But here’s the tell: As O’Reilly read from the Times story, when he reached the line about a cop “firing five shots,” he omitted the rest of the sentence: “over the heads of the fleeing demonstrators.” He jumped straight to the next sentence, hoodwinking the audience, for with this selective quotation, he had conveyed the impression that at least one cop had been firing on the protesters. He had adulterated his supposed proof.

Later in the show, Kurtz gently asked O’Reilly, “You’ve have said you covered a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War, you said the war zones of the Falkland conflict in Argentina. Looking back, do you wish you had worded it differently?” O’Reilly replied:

No. When you have soldiers, and military police, firing into the crowd, as the New York Times reports, and you have people injured and hurt and you’re in the middle of that, that’s the definition, all right.

Only that is not what the New York Times reported. O’Reilly was citing an article that disproved his point to prove his point.

And the reporter of that Times story, Richard Meislin, weighed in after the show to say O’Reilly had misled the audience about this article. On Facebook, Meislin wrote:

Bill O’Reilly cut out an important phrase when he read excerpts of my report from The Times on air Sunday to back up his claim that Buenos Aires was a “war zone” the night after Argentina surrendered to Britain in the Falklands war…

When he read it on Howard Kurtz’s Media Buzz show, O’Reilly left out that the shots were “over the heads of fleeing demonstrators.” As far as I know, no demonstrators were shot or killed by police in Buenos Aires that night.

What I saw on the streets that night was a demonstration—passionate, chaotic and memorable—but it would be hard to confuse it with being in a war zone.

There may be more proofiness to come. During Kurtz’s show, O’Reilly announced that on his Monday night show he expected to air the footage that he and his crew gathered during the Buenos Aires protest. If he does, there’s no doubt the video will present a protest that turned ugly. (Our article included video from the CBS News report on the protest—which did feature some of the footage that O’Reilly and his camera crew obtained—and that entire segment showed no troops or police firing on the protesters and slaughtering Argentines.) But unless the video O’Reilly presents on his program shows soldiers shooting into the crowd and massacring civilians, it will not likely bolster O’Reilly’s case.

That doesn’t mean he won’t cite it as proof he’s been wronged. That’s how proofiness works. The assertion is more important than the evidence itself.

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The Proofiness of Bill O’Reilly

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How Screwed Are Your State’s Oysters?

by Amilianp2t Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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When carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and cars rise into the atmosphere, they don’t always stay there. While the majority of these emissions hang around to create the greenhouse effect that causes global warming, up to 35 percent of man-made carbon falls into the ocean. When that happens, the pH level of the ocean drops, causing a phenomenon known as ocean acidification. Some scientists call this the “evil twin” of climate change.

Over the last century, the oceans have become about 30 percent more acidic, a faster rate of change than at anytime in the last 300 million years. That’s really bad news for any sea creatures that live in hard shells (shellfish) or have bony exoskeletons (i.e., crabs and lobsters), and for coral. Fish larvae and plankton can also be affected. And since many of these organisms are food for bigger fish and mammals, ocean acidification puts the whole marine ecosystem at risk.

Of course, humans depend on these critters as well, especially in coastal communities whose economies are deeply tied to the fishing industry. In the last few years, the threat to oyster harvests in the Pacific Northwest has been well documented. But every bit of the US coastline bears some level of risk, according to a new report in Nature. The study offers the first comprehensive projection of which parts of the US coast will be worst off, and when ocean acidification could reach dangerous levels there.

Julia Ekstrom, a climate adaptation researcher at the University of California-Davis, combed through existing scientific literature for three key types of data: How ocean acidification is projected to change in different regions over the next century; how dependent individual local economies are on the shellfish harvest (the study focused only on bivalves like oysters—other critters could be the subject of future research); and social factors that could help communities adapt, like pollution controls (runoff from rivers can also affect local pH) or the availability of other jobs. That data, combined, led to the map below.

Purple indicates the time at which ocean acidification is expected to become serious enough to significantly affect shellfish (darker is sooner); red indicates how vulnerable a region would be to a drop-off in shellfish productivity. So Washington, for example, could see the impacts soon but is relatively well-prepared to handle them. Impacts to the Gulf Coast are expected much further in the future but could be more economically severe.

Ekstrom et al, courtesy Nature

The good news is that many of what could be the hardest-hit communities still have time to prepare. Then again, the outlook could be worse in some places (Maine, for example) if you conducted similar research on lobsters and other vital fisheries. Ekstrom said localized predictions like this are key to enabling communities to prepare and can also help scientists decide where to focus efforts to monitor and track acidification as it progresses.

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How Screwed Are Your State’s Oysters?

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