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Piano performance next to a crumbling glacier will give you chills

by Zandra23Mqghpna Posted on June 21, 2016

Ice ice baby grand

Piano performance next to a crumbling glacier will give you chills

By on Jun 21, 2016Share

The Arctic Ocean may not be a typical venue for a piano performance, but it’s a prime setting for making a point about climate change. Ludovico Einaudi, an Italian composer-pianist, performed an original piece while stranded on an “artificial iceberg” (or rather, a floating platform made of white, wooden triangles) as Norway’s Wahlenbergbreen glacier collapsed in the background.

Greenpeace shipped the baby grand piano from Germany to the Arctic for the stunt, which was meant draw attention to a proposal to create a sanctuary in 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean, protecting it from oil drilling, fishing trawlers, and other exploitation.

There are no promises it will work, but enjoy the exciting performance on a stranded iceberg — no polar bears needed.

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Piano performance next to a crumbling glacier will give you chills

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California Might Close Its Last Nuclear Plant

by RolandLohman Posted on June 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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California’s biggest electric utility announced a plan on Tuesday to shut down the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant within the next decade. The plant, Diablo Canyon, has been controversial for decades and resurfaced in the news over the last few months as Pacific Gas & Electric approached a deadline to renew, or not, the plant’s operating license.

“California’s new energy policies will significantly reduce the need for Diablo Canyon’s electricity output,” PG&E said in a statement, pointing to the state’s massive gains in energy efficiency and renewable energy from solar and wind.

The most significant part of the plan is that it promises to replace Diablo Canyon with a “cost-effective, greenhouse gas free portfolio of energy efficiency, renewables and energy storage.” As I reported in February, some environmentalists were concerned that closing the plant could actually increase the state’s carbon footprint, if it were replaced by natural gas plants, as has happened elsewhere in the country when nuclear plants were shut down:

As the global campaign against climate change has gathered steam in recent years, old controversies surrounding nuclear energy have been re-ignited. For all their supposed faults—radioactive waste, links to the Cold War arms race, the specter of a catastrophic meltdown—nuclear plants have the benefit of producing huge amounts of electricity with zero greenhouse gas emissions…

A recent analysis by the International Energy Agency found that in order for the world to meet the global warming limit enshrined in the Paris climate agreement in December, nuclear’s share of global energy production will need to grow from around 11 percent in 2013 to 16 percent by 2030. (The share from coal, meanwhile, needs to shrink from 41 percent to 19 percent, and wind needs to grow from 3 percent to 11 percent.)

Michael Shellenberger, a leading voice in California’s pro-nuclear movement, estimated in February that closing Diablo Canyon “would not only shave off one-fifth of the state’s zero-carbon energy, but potentially increase the state’s emissions by an amount equivalent to putting 2 million cars on the road per year.” But that estimate presupposed that the plant would be replaced by natural gas. The plan announced today—assuming it’s actually feasible—appears to remedy that concern.

In any case, the plant won’t be closing overnight. Over the next few years we should be able to watch an interesting case testing whether it’s possible to take nuclear power offline without worsening climate change.

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California Might Close Its Last Nuclear Plant

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The weather is throwing thunderstorm tantrums

by IsaacExj6856 Posted on June 21, 2016

Jerkstorm alert

The weather is throwing thunderstorm tantrums

By on Jun 21, 2016 5:05 amShare

Good news for thunderstorms that get a kick out of ganging up, flooding a few billion dollars worth of real estate, and tearing roofs off buildings: the climate is working in your favor.

Hoo boy, is it ever. Burning wood, coal, and oil generate fine aerosol particles that create perfect conditions for thunderstorm ragers, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Aerosol particles do this by delaying rainfall from anything from a few hours to a full day, causing clouds to grow bigger and bigger until the resulting storm is a puffed-up, roided-out monster.

Scientists have suspected the connection between aerosols and crazy weather for a while. Aerosol particles from Chinese factories, for example, have been implicated in the frat party storms of the Pacific Northwest. What makes this study different is its scale. The research team looked at satellite data from 2,430 different cloud systems gathered from geostationary satellites that track the same spot on the Earth’s surface all day, instead of just flying over the planet a couple of times the way other weather satellites do.

Think of these thunderstorms as tantrums that the weather is going to throw with more and more intensity until we get the hang of making energy without throwing fine particulate matter into the atmosphere. Even then storms won’t go away entirely, but at least they’ll be tearing up the town a lot less often.

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The weather is throwing thunderstorm tantrums

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Climate denier tries to expose scientists, fails miserably

by ClydeFyans Posted on June 20, 2016

Climate denier tries to expose scientists, fails miserably

By on Jun 20, 2016Share

A recent study from Indiana University found that Americans are more likely to follow advice from climate scientists who have worked to cut their own carbon footprints. In light of this, science-denier blogger Anthony Watts did some sleuthing on Google to supposedly prove that prominent climate scientists don’t practice what they preach.

Watts posted what he calls “aerial surveys” or satellite images of their homes, including those of Michael Mann, Jonathan Overpeck, and Kevin Trenberth, scientists who are regular right-wing targets. He deduced that none have solar panels on their rooftops.

“The results don’t speak well for them,” he writes. You can sense how thrilled he was with this discovery.

Except … he was wrong.

DeSmog’s Graham Readfearn did real-life reporting and followed up with these scientists. He found that nearly all of them use some form of renewable power in their homes. As Michael Mann confirmed to Grist, “our power comes entirely from wind. Apparently it didn’t occur to Anthony Watts that there are a variety of sources of renewable energy, and a variety of plans (in Pennsylvania and elsewhere) that allow you to elect to purchase your power entirely from renewables.”

With this out of the way, maybe Watts can go forth with an equally valuable scientific inquiry: Proving, once and for all, that the Earth is a giant cube.

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Trump Dumps Campaign Manager—Twitter Delights

by MosheRRMEecxgd Posted on June 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump fired his longtime campaign manager Corey Lewandowski this morning, and political Twitter had very little sympathy for the ousted operative. Lewandowski, who is known to be abrasive and to have contentious relations with the media, has long been a controversial presence on Trump’s campaign. His manhandling of reporter Michelle Fields during a campaign event in March drew an outcry and calls for his firing. More recently, he has feuded with campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was brought in to professionalize the Trump operation. He appears to have lost his battle for supremacy against Manafort and his firing was announced at prime time (10 a.m. Monday morning) for the chattering classes to notice.

A member of Trump’s own staff jumped in to celebrate. Here’s the campaign’s senior adviser and head of Trump’s New York operation:

Also reveling in the news was Michelle Fields, who wound up getting fired from Breitbart News over the incident, when she protested the conservative outlet seeming to take Lewandowski’s side.

Rick Wilson, a top GOP consultant who has long been a top Trump critic couldn’t resist either.

But it wasn’t all celebration. Fellow GOP operatives took to Twitter to point out just how ill-timed the move was, and how Lewandowski’s firing might be anything but calming for the Trump campaign. Ryan Williams, a former spokesman for Mitt Romney, pointed out that Trump still needs Lewandowski’s support, at least for another month.

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Trump Dumps Campaign Manager—Twitter Delights

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Antarctica, most remote place on Earth, just hit a scary CO2 milestone

by PercySpangler Posted on June 17, 2016

Antarctica, most remote place on Earth, just hit a scary CO2 milestone

By on Jun 17, 2016 3:38 pm

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

We’re officially living in a new world.

Carbon dioxide has been steadily rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, setting a new high year after year. There’s a notable new entry to the record books. The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it.

Carbon dioxide officially crossed the 400 ppm threshold on May 23 at the South Pole Observatory. NOAA

A little 400 ppm history. Three years ago, the world’s gold standard carbon dioxide observatory passed the symbolic threshold of 400 ppm. Other observing stations have steadily reached that threshold as carbon dioxide has spread across the planet’s atmosphere at various points since then. Collectively, the world passed the threshold for a month last year.

In the remote reaches of Antarctica, the South Pole Observatory carbon dioxide observing station cleared 400 ppm on May 23, according to an announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday. That’s the first time it’s passed that level in 4 million years (no, that’s not a typo).

There’s a lag in how carbon dioxide moves around the atmosphere. Most carbon pollution originates in the northern hemisphere because that’s where most of the world’s population lives. That’s in part why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit the 400 ppm milestone earlier in the northern reaches of the world.

But the most remote continent on earth has caught up with its more populated counterparts.

“The increase of carbon dioxide is everywhere, even as far away as you can get from civilization,” Pieter Tans, a carbon-monitoring scientist at the Environmental Science Research Laboratory, said. “If you emit carbon dioxide in New York, some fraction of it will be in the South Pole next year.”

An animation showing how carbon dioxide moves around the planet. NASA/Youtube

Tans said it’s “practically impossible” for the South Pole Observatory to see readings dip below 400 ppm because the Antarctic lacks a strong carbon dioxide up and down seasonal cycle compared to locations in the mid-latitudes. Even factoring in that seasonal cycle, new research published earlier this week shows that the planet as a whole has likely crossed the 400 ppm threshold permanently (at least in our lifetimes).

Passing the 400 ppm milestone in is a symbolic but nonetheless important reminder that human activities continue to reshape our planet in profound ways. We’ve seen sea levels rise about a foot in the past 120 years and temperatures go up about 1.8 degrees F (1 degrees C) globally. Arctic sea ice has dwindled 13.4 percent per decade since the 1970s, extreme heat has become more common and oceans are headed for their most acidic levels in millions of years. Recently, heat has cooked corals and global warming has contributed in various ways to extreme events around the world.

The Paris Agreement is a good starting point to slow carbon dioxide emissions, but the world will have to have a full about-face to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change. Even slowing down emissions still means we’re dumping record-high amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

That’s why monitoring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa, the South Pole, and other locations around the world continues to be an important activity. It can gauge how successful the efforts under the Paris Agreement (and other agreements) have been and if the world is meeting its goals.

“Just because we have an agreement doesn’t mean the problem [of climate change] is solved,” Tans said.

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Antarctica, most remote place on Earth, just hit a scary CO2 milestone

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Your food is better traveled than you are

by TrudyKKRmyb Posted on June 14, 2016

as kazakh as apple pie

Your food is better traveled than you are

By on Jun 14, 2016Share

Cuisine is a powerful source of national identity. America is apple pie. Italy is lasagna. France is wine. As the Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang wrote, “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?”

But a new project from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture reminds us that our national dishes are made up of immigrants. The apples for American pie come originally from Central Asia, the tomatoes for Italian lasagnas and pizzas from the Andes, the grapes for French wine from North America (and North Africa), Thai chiles from Central America, Irish potatoes from South America. Some 70 percent of crops grown around the world are essentially foreign-born.

What we think of as national cuisines are really global cuisines. The more we try to use food to solidify our tribal boundaries, the more we wind up reaching into the communal fridge.

Play with the interactive graphic showing where crops originated, here. Hat tip to Jeremy Cherfas at NPR’s The Salt.

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Your food is better traveled than you are

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Alaska is way, way hotter than normal right now

by PamelaNegrete8 Posted on June 11, 2016

Baked Alaska

Alaska is way, way hotter than normal right now

By on Jun 11, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

Alaska just can’t seem to shake the fever it has been running. This spring was easily the hottest the state has ever recorded and it contributed to a year-to-date temperature that is more than 10 degrees F (5.5 degrees C) above average, according to data released Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

How much spring temperatures differed from average in Alaska.NOAA

The Lower 48, meanwhile, had its warmest spring since the record-breaking scorcher of 2012.

While May as a whole was only slightly above average — thanks in part to whiplashing weather from the beginning of the month to the end — every state in the contiguous United States had warmer-than-normal temperatures for the spring as a whole.

The main area of relative cool in May was in the Central and Southern plains, where considerable rains fell during the month. Storm systems generally tend to drag in cooler air and cloudy days help to keep a lid on temperatures.

“In addition, when soils are waterlogged it prevents afternoon temperatures from rising as high as they would if soils were dry,” Deke Arndt, chief of the monitoring branch of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said in an email.

The contiguous United States is having its fourth warmest year-to-date; May’s milder weather brought that trend down a bit from April when 2016 was in the No. 2 slot.

The clear standout of above-average temperatures for the Lower 48 — both in May and spring as a whole — was the coastal Pacific Northwest. Seattle had its fourth-hottest May and several spots in Washington, including Seattle-Tacoma Airport, were having their hottest year-to-date.

Alaska, for first time in modern records, had a spring average temperature of 32 degrees F (0 degrees C) — that may sound cold, but warmth is a relative term. That temperature handily beat the previous record hot spring of 1998 by 2 degrees F (1 degrees C), according to NOAA.

Several spots in Alaska, including Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau, recorded their hottest springs. Several others, including Barrow, the northernmost city in the United States, had their second-warmest spring.

Year-to-date, the state is running 10.3 degrees F above the 1925-2000 average of 26.1 degrees F (-3.3 degrees C) and 2.4 degrees F (1.3 degrees C) higher than the previous mark of 23.7 degrees F (-4.6 degrees C) set in 1981. In fact, the past three January-May periods are among the four warmest in Alaska’s records.

Year-to-date temperature anomalies across the contiguous United States.NOAA

Rick Thoman, climate science and services manager for the NWS’s Alaska region, said that several factors had converged to keep Alaska so relatively toasty, including persistent high pressure systems over the region and warm waters off the coast. Early snowmelt has also exacerbated the spring heat.

The effects of the elevated temperatures are readily apparent, Thoman said, with berries ripening weeks earlier than usual, very early “last frosts”, and an early start to construction projects.

Temperatures in Alaska have also steadily risen — like the planet as a whole, and the Arctic in particular — thanks to the excess heat trapped by human emissions of greenhouse gases. There is a 99 percent chance that 2016 will be the hottest year on record globally, mainly due to that excess heat.

NOAA forecasters expect the odds this summer to continue to favor above-average temperatures across Alaska, and there’s a good chance that 2016 as a whole could be record-hot for the state as well. But that depends on how the rest of the year plays out.

“Certainly, the combination of five months already in the books and the outlook for continued warmth raises the chances for the warmest year on record,” Arndt said. “But it would just take one or two really cold months to change the scenario from ‘warmest year’ to ‘one of the warmest years.’ ”

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New York City tries to end scourge of plastic bags. New York state says, “Nope.”

by FredericStonge Posted on June 8, 2016

New York City tries to end scourge of plastic bags. New York state says, “Nope.”

By on Jun 8, 2016Share

In May, New York City became the largest American city to tackle the plastic bag problem by narrowly passing legislation adding a 5 cent fee to each bag, both paper and plastic.

But, the New York Post reports, that law is hardly a done deal: The Republican-led New York Senate blocked the measure this week by passing legislation that prevents municipalities from imposing their own bag fees.

City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito quickly responded that she would work around the bill by changing the language for the bag fee and amending it to start next year.

But even city-wide support for the fee is mixed. Some, including Democrats in the state Senate, say it will disproportionately effect low-income and minority shoppers, although those buying groceries with government benefits would be exempt.

Others object to where the money is going — namely, the retailers themselves. “I was in Washington, D.C., when the bag fee happened, and you know what? It was to clean up the river,” Bertha Lewis, a social justice activist who opposes the measure told the New York Times. “These funds are being dedicated to the pockets of the retailers.” Lewis’ group, the Black Institute, collected signatures against the bill, and they were backed by plastic bag lobbying group the American Progressive Bag Alliance.

Plastic bags have long been a source of ire for environmentalists and litter-haters, and it’s easy to see why: As my colleague Ben Adler wrote, “When they’re not piling up in landfills, they’re blocking storm drains, littering streets, getting stuck in trees, and contaminating oceans, where fish, seabirds, and other marine animals eat them or get tangled up in them.”

There’s still the question of whether paper or reusable bags are really that much better for the environment. Plastic is undeniably bad, but the paper isn’t great either: A 2007 study found that the carbon footprint of paper is actually higher than that of plastic, mostly due to manufacturing and transportation. The same study noted that reusable cotton has problems of its own: A pound of cotton takes over 5,000 gallons of water to produce on average, and cotton isn’t recyclable in most places.

Clearly, the bag debate is far from over in New York and elsewhere. But we can be sure about one thing: While the environmental cost of any bag is high, it’s nothing compared to what you put in it.

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New York City tries to end scourge of plastic bags. New York state says, “Nope.”

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Oregon explosion reminds us that oil trains are “weapons of mass destruction”

by RoccoKroemer Posted on June 6, 2016

Oregon explosion reminds us that oil trains are “weapons of mass destruction”

By on Jun 6, 2016Share

An oil train that went off the tracks and burst into flames in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon last week hasn’t been cleaned up yet, but the railroad is already back to business as usual. And many North Americans are feeling renewed anxieties about the danger of what activists call “bomb trains.”

On Friday, 16 Union Pacific train cars filled with highly combustible fracked oil from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota derailed outside Mosier, Ore. Multiple cars caught fire, and about 100 people were evacuated from nearby homes. Elizabeth Sanchey, one of the first responders, told Oregon Public Broadcasting that the scene “looked like the apocalypse.” This weekend, a sheen of oil was spotted on the Columbia River nearby.

Mosier city officials quickly passed an emergency motion calling on Union Pacific to remove all oil from the damaged cars before the line was reopened, but Union Pacific just pushed the disabled cars to the side of the track and restarted operations. As of this writing, the cars are still filled with oil.

Oil train derailment in Mosier, Ore.Columbia Riverkeeper

“Restarting trains before the high-risk carnage of their last accident is even cleared from the tracks is telling Mosier they are going to play a second round of Russian roulette without our town,” said Mayor Alrene Burns in a statement. “It’s totally unacceptable.”

Mosier’s citizens agree. Dozens of locals — including city officials, tribal representatives, faith leaders, and members of environmental groups — gathered in nearby Hood River, Ore., over the weekend to protest the oil trains moving through their communities.

Protesters gathered after Mosier oil-train explosion.Columbia Riverkeeper

Mosier, of course, isn’t the only town at risk.

Crude oil from the Bakken shale is especially flammable, and it is transported all across the U.S. and Canada. In 2013, a train moving Bakken crude derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people and destroying much of the town center. It was the most deadly oil-train derailment in recent history, but it was far from the only one. In the past few years, more than a dozen derailments and explosions have occurred, leading to evacuations, oil spills, and, in some cases, fires that burned for days.

The 2013 oil-train disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. Public Herald

Though oil transport by rail is increasingly common, many residents have no idea that these trains are passing through their communities. (This map shows some rail lines that transport oil, as well as sites where accidents have occurred.) In 2014, national railroad operators agreed to eight voluntary measures to lower the risk of derailments, including reducing speed in some cities and increasing inspections, but communities still aren’t getting the information they would need to effectively respond to disasters, let alone prevent them.

Mosier has about 400 residents, but these oil trains aren’t only going through rural areas and small towns. They go through major American cities as well.

In Seattle, an oil train carrying nearly 100 cars derailed underneath a bridge in 2014. While all the cars were left intact and there was no public safety risk, according to officials, the incident underscored the potential for disaster. And that potential is huge: Last year, a KOMO News investigation captured video of more than a hundred train cars filled with oil rolling past the Seattle Seahawks football stadium as 32,000 fans watched a game inside. The Seattle City Council has called for railroads to curb oil train shipments through the city, but the companies have refused to comply, or even to release train schedules. And there’s no law that requires them to.

“The railroads are bringing weapons of mass destruction through our cities,” Fred Millar, oil safety and hazardous materials expert, tells Grist, and the only thing firefighters can do in the event of an explosion is to back off and let it burn.

As for Mosier, all evacuees have been allowed to return home, but their ordeal is far from over. The city’s wastewater treatment plant is offline, residents have a boil advisory for drinking water, and the full oil cars are still sitting there beside the tracks.

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Oregon explosion reminds us that oil trains are “weapons of mass destruction”

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