Tag Archives: oklahoma

Scientists See Quake Risk Increasing in Oklahoma

by Myrna Posted on May 6, 2014

A sharp rise in earthquakes in the state is apparently related to underground disposal of wastewater from oil and gas production, scientists say. Read this article:   Scientists See Quake Risk Increasing in Oklahoma ; ;Related ArticlesFor Florida Grapefruit, One Blow After AnotherHow To Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is RealWorld Briefing: The Netherlands: Greenpeace Stymied ;

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Scientists See Quake Risk Increasing in Oklahoma

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7 Scary Facts About How Global Warming Is Scorching the United States

by AlfredoBML Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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The new National Climate Assessment, being launched today by the Obama administration, is a landmark document.

It is a landmark because unlike the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is written in plain language that ordinary mortals can understand. (“Evidence for climate change abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans.” “Data show that natural factors like the sun and volcanoes cannot have caused the warming observed over the past 50 years.”)

It is a landmark because unlike past National Assessments, this report is not being buried or ignored. Rather, President Obama is using it to launch a very impressive communications campaign aimed directly at Americans via one of their most trusted scientific sources, TV meteorologists.

But most of all, it is a landmark because it shows, unequivocally, that we simply do not live in the same America any more, thanks to climate change. It is a different place, a different country. Here are some of the most striking examples of how:

1. America is much hotter than it was before. According to the assessment, the 2000s were the hottest decade on record for the United States, and 2012 was quite simply the hottest year ever (for the contiguous US).

2. That translates into extreme heat where you live. Of course, nobody feels temperature as a national average: We feel it in a particular place. And indeed, we’ve felt it. The National Climate Assessment makes clear that extreme heat waves are striking more than before, and climate change is involved. Take Texas’ extreme heat in the summer of 2011, the “hottest and driest summer on record” for the state, with temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees for 40 straight days! “The human contribution to climate change approximately doubled the probability that the heat was record-breaking,” notes the assessment.

Oh, and if we continue to mess around, it gets a lot, lot worse: By 2100, a “once-in-20-year extreme heat day” will occur “every two or three years over most of the nation.”

Projected decline in water stored in snow across the Southwest National Climate Assessment.

3. America is parched. According to the assessment, the Western drought of recent years “represents the driest conditions in 800 years.” Some of the worst consequences were in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and 2012, where the total cost to agriculture amounted to $10 billion. The rate of loss of water in these states was “double the long-term average,” reports the assessment. And of course, future trends augur more of the same, or worse, with the Southwest to be particularly hard hit. As seen in the image at right, projected “snow water equivalent,” or water held in snowpack, will decline dramatically across this area over the course of the century.

4. But when it rains, the floods can be devastating. At the same time, climate change is also exacerbating extreme rainfall, because on a warmer planet, the air can hold more water vapor. Sure enough, the United States has seen record rains and floods of late, including, most dramatically, a June 2008 Iowa flooding event that “exceeded the once-in-500-year flood level by more than 5 feet,” according to the assessment.

More generally, reports the document, the “amount of rain falling in very heavy precipitation events has been significantly above average” since 1991. Staggeringly, the Northeast has seen a 71 percent increase in the amount of precipitation that now falls in the heaviest precipitation events, rain or snow, since 1958.

National Climate Assessment.

5. There is less of America. Thanks to global warming, the United States has shrunk. That’s right: Sea level around the world has risen by eight inches in the last century, swallowing up coastline everywhere, including here. Granted, “eight inches” in this case is just an average; the actual amount of sea level rise varies from place to place. But the risk is clear: When a storm like Sandy arrives, those living on the coasts have less protection. Quite simply, they’re closer to the danger.

Such is the condition for quite a lot of Americans: Almost 5 million currently live within four vertical feet of the ocean at high tide, according to the assessment. In the future, they’re going to live even closer than that, as sea level is projected to increase by one to four feet over the coming century.

Oh, and then there’s the infrastructure. “Thirteen of the nation’s 47 largest airports have at least one runway with an elevation within 12 feet of current sea levels,” notes the assessment.

6. Alaska is becoming unrecognizable. Nowhere is global warming more stark than in our only Arctic state. Temperatures there have increased much more than the national average: 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1949, or “double the rest of the country.” The state has the United States’ biggest and most dramatic glaciers—and it is losing them rapidly. Meanwhile, storms batter coasts that used to be insulated by now-vanished sea ice.

And the ground is literally giving way in many places, as permafrost thaws, destabilizing roads, infrastructure, and the places where people live. Eighty percent of the entire state has permafrost beneath its surface. The state currently spends $10 million per year to repair the damage from thawing permafrost and is projected to spend $5.6-$7.6 billion repairing infrastructure by 2080.

7. America is ablaze. More drought, and more heat, means more wildfires. And sure enough, the United States has been setting numerous records on this front. In 2011, Arizona and New Mexico had “the largest wildfires in their recorded history, affecting more than 694,000 acres.” The same went for scorching Texas that year; it also saw unprecedented wildfires and 3.8 million acres consumed in the state. That’s “an area about the size of Connecticut,” notes the assessment.

And then there is Alaska, where “a single large fire in 2007 released as much carbon to the atmosphere as had been absorbed by the entire circumpolar Arctic tundra during the previous quarter century.” Because, on top of everything else, increasing wildfires actually make global warming itself worse, by releasing still more carbon from the ground.

In sum, you don’t live in America any more. To borrow a page (or, a title) from Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth, perhaps we should say you live in Ameriica. It is a different place, a different country, and by now, everybody is noticing.

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7 Scary Facts About How Global Warming Is Scorching the United States

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How To Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is Real

by BettyWhitefoord Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian, has had quite the run lately. A few weeks back, she was featured in the first episode of the Showtime series The Years of Living Dangerously, meeting with actor Don Cheadle in her home state of Texas to explain to him why faith and a warming planet aren’t in conflict. (You can watch that episode for free on YouTube; Hayhoe is a science adviser for the show.) Then, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2014; Cheadle wrote the entry. “There’s something fascinating about a smart person who defies stereotype,” Cheadle observed.

Why is Hayhoe in the spotlight? Simply put, millions of Americans are evangelical Christians, and their belief in the science of global warming is well below the national average. And if anyone has a chance of reaching this vast and important audience, Hayhoe does. “I feel like the conservative community, the evangelical community, and many other Christian communities, I feel like we have been lied to,” explains Hayhoe on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “We have been given information about climate change that is not true. We have been told that it is incompatible with our values, whereas in fact it’s entirely compatible with conservative and with Christian values.”

Hayhoe’s approach to science—and to religion—was heavily influenced by her father, a former Toronto science educator and also, at one time, a missionary. “For him, there was never any conflict between the idea that there is a God, and the idea that science explains the world that we see around us,” says Hayhoe. When she was 9, her family moved to Colombia, where her parents worked as missionaries and educators, and where Hayhoe saw what environmental vulnerability really looks like. “Some of my friends lived in houses that were made out of cardboard Tide boxes, or corrugated metal,” she says. “And realizing that you don’t really need that much to be happy, but at the same time, you’re very vulnerable to the environment around you, the less that you have.”

Her research today, on the impacts of climate change, flows from those early experiences. And of course, it is inspired by her faith, which for Hayhoe, puts a strong emphasis on caring for the weakest and most vulnerable among us. “That gives us even more reason to care about climate change,” says Hayhoe, “because it is affecting people, and is disproportionately affecting the poor, and the vulnerable, and those who cannot care for themselves.”

The fact remains, though, that most evangelical Christians in the United States do not think as Hayhoe does. Recent data from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication suggests that while 64 percent of Americans think global warming is real and caused by human beings, only 44 percent of evangelicals do. Evangelicals in general, explains Hayhoe, tend to be more politically conservative, and can be quite distrusting of scientists (believing, incorrectly, that they’re all a bunch of atheists). Plus, some evangelicals really do go in for that whole “the world is ending” thing—not an outlook likely to inspire much care for the environment. So how does Hayhoe reach them?

From our interview, here are five of Hayhoe’s top arguments, for evangelical Christians, on climate change:

1. Conservation is Conservative. The evangelical community isn’t just a religious community, it’s also a politically conservative one on average. So Hayhoe speaks directly to that value system. “What’s more conservative than conserving our natural resources, making sure we have enough for the future, and not wasting them like we are today?” she asks. “That’s a very conservative value.”

Indeed, many conservatives don’t buy into climate science because they don’t like the “Big Government” solutions they suspect the problem entails. But Hayhoe has an answer ready for that one too: Conservative-friendly, market-driven solutions to climate problems are actually all around us. “A couple of weeks ago, Texas…smashed the record for the most wind energy ever produced. It was 38 percent of our energy that week, came from wind,” she says. And Hayhoe thinks that’s just the beginning: “If you look at the map of where the greatest potential is for wind energy, it’s right up the red states. And I think that is going to make a big difference in the future.”

2. Yes, God Would Let This Happen. One conservative Christian argument is that God just wouldn’t let human activities ruin the creation. Or, as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma has put it, “God’s still up there, and the arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what he is doing in the climate, is to me, outrageous.” You can watch Inhofe and other religious right politicians dismissing climate change on biblical grounds in this video:

Hayhoe thinks the answer to Inhofe’s objection is simple: From a Christian perspective, we have free will to make decisions and must live with their consequences. This is, after all, a classic Christian solution to the theological problem of evil. “Are bad things happening? Yes, all the time,” says Hayhoe. “Someone gets drunk, they get behind the wheel of a car, they kill an innocent bystander, possibly even a child or a mother.”

Climate change is, to Hayhoe, just another wrong, another problem, brought on by flawed humans exercising their wills in a way that is less than fully advisable. “That’s really what climate change is,” she says. “It’s a casualty of the decisions that we have made.”

3. The Bible Does Not Approve of Letting the World Burn. Hayhoe agrees with the common liberal perception that the evangelical community contains a significant proportion of apocalyptic or end-times believers—and that this belief, literally that judgment is upon us, undermines their concern about preserving the planet. But she thinks there’s something very wrong with that outlook, and indeed, that the Bible itself refutes it.

“The message that, we don’t care about anybody else, screw everybody, and let the world burn, that message is not a consistent message in the Bible,” says Hayhoe. In particular, she thinks the apostle Paul has a pretty good answer to end-times believers in his second epistle to the Thessalonians. Hayhoe breaks Paul’s message down like this: “I’ve heard that you’ve been quitting your jobs, you have been laying around and doing nothing, because you think that Christ is returning and the world is ending.” But Paul serves up a rebuke. In Hayhoe’s words: “Get a job, support yourself and your family, care for others—again, the poor and the vulnerable who can’t care for themselves—and do what you can, essentially, to make the world a better place, because nobody knows when that’s going to happen.”

One reason some evangelicals dismiss climate worries is an apocalyptic worldview. Igor Zh./Shutterstock

4. Even If You Believe in a Young Earth, It’s Still Warming. One reason there’s such a tension between the evangelical community and science is, well, science. Many evangelicals are Young-Earth creationists, who believe that the Earth is 6,000 or so years old.

Hayhoe isn’t one of those. She studied astrophysics, and quasars that are quite ancient; and as she notes, believing the Earth and universe to be young creates a pretty problematic understanding of God: “Either you have to believe that God created everything looking as if it were billions of years old, or you have to believe it is billions of years old.” In the former case, God would, in effect, seem to be trying to trick us.

But when it comes to talking to evangelical audiences about climate change, Hayhoe doesn’t emphasize the age of the Earth, simply because, she says, there’s no need. “When I talk to Christian audiences, I only show ice core data and other proxy data going back 6,000 years,” says Hayhoe, “because I believe that you can make an even stronger case, for the massive way in which humans have interfered with the natural system, by only looking at a shorter period of time.”

6,000 years of temperatures records and a projection of the warming to come. Jos Hagelaars/My View on Climate Change

“In terms of addressing the climate issue,” says Hayhoe, “we don’t have time for everybody to get on the same page regarding the age of the universe.”

5. “Caring for our environment is caring for people.” Finally, Hayhoe thinks it is crucial to emphasize to evangelicals that saving the planet is about saving people…not just saving animals. “I think there’s this perception,” says Hayhoe, “that if an environmentalist were driving down the road…and they saw a baby seal on one side and they saw a human on the other side, they would veer out of the way to avoid the baby seal and run down the human.” That’s why it’s so important, in her mind, to emphasize how climate change affects people (a logic once again affirming the perception that the polar bear was a terrible symbol for global warming). And there’s bountiful evidence of this: The just-released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Working Group II” report on climate impacts emphasizes threats to our food supply, a risk of worsening violence in a warming world, and the potential displacement of vulnerable populations.

So is the message working? Hayhoe thinks so. After all, while only 44 percent of evangelicals may accept modern climate science today, she notes that that’s considerable progress from a 2008 Pew poll, which had that number at just 34 percent. Ultimately, for Hayhoe, it comes down to this: “If you believe that God created the world, and basically gave it to humans as this incredible gift to live on, then why would you treat it like garbage? Treating the world like garbage says a lot about how you think about the person who you believe created the Earth.”

To listen to the full interview with Katharine Hayhoe, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of recent findings that laboratory mice respond differently to male researchers, and new breakthroughs in “therapeutic cloning,” or the creation of embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How To Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is Real

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Does This Secret Drug Cocktail Work To Execute People? Oklahoma Will Find Out Tonight.

by OliverSheets Posted on April 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tonight Oklahoma will continue the nation’s ongoing experiment in executing people with untested drug combinations as it moves forward to kill death row inmates Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner using a new, secretly acquired drug cocktail.

Officials in Oklahoma and other states have resorted to these methods because they can no longer access sodium thiopental, the anesthetic traditionally used in lethal injections, and another drug used to paralyze the condemned. The lone US manufacturer quit producing sodium thiopental in 2011, and international suppliers—â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;particulalry in the European Union, which opposes the death penalty on humanitarian grounds—â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;have stopped exporting both drugs to the United States. This has left states like Oklahoma scrambling to find new pharmaceuticals for killing death row inmates. Some have been reduced to illegally importing the drugs, using untested combinations, or buying from unregulated compounding pharmacies, a number of which have a history of producing contaminated products.

Death row inmates and their lawyers have protested on the grounds that these untested protocols could produce a level of suffering that violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, and they’ve sued for more information about the source and purity of the drugs. In response, several states have passed secrecy laws, allowing them to keep the names of their suppliers, and in some cases the contents of the lethal injection, under wraps. (Oklahoma is so eager to hide the source of its death drugs that it buys them with petty cash so there are no transaction records.) Death row inmates, in turn, have filed suits challenging the constitutionality of these secrecy statutes.

In February, Lockett and Warner prompted a high-profile showdown between Oklahoma officials when they sued the state, asserting that its execution protocol could inflict “severe pain” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. A lower state court found the drug secrecy law patently unconstitutional, and the state Supreme Court ultimately stayed the two men’s executions until the issues were fully litigated. But Republican Gov. Mary Fallin insisted they be executed regardless of the court’s ruling, prompting a political crisis. On April 23, the Oklahoma Supreme Court, whose justices are now being threatened by the Legislature with impeachment, caved and allowed the executions to move forward.

The public knows very little about the drugs that will be used to kill Lockett and Warner who stand convicted of murder. â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;Lockett shot a teenage girl, then buried her alive, while Warner raped and killed his girlfriend’s 11-month-old daughter in 1997. Initially, the state said it would deploy a three-drug cocktail, including the sedative pentobarbital (normally used to euthanize animals); vercuronium bromide, which paralyzes the inmate; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. The first drug is supposed to knock out the inmate so he doesn’t feel pain. The second drug paralyzes him so onlookers can’t tell if he’s suffering. But pentobarbital, which states substituted for sodium thiopental after it went off the market, works more slowly than the old drug, and wasn’t tested in advance to make sure it was an appropriate substitute. Also, lawyers argue that it doesn’t prevent pain during an execution. For that reason, injecting it into a conscious animal in California is actually a crime.

Due to a shortages of pentobarbital and vercuronium bromide, Oklahoma planned to buy the drugs from an unnamed compounding pharmacy. This was problematic because such pharmacies are unregulated, and contaminated pentobarbital can result in excruciatingly painful deaths. (Experts say it can feel as though the insides of a person’s veins are being scraped with sandpaper.) South Dakota used a compounded pentobarbital contaminated with a fungus to execute Eric Robert in 2012. During the execution, he repeatedly opened his eyes—a sign that the drug wasn’t working, some experts said. Oklahoma has had similar problems. In January, it executed another man, Michael Lee Wilson, using pentobarbital from an unidentified compounding pharmacy. During the execution he sputtered, “I feel my whole body burning,” another sign that the drug wasn’t doing its job.

In March, Oklahoma backed away from this approach and said it would instead use one of five possible drug combinations, including a two-drug cocktail of midazolam (a sedative) and hydromorphone (a pain killer). When states first proposed using those drugs in lethal injection mixes last year, defense lawyers and medical experts warned that inmates receiving them would essentially suffocate to death. Brushing aside these concerns, in January Ohio used the drugs to execute Dennis McGuire, who gasped and convulsed horribly for more than 10 minutes before taking a record 26 minutes to die. His family, who watched in horror, is now suing over what they allege was cruel and unusual punishment.

Oklahoma has since shifted course again and announced that it would use a three-drug combo that includes midazolam and pancuronium bromide. According to Madeline Cohen, an assistant federal public defender representing Charles Warner, the state claims that both drugs are being purchased from manufacturers rather than compounding pharmacies but wouldn’t provide any other information. The only known use of this drug combination for executions was in Florida in 2013, but Florida used five times the dose of midazolam that Oklahoma plans to use, meaning Lockett and Warner will essentially be human guinea pigs. “It is an experiment, and I don’t think anybody is absolutely certain what will happen in Oklahoma,” says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Dieter adds that we’ll never know whether the drugs worked properly or caused needlessly painful deaths because the people who could tell us will be dead.

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Does This Secret Drug Cocktail Work To Execute People? Oklahoma Will Find Out Tonight.

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Dot Earth Blog: Dome it! Schools Can Affordably Survive Tornadoes

by Myrna Posted on April 29, 2014

A domed alternative to conventional school building designs could save lives, money and energy in America’s tornado zones. More:  Dot Earth Blog: Dome it! Schools Can Affordably Survive Tornadoes ; ;Related ArticlesDome it! Schools Can Affordably Survive TornadoesNuclear Industry Gains Carbon-Focused Allies in Push to Save ReactorsExperimental Efforts to Harvest the Ocean’s Power Face Cost Setbacks ;

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Dot Earth Blog: Dome it! Schools Can Affordably Survive Tornadoes

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Will Global Warming Produce More Tornadoes?

by Bernadine Posted on April 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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After a remarkably quiet start, the US tornado season exploded into action over the weekend, as a battery of tornadoes in Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma killed 16 people. The Arkansas towns of Mayflower and Vilona were particularly devastated. Based on preliminary assessments, some of the twisters may have reached EF-3 or stronger on the Enhanced Fujita scale, meaning that they had wind gusts of more than 136 miles per hour.

It all amounts to quite the burst of weather whiplash. Just days ago, after all, USA Today could be found calling 2014 the “safest start to tornado season in a century.” April 2014 was certainly looking nothing like April 2011, which featured a staggering 753 tornadoes in the United States, a new all-time record. So what’s up with this sharp variation in the behavior of tornadoes, these extraordinarily powerful storms that afflict the US more than any other part of the world? And could global warming have something to do with the matter?

Until pretty recently, scientists really felt that they couldn’t say much about that question. “The issue of global warming and severe thunderstorms which often result in tornadoes has been an outstanding challenge for the scientific community,” explains Noah Diffenbaugh, an Earth scientist at Stanford University who has focused on the question. For instance, a recent consensus report on extreme storms and climate change, published early last year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, found that there was “little confidence” of any trend in tornado occurrence, and also concluded that there were no clear changes in the environments in which these storms form.

In recent months, though, this consensus—that we really don’t know what’s happening with global warming and tornadoes—has been challenged by some interesting new research. To understand why, it helps to first grasp some basics on how tornadoes form, a crucial first step toward determining whether global warming may change them.

Tornadoes emerge in some, but not all, severe thunderstorms, powerful explosions of atmospheric energy that also frequently feature lightning, hail, strong winds, and intense rainfall. Scientific research has determined that while a variety of environmental and atmospheric conditions support severe thunderstorm development, two in particular are crucial. The first is that there have to be high levels of so-called “convective available potential energy,” or CAPE, which denotes the instability of the atmosphere, and thus how friendly it is to thunderstorm updrafts. The second condition is that there must be strong wind shear, defined as the difference in speed or direction of winds as one ascends from the surface higher into the atmosphere.

Based on this knowledge, researchers have turned to global climate models in order to predict how global warming could change the relationship between CAPE and shear in the the future. And for a long time, the two factors were basically expected to offset each other. Or as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tornado researcher Harold Brooks put it in a 2013 paper summarizing the consensus: “Climate model simulations suggest that CAPE will increase in the future and the wind shear will decrease.” So even though higher overall heat might lead to the potential for more explosive storms, the expected decrease in shear meant that potential might not get realized. In other words, it was basically looking like a wash.

The environments in which tornadoes form are changing, according to the latest research. NOAA/Wikimedia Commons

That conclusion fell into question late last year, though, with a paper by Diffenbaugh and two colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using a suite of the most state-of-the-art climate models, the researchers found, once again, that wind shear decreases under global warming. However, they also found that that didn’t really matter, because the number of days with both high CAPE and high shear nonetheless increased. “We find that in fact, at the monthly or seasonal scale, that decrease in shear does occur over the US,” Diffenbaugh says, “but it’s concentrated in these days with very low CAPE.” That means that the net number of days with high CAPE and high shear was still projected to increase in the future.

That means more favorable environments for severe thunderstorms in general, but what about the subset of those storms that produce tornadoes? For tornado occurrence, Diffenbaugh explains, wind shear very close to the surface appears to be particularly important. In their new modeling study, Diffenbaugh and his colleagues looked at this parameter too, and they found an “increase in the fraction of severe thunderstorm environments that have high CAPE and high low-level shear,” as Diffenbaugh puts it. As the authors wrote, this result is suggestive “of a possible increase in the number of days supportive of tornadic storms.”

The paper by Diffenbaugh and his colleagues represents “the first significant evidence that we might expect to see a change in tornadoes,” says NOAA’s Brooks.

Meanwhile, Brooks thinks he might have found a trend in a different area: actual tornado statistics.

In general, the scientific consensus has been that our tornado data just isn’t good enough to support the idea of any clear, historic trend in tornadic activity. But in his latest research, Brooks thinks he has detected a “pretty strong signal that there’s been an increase in the variability of tornado occurrence on a national scale.” What does that mean? Basically, an increase in erratic behavior: periods with little or no activity, followed by intense bursts of activity.

There’s been “a decrease over the last 40 years in the number of days per year with at least one F1 tornado occurring somewhere in the US,” says Brooks. “At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of days with at least 30 F1 tornadoes.”

As noted above, recent tornado behavior has certainly seemed pretty up and down. According to Brooks, in recent years we’ve seen records for the most tornadoes ever in a 12-month period, as well as for the fewest in a 12-month period. And Brooks says we are also seeing increasing variability in terms of when the tornado season actually starts. (Note: The relationship between Diffenbaugh’s research, and Brooks’ new finding, isn’t clear at this point.)

In summary, then, it would be very premature to say that scientists know precisely what will happen to tornadoes as global warming progresses. However, they have come up with some interesting new results, which point to potentially alarming changes. More generally, the upshot of this research is that tornadoes must change as a result of climate change, because the environments in which they form are changing.

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Will Global Warming Produce More Tornadoes?

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Elizabeth Warren Pens a Book, Is Still Totally Not Running for President

by Larissaiyb Posted on March 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s been a busy first year in the Senate for Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Since she entered the Congress in January 2013, she’s become a liberal hero, a frequent YouTube star who turns dull congressional hearings into viral hits. She’s pushed the government to lower interest rates on student loans. Protected vets from financial scams. Introduced legislation to protect poor people searching for a job. Called on banks to reveal their donations to think tanks.

Somehow she’s also found time to write a 384-page book. Next month Warren will release A Fighting Chance, which, according to the AP, will tell her whole life story, dating back to her early life in Oklahoma to her time setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and her first year in the Senate. Warren will embark on a brief book tour in Massachusetts after the book’s publication on April 22.

Warren is already a prolific author, having published eight books before she ever ran for office. But those other writing ventures were an outgrowth of her academic career. Her new book appears purely political, the sort of hagiographic biography politicians pen to position themselves for a future run at higher office. Barack Obama published The Audacity of Hope, at around the same point of his career in the Senate. Mitt Romney wrote No Apology: The Case for American Greatness in 2010 to gear up for his 2012 campaign. Hillary Clinton is set to release a book in June.

Warren has said, time and again, that she has no intention of moving into the White House. “I’m not running for president and I plan to serve out my term,” she said at a December press conference. But politicians have a long history of ignoring their previous denials when circumstances change. Barack Obama frequently dismissed the notion that he’d seek the presidency so early in his career, only to ditch those denials and announce a campaign in 2007. It’s unlikely that Warren would challenge Clinton should Clinton, as expected, run in 2016. The Massachusetts politician joined her fellow female senators in signing a letter urging Clinton to run for president again. But, should she pass on another bid, Warren could always change her tune.

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Elizabeth Warren Pens a Book, Is Still Totally Not Running for President

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MAP: The Republican Crusade to End Insurance Coverage of Abortion

by PEACarinzhpby Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, the GOP-led House of Representatives passed the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, a bill that would radically limit Americans’ ability to buy private-sector health insurance that covers abortion. With the Senate under Democratic control and Barack Obama in the White House, the bill is doomed to fail. But abortion foes can rest easy. Although their momentum has stalled on Capitol Hill, there is a quiet campaign underway in states across the country to outlaw private-insurance coverage of abortion—and it’s working.

Lawmakers in 24 states have already prohibited plans on the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces from covering abortion. Now some states are going even further, targeting the tens of millions of women who receive health insurance from their private-sector employers. Nine states already have these broader bans, leaving 3.5 million women without insurance coverage for abortion. And since 2011, lawmakers in 10 more states have threatened the coverage of more than 9 million women, according to data assembled by the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit legal foundation focused on women’s rights.

Five states—Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, and Oklahoma—have prohibited private insurers from covering abortion for years. (The oldest ban, in North Dakota, dates back to 1979.) But the 2010 elections, which swept Republicans into power in state governments around the country, renewed interest in passing these bans. And since 2010, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, and Utah all have passed new laws banning private insurers from covering abortions.

From 2011 to 2013, lawmakers in another 10 states—Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia—introduced bans on private-insurance abortion coverage, with many coming extremely close to passage, according to Elizabeth Nash, the state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights think tank.

Now, just four weeks into the new year, lawmakers in Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia are slated to consider new bills to eliminate abortion coverage from every insurance policy in the state, putting almost 2 million more women at risk of losing coverage for abortion. (That’s according to estimates by the National Women’s Law Center, which calculated how many women of reproductive age are insured through the workplace in each state.)

The millions of women who now face having to pay for abortions out of pocket will find the procedures don’t come cheap. A May 2013 study from the Guttmacher Institute found that for women whose abortions weren’t fully covered by their insurance, an abortion cost an average of $485. Half of the women who were unable to rely on insurance to pay for their abortions—either because they didn’t have it or it didn’t cover abortions—ultimately found it difficult to pay. Large numbers of those women put off paying their rent or utilities or cut back on buying food in order to afford the procedure.

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MAP: The Republican Crusade to End Insurance Coverage of Abortion

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Believe It: Global Warming Can Produce More Intense Snows

by AbbieUsusd Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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We all remember “Snowmageddon” in February of 2010. Even as Washington, D.C., saw 32 inches of snowfall for the month of February—more than it has seen in any February since 1899—conservatives decided to use the weather to mock global warming. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe and his family even built an igloo on Capitol Hill and called it “Al Gore’s New Home.” Har har.

Yet at the same time, scientific voices were pointing out something seemingly counterintuitive, but in fact fairly simple to understand: Even as it raises temperatures on average, global warming may also lead to more intense individual snow events. It’s a lesson to keep in mind as the northeast braces for winter storm Janus—which is expected to deliver as much as a foot of snow in some regions—and we can expect conservatives to once again mock climate change.

To understand the relationship between climate change and intense snowfall, you first need to understand that global warming certainly doesn’t do away with winter or the seasons. So it’ll still be plenty cold enough for snow much of the time. Meanwhile, global warming loads the dice in favor of more intense precipitation through changes in atmospheric moisture content. “Warming things up means the atmosphere can and does hold more moisture,” explains Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “So in winter, when there is still plenty of cold air there’s a risk of bigger snows. With east coast storms, where the moisture comes from the ocean which is now warmer, this also applies.”

Why does the atmosphere hold more moisture? The answer is a key physical principle called the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, stating that as atmospheric temperature rises, there is an exponential increase in the amount of water vapor that the air can hold—leading to more potential precipitation of all types. (A detailed scientific explanation can be found here.)

Indeed, scientific reports have often noted the snow-climate relationship. An expansive 2006 study of US snowstorms during the entirety of the 20th century, for instance, found that they were more common in wetter and warmer years. “A future with wetter and warmer winters…will bring more snowstorms than in 1901-2000,” the paper predicted. There is also a clear increase in precipitation in the most intense precipitation events, especially in the northeast:

Percent increases in the amount of precipitation occurring in the heaviest precipitation events from 1958 to 2007. US Global Change Research Program.

“More winter and spring precipitation is projected for the northern U.S., and less for the Southwest, over this century,” adds the draft US National Climate Assessment. Precipitation of all kinds is expected to increase, the study notes, but there will be large regional variations in how this is felt.

“The old adage, ‘it’s too cold to snow,’ has some truth to it,” observes meteorologist Jeff Masters, co-founder of the Weather Underground. “The heaviest snows tend to occur when the air temperature is near the freezing mark, since the amount of water vapor in the air increases as the temperature increases. If the climate in a region where it is ‘too cold to snow’ warms to a level where more snowstorms occur near the freezing point, an increase in the number of heavy snowstorms is possible for that region.”

In fairness, global warming is also expected to decrease overall snow cover, because intense snow events notwithstanding, snow won’t last on the ground as long in a warmer world. In fact, a decrease in snow cover is already happening.

Today’s snows will usher in a new northeast cold spell, not as intense as the “polar vortex” onslaught of two weeks ago but still pretty severe. But a temporary burst of cold temperatures doesn’t refute climate change any more than a major snowstorm does. Indeed, we have reasons to expect that the rapid warming of the Arctic may be producing more cold weather in the mid-latitudes in the Northern hemisphere. For an explanation of why, listen to our interview with meteorologist Eric Holthaus on a recent installment of Inquiring Minds (from minutes 2 through 12 below):

None of this is to say, of course, that global warming explains single events; its effect is present in overall changes in moisture content, and perhaps, in the large-scale atmospheric patterns that bring us our weather.

Still, that’s more than enough to refute conservatives who engage in snow trolling.

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Believe It: Global Warming Can Produce More Intense Snows

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California is now really, truly, officially screwed by drought

by MahaliaCooke Posted on January 17, 2014

California is now really, truly, officially screwed by drought

By

David Prasad

We tend to complain about precipitation in the winter: It’s cold, it’s depressing, it can make getting around dangerous and not fun. But as California can tell you right about now, there is definitely such thing as not enough “wintry mix.”

Friday morning, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) officially declared a drought emergency. He directed state agencies to use less water, and asked residents and businesses to voluntarily cut their usage 20 percent. Mandatory water limitations could follow, and Brown might ask for federal aid. Meanwhile, public landscaping will go dry and emergency firefighters will be added to the payroll.

We’ve been nervously watching the Golden State’s clear skies this winter, but recently things have gone from bad to worse fast. In the past two weeks, the percentage of the state experiencing extreme drought conditions shot from 28 percent up to a vertigo-inducing 63 percent, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains is at a perilously low 17 percent of its usual level this time of year. Since as much as 65 percent of Cali’s water comes from this virtual water cooler, and much of that goes toward the state’s multibillion-dollar agricultural industry, the effects of a catastrophic water shortage may be widely felt in the year to come.

Though droughts are not uncommon in the region’s Mediterranean climate, the pattern of the past few years points to a slow-mo climate crisis crashing into the West Coast. 2013 was California’s driest year on record, with about two thirds of the state experiencing severe water shortage and fire danger. (Yesterday, a wildfire just outside of L.A. started gobbling up homes and trees in the Angeles National Forest, despite the fact that January and February are typically the wettest months in California.) From Salon:

Experts say that California must look beyond the current crisis … warning that the state can expect more of the same in future years. “The current historically dry weather is a bellwether of what is to come in California, with increasing periods of drought expected with climate change,” Juliet Christian-Smith, climate scientist in the California office of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. “Because increasing demand and drought are straining our water resources, we need to adopt policies that address both the causes and consequences of climate change.”

“Hopefully it’ll rain eventually,” Brown said during his announcement, with meteorologically sanctioned pessimism, as in: Probably not soon. The imminent return of the polar vortex is likely to impose moisture-free conditions on California while dumping extra snow over much of the rest of the country for the next few weeks.

Other states are suffering from dry spells too, including Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, and Hawaii. Maybe it’s time to put that spoon under your pillow and wish for a slush storm like the good old days.


Source
“The worst drought California has ever seen” is now an official emergency, Salon
California governor declares drought emergency, asks for conservation, NBC

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern.

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California is now really, truly, officially screwed by drought

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