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Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

by MarilouK96 Posted on June 30, 2014

Space Oddity

Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

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JPL/NASA

The last time NASA tried to launch a satellite to measure carbon dioxide levels from space, within minutes the $273 million project plopped into the Southern Ocean (oops). Tomorrow they’re giving it another go. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2 will blast off at 2:56 a.m. PDT from the Vadenburg Air Force Base in California. This time, it’ll hopefully make it to 438 miles above the planet, where it will be in a prime position to obsessively watch Earth breathe.

JPL/NASA

Which sounds stalker-esque, but don’t get too creeped out. OCO’s main goal is to figure out where, exactly, atmospheric CO2 currently comes from – and, more mysteriously, where it ends up. While fossil fuel emissions have tripled since the 1960s, levels of atmospheric CO2 have risen by less than a quarter (but unfortunately that’s still enough to cause big global change). That’s because somehow our oceans and plants have, on average, been able to keep pace with absorbing half of the total atmospheric CO2. But scientists still don’t know a lot about the dynamics of how this is happening, which leaves them wondering: How long can we expect these carbon sinks to keep sucking the stuff down?

“Understanding what controls that variability is really crucial,” OCO project manager Ralph Basilio said at a press conference in Pasadena. “If we can do that today, it might inform us about what might happen in the future.”

The satellite will carry a 300-pound instrument that measures the colors of sunlight that bounce off the earth, because that color intensity indicates how much CO2 the light beams through. While it will only take in a square mile at a time – an area smaller than New York’s Central Park – scientists say that it will tell a much more complete story of the comings and goings of atmospheric CO2 than the 150 land-based stations from which they currently get their measurements. It will collect 24 measurements a second, which means a million a day, but scientists predict that only a tenth of them (100,000/day) will be clear enough of clouds to be usable.

If they can get it up there in the first place, that is. Ground control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on …


Source
NASA satellite to inventory climate-changing carbon from space, Reuters
NASA Launching Satellite to Track Carbon, The New York Times

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

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Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

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TV Strike Against Dodgers May be the Straw That Breaks the Sports Bubble

by PaulettPearl Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez thinks it’s long past time for everyone to figure out a way to end the Dodgers TV blackout in Southern California:

This all began in 2012 when the Guggenheim Group, or whatever they call themselves, paid too much money — about $2 billion — to buy the Dodgers from the hated Frank McCourt….The new owners then managed to dupe Time Warner Cable into spending an even more obscene amount — $8.4 billion — for the rights to broadcast the games on SportsNet LA.

….They figure they’ll get all of it back from you and me by raising the price of tickets and hot dogs and the fees for getting the games on TV….But in the case of the Dodgers, there was a snag along the way. DirecTV and other companies didn’t like Time Warner’s asking price for the right to carry the games, and they told the cable giant to stuff it. So the standoff continues, with half the season gone and no relief in sight.

Actually, I don’t think this is quite right. It’s not the asking price per se that cable companies don’t like, it’s the fact that Time-Warner is demanding that their spiffy new all-Dodgers channel be added to the basic cable menu. Other broadcasters aren’t willing to do this. If Time-Warner wants to set a carriage fee of $5 or $10 or whatever, that’s OK as long as it’s only being paid by people who actually want to watch the Dodgers. It’s not OK if every single subscriber has to pay for it whether they like it or not. At that point, it basically becomes a baseball tax on every TV viewer in Southern California.

Of course, this is just another way of saying what Lopez said: Everyone involved in this fiasco has overpaid. Time-Warner is demanding that their Dodgers channel be added to basic cable because they know they can never justify their purchase price if they can only get subscription revenue from the one-half or one-third of all households who actually care about the Dodgers. So they’re holding out for the tax.

I’d like to see the Dodgers on TV, but I hope everyone holds out forever anyway. It’s time for a revolt against the absurd spiral in prices for sports teams, and maybe historians will eventually point to this as the straw that finally broke the sports bubble. But that all depends on how long everyone can hold out.

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TV Strike Against Dodgers May be the Straw That Breaks the Sports Bubble

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New White House Program Will Provide Legal Aid to Unaccompanied Migrant Kids

by JosefWOOZigzhlu Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

Last Friday, the Obama administration announced the launch of “justice AmeriCorps,” a new program that will provide legal support to unaccompanied migrant children facing deportation. As Mother Jones has reported extensively, the number of undocumented children caught illegally entering the US without a parent or guardian has more than doubled in recent years, to nearly 39,000 in 2013.

The new initiative is sponsored by the the Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review and the Corporation for National & Community Service (CNCS), which runs AmeriCorps. According to a CNCS statement, around 100 lawyers and paralegals will be recruited to provide legal services and representation for unaccompanied kids under 16 facing removal hearings. Nonprofits in 29 cities with high immigrant populations will enlist and supervise the legal volunteers, who will commit to one year of service as AmeriCorps members. Attorney General Eric Holder called the program “a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society.”

This marked the administration’s second major recent announcement regarding the influx of unaccompanied children. Last Monday, the White House announced the creation of a task force to ensure that federal agencies are “unified in providing relief to affected children,” as well as plans to relocate 600 kids from border holding cells to an emergency shelter at Naval Base Ventura County in Southern California.

In his statement, Holder noted that many of the children and teens who will be assisted by the new AmeriCorps program “are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse, or trafficking.” This description of the circumstances under which children migrate alone matches the findings of a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Of 400 unaccompanied migrant children interviewed, 58 percent “had suffered, been threatened, or feared serious harm” that might merit international protection.

As Wendy Young, executive director of KIND, a nonprofit that helps unaccompanied immigrant kids find pro bono legal support, told Mother Jones’ Ian Gordon, “This is becoming less like an immigration issue and much more like a refugee issue. Because this really is a forced migration. This is not kids choosing voluntarily to leave.” Deported children often return to the same dangerous or desperate situations they attempted to escape, further burdened with smuggling debt. The new initiative will attempt to curb this problem by training its members to identify signs of human trafficking and abuse in the children they serve.

Kimi Jackson, director of ProBAR, which provides legal services to detained children in South Texas, said in an email that “this initiative is a good step. Currently, the majority of kids appear in court and represent themselves without a lawyer. Attorneys for released kids are urgently needed.”

Although the program aims to serve the “most vulnerable” unaccompanied children, the 100 funded lawyers and paralegals will only be capable of providing assistance to a fraction of the 74,000 children anticipated to be apprehended by Border Patrol this year. CNCS estimates that 10,000 unaccompanied kids will appear in immigration court in the 29 participating cities in the 2015 fiscal year.

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New White House Program Will Provide Legal Aid to Unaccompanied Migrant Kids

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This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border

by FletcheDriscoll Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, the Obama administration announced that it was creating a multiagency taskforce to oversee the recent surge of unaccompanied child migrants coming primarily from Central America and Mexico. The announcement included plans to move some 600 kids from holding cells at the border to an emergency shelter at Naval Base Ventura County in Southern California.

As the number of unaccompanied children entering the United States has more than doubled since 2011, the Office of Refugee Resettlement—the part of the Department of Health and Human Services charged with caring for unaccompanied minors in US custody—has brought more and more shelters online to accommodate the influx. (Kids are typically housed in these shelters until ORR can reunify kids with US-based family, with whom they stay pending their immigration hearings.) Here’s what the increase has looked like:

So where, exactly, are these shelters? Fifty of the 80 shelters in 2013 were in states along the Southwest border; Texas alone had 33 shelters. The rest, however, are spread out throughout the country. As Maria Woltjen, director of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told me in an interview: “Nobody in Chicago knows there are 400 kids detained in our midst. You walk by, and you think it’s just an old nursing home, and it’s actually all these immigrant kids who are detained inside.”

Check out our map of ORR’s 2013 shelters, data I obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request:

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This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border

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Hurricane Amanda Just Set an Ominous New Record

by RJIDinahhonbocu Posted on May 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Usually, people living in the United States don’t pay much attention to hurricanes in the eastern Pacific, the other basin where megastorms that can affect North America are formed. Mostly, these storms wallop Mexico, or travel harmlessly out to sea. So, given the standard myopia of the media, we rarely hear much about them.

But this year, perhaps, we ought to be paying more attention. The eastern Pacific hurricane season started on May 15, and already, with its first storm, it has set an ominous record. The hurricane in question, named Amanda, spun up south of the Baja California peninsula Thursday, and on Sunday it attained maximum sustained wind speeds of 155 miles per hour—just below Category 5 status. Or as National Hurricane Center forecaster Stacy Stewart put it when the storm reached its peak strength: “Amanda is now the strongest May hurricane on record in the eastern Pacific basin during the satellite era.”

This record is notable for two reasons. First of all, even though there remains a great deal of uncertainty and debate about the relationship between hurricanes and global warming, the fact is that in many hurricane basins across the world, new storm intensity records have been set just since the year 2000. Amanda therefore fits into this broader pattern.

Second, there is growing evidence that El Niño conditions—characterized by an eastward shift of warm water across the great Pacific Ocean, with global weather ramifications—are developing in the Pacific right now. The latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now gives us a greater than 65 percent chance that El Niño conditions will develop by this summer.

In El Niño years, we tend to see a great firing of hurricane activity in the eastern Pacific, and a suppression of these storms in the Atlantic. In fact, the strongest storm ever recorded in the eastern Pacific, Category 5 Hurricane Linda in 1997, occurred during the last super-strong El Niño year.

So if El Nino does occur, Amanda may not be the strongest storm that we see in the Eastern Pacific this year. That’s potentially bad news for Mexico. In fact, there is even a tiny possibility that during an El Niño year, a storm might be able to travel as far north as Southern California (albeit in a pretty weakened state), as Hurricane Linda was at one point forecast to do. In fact, recent historical work on past hurricanes has revealed that in 1858, San Diego was struck by what appears to have been a Category 1 hurricane.

As of now, Hurricane Amanda has weakened and is not expected to affect land in a serious way. But this is definitely a storm whose significance extends well beyond its immediate impact.

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Hurricane Amanda Just Set an Ominous New Record

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Insane wildfires arrive months early in SoCal, threaten nuke plant

by RamonitTorrez Posted on May 15, 2014

the violent crackle of global warming

Insane wildfires arrive months early in SoCal, threaten nuke plant

By

Reuters/Sam HodgsonFirefighters battle the Poinsettia Fire in Carlsbad, Calif., on May 14, 2014.

Drought-parched Southern California has erupted in flames, months before the state’s fire season used to normally begin. The fires threaten homes and schools – and a shuttered nuclear power plant.

More than 20,000 people were evacuated from their homes on Wednesday as wildfires tore through the San Diego area, where temperatures today could hit 106 degrees. From The Christian Science Monitor:

For many Californians, the wildfire season has settled into expectation and habit. But this year, the highly flammable combination of record heat, the seasonal Santa Ana winds, and lack of rain are exacerbating the problem and producing severe fire conditions several months ahead of the usual fire season.

California fire, civic, and police officials up and down the state are admonishing residents that more could be on the way with the state’s worst drought in a century and blistering Santa Ana winds resulting in some of the hottest May temperatures since record-keeping began in 1896. …

Funds and firefighters are exhausted with the relentless pace of the state’s 1,244 wildfires this year — already triple the state average — and US Interior Department officials are predicting no letup.

San Diego appears to be the hardest hit with at least nine different fires that have forced the closing of California State University at San Marcos and the San Diego Unified School District. At least 10,000 acres have burned, along with dozens of homes.

Some of the fires threaten the San Onofre nuclear plant, which was shuttered following radioactive leaks in 2012. The plant evacuated 13 non-essential employees yesterday.

The violent crackling sounds plaguing Southern California right now are what global warming sounds like, and the odor of the noxious smoke is what it smells like. These are the kinds of fires that are becoming more frequent as the climate changes, particularly in the American West, which is maxing out already-stretched firefighting budgets.


Source
California wildfires set relentless pace months before typical season, The Christian Science Monitor

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Insane wildfires arrive months early in SoCal, threaten nuke plant

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SPECIAL EVENT: "Noah" Director Darren Aronofsky Discusses Faith and the Environment

by GiselleBatson Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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There has been no lack of conservative Christian criticism aimed at Oscar-nominated director Darren Aronofsky’s blockbuster film, Noah, a work suffused with environmental themes. “I expected to be irritated by the movie—but I found myself grieved,” wrote Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, characterizing the film’s environmentalism as leading to “a horrifying anti-humanism.”

“Noah” and the Nexus of Faith and Environmentalism.

April 23, 2014, 3:00 – 4:00 pm ET.

The Center for American Progress, 1333 H St., NW, 10th Fl. Washington, DC 20005.

RSVP here (space is extremely limited); a live web stream will be available here on the day of the event.

Yet there is a very strong case to be made that the film is not just provocative—it captures something very deep about the Noah story. Noah was the “first environmentalist,” according to Aronofsky, whose acclaimed previous films include The Wrestler and Black Swan. Aronfsky certainly has not been shy about the film’s green content. “There is a huge statement in the film, a strong message about the coming flood from global warming,” Aronofsky told The New Yorker.

Noah stirs the pot over faith and environmentalism, but the pot was already boiling: In the past decade, there has been a growing movement to highlight scripturally based moral imperatives for conserving the environment. That’s why the film furnishes a perfect moment to discuss how religious faith, today, serves as an increasingly crucial motivator of environmental action.

Aronofsky himself will be leading that discussion in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, April 23. The director will be on hand to talk about the environmental and religious themes in his new film—and their implications for modern issues like climate change—at an event cosponsored by the Climate Desk, the Center for American Progress, and the Sierra Club. Other panelists will include Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune; Danielle Baussan, managing director of Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress; and Jack Jenkins, a senior writer and researcher with the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress. The event will be moderated by Chris Mooney (me) of Climate Desk. See above for more details.

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SPECIAL EVENT: "Noah" Director Darren Aronofsky Discusses Faith and the Environment

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LISTEN: Alleged Kansas Gunman Frazier Glenn Miller Discusses the Tea Party, Obama, and Ron Paul

by DorotheaOsulliv Posted on April 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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In a 2010 radio interview, Frazier Glenn Miller, the man suspected of killing three people on Sunday at a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement center in Kansas, said he was interested in the tea party, voiced support for then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and spoke approvingly of Ron Paul, the Texas Republican congressman and presidential candidate. In late April 2010, Miller, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, was a guest on The David Pakman Show, a nationally syndicated left-of-center radio and television program. At the time, Miller was running for US Senate as an independent in his home state of Missouri with the slogan, “It’s the Jews, Stupid,” and Pakman pressed Miller on his extreme views.

During the interview, Miller was unabashed about his anti-Semitic positions. When asked whether he thought the United States would be better off if Hitler had succeeded, Miller responded, “Absolutely, the whole world would… Hitler would have created a paradise on Earth, particularly for white people. But he would have been fair to other people as well.” He added, “Germans are blamed collectively because of the alleged so-called Holocaust.”

Not surprisingly, Miller denigrated most American politicians, but cited one positively: “If I had my way all US Senators would be in jail right now for treason, if not hung from a sturdy oak tree… Ron Paul is the only independent politician, representative in Washington.” He also spoke highly of another conservative: “Patrick Buchanan, he’s a great man, he’s a great historian, he’s one of the very few journalists who has the courage to speak out against Jewish domination in the country.” Miller called Howard Stern “a Jew liar.” When asked whether he supported the tea party, Miller replied, “The school’s still out on them. They’re a new movement. I’m watching them closely. I suspect, however, they’ll be infiltrated by the Jews and therefore led into defeat.”

During the interview, Pakman asked Miller whom he would “elect, deport, and waterboard”—given the choices of President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and former Fed chair Alan Greenspan. Miller answered, “I like Obama more than the other two, by far.” He chose to elect Obama, deport Greenspan, and waterboard Biden. Miller said, “I have a great deal of admiration for Louis Farrakhan,” and he called Ahmadinejad “a great man” because he “has guts and he tells the truth about the Jews.”

“I’m a convicted felon and I’m proud of it,” Miller boasted, noting that he “was convicted of declaring war on the federal government and possession of illegal weapons.” He added that Jews “were responsible for my conviction that prompted me to go underground and declare war… Morris Dees mainly, he’s a Jew that runs the Southern Poverty Law Center.” (The SPLC monitors hate groups.)

In November 2013, Pakman had an exchange of emails with Miller in which Miller noted that he was “close friends” with Craig Cobb, a white supremacist who had attempted to form an all-white town in Leith, North Dakota. According to Miller, the two had worked together “on several White Nationalist projects, including the Aryan Alternative newspaper.” Referring to the recent news that a DNA test indicated that Cobb had African ancestry, Miller told Pakman, “I can’t believe a man as intelligent as you, actually believes Craig Cobb is an octoroon. Surely, you know it’s just another jewsmedia fraud.”

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LISTEN: Alleged Kansas Gunman Frazier Glenn Miller Discusses the Tea Party, Obama, and Ron Paul

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In Defense of Scott Brown, Carpetbagger

by ClaritaINAJ Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Illustration: Thomas Nast/Library of Congress; Scott Brown: Seamas Culligan/ZUMA

Scott Brown has a carpetbagging problem. On Monday, the former Republican senator from Massachusetts—who is now running for Senate in New Hampshire—defended his Granite State bona fides by taking a page from Lisa Simpson: “Do I have the best credentials? Probably not. ‘Cause, you know, whatever.”

At this point, it’s the rare Brown story that doesn’t at least allude to the dreaded c-word. “Carpetbagger or Comeback Kid?” asked the Washington Examiner‘s Rebecca Berg. “Scott Brown’s first hurdle in the Granite State will be addressing the carpetbagging charge,” argued US News & World Report‘s David Catanese. Respondents to a March poll from Suffolk University, a plurality of whom disapproved of Brown, used words like “carpetbagger” and “interloper” to describe the ex-senator. His opponent in the Republican primary, former Sen. Bob Smith, has even offered to buy Brown a road map to the state—although Smith has run for Senate in Florida twice in the last decade.

If Brown wants to go back to Washington next winter, he should probably come up with a better response than “whatever.” But his critics in Washington have it all wrong. For more than a century, carpetbaggers have gotten a bad rap for all the wrong reasons.

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In Defense of Scott Brown, Carpetbagger

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Vladimir Putin May Be Tough, But He’s Also Destroying Russia

by Rafael40Ru Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen catches Bill Kristol saying this about Ukraine:

So, look; it’s nice for President Obama to say it’s not “a Cold War chessboard.” I don’t know why he says that with some disdain. That was not an ignoble thing for us to play on that chessboard for 45 years. We ended up winning that Cold War.

And I do think Putin thinks he’s playing chess. He thinks he’s playing even a rougher game than chess and we have to be able to match it.

I don’t know squat about Ukraine, and I don’t really know much about Russia either. So take what I’m about to say with a big grain of salt.

That said, here it is: do guys like Kristol ever learn? Yes, Putin is playing a rough game. But why does Kristol seem to think that’s something we ought to emulate? Does he not realize that Putin is basically destroying Russia?

During the Cold War, hawks like Kristol routinely warned that the Soviet Union was overtaking us. And they honestly seemed to believe it. But why? Did they really think that the Soviet Union’s command economy was producing faster growth and better weapons systems than ours? They seemed to, even while extolling the virtues of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. But in the end, it turned out that liberal democracy and free market capitalism really were better. The Soviet Union was collapsing before our eyes and we were barely even noticing it.

The same thing is happening now. Has Putin temporarily shored up Russia’s standing in the world? Maybe. But if he has, he’s done it at the expense of Russia’s long-term health. This is, after all, country with serious problems: terrible demographics, a rusty and aging industrial sector, and endemic corruption. Putin has done nothing to address any of this. Instead, he’s papered it over by building an economy based on oligarchy, mineral wealth, and relentless bullying of both neighbors and citizens.

Will that work for a while? Sure. Russia has a helluva lot of mineral wealth. But it won’t last forever, and in the background Russia is getting frailer and frailer. This is the result of Putin ignoring real problems and instead spending his time projecting toughness on the world stage.

That’s what Kristol apparently thinks we should do. But he’s wrong. Putin acts the way he does because he’s ruling from a position of weakness and has no real solutions to Russia’s long-term decline. In the end, the oil and gas will run out; Russia’s neighbors will revolt the same way Ukraine is revolting; the oligarchs will cling on for dear life; and Russia’s place in the world will continue to deteriorate. Anyone who thinks we should adopt even the tiniest piece of Putin’s approach is just being willfully crazy.

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Vladimir Putin May Be Tough, But He’s Also Destroying Russia

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