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Worldwide Water Shortages Might Be Worse Than We Thought

by DevinGeer32262 Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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The world’s water crisis might be much worse than we thought. Four billion people, or two-thirds of the global population, face severe water shortages for at least one month out the year, according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances.

Arjen Hoekstra, a professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the study’s lead author, says better living standards and the expansion of agriculture are among the factors that have increased demand for water and caused resources to dry up across the globe. And during the hot months of the year when water is already scarce, people draw from rivers and groundwater, further threatening water sources and the people who rely on them.

“Direct victims of the over consumption of water resources are the users themselves, who increasingly suffer from water shortages during droughts,” according to the study’s authors, who add that even one month without reliable access to water affects quality of life.

Of the 4 billion people who face severe water scarcity for at least part of the year, 130 million reside in the United States, mostly in Western and Southern states like California, Texas, and Florida, where drought is already a common aspect of life. But those dry spells are made worse by the rising demand for water. In the West, the vast majority of water flowing from the all-important Colorado River goes to agriculture, and federal subsidies actually encourage farmers to plant the thirstiest crops, like cotton. On top of that, state laws push farmers to flood their fields with as much water as they can.

The remaining 3.8 billion people affected by severe water shortages are outside the United States, in places like Africa and the Middle East, where access to water has long been a source of concern. This January marked the fifth year in a row that the World Economic Forum ranked water crises among the top three risks to the world economic stability, alongside climate change and weapons of mass destruction.

Increased water depletion could also create fodder for increased political tensions. Volatile places like Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and Somalia are among the countries where large portions of the population experience severe water scarcity all year-round. A Yemeni newspaper estimated that 70 to 80 percent of conflicts in rural areas of that country were about water. Yemen’s Al Qaeda branch has even exploited the shortage, winning over support by digging wells and providing villages with water.

Hoekstra’s findings paint a much bleaker picture of the global water crisis than most previous estimates. Both the World Wildlife Fund and the United Nations have said it would take until 2025 for two-thirds of the world population to be without access to water, meaning today’s findings put us a decade ahead of schedule.

“We have generally underestimated the risks associated with water scarcity,” Hoekstra told Mother Jones in an email. But, he adds in a press release, there’s a bright spot: “All over the world, it is clear that the risks associated with high water consumption are being increasingly recognized.”

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Worldwide Water Shortages Might Be Worse Than We Thought

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Come On, Folks, Give Nikki Haley a Break

by JuliannDiggs Posted on January 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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My Twitter feed has been alight with mockery of the latest from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley: “We’ve never, in the history of this country, passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion,” she said at a press conference today. What an idiot!

But, you know, always click the link. Here’s the full quote:

When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion. Let’s not start that now.

This still isn’t quite correct: After World War I a series of immigration restrictions were passed that explicitly favored northern European whites; limited immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans; and banned Asian immigrants almost entirely. Still, Haley can be forgiven for not knowing this. It’s not especially common knowledge these days. In any case, she obviously wasn’t pretending that Jim Crow and its ilk never existed.

So let’s dial down the faux outrage. Haley was doing the Lord’s work here, criticizing Donald Trump’s call to bar Muslims from entering the country. In fact, given the context, she might have meant to refer not to immigrants at all, but merely to people visiting the country on ordinary visas—in which case she didn’t really say anything wrong at all. Either way, though, she did nothing worse than betray an incomplete knowledge of American history while talking off the cuff. It’s hardly a big deal.

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Come On, Folks, Give Nikki Haley a Break

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The Kids Today…Seem Pretty Smart, Actually

by TheodorWashingt Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m not as cynical about the purpose of universal education as the late Aaron Swartz, but I love this historical retrospective from a piece of his reprinted today in the New Republic:

In 1845, only 45 percent of Boston’s brightest students knew that water expands when it freezes….In 1898, a…Harvard report found only 4 percent of applicants “could write an essay, spell, or properly punctuate a sentence.” But that didn’t stop editorialists from complaining about how things were better in the old days. Back when they went to school, complained the editors of the New York Sun in 1902, children “had to do a little work. … Spelling, writing and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn.”

In 1913…more than half of new recruits to the Army during World War I “were not able to write a simple letter or read a newspaper with ease.” In 1927, the National Association of Manufacturers complained that 40 percent of high school graduates could not perform simple arithmetic or accurately express themselves in English.

….A 1943 test by the New York Times found that only 29 percent of college freshmen knew that St. Louis was on the Mississippi….A 1951 test in LA found that more than half of eighth graders couldn’t calculate 8 percent sales tax on an $8 purchase….In 1958, U.S. News and World Report lamented that “fifty years ago a high-school diploma meant something…. We have simply misled our students and misled the nation by handing out high-school diplomas to those who we well know had none of the intellectual qualifications that a high-school diploma is supposed to represent—and does represent in other countries. It is this dilution of standards which has put us in our present serious plight.”

A 1962 Gallup poll found “just 21 percent looked at books even casually.” In 1974, Reader’s Digest asked, “Are we becoming a nation of illiterates? There is an evident sag in both writing and reading…at a time when the complexity of our institutions calls for ever-higher literacy just to function effectively.”

Education was always better in the old days. Except that it wasn’t. As near as I can tell, virtually all the evidence—both anecdotal and systematic—suggests that every generation of children has left high school knowing as much or more than the previous generation. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But if I am, I sure haven’t seen anyone deliver the proof.

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The Kids Today…Seem Pretty Smart, Actually

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Good News: The Fed Is Finally Going After Leverage in the Shadow Banking Sector

by DanteDornllauqi Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s some welcome news. The Fed is bringing back an old tool to regulate leverage in the financial market: increased margin requirements. And in even more welcome news, these requirements will apply to everyone, not just banks:

A little-noticed global agreement recently paved the way for the central bank to move forward with plans to alter margin requirements. Under the accord announced Nov. 12, regulators representing 25 economies agreed to adopt rules similar to ones the Fed is developing, a united front intended to prevent financial firms from moving transactions offshore in response to tighter Fed rules.

….Unlike earlier Fed margin rules, which focused largely on stock purchases, the new rules being crafted by the central bank would apply to securities-financing transactions, a multitrillion dollar market involving repurchase agreements, or repos, for stocks and bonds, as well as lending of securities.

….Unlike most of the central bank’s regulatory authority, this rule would reach beyond banks and across the entire financial system, affecting investment funds and other nonbank players, reflecting the Fed’s growing concern about what has been called shadow banking.

The tighter that regulations become on banks, the more incentive there is to move transactions into the shadow banking sector.1 That’s why we need rules that apply everywhere. As we learned in 2008, a run on the shadow banking sector is every bit as dangerous as a run on ordinary banks. In fact, since shadow banks are so loosely regulated, shadow runs can be even more dangerous than normal runs.

In any case, this is basically an effort to reduce leverage in yet another corner of the financial industry. That’s a good thing. Pretty much any effort to reduce leverage in any part of the financial sector is a good thing. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d trade pretty much every financial regulation we’ve put in place since 2008 for a simpler, more robust restriction on leverage everywhere and anywhere it occurs. This stuff is boring, but it’s important.

1Commercial banks take short-term deposits and make long-term loans. They are inherently vulnerable to runs since depositors can remove their money anytime they get scared, but banks can’t just call in their loans at will in order to fund all the depositors who want their money.

A shadow bank is any entity that isn’t a commercial bank but acts just like one (borrows short, lends long). By 2008, the shadow banking sector was about as big as the ordinary commercial banking sector, and the shadow banking run in that year was responsible for a large part of the Great Meltdown.

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Good News: The Fed Is Finally Going After Leverage in the Shadow Banking Sector

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The CARD Act Has Saved Us $12 Billion Per Year

by celemaiieftinebileteavion Posted on January 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Who do credit card companies make the most money from? Answer: the poor, by far, because they rack up the highest fees and the highest interest expense. Card issuers also make some money on the rich, because they buy a lot of stuff. This generates interchange fees (usually 2-3 percent of the amount charged) that exceed the cost the reward points they dole out to attract these customers.

It’s the customers in the middle who cost them. They don’t buy enough stuff to generate lots interchange fees, but they aren’t poor enough to get themselves stuck with lots of late fees and interest charges. The chart below shows this. Folks with FICO scores between 660 and 730 (representing about a third of all customers) are net losses for credit card companies.

This comes from a paper written last year about the effect of the CARD Act, a law passed in 2009 that modestly regulated the credit card industry. The authors’ conclusion: “The CARD Act successfully reduced borrowing costs, in particular for borrowers with the lowest FICO scores. We find no evidence for offsetting increases in other costs or a decline in credit volume.” All in all, the CARD Act saved consumers—mostly lower-income consumers—about $12 billion per year. For much more, see today’s Harold Pollack interview with one of the authors here.

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The CARD Act Has Saved Us $12 Billion Per Year

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Hip Hip Hooray For They!

by MonikaKerr Posted on January 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post reports some terrific news:

Singular “they,” the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening.

….The Post’s style guide ratified this usage last month, which caused some grammar pedants to shriek. But as Post copy editor Bill Walsh explained, the singular they is “the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun.”

OK, so we can now say:

I talked to Pat, and they said the sofa was on its way.
Pat said their sofa had been promised for tomorrow.
Pat came over, and I talked to them about when the sofa would arrive.

Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it? But I’m all for it. I will celebrate the day when gendered pronouns are gone for good.

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Hip Hip Hooray For They!

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When Men and Women Work Together, Men Get All the Credit

by SheliaBreen Posted on January 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Anne Case and Angus Deaton recently wrote a paper that’s gotten a lot of attention. One of the minor ways it’s gotten attention is in the way a lot of people talk about it: as the Deaton paper, or the Deaton/Case paper, despite the fact that it’s traditional in economics to list authors alphabetically.

Is this just because Angus Deaton recently won a Nobel prize? That probably didn’t hurt. But Justin Wolfers points today to a new working paper that suggests this is a widespread problem: when women coauthor papers in economics with men, it’s the men who get all the credit. The study is by Heather Sarsons, a PhD candidate at Harvard, who examined economics papers and tenure decisions at elite universities over the past 40 years. The chart on the right comes from her paper, and it shows the basic state of play. For men, it didn’t matter if they coauthored papers. They got tenure at about the same rate regardless of whether they coauthored or solo authored. For women, it mattered a lot. Solo authoring 80 percent of their papers doubled their chance of getting tenure compared to co-authoring most of their papers:

The coauthoring penalty is almost entirely driven from coauthoring with men. An additional coauthored paper with a man has zero marginal effect on tenure. Papers in which there is at least one other woman have a smaller effect on tenure for women than for men (8% vs. 3.5%) but still have a positive marginal impact.

Roughly speaking, Sarsons examines several possible explanations for this (maybe women are genuinely less qualified, maybe they pair up more often with senior people, etc.), and her conclusion is fairly simple: It’s none of that stuff. The ability of the female economists is, in fact, just as high as their male counterparts. Nevertheless, when women work in mixed-gender teams, people tend to think men did all of the actual work. Women get essentially no credit at all. The only way for them to get credit is to work on their own or with other women. This has broad implications:

Many occupations require group work. The tech industry, for example, prides itself on collaboration. In such male-dominated fields, however, group work in which a single output is produced could sustain the leaky pipeline if employers rely on stereotypes to attribute credit….Employers will rely primarily on their priors and women will be promoted at even lower rates. Bias, whether conscious or subconscious, can therefore have significant implications for the gender gap in promotion decisions.

Note to managers: be aware of this! Just because the guys who work for you are more aggressive about touting their work doesn’t mean they actually did more of it. Dig a little deeper and figure out who really did most of the work if you’re not sure. You might be surprised.

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When Men and Women Work Together, Men Get All the Credit

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

by LynwoodWingfiel Posted on December 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: 

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

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Like a Zombie, You Just Can’t Kill Countrywide Financial

by Dee24Gylizjqka Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back at the height of the housing bubble, Countrywide Financial was responsible for about 15 percent of all the mortgage loans in America. This turned out to be disastrous because the people who ran Countrywide showed no interest at all in the quality of the loans they originated. Thanks to this, their business eventually imploded and in 2008 they were acquired by Bank of America.

But fear not. The executives behind Countrywide are still around, and they’re still shoveling out the loans:

PennyMac, AmeriHome Mortgage and Stearns Lending have several things in common.

All are among the nation’s largest mortgage lenders — and none of them is a bank. They’re part of a growing class of alternative lenders that now extend more than 4 in 10 home loans.

All are headquartered in Southern California, the epicenter of the last decade’s subprime lending industry. And all are run by former executives of Countrywide Financial, the once-giant mortgage lender that made tens of billions of dollars in risky loans that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

This time, the executives say, will be different.

You betcha! I’m sure these folks have all learned their lessons and will never push the mortgage envelope again. We can all breathe easy.

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Like a Zombie, You Just Can’t Kill Countrywide Financial

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No, Californians, Venomous El Niño Snakes Are Not Going to Kill You

by RandallEZML Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is some video, they are dangerous and venomous, don’t get close to them. Rescued this sea snake today on the beach here at Silverstrand in Oxnard. Prior to this there was only a report of them being seen as far north as Orange County. El Niño has definitely brought a lot of strange and unusual aquatic fish and animals up. Caution these snakes are venomous and should be avoided and not handled. And yes it is alive.

Posted by

Robert Forbes on Friday, October 16, 2015

On Friday, Southern Californians began freaking out after a surfer discovered a venomous sea snake on a beach north of Los Angeles. The species, the yellow-bellied sea snake, normally keeps to tropical waters and has not been reported on the Golden State’s shores for more than 30 years, and never as far north as Ventura County. The snake died shortly after it was found, but not before adding to El Niño apocalypse anxiety. Local wildlife experts have hypothesized that the snake traveled this far north because of unusually warm waters off of the California coast due to El Niño.

If you suffer from ophidiophobia, these reports probably gave you a scare. But we have some good news: While venomous snakes are a significant danger in other parts of the world, the United States is almost certainly not going to see a wave of deadly snake attacks, even with a strong El Niño. Yes, sea snakes might be feeding further north this winter, but that does not mean they are going to be out for human prey; likely the only reason this snake came ashore is because it was injured or sick.

Furthermore, according to David Steen, a snake expert and researcher at Auburn University’s Museum of Natural History, there are no known human deaths attributed to the yellow-bellied sea snake, and only about five people per year are killed by venomous snakes of any kind in the United States. By contrast, there were 42 reports of dog-bite fatalities in the United States last year.

“Venomous snakes deserve our respect but in many cases the danger they represent is exaggerated,” Steen wrote me in an email, adding that a sea snake would have no reason to attack a human unless it was picked up or harassed. “If you don’t already know that it is a bad idea to pick up snakes that you do not recognize then you probably have bigger problems.”

This story has been revised.

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No, Californians, Venomous El Niño Snakes Are Not Going to Kill You

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