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We are so good at causing earthquakes that the government is starting to forecast them

by KristeenSanjuan Posted on April 24, 2015

We are so good at causing earthquakes that the government is starting to forecast them

By on 24 Apr 2015commentsShare

Humans have gotten very good at causing earthquakes. Humans who work for the oil and gas industry, that is. They’ve gotten so good, in fact, that the U.S. Geological Survey has decided that it needs to start forecasting human-caused earthquakes in addition to the natural ones that it’s been forecasting for decades.

Between 1973 and 2008, the average number of earthquakes of magnitude 3 or more in the central and eastern U.S. was 21. Between 2009 and 2013, that number was 99. And last year alone, there were 659.

Cumulative number of earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 or larger in the central and eastern United States, 1973-2014. The rate of earthquakes began to increase starting around 2009 and accelerated in 2013-2014.USGS

Scientists attribute this rise to “induced” earthquakes caused when we inject wastewater from gas and oil extraction sites into disposal wells.

“These earthquakes are occurring at a higher rate than ever before and pose a much greater risk to people living nearby. The USGS is developing methods that overcome the challenges in assessing seismic hazards in these regions in order to support decisions that help keep communities safe from ground shaking,” Mark Peterson, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Modeling Project, said yesterday in a press release.

Traditionally, the USGS has put out a map every six years showing which parts of the country are most likely to experience earthquakes within 50 years, but those maps have never included induced earthquakes. Here’s the latest, which came out in 2014:

2014 USGS National Seismic Hazard Map, displaying intensity of potential ground shaking from an earthquake in 50 years (which is the typical lifetime of a building).USGS

Last November, the USGS and the Oklahoma Geological Survey gathered more than 100 academics, industry representatives, and government officials to discuss the growing prevalence of induced earthquakes and how best to incorporate them into the USGS forecasting models.

Representatives from the meeting released a report yesterday, detailing the group’s initial findings. They found, for example, that certain parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas are now particularly susceptible to induced earthquakes:

Research has identified 17 areas in the central and eastern United States with increased rates of induced seismicity. Since 2000, several of these areas have experienced high levels of seismicity, with substantial increases since 2009 that continue today.USGS

The group also concluded that induced earthquake forecasts would likely have to be issued once per year (if not more frequently) in order to account for changes in industrial activity.

According to the USGS website, most induced earthquakes are either magnitude 3 or 4, and they’ve never reached 6, meaning they’re often strong enough for people to feel but not usually strong enough to cause damage. Two induced quakes did cause some damage and injuries in 2011, though — a 5.3 in Colorado and a 5.6 in Oklahoma.

But don’t underestimate the oil and gas industry — they’re endlessly inventive and might soon figure out how to cause bigger earthquakes more often.

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New Insight on Ground Shaking from Man-Made Earthquakes

, USGS.

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We are so good at causing earthquakes that the government is starting to forecast them

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Cruz Campaign Accuses Paul and Rubio of Wimping Out on Gun Rights After Newtown

by ClarissSiggers Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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With the gaggle of GOP 2016 presidential contenders growing, the Republican wannabes have largely refrained from assailing one another and have instead focused their wrath on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. But now Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has launched one of the first R-on-R attacks, and he has done so regarding an issue of primal importance to the Republican voting base: guns.

A few days ago, Cruz’s presidential campaign zapped out an email hitting up conservatives for donations. The solicitation showed Cruz, the tea party favorite, wearing a bright orange hunting vest, with a shotgun on his shoulder, and its message was stark: Send me money so I can support your Second Amendment rights, which “serve as the ultimate check against government tyranny.” Cruz warned that he was “under attack from the left-wing media and even Republicans who want to label me as an extremist—all for supporting a fundamental right.” And then he took a shot at the other GOP 2016 contestants: “I’m the only candidate running for President who not only believes in the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms—but has the record of fighting for it, tooth and nail.”

The only Republican 2016er who’s a proven crusader for gun rights? That was quite the claim—and a dig at everyone else in the crowded field, particularly the other GOPers who are competing for tea party and conservative voters. After all, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has declared himself a champion of gun rights. He has long supported the National Association for Gun Rights—a group that hypes itself as the conservative alternative to the NRA. Rand Paul often signs email solicitations for this outfit, such as one that asserted that President Barack Obama and the United Nations were plotting to “CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL ‘unauthorized’ civilian firearms.'” (Paul was not invited to the NRA’s recent convention—because, NGAR president Dudley Brown claimed, “Paul is more pro-gun that the NRA.”) Paul has repeatedly moved to eviscerate the gun laws of Washington, DC. And prior to becoming a senator, he campaigned at a gun rights rally with armed militia members who noted that guns could be used to prevent “progressive socialists” from thwarting Second Amendment and other rights. That is, Paul has established a rather die-hard stance on guns.

Yet that did not stop Cruz from depicting himself as the only true and tested advocate for gun rights in the Republican’s 2016 gang. So what does the Paul campaign think of this Cruz attack? Paul campaign officials would not comment on the record. “We’ll pass for now,” spokesman Sergio Gor said—a suggestion that the Paul did not want to mix it up with Cruz at this point.

The same sentiment was not evident when I asked the Cruz campaign how Cruz could justify this implied assault on Rand Paul. Rick Tyler, a well-known conservative consultant working for Cruz, responded with a detailed email that essentially accused Paul and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), another GOP 2016 candidate, of wimping out at a key moment for the gun rights crowd:

From April 11-18, 2013 in the shadow of Newtown, CT, when the Democrats were lined up to hammer Republicans, Paul and Rubio never came to the floor to stand up for the Second Amendment when the Toomey-Manchin gun bill which would have required background checks on all commercial gun sales was being considered. On April 17, Cruz came to the floor promoting a bill (Grassley-Cruz) he co-authored which was the conservative alternative to Toomey-Manchin and which did not expand background checks and made it easier to purchase and transport guns against state lines. It got 52 votes including 9 from Democrats but failed the cloture vote. During that time Cruz and Lee were very aggressive in defending the Second Amendment including gathering stories for the Congressional Record of Americans who used a firearm in self-defense.

With this note, the Cruz campaign, rather than retreat from a political fight over who’s best on gun rights, made its assault on Paul and Rubio explicit, asserting that both Paul and Rubio failed the gun rights movement in its hour of need.

And once again, Paul’s campaign did not engage, declining to answer questions about Tyler’s amplification of the original criticism. Rubio’s campaign also did not respond to a request for comment.

Paul has insisted in the past that after the Newtown gun massacre, he quickly took steps to prevent any gun safety bills from advancing in the wake of that tragedy. On April 10, 2013, he wrote on CNN’s website, “Along with Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas, I circulated a letter promising to ‘oppose any legislation that would infringe on the American people’s constitutional right to bear arms, or on their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance.'”

Following the Newtown tragedy, Paul considered Cruz an ally in the battle to beat back gun safety legislation. These days, Cruz is not returning the favor and looking to turn Paul and Rubio into targets in order to best them among a critical GOP constituency. The question is, how long will this remain a one-way fight?

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Cruz Campaign Accuses Paul and Rubio of Wimping Out on Gun Rights After Newtown

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There’s a Place That’s Nearly Perfect for Growing Food. It’s Not California.

by ShaunLadprsnu Posted on April 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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California is by far the dominant US produce-growing state—source of (large PDF) 81 percent of US-grown carrots, 95 percent of broccoli, 86 percent of cauliflower, 74 percent of raspberries, 91 percent of strawberries, etc.

But all three of its main veggie growing regions—the Imperial Valley, the Central Valley, and the Salinas Valley—face serious short- and long-term water challenges. As I recently argued in a New York Times debate, it’s time to “de-Californify” the nation’s supply of fruits and vegetable supply, to make it more diversified, resilient, and ready for a changing climate.

Here are maps of US fruit and vegetable production:

USDA

USDA

Now check out this map depicting average annual precipitation. The data are old—1961 to 1990—and weather patterns have changed since then as the climate has warmed over the decades. But the overall trends depicted still hold sway: The West tends to be arid, the East tends to get plenty of rain and snow, and the Midwest lands, well, somewhere in the middle. So the map remains a good proxy for understanding where water tends to fall and where it doesn’t, though the precipitation levels depicted for California look downright Londonesque compared to the state’s current parched condition.

Not only is California gripped in its worst drought in at least 1,200 years, but climate models and the fossil record suggest that its 21st-century precipitation levels could be significantly lower than the 20th-century norm, when California emerged as a fruit-and-vegetable behemoth.

So here’s an idea that could take pressure off California. In my Times piece, I looked to the Corn Belt states of the Midwest as a prime candidate for a veggie revival: Just about a quarter million acres (a veritable rounding error in that region’s base of farmland) from corn and soy to veggies could have a huge impact on regional supply, a 2010 Iowa State University study found.

Now my gaze is heading south and east, to acres now occupied by cotton—a crop burdened by a brutal past in the South (slavery, sharecropping) and a troubled present (a plague of herbicide-tolerant weeds):

Let’s leave aside all of the cotton growing on the arid side of the map. (The drought is already squeezing out production of the fluffy fiber in California; as for the Texas panhandle, cotton production there relies heavily on water from the fast-depleting Ogallala Aquifer—not a great long-term strategy.)

What I’m eyeing are those cotton acres on the water-rich right side of the map—the Mississippi Delta states Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Louisiana, along with the Carolinas, Alabama, and Georgia to the east. According to the USDA, mid-Southern and Southeastern states planted more than 4 million acres of cotton in 2014. This is what’s left of the old—and let’s face it, infamous—Cotton Belt that stocked the globe’s textile factories during the 19th-century boom that delivered the Industrial Revolution (a story told in Sven Beckert’s fantastic 2014 book Empire of Cotton).

Decades of low prices have already put a squeeze on Southern cotton acres, and the fiber has recently slumped anew in global trading. Why not transition at least some acres into crops with a robust domestic market? I bounced my idea of a Cotton Belt fruit-and-vegetable renaissance off a few experts to see if it was nuts. Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, called it “noncrazy.” He pointed out that, as in most other parts of the United States, small-scale farms that sell directly to consumers are “already gearing up down there,” and added that the region “seems ripe for entrepreneurial companies to come in, buy land, grow farmers, introduce a whole new vegetable supply chain on a bigger scale, especially with California’s woes.”

I’m not talking about a fantasy in which everyone eats from within 20 miles (although such locavore networks, which have thrived nationwide over the last two decades, certainly add diversification and resilience to the overall food system). I’m simply pushing a more regionalized, widely distributed scheme for filling our salad and fruit bowls, one less dependent on California and its overtaxed water resources.

Scott Marlow, executive director of North Carolina-based RAFI USA, a farmer advocacy organization, also said the idea make sense—with caveats. One is credit. Marlow says that most farmers who still plant cotton are large enough that they rely on loans to start the growing season—and bankers understand and are used to cotton, but may find vegetables too exotic and risky. For such farmers, “if the banker won’t lend for it, they are not doing it,” he said. Reforms in the latest farm bill made it easier for “specialty crop” (i.e., fruit and vegetable) farmers to get good crop insurance, and that, in turn, made it easier to get loans, he said. But those changes take time to sink in.

He added that the South’s high levels of precipitation can actually be a liability compared to California’s aridity, because “rain spreads diseases through splash erosion, ruins product, screws up harvest, reduces product quality.” California farmers, who meet their watering needs through controlled irrigation, don’t have those problems.

But rain troubles can be addressed through low-tech means like high tunnels, which are already being adapted by Southern produce farmers to extend the growing season, but also to protect sensitive crops from rain, Marlow said. Black plastic mulch, another widely adapted practice, also helps keep crops healthy in rainy periods, he added. The South’s farmers have demonstrated the ability to innovate, he said, but “there have to be markets, there has to be risk management, and there has to be access to credit.”

Converting swaths of Dixie country to vegetables won’t be a fast or easy process. But if California’s water troubles drag on, as it appears they will, broccoli may yet emerge as the heir apparent to doddering King Cotton.

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There’s a Place That’s Nearly Perfect for Growing Food. It’s Not California.

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This Year’s Hottest Destination for GOP Candidates Is the Mexican Border

by LutherCKAF Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will visit the US-Mexico border on Friday with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Walker, who is considering a run for president, is aiming to bolster his credentials as a critic of President Obama’s immigration policies. A photo wouldn’t hurt either.

The Mexican border is now an almost mandatory pit stop for Republican politicians (especially presidential aspirants) looking for the aura of on-the-ground experience on immigration. Sure, talking to a rancher, staring across a river, and visiting a detention facility in McAllen for 30 minutes might not offer much of a big-picture perspective. But that hasn’t stopped lawmakers from surveying the region in gunboats, ATVs, helicopters, and jeeps—invariably with camera crews in tow. Here’s a roundup:

Former Gov. Rick Perry: As governor of Texas for 14 years, Perry had plenty of opportunities to work on his border game face, and it shows:

I’m on a boat. Rick Perry/Flickr

That’s some electric-fence-with-alligator-moat level intimidation. Let’s zoom in:

Rick Perry/Flickr

Here’s Perry on that same trip with Fox News host Sean Hannity on the set of Rambo on the Rio Grande last summer:

Sen. Marco Rubio: The Florida senator may take a hit from some conservatives for his support for a path to citizenship for some undocumented residents, but he demonstrated his ability to look stern while gazing into the great unknown on this visit to El Paso in 2011:

Sen. Marco Rubio

Gov. Bobby Jindal: Last November, Louisiana’s chief executive toured the Mexican border by boat and helicopter in the hopes of better understanding the child migrant crisis, which by that point had already subsided. Jindal’s entourage didn’t come away empty-handed: “In at least three locations, we saw where people were trying to make their way into Texas in an unimpeded manner,” boasted one member of Jindal’s group.

Gov. Bobby Jindal/Facebook

Sen. Ted Cruz: Texas’ junior senator has made more visits to Iowa than he has to South Texas, his state’s poorest region (much to locals’ chagrin). But last year, as media interest in the child migrant crisis peaked, he took the time to visit the border and tour a migrant processing facility in McAllen with former Fox News personality Glenn Beck:

Toured the border and spent time with Glenn Beck, @sentedcruz and @replouiegohmert over the weekend. Learned and saw a lot. We must secure our border. #AmericaFirst

A photo posted by Randy Weber (@txrandy14) on Jul 21, 2014 at 6:30am PDT

For now, the rest of the field is playing catch-up. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee visited the border in Texas during his 2008 campaign (joined at the Rio Grande by action star Chuck Norris) but has not been back since. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has not visited the border, although he did propose building a fence along New Hampshire’s southern border to keep out people from Massachusetts. Acclaimed pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson recently visited the Israeli border, where he mistook construction equipment for machine gun fire.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be the only potential candidate who has avoided the border on principle. Although he visited Mexico City on a trade mission in 2014, he balked at extending his trip to the Rio Grande—which is very far from both Mexico City and New Jersey. “This is silliness,” he told NJ.com. “If I went down there and looked at it, what steps am I supposed to take exactly? Send the New Jersey National Guard there?”

It’s not just potential Republican candidates getting in on the action. In recent years, the Rio Grande has been a frequent destination for DC’s finest. In 2013, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—who is not running for president—watched law enforcement apprehend a woman who had scaled the 18-foot border fence in Nogales. That same year, while aboard a speed boat with two Republican colleagues, Rep. Leonard Lance (R-N.J.) found a body floating in the Rio Grande. (“It was a vivid reminder that we have to secure our border and do it as quickly as possible,” he told Roll Call.) Last year, Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) traveled to McAllen accompanied by writer (and birther) Jerome Corsi and a film crew from conspiracy website WorldNetDaily. The crew showed up unannounced at a DHS detention center at midnight and was not allowed in.

Still, Walker is smart to get his border-fence photo-op out of the way early—it may not be there much longer. If elected president, real-estate mogul Donald Trump (who has not visited the border) has pledged to personally supervise the construction of a new barrier along the southern border that will permanently end illegal immigration. “A wall,” he told Iowa voters last week. “A real wall…not a wall that people walk over.”

President Trump’s 2020 challengers may have to visit the Canadian border instead.

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This Year’s Hottest Destination for GOP Candidates Is the Mexican Border

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3 Times the Old Ted Cruz Contradicted the New Ted Cruz

by JodiBtvcgw Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) talks a good game as an uncompromising conservative. But before he vowed to destroy Obamacare only to admit he may use it, before he forsook rock’n’roll—back when he was a private appellate lawyer charging $695 an hour, Cruz forcefully argued positions that contradict what he now espouses. Some examples from the Ted Cruz Wayback Machine:

Federal stimulus money

THEN: In 2009, he wrote a brief arguing that giving federal stimulus money to retired Texas teachers “will directly further the greater purpose of economic recovery for America.”

NOW: Obama’s economic program is “yet another rehash of the same big-government stimulus programs that have consistently failed to generate jobs.”

BIG JURY AWARDS

THEN: As a lawyer, Cruz defended a $54 million jury award to a severely disabled New Mexico man who had been raped in a group home, asserting that “a large punitive damages award is justified by the need to deter conduct that is hard to detect and often goes unpunished.”

NOW: Wants to spread Texas-style tort reform—which caps punitive damages at $750,000—to the rest of the nation.

The death penalty

THEN: Cruz worked on the Supreme Court case of a Louisiana man who’d been wrongfully sentenced to death, stating that prosecutorial misconduct undermined “public confidence in the criminal-justice system.”

NOW: “I trust the criminal-justice system to operate, to protect the rights of the accused, and to administer justice to violent criminals.”

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3 Times the Old Ted Cruz Contradicted the New Ted Cruz

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Ted Cruz’s First Campaign Stop: the Birthplace of the "Clinton Body Count"

by DelorisEumarrah Posted on March 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) launched his presidential campaign on Monday at Virginia’s Liberty University, a private Christian college founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. Liberty has become a mandatory stop for aspiring Republican candidates—and it’s not just for the campus museum exhibit of the taxidermied bear that Falwell’s father once wrestled. Liberty is perhaps the premier academic institution of the religious right, and Cruz’s choice of venue sends a clear message that he’s trying to position himself in 2016 Republican field as a social conservative crusader—and that he’s counting on evangelicals for support.

But Liberty University and its controversial founder have additional significance to the 2016 presidential race. During the 1990s, the anti-gay pastor did more than anyone to popularize the so-called “Clinton Body Count“—the notion that Bill and Hillary Clinton had been responsible for dozens of murders during and after their time in Arkansas. This conspiracy theory was the centerpiece of a 1994 film called the Clinton Chronicles, which Falwell helped distribute to hundreds of thousands of conservatives across the country.

Despite Falwell’s best efforts, though, President Bill Clinton won his 1996 re-election campaign, and the episode helped reinforce the pastor’s reputation as a bigoted crank. Republican candidates will find it hard to avoid Falwell’s institution as the 2016 campaign heats up. We’ll see if they’ve learned from his mistakes, too, when it comes to taking on the Clinton political machine.

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Ted Cruz’s First Campaign Stop: the Birthplace of the "Clinton Body Count"

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Three Cheers For the California Miracle!

by ad Posted on March 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Oh dear. Here’s some bad news for Ted Cruz on his very first day as an official presidential candidate:

For years, business lobbyists complained about what they derided as “job killer” laws that drive employers out of California. Rival state governors, notably former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, made highly publicized visits to the Golden State in hopes of poaching jobs.

But new numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tell a different story. Total jobs created in the 12 months ending Jan. 31 show California leading other states. California gained 498,000 new jobs, almost 30% more than the Lone Star State’s total of 392,900 for the same period.

Them’s the breaks. There’s no more “Texas Miracle” for either Cruz or Rick Perry. We’re in the middle of a California Miracle right now.

So how is Sodom on the Pacific pulling this off? Actually, that’s pretty easy to answer. California was hit hard by the housing bubble, while Texas wasn’t. So California’s economy took a big hit during the recession and the slow recovery, while Texas did pretty well—aided and abetted by a rise in oil prices.

Now everything has turned around. California is rebounding strongly from the housing crisis while Texas is suffering from the global collapse in oil prices. There is, frankly, nothing very miraculous about either story. It’s just the business cycle at work in a fairly normal and predictable way.

In fact, you may recall that there was never much of a Texas Miracle in the first place. It was mostly just PR bluster, as the chart on the right shows. The thick green line shows the unemployment rate in Texas compared to its neighboring states, and Texas is right smack in the middle—and it always has been. It’s better than half a dozen nearby states and worse than another half dozen. It is, sad to say, entirely average. That’s not something Texans are likely to take kindly to, but numbers don’t lie.

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Three Cheers For the California Miracle!

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Ted Cruz Throws His Hat In General Direction of Presidential Ring

by Anderso7849 Posted on March 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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The big news sweeping my Twitter feed last night was Ted Cruz’s rather sudden decision to announce that he’s running for president. Usually there’s a warmup period of some kind (an “exploratory committee,” etc.) but apparently Cruz decided to dispense with all that and simply throw his hat in the ring posthaste. The motivation for his sudden haste is a little mysterious at this point.

The other thing sweeping my Twitter feed was the fact that the URL tedcruz.com leads to the site on the right. Patrick Caldwell explains this and much more in his brisk overview of potential candidates and their unfortunate lack of attention to the basics of internet campaigning:

Unfortunately for the Texas Republican, long before he ran for Senate in 2012, TedCruz.com had been nabbed by an Arizona attorney who shares his name. Based on a search of the Wayback Machine, an internet archive, the Arizona Cruz’s website dates back to at least early 2008, when it was a normal, if slightly Geocities-tinged, business website. “Putting All Your Real Estate Needs In ‘CRUZ CONTROL,'” the attorney’s tagline said at the time. But sometime within the past year he ditched his law site to instead mock the would-be-president. On a simple black background, in large font, the website screamed: “COMING SOON, Presidential Candidate, I Luv CHRISTIE!!!!!” Attorney Cruz wouldn’t say anything to Mother Jones over email except to acknowledge that he has owned the domain for several years. But he deleted the section about loving Christie shortly thereafter. Given the initial message, though, it seems unlikely that the Arizona attorney will be easily persuaded to relinquish control of the domain to the senator.

That’s bad luck, no? Still, at least Cruz has control of tedcruz.org. It was obviously thrown together pretty quickly, though at least it’s got the basics. But why the slapdash approach? According to the New York Times this morning, Cruz was afraid of being upstaged: “By becoming the first candidate to declare himself officially in the race, Republicans briefed on his strategy said, Mr. Cruz hopes to reclaim the affection and attention of those on the party’s right wing who have begun eyeing other contenders, particularly Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.”

Cruz’s official announcement, inevitably, will be done at Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s shrine to the Christian Right. I think we can expect many, many more speeches and announcements from Republican wannabes there. But Cruz will be the first! Take that, Bobby Jindal!

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Ted Cruz Throws His Hat In General Direction of Presidential Ring

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Why We Should Talk About Geoengineering Even If We Never Do It

by Myrna Posted on March 18, 2015

“By talking about geoengineering, I get more people interested in talking about climate change.” Trifonov_Evgeniy/iStock Ben Kravitz has studied geoengineering for the past seven years and doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon, despite ongoing controversy around the issue. That’s because even if geoengineering never happens in the real world, the concept alone is already playing an important role in the climate change story. “[Theoretical geoengineering] has allowed us to ask questions about how the climate system works that we didn’t even know we wanted to ask,” says Kravitz, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “It’s actually in some ways changed the way I think about problems in climate science.” Kravitz’s interest in geoengineering began back in 2007, when he was a graduate student at Rutgers University. He attended a seminar on geoengineering by environmental scientist Alan Robock, and, immediately recognizing the importance of the work, asked Robock to take him on as a PhD student. Together, they started the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP), an international collaboration that runs identical geoengineering simulations on some of the world’s most advanced climate models. Kravitz and Robock came up with GeoMIP after realizing that different models running different experiments were coming up with conflicting predictions—a problem if those predictions were ever going to inform real-world decisions. Read the rest at Grist. Read article here: Why We Should Talk About Geoengineering Even If We Never Do It

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Why We Should Talk About Geoengineering Even If We Never Do It

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California Is Pumping Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

by Myrna Posted on March 18, 2015

And it’s not going to be replaced any time soon. Irrigating rice fields in Richvale, Calif. Jae C. Hong/AP By now, the impacts of California’s unchecked groundwater pumping are well-known: the dropping water levels, dried-up wells and slowly sinking farmland in parts of the Central Valley. But another consequence gets less attention, one measured not by acre-feet or gallons-per-minute but the long march of time. As California farms and cities drill deeper for groundwater in an era of drought and climate change, they no longer are tapping reserves that percolated into the soil over recent centuries. They are pumping water that fell to Earth during a much wetter climatic regime—the ice age. Such water is not just old. It’s prehistoric. It is older than the earliest pyramids on the Nile, older than the world’s oldest tree, the bristlecone pine. It was swirling down rivers and streams 15,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans were crossing the Bering Strait from Asia. Read the rest at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. More: California Is Pumping Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

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California Is Pumping Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

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