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It Would Take More Than a Foot of Rain to End California’s Drought

by Ernest Ricafort Posted on July 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared in CityLab and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Every so often there comes an image that really brings home the West’s damnable dryness. There was that photo of California’s disappearing Folsom Lake, for instance, and now there’s this: a map showing how much rain must fall in one month to end the reigning drought.

NOAA

The map, tweeted out by NOAA, is an illustration in impossible outcomes. (It’s dated for June, though with practically no rainfall in California since then it’s safe to assume it still applies.) Though the northern and southeastern parts of the state would require a relatively modest-sounding 3 to 6 inches of rain to escape drought, the parched Central Valley (where so much of America’s food is grown) needs a biblical dousing of 12 to as much as 15 inches. To put that in perspective, 15 inches of liquid precipitation is equal to 12.5 feet of snow.

Now here’s the probability of that rain bomb happening: zero. Forecasters see drought in July not slacking off but persisting or intensifying, according to this outlook from the Climate Prediction Center:

NOAA

The government’s latest climate assessment paints a grim portrait of California’s arid landscape. Ninety percent of the state’s subsoil is “short or very short of moisture,” reflecting the intolerable duration of this dry spell. Three fourths of its pasture and rangeland is considered to be in “poor to very poor condition.” Meanwhile, many wells are at their lowest levels in 20 years and reservoirs are doing terribly, as shown in this depiction of their current capacities versus their historical averages:

NOAA

With harsh times looming, people are scrambling for any possible fix. Earlier this year, California Governor Jerry Brown asked that everyone reduce their water usage by 20 percent. That didn’t work out too well: Compared with the historical average, water use in urban areas actually went up 1 percent in May, reports the LA Times.

So on Tuesday, California approved a measure that slaps “water wasters” with a $500 fine. That means that beginning in August, folks will (hopefully) be looking over their shoulders any time they engage in activities that drain precious H2O, such as hosing down driveways or having runoff from their yard sprinklers.

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It Would Take More Than a Foot of Rain to End California’s Drought

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Stroke Lessons (Time Wasted is Brain Lost)

by Myrna Posted on July 3, 2014

Three years after a lucky stroke, a reminder about the importance of speedy diagnosis and care. Visit link:   Stroke Lessons (Time Wasted is Brain Lost) ; ;Related ArticlesThe Agriculture Secretary Sees a Smart (Phone) Solution to GMO Labeling FightTechnology as a Path to Product TransparencyStunning New Video View of Swimming Polar Bears ;

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Stroke Lessons (Time Wasted is Brain Lost)

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Yes, You Can Now Call Your Crock Pot on Your iPhone

by EdisonWJOkpkr Posted on June 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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From the annals of stories I’m afraid to read:

The age of cooking by smartphone is here. We test a Robo-Crock in the connected kitchen.

But I’m a professional, so I clicked the link:

For my first test, I made chili….But instead of reaching for any knobs or buttons on the front of the device, I launched an app on my phone to set temperature and time.

The machine fired up, eventually reaching a simmer. The app kept track of time and alerted me with a pop-up message when my three-hour stew was ready for mass consumption. If I had wanted to bump the temperature from High to Low or adjust the cook time, I could easily do that whether I was down the street or half a world away.

I am happy to report that the $130 Smart Crock-Pot works as billed….The chili came out great. It was at that point that the greater existential questions surrounding a Smart Crock-Pot began surfacing: When would I really need this? Is it worth the extra $50? And is it smart enough?

Indeed. Is it smart enough? I’d say no, because it still forces me to cut up all the meat and vegetables and then manually toss them in the crock pot. That doesn’t sound nearly smart enough to me. Call me back when a robot version of Wolfgang Puck is available for $130.

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Yes, You Can Now Call Your Crock Pot on Your iPhone

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Supreme Court to NRA: No, People Can’t Lie to Buy Guns

by AlanaDorngo Posted on June 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Gun control lives! In a 5-4 decision Monday, the high court knocked down a National Rifle Association-backed challenge to elements of a 1968 statute that criminalizes lying about the intended owner of a firearm. The law—which basically says that you can’t claim you’re buying a gun for yourself when you’re really buying it for someone else—has been used by the Department of Justice to target gun traffickers, who routinely employ third parties known as straw purchasers to bypass the federal background check system.

In the case, Abramski v. United States, the NRA and other gun groups argued that lying about who would end up with the gun shouldn’t matter if the intended owner could legally own one—and more broadly, that the entire prohibition on straw purchasing was itself a “legal fiction” with no real basis in the law itself. Twenty-six states signed on in support, arguing that the law infringed on their rights to regulate gun sales.

In the majority opinion, Justice Elena Kagan, who was joined by the three other liberal-leaning justices and the swing vote, Anthony Kennedy, emphatically disagreed: “No piece of information is more important under federal firearms law than the identity of a gun’s purchaser—the person who acquires a gun as a result of a transaction with a licensed dealer.”

The challenge arose out of a case of mistaken identity. Angel Alvarez sent his nephew, Bruce Abramski, a check for $400 with instructions to purchase and deliver to him a Glock 19 handgun. Ambraksi walked into a firearm dealership in Rocky Mount, Virginia, two days later, passed a background check, and signed a form indicating that he was the intended owner of the firearm. When investigators later misidentified Abramski as a suspect in a bank robbery (he wasn’t charged), federal investigators found a copy of the receipt revealing that he had purchased the Glock for his uncle—meaning he’d lied on a federal form to purchase the gun.

In lower courts, Abramski argued that his straw purchase was immaterial because his uncle was legally empowered to own a gun and could have passed a background check. But Abramski then made a far larger argument—that the 1968 gun control law really only governs the initial purchase, and had nothing to do with straw purchases. According to the NRA, federal regulators simply pulled the straw purchasing prohibition from thin air. Kagan wanted nothing of it:

The provision thus prevents remote sales except to a small class of buyers subject to extraordinary procedures—again, to ensure effective verification of a potential purchaser’s eligibility. Yet on Abramski’s view, a person could easily bypass the scheme, purchasing a gun without ever leaving his home by dispatching to a gun store a hired deliveryman. Indeed, if Abramski were right, we see no reason why anyone (and certainly anyone with less-than-pure motives) would put himself through the procedures laid out in §922(c): Deliverymen, after all, are not so hard to come by.

Abramski envisioned a federal gun control law that “would stare myopically at the nominal buyer while remaining blind to the person exiting the transaction with control of the gun,” Kagan argued.

Monday’s decision is good news for the Justice Department. The law stands. Now the government just has to find a way to enforce it.

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Supreme Court to NRA: No, People Can’t Lie to Buy Guns

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Ted Cruz Addresses Rally Organized By Doctor Who Says Gays Recruit Children

by PedroFljuqey Posted on June 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz Cruz spoke at an anti-gay marriage rally on Thursday hosted by Steven Hotze, a controversial doctor who has told women that birth control would make them unappealing to men and has warned that equality for gays would be a stepping stone to child molestation. Hotze, who runs an alternative medicine practice in suburban Houston and is suing the Obama administration over the Affordable Care Act, organized the event through his political action committee, Conservative Republicans of Texas. Cruz was joined on stage fellow Sen. John Cornyn, and state Sen. Dan Patrick, the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor.

As I reported in April, Hotze’s opposition to gay rights stretches back to at least the early 1980s, when he told Third Coast magazine that gay people “proliferate by one means, and one means only, and that’s recruiting. And they recruit the weak. They recruit children or young people in their formative years.” With that, he was off:

Three years later, after overturning an anti-discrimination ordinance in Houston, Hotze organized a group of eight candidates he considered allies in the fight against homosexuality. He called them “the Straight Slate.” His preferred mayoral candidate said that the best way to fight AIDS was to “shoot the queers.” Hotze told a local newspaper reporter that he cased out restaurants before making reservations to make sure they didn’t have any gay employees and became such a divisive figure in local politics that for a brief period the Harris County Republican Party cleaved in two.

More recently, his PAC spent big bucks to oppose Annise Parker, a Democratic candidate who would become Houston’s first openly gay mayor in 2009. On Thursday, Cruz also signed onto an amicus brief in support of Hotze’s lawsuit against Obamacare, which he contends is unconstitutional because it did not originate in the House. But Hotze is an unusual mascot for politicians who fear Obamacare has ruined the health care system, because he operates largely outside of it. An investigation by the Houston Press raised questions about his medical practice, noting that he had inflated his credentials and touted the healing powers of treatments such as colloidal silver—which can turn patients’ skin permanently blue—which are not covered by health insurance and not backed up by studies.

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Ted Cruz Addresses Rally Organized By Doctor Who Says Gays Recruit Children

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Can Mental Health Courts Fix California’s Prison Overcrowding?

by PearlinGuthrie Posted on May 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Passed in 1994, California’s “three strikes” law is the nation’s harshest sentencing law. Designed to imprison for life anyone who commits three violent crimes, the law has inadvertently resulted in the incarceration of a lot relatively harmless people, for a long time and at great public expense. Crimes that have earned people life sentences: Stealing a dollar in loose change from a car, breaking into a soup kitchen to steal food, stealing a jack from the open window of a tow truck, and even stealing two pairs of children’s shoes from Ross Dress for Less. The law is one reason that California’s prison system is dangerously, and unconstitutionally, overcrowded. More than 4,000 people in the prison system are serving life sentences for non-violent crimes.

In 2012, with corrections costs consuming ever more of the state budget, the voters in the state had had enough, and they approved a reform measure that would spring many of these low-level offenders from a lifetime of costly confinement. By August of last year, more than 1,000 inmates had their life sentences changed and were released; recidivisim rates for this group has also been extremely low. But further progress in the reform effort is being stymied by one thorny problem: Nearly half of the inmates serving time in California prisons suffer from a serious mental illness such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. So far, judges have been reluctant to let these folks out of their life sentences.

A new report from Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes project notes that the number of mentally ill prisoners denied relief from a life sentence is three times larger than those without a brain disease. The disparity largely stems from the fact that judges and juries tend to give people with brain diseases much harsher sentences to begin with.

Once in prison, their illnesses go untreated, and the prison conditions exacerbate their behavioral symptoms. As a result, they are at greater risk of getting in trouble for breaking prison rules and being sanctioned with severe disciplinary measures, including solitary confinement—a vicious cycle that can make their symptoms even worse, getting them in even more trouble. A long record of rule-breaking is one thing judges consider when weighing a request to reduce a life sentence under three-strikes reform, and a reason so many mentally ill people have been denied resentencing.

All of these factors are now driving a push in California to work harder to ensure that people with brain diseases don’t end up in the correctional system in the first place. Led by State Senator Darrell Steinberg and Stanford law professors who published the new report, the effort includes a call for more investment in mental health courts that focus on treatment rather than punishment. California currently has 40 such courts in 27 counties, and people like Steinberg think they should be expanded state-wide thanks to their effectiveness and cost-savings.

In 2006, Santa Clara County calculated $20 million in savings from its mental health court’s success in keeping mentally ill people out of prisons. Sacramento County saw the cost of keeping mentally ill people out of traditional courts fall 88 percent thanks to its mental health court. Other research has shown that the specialized courts also keep mentally ill people from cycling back into the justice system. Mentally ill people in Michigan’s mental health courts commit new crimes at a rate 300 percent lower than those who weren’t in those courts.

But money isn’t the only reason Steinberg wants to see mental health courts expanded. He notes in the Stanford report that this new approach “saves lives from being forsaken.” He invokes the moral cost of failing to treat sick people with compassion, and the tragedy of the lost human potential that occurs when the only place for a person with a brain disease today is in a prison.

Watch the video directed by Kelly Duane de la Vega and Kattie Galloway of Loteria Films (above) about the mental health courts that makes his point and shows just how powerful such venues can be in reclaiming lives and helping sick people return to normal functioning in the community.

All charts courtesy of Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes project

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Can Mental Health Courts Fix California’s Prison Overcrowding?

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The dictionary finally admits fracking is here to stay

by JMTJaniceuq Posted on May 20, 2014

Catch Word

The dictionary finally admits fracking is here to stay

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Kids, do you remember the dictionary? No, not Urban Dictionary. The dictionary! That heavy, paper thing where you hum the alphabet quietly under your breath and look for physical proof that the seven-letter word you just played in Scrabble really exists.

Environmentalists got a few extra words added to their Scrabble repertoire on Monday, when Merriam-Webster announced it was adding some new vocab to its 11th edition, including fracking, e-waste, cap-and-trade and freegan. Also inducted into the halls of dictionarydom were such gems as turducken, tweep, and selfie. (So last year, gloats the Oxford English Dictionary, ahead on the pop culture curve for the first time in 200 years.)

The new edition has already shipped, which means the approximately 11 people who still rely on paper dictionaries (hi, grandma!) will have the pleasure of learning about the joys of dumpster diving. From the AP:

“It’s a young word, from 2006,” [Merriam Webster editor Peter] Sokolowski said of freegan. “It’s one of the youngest in this list. This kind of environmentalism was a Lone Ranger type of activity before but has taken off.”

Merriam-Webster relies on a network of observers who track down word usage in everything from newspapers to soup can labels. Three or four senior editors make the final cut.

Someone at MW must have noticed that there sure is an awful lot of noise about this whole fracking thing (or one of the editors finally watched the reboot of Battlestar Galactica). On the other hand, cap-and-trade was a bit of a gambit.

But Sokolowski pointed out that one reason dictionaries lag behind the internet is a conscious effort to avoid the it-factor:

“One of the most important things we have to watch is the trendiness of language, so we don’t want to put a word in that will then have to come out,” he said. “We want to make sure a word is here to stay.”

Freegans, nice to have you, but we kinda wish fracking had just been an awkward phase.

Let’s page through a few of the new entries:

cap–and–trade, adjective, relating to or being a system that caps the amount of carbon emissions a given company may produce but allows it to buy rights to produce additional emissions from a company that does not use the equivalent amount of its own allowance

e-waste, noun ˈē-ˌwāstwaste consisting of discarded electronic products (as computers, televisions, and cell phones)

frack·ing, noun ˈfra-kiŋ the injection of fluid into shale beds at high pressure in order to free up petroleum resources (such as oil or natural gas)

free·gan, noun ˈfrē-gən an activist who scavenges for free food (as in waste receptacles at stores and restaurants) as a means of reducing consumption of resources


Source
Merriam-Webster Adds Da ‘Yoopers’ To Dictionary, Associated Press

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.

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The dictionary finally admits fracking is here to stay

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What the U.N.’s new climate report says about North America

by FerminCockrell Posted on March 31, 2014

What the U.N.’s new climate report says about North America

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NASA

Global warming is a global crisis, but the effects of climate change are being felt differently in different corners of the globe. The latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of a world wracked by hunger, violence, and extinctions. But the IPCC also dedicates chapters to impacts that are underway and anticipated in individual regions and continents.

For North America, the report states there is “high confidence” of links between climate change and rising temperatures, ravaging downpours, and declining water supplies. Even if temperatures are allowed to rise by just 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 C), which is the goal of current international climate negotiations (a goal that won’t be met unless everybody gets a lot more serious about curbing greenhouse gas pollution), such severe weather is going to get a lot worse.

North America’s coastal regions will continue to face a particularly long list of hazards, with climate change bringing growing risks of “sea-level rise, warming, ocean acidification, extratropical cyclones, altered upwelling, and hurricanes and other storms.”

Here are some highlights from the North American chapter of the IPCC’s new report:

Observed climate trends in North America include an increased occurrence of severe hot weather events over much of the US, decreases in frost days, and increases in heavy precipitation over much of North America …

Global warming of approximately 2°C (above the pre-industrial baseline) is very likely to lead to more frequent extreme heat events and daily precipitation extremes over most areas of North America, more frequent low snow years, and shifts towards earlier snowmelt runoff over much of the western US and Canada. Together with climate hazards such as higher sea levels and associated storm surges, more intense droughts, and increased precipitation variability, these changes are projected to lead to increased stresses to water, agriculture, economic activities and urban and rural settlements.

The following figure from the report shows how temperatures have already risen — and how they are expected to continue to rise in different parts of the continent under relatively low (“RCP2.6″) and high (“RCP8.5″) greenhouse gas pollution scenarios:

IPCCClick to embiggen.

And this figure shows that rain and snow are falling more heavily in parts of central and eastern U.S., but that the changes are more mixed in the West:

IPCCClick to embiggen.

Care about other parts of the world? Good for you! So do we. Here are links to chapters on other regions, along with our brief summaries of their findings:

Africa. This already overheated continent can expect to experience faster warming than other parts of the world – we’re talking about as much as 11 degrees F of warming by the end of the century. Couple that with worsening water shortages in many areas and more severe floods, and many Africans are staring down a hellish long-term weather forecast.

Europe. Worse floods and droughts, peppered with brutal winter winds over Central and Northern Europe.

Asia. A bento box of impacts varying widely across the region. Water shortages and rising seas are among the big worries. Farmers in some countries might benefit, but rice growers will generally find it more difficult to feed Asia. “There are a number of regions that are already near the heat stress limits for rice,” the chapter states.

Australasia. Crikey, them cyclones are gonna hit Down Under harder than a ‘roo on a bonnet. And that’s not all. Fires, heat waves, and flooding will continue to get worse in many areas of Australia and New Zealand.

Central and South America. Temperatures will continue to rise, and rain and snow will fall harder in some places but grow scarcer in others. The Andes will continue to lose snow.

Polar Regions. As the poles melt and grow more balmy, new biomes will appear. The report notes that the “tree line has moved northward and upward in many, but not all, Arctic areas … and significant increases in tall shrubs and grasses have been observed in many places.” Which sounds like a good thing, except that the melting permafrost is unleashing climate-changing methane.

Small islands. Those island bits that remain above sea level will be buffeted by salty floods, which will make freshwater harder to come by. The coral reefs that foster the ecosystems that support the livelihoods of islanders will continue to bleach and die.

The ocean. Three words: acidic rising seas.


Source
IPCC WGII AR5 Chapter 26, IPCC
WGII AR5 Final Drafts, IPCC

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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What the U.N.’s new climate report says about North America

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Scientists tell Americans: This climate change thing really is a big deal

by Hedrick Lepsch Posted on March 18, 2014

Scientists tell Americans: This climate change thing really is a big deal

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One of the world’s largest and most influential science organizations is launching a new campaign to cut through the noise of climate denialism and help the public understand the threat of climate change.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science kicked things off on Monday by publishing a 20-page report entitled What We Know. The gist: We know that global warming is real, risky, and demands a serious response — “the three Rs of climate change.”

“We’re trying to provide a voice for the scientific community on this issue so that we can help the country, help the world move this issue forward,” AAAS CEO Alan Leshner said during a call with reporters on Tuesday morning. “If we don’t move now we are at tremendous risk for some very high impact consequences, many of which are laid out in the report.”

The AAAS has also assembled a panel of a 13 leading scientists who will make public presentations and try to spread climate smarts far and wide.

Here’s an explanation of those three climate Rs from the initiative’s website:

The first is Reality — 97% of climate experts have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.

The second is Risk — that the reality of climate change means that there are climate change impacts we can expect, but we also must consider what might happen, especially the small, but real, chance that we may face abrupt changes with massively disruptive impacts.

The third R is Response — that there is much we can do and that the sooner we respond, the better off we will be.

The report is not all gloom and doom. The call to action is premised on hope:

By making informed choices now, we can reduce risks for future generations and ourselves, and help communities adapt to climate change. People have responded successfully to other major environmental challenges such as acid rain and the ozone hole with benefits greater than costs, and scientists working with economists believe there are ways to manage the risks of climate change while balancing current and future economic prosperity.

As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do or must believe about the rising threat of climate change. But we consider it to be our responsibility as professionals to ensure, to the best of our ability, that people understand what we know: human-caused climate change is happening, we face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes, and responding now will lower the risk and cost of taking action.

Renowned climate scientist Michael Mann – a member at large of AAAS’s atmospheric sciences division but not a member of the new climate panel — lauded the initiative. “AAAS is the largest non-governmental scientific membership body in the world, so them taking such an affirmative role in the societal debate over climate change, and what to do about it, is significant,” Mann told Grist.

“The crux of the matter is that, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that exists that, (a) climate change is real, (b) it is caused by us, and (c) it poses a grave threat to society if we do nothing about it, the public still thinks that there is a ‘debate’ on each of those elements,” Mann said.


Source
What We Knew: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change, AAAS

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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Scientists tell Americans: This climate change thing really is a big deal

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Scientists to Americans: This climate change thing really is a big deal

by ChangHamblen Posted on March 18, 2014

Scientists to Americans: This climate change thing really is a big deal

By

Shutterstock

One of the world’s largest and most influential science organizations is launching a new campaign to cut through the noise of climate denialism and help the public understand the threat of climate change.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science kicked things off on Monday by publishing a 20-page report entitled What We Know. The gist: We know that global warming is real, risky, and demands a serious response — “the three Rs of climate change.”

“We’re trying to provide a voice for the scientific community on this issue so that we can help the country, help the world move this issue forward,” AAAS CEO Alan Leshner said during a call with reporters on Tuesday morning. “If we don’t move now we are at tremendous risk for some very high impact consequences, many of which are laid out in the report.”

The AAAS has also assembled a panel of a 13 leading scientists who will make public presentations and try to spread climate smarts far and wide.

Here’s an explanation of those three climate Rs from the initiative’s website:

The first is Reality — 97% of climate experts have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.

The second is Risk — that the reality of climate change means that there are climate change impacts we can expect, but we also must consider what might happen, especially the small, but real, chance that we may face abrupt changes with massively disruptive impacts.

The third R is Response — that there is much we can do and that the sooner we respond, the better off we will be.

The report is not all gloom and doom. The call to action is premised on hope:

By making informed choices now, we can reduce risks for future generations and ourselves, and help communities adapt to climate change. People have responded successfully to other major environmental challenges such as acid rain and the ozone hole with benefits greater than costs, and scientists working with economists believe there are ways to manage the risks of climate change while balancing current and future economic prosperity.

As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do or must believe about the rising threat of climate change. But we consider it to be our responsibility as professionals to ensure, to the best of our ability, that people understand what we know: human-caused climate change is happening, we face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes, and responding now will lower the risk and cost of taking action.

Renowned climate scientist Michael Mann – a member at large of AAAS’s atmospheric sciences division but not a member of the new climate panel — lauded the initiative. “AAAS is the largest non-governmental scientific membership body in the world, so them taking such an affirmative role in the societal debate over climate change, and what to do about it, is significant,” Mann told Grist.

“The crux of the matter is that, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that exists that, (a) climate change is real, (b) it is caused by us, and (c) it poses a grave threat to society if we do nothing about it, the public still thinks that there is a ‘debate’ on each of those elements,” Mann said.


Source
What We Knew: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change, AAAS

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.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Scientists to Americans: This climate change thing really is a big deal

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