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Photos: Inside Urban Shield, the Convention for Warrior Cops

by CeliaZeller Posted on September 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Each year, the Alameda County Sheriff’s office hosts Urban Shield, a trade show and series of exercises for first responders, primarily police department SWAT teams from around the nation. (Similar events have also been held in Boston and Dallas.) The first two days are taken up by a trade show, where vendors show off gear from armored vehicles to dog-mounted cameras and anatomically correct medical dummies. Mother Jones’ Shane Bauer is attending this year’s event and has been tweeting some of the highlights.

Here’s all the gear that was being hawked:

Some choice quotes, photos, and video from the convention:

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Photos: Inside Urban Shield, the Convention for Warrior Cops

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Hillary Clinton Praises a Guy With Lots of Blood on His Hands

by TangelaMullens Posted on September 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton often plays the hawk card: She voted for the Iraq war, dissed President Barack Obama for not being tough enough on Syria, and compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. This is to be expected from a politician who has angled for a certain title: the first female president of the United States. Whether her muscular views are sincerely held or not, a conventional political calculation would lead her to assume it may be difficult for many voters to elect as commander-in-chief a woman who did not project an aggressive and assertive stance on foreign policy. So her tough talk might be charitably evaluated in such a (somewhat) forgiving context. Yet what remains more puzzling and alarming is the big wet kiss she planted (rhetorically) on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger this week, with a fawning review of his latest book, World Order.

Sure, perhaps there is secretary’s privilege—an old boy and girls club, in which the ex-foreign-policy chiefs do not speak ill of each other and try to help out the person presently in the post. Nothing wrong with that. But former-Madam Secretary Clinton had no obligation to praise Kissinger and publicly participate in his decades-long mission to rehabilitate his image. In the review, she calls Kissinger a “friend” and reports, “I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.” She does add that she and Henry “have often seen the world and some of our challenges quite differently, and advocated different responses now and in the past.” But here’s the kicker: At the end of the review, she notes that Kissinger is “surprisingly idealistic”:

Even when there are tensions between our values and other objectives, America, he reminds us, succeeds by standing up for our values, not shirking them, and leads by engaging peoples and societies, the sources of legitimacy, not governments alone.

Kissinger reminds us that America succeeds by standing up for its values? Did she inhale?

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Hillary Clinton Praises a Guy With Lots of Blood on His Hands

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How Understanding Randomness Will Give You Mind-Reading Powers

by OsvaldoTeague Posted on September 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the 1930s, a Duke University botanist named Joseph Banks Rhine was gaining notoriety for focusing a scientific lens on the concept of extrasensory perception, or ESP. His initial research, which he claimed demonstrated the existence of ESP, consisted of case studies of exceptional individuals who seemed to be able to predict which cards a research associate was holding—even when sitting 250 yards away and separated by physical barriers like a wall—with greater accuracy than simple guessing would yield.

But case studies can only take you so far.

One night, Rhine met with Eugene Francis McDonald Jr., the CEO of the Zenith Radio Company. McDonald offered up his technology for what promised to be the largest and most impressive test of ESP yet: a nationwide experiment showing that telepathy is real.

“The idea was that they would have a bunch of people in a radio studio, and they would try to transmit their thoughts to the nationwide radio audience,” explains science writer William Poundstone, author of the book Rock Breaks Scissors, on this week’s Inquiring Minds podcast. “And then people at home could write down what they think they received and send that in, and scientists would look at it and decide if they had shown ESP or not.” The hope, says Poundstone, was that the participation of millions of radio listeners would produce results that were supposedly “much more statistically valid” than earlier ESP studies.

The first few broadcasts were a dramatic success. Most listeners were correct in their guesses of what the “senders” in a radio station in Chicago were thinking. On one episode, writes Poundstone, the thought-senders attempted to use their brains to transmit a series of five Xs and Os—OXXOX—and a majority of the audience members sent in the right answers. “So this seemed very impressive, and the head of Zenith put out big press releases saying that, you know, there’s no way this could be a coincidence,” says Poundstone.

But while it wasn’t a coincidence, a young psychologist named Louis D. Goodfellow figured out that the experiment wasn’t really measuring telepathy. Rather, it was demonstrating something far more interesting about human nature: our inability to behave randomly. It turned out that Goodfellow, who had been hired by Zenith to work on the show, could predict listeners’ guesses even before they had a chance to make them. He started out with the hypothesis that there is no ESP. In that case, the radio audience had to come up with a random sequence themselves. “And he realized that it’s not so easy for a person to make up a random sequence.” says Poundstone. “When people try to do that they fall into certain unconscious patterns, and these patterns are really very similar for everyone.”

In his own laboratory experiments, Goodfellow found that his subjects preferred certain types of sequences when they’re trying to come up with random ones. When he asked people to make up the results of five imaginary coin tosses, for instance, “he found first of all that the most popular first toss was heads,” says Poundstone. How popular? Seventy-eight percent of the study participants selected “heads” as the first result in their supposedly “random” sequences.

What’s more, explains Poundstone, Goodfellow discovered that “people liked sequences that were very well shuffled.” Indeed, the most common sequence chosen by Zenith audiences was heads, heads, tails, heads, tails (or its equivalent in Os and Xs)—they picked it nearly 30 times more frequently than tails, tails, tails, tails, tails. “It’s not too surprising that the least common ones were just five heads in a row, or five tails in a row,” adds Poundstone. “People figured that just wasn’t random.”

So, mystery solved. When the Zenith program transmitted thoughts that matched sequences that were popular with its listeners, “it suddenly looked like the public had a great deal of ESP,” says Poundstone. “But when the sequences were not so popular, then suddenly the telepaths were off their game.”

More recently, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proposed the so-called Law of Small Numbers, a theory that accounts for human misunderstandings of randomness. Specifically, we wrongly expect small samples to behave like very large ones. So if you toss a coin five times, you assume that you’ll get some variation of a pattern that includes two or three heads and two or three tails. If your coin lands on tails five times in a row, you tend to believe that it can’t be a coincidence. But in fact, the odds of five tails in a row are 1 in 32—not especially common, but not terribly rare, either. “So we have all these sort of false positives where we figure there must be something wrong with that coin, or maybe the person’s got some magic hot-hand in tossing coins,” Poundstone says.

Understanding these pitfalls can actually help you predict, with accuracy above chance, what someone else is going to do, even when he or she is trying, purposefully, to act randomly. These predictions are at the core of Poundstone’s book, which offers a practical guide to outguessing and outwitting almost anybody—in activities ranging from Rock, Paper, Scissors (men tend to go with rock, so you can beat them with paper) to investing in stocks.

Naturally, the larger the dataset, the more accurately a person—or a computer—can predict behavior. With access to Big Data, large corporations like Target have developed analytics that can predict our behavior with remarkable accuracy, even when we think we’re making decisions in the moment. Siri, your iPhone’s talking app, learns about you and the behavior of all the other iPhone users and uses that information to predict what you’re going to ask her even as you are evaluating your own needs.

And sometimes, the Big Data machine is more observant than even the people closest to us. In his book, Poundstone cites the story of a Minnesota dad (first reported by the New York Times) who complained to a Target manager that his teenage daughter was being encouraged by the company to engage in unprotected sex. The store, he noted, had sent her a mailer littered with photos of cute babies, baby gear, and maternity clothing. As Poundstone writes, the manager apologized and promised that he’d suss out the source of the error. In doing so, he learned that Target analyzes purchases made online and in stores that are predictive of the behavior of an expectant mother. When he called the angry father once again to apologize, he realized just how powerful these algorithms can be. As it turns out, this time the customer was apologetic: Apparently Big Data noticed his daughter’s pregnancy well before he did.

Poundstone draws a direct line between Goodfellow’s debunking of ESP and modern efforts to predict consumer behavior. “It basically demonstrated that a lot of the little everyday decisions we make are incredibly predictable, provided you’ve got a little bit of data to work from,” he says. “And that’s become a very big business today, needless to say.”

But does this predictability apply to everyone? Poundstone knows of at least one person who defies the odds. Computer scientist Claude Shannon built the first computer to predict human behavior. And of all the people tested, he was also the only one who could beat the machine at its own game. When asked how he managed to do this, “he said that he had a very simple secret,” reveals Poundstone. “He essentially mentally emulated the code of the machine and did the algorithm in his head, so he knew what the machine was going to predict, and then he did the opposite.” But Shannon is a special case. “For almost everyone else, mere humans,” says Poundstone, “I think it is pretty easy to predict, at least a good deal of the time.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How Understanding Randomness Will Give You Mind-Reading Powers

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Surprise! Eric Cantor Lands $3.4 Million Job on Wall Street

by ClemmieOneill Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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After Rep. Eric Cantor lost his primary to a tea party challenger in June, he could have stayed on as a lame duck, collecting his salary and voting as a full member of Congress through January 2015. Instead, Cantor decided to step down from his job as the GOP’s majority leader and resign his seat early. Cantor claimed that the decision to call it quits was in the interests of his constituents. “I want to make sure that the constituents in the 7th District will have a voice in what will be a very consequential lame-duck session,” Cantor said at the time, explaining that he’d timed his decision so his replacement could be seated as soon as possible.

No one believed it—on August 1, the Huffington Post‘s Arthur Delaney and Eliot Nelson wrote that voters would soon hear about “Eric Cantor’s forthcoming finance job.” A month later, their prediction has proven true: On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cantor will soon start work at Moelis & Co, an investment bank. Cantor—whose experience prior to becoming a professional politician largely consisted of working in the family real estate development business—will earn a hefty salary for his lack of expertise: According to Business Insider, he’s set to make $3.4 million from the investment firm. “Mr. Moelis said he is hiring Mr. Cantor for his “judgment and experience” and ability to open doors—and not just for help navigating regulatory and political waters in Washington,” the Journal reported.

Democrats sell out, too. In 2010, former Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh announced his plans to retire in 2010 in a New York Times op-ed that bemoaned the lack of bipartisan friendships in the modern Senate and attacked the influence of money in politics. Yet shortly after he left Congress, Bayh signed up with law firm McGuireWoods and private equity firm Apollo Global Management and began acting as a lobbyist for corporate clients in all but name. Less than a year later, he joined the US Chamber of Commerce as an adviser. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) pulled a similar trick, promising “no lobbying, no lobbying,” before taking a $1-million-plus job as the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s main lobbying group.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 417 ex-lawmakers hold lobbyist or lobbyist-like jobs.

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Surprise! Eric Cantor Lands $3.4 Million Job on Wall Street

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Which States’ Kids Miss the Most School?

by dfdedtcf Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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September is upon us, and American kids are filling up their backpacks. But lots of kids won’t be going back to school—at least not very much. The map above shows the results of a national report released Tuesday by nonprofit Attendance Works, which zooms in on a statistic called “chronic absenteeism,” generally defined as the number of kids who miss at least 10 percent of school days over the course of a year. The measure has become popular among education reformers over the past few years because unlike other measures like average daily attendance or truancy, chronic absenteeism focuses on the specific kids who are regularly missing instructional time, regardless of the reason why or the overall performance of the school.

Several studies have shown that missing 10 percent of school seems to be a threshold of sorts: If you miss more than that, your odds of scoring well on tests, graduating high school, and attending college are significantly lower. A statewide study in Utah, for example, found that kids who were chronically absent for a year between 8th and 12th grades were more than seven times more likely to drop out. The pattern starts early in the year: A 2013 Baltimore study found that half of the students who missed two to four days of school in September went on to be chronically absent.

The Attendance Works study, which used missing three days per month as a proxy for the 10 percent threshold, categorized students missing school by location, race, and socioeconomic status. Here’s what they found:

Oddly enough, the federal government doesn’t track absenteeism. Seventeen states do, and, as David Cardinali wrote in the New York Times last week, states have found that school attendance often falls on socioeconomic lines: In Maryland, nearly a third of high school students who receive free or reduced lunch are chronically absent.

In order to work with a national dataset, Attendance Works looked at the results of the National Assessment for Educational Attainment, the nation’s largest continuing standardized test, taken by a sample of fourth- and eighth-graders across the country every two years. In addition to academic content, the test asks students a series of nonacademic questions, including how many days of school they have missed in the past month. If students reported missing three or more days, they had crossed the 10 percent threshold; assuming that month is representative of the rest of the year, the kids qualify as chronically absent.

Obviously, there’s a huge disclaimer here: Students may not remember or accurately report their own absences, and one month may not be representative of an entire school year. But at the same time, the results were remarkably consistent, reflecting conclusions from localized studies: Students in poverty are less likely to come to school, and as the chart below shows, students who come to school less perform markedly worse on tests. (For reference, an improvement of 10 points on the National Assessment for Educational Progress is roughly equivalent to jumping a grade level.)

Phyllis Jordan, a coauthor of the Attendance Works report, hopes that as schools look more into the data, they’ll be able to identify the core reasons for the absence: “If everybody from a certain neighborhood is missing school and they have to walk through a bad neighborhood, then suddenly you say, ‘Oh, we should run a school bus through there.’ If it’s all the kids with asthma and you don’t have a school nurse, maybe that’s a reason. Or maybe it’s all concentrated in a single classroom, and you have an issue with the teacher.”

The good news is that citywide studies in New York City and Chicago show that when chronically absent kids start coming to school more, they can make substantial academic gains. And the simple act of tracking and prioritizing absenteeism can lead to statewide progress: When Hawaii started keeping track of chronic absenteeism in 2012, the state went from having a chronic absentee rate of 18 to 11 percent over the course of a single year.

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Which States’ Kids Miss the Most School?

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Top Gun Rights Group Backs White Supremacist’s Supreme Court Case

by JaimeTeeter Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Samuel Johnson isn’t exactly a lawyer’s dream client. He’s a white supremacist with a lengthy rap sheet who a couple years ago was accused of plotting an attack on a Mexican consulate. He ended up drawing a 15-year prison term on a gun charge, and his case is now on his way to the US Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear a challenge to his sentence. Johnson has won the vocal backing of a top gun rights group, but as his case moves forward, it may eventually draw support from some liberals and civil libertarians who oppose harsh mandatory minimum sentences.

Johnson’s story started back in 2010, when he caught the attention of the FBI, not long after he’d started organizing anti-immigration rallies in Minnesota. Initially a member of the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi group, Johnson quit to start his own outfit, the Aryan Liberation Movement. He allegedly planned to support the group by counterfeiting money.

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Top Gun Rights Group Backs White Supremacist’s Supreme Court Case

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Meet the Risky Mortgage Pioneer Trying to Pay His Buddy’s Way Into Congress

by SoilaEllsworth Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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If New Hampshire Republican Dan Innis wins his congressional race, he knows where to send the fruit basket: to the home of mortgage giant Peter T. Paul.

Before running for Congress, Innis served as dean of the University of New Hampshire’s business school, which was renamed for Paul after he donated $25 million. His campaign website touts major building projects he oversaw as dean—projects financed by Paul’s contribution. And Innis’ congressional run is getting a big-time boost from a brand new super-PAC founded and financed by Paul.

“Dan’s a friend,” says Paul, who lives in California. Paul is an alumnus of the University of New Hampshire, and he met Innis through his UNH philanthropy. “He’s the better candidate. He needs to get known.”

Innis, who is one of four candidates running in the Republican primary on September 9 to challenge Democratic Rep. Carol Shea Porter, is socially liberal and favors shrinking the government—exactly the type of politician Paul says he would like to see in Congress. In order to make that happen, Paul created a super-PAC, New Hampshire Priorities PAC, and financed it with $562,000. So far, $376,000 of that has gone into radio and TV ads supporting his friend. Innis himself has raised a little more than $338,000—about $150,000 less than his closest Republican opponent. With Paul in the mix, Innis is head and shoulders over his GOP competitors.

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Meet the Risky Mortgage Pioneer Trying to Pay His Buddy’s Way Into Congress

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Stop Dreaming. Republicans Are Not Going for a Carbon Tax.

by MoniqueFournier Posted on August 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Republicans, as everyone knows, hate taxes and don’t accept, much less care about, climate change. But wonks on both sides of the aisle fantasize that a carbon tax could win bipartisan support as part of a broader tax-reform package. A carbon tax could be revenue neutral, the dreamers point out, and if revenue from the tax is used to cut other taxes, it shouldn’t offend Republicans—in theory.

And so people who want to bring Republicans into the climate movement like to argue that the GOP could come to embrace a carbon tax. We’ve heard it from former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who lost his seat to a Tea Party primary challenger in 2010 after he proposed a revenue-neutral plan to create a carbon tax and cut payroll taxes. We’ve heard it from energy industry bigwigs like Roger Sant, who recently argued the case at the Aspen Ideas Festival. We’ve heard it from GOP think tankers like Eli Lehrer.

It’s the epitome of centrist wishful thinking. It will not happen.

I know because I asked the man most responsible for setting Republican tax policy: Grover Norquist. As head of Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist has gotten 218 House Republicans and 39 Senate Republicans to sign his “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” never to raise taxes. His group has marshaled the Republican base’s zealous anti-tax activists and successfully primaried politicians who violate the pledge, making Norquist a much-feared and much-obeyed player in D.C. The Boston Globe Magazine went so far as to call him “the most powerful man in America“—at least of the unelected variety.

First off, Norquist has no interest in a carbon tax because, he told me, there has been no global warming for the last 15 years. That right-wing shibboleth is false, but the point is that if you don’t accept climate science, as Norquist and the Republicans don’t, you’ve got no reason to back a carbon tax.

Although Norquist conceded that you could theoretically construct a revenue-neutral carbon tax that does not violate his pledge, he would still oppose it, and he said Republicans generally would too. “I would urge people not to vote for a carbon tax, because the tax burden is a function of how many taxes you have,” Norquist said, noting that higher-tax jurisdictions tend to have more sources of tax revenue. “With one tax, people can see how big it is. Divide it and no one knows.”

“I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes,” he concluded. Neither do I.

It’s useful to look at how Republicans react to other tax-reform ideas: Eliminate the carried-interest loophole that taxes hedge-fund managers at a lower rate than their secretaries? No way! Eliminate deductions for oil and gas companies? Nothing doing.

The arguments Republicans make about this one tax being unfair or that one stifling economic growth are all just arguments of convenience. Republicans are for taxing the things they don’t care about (poor people’s meager earnings) and against taxing the things they do care about (rich people’s unearned income). So Republicans oppose taxing inheritances and capital gains, but seem not to mind flat taxes on income or sales. That’s why the big tax-reform proposals that insurgent Republican candidates have ridden to prominence—Mike Huckabee’s “Fair Tax,” Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” plan—involve shifting much of the tax burden to a national sales tax: because sales taxes fall disproportionately on poor people. (Poor people have to spend a bigger portion of their income than rich people do just to get by, so sales taxes are regressive.)

And that’s why offering to cut payroll taxes in exchange for creating a carbon tax won’t win a bunch of Republican votes. First of all, Republicans don’t care about the tax burden on poor people, so the payroll tax deduction is not going to entice them. (In fact, they opposed an extension of President Obama’s payroll-tax holiday.) Meanwhile, they don’t share the premise that fuel consumption and carbon pollution are bad, because they don’t accept climate science. And they don’t want to shift the tax burden to fossil fuel companies, which are huge GOP contributors.

It’s worth remembering how a carbon tax became the ostensible bipartisan solution to climate change. Back in 2008, both parties’ presidential candidates backed cap-and-trade plans. Obama won and advanced his plan, so Republicans all opposed it. By default, whatever Obama proposes becomes “partisan” and the alternative becomes supposedly the reasonable, non-ideological idea Republicans would have supported. It’s always a lie.

There are two possible paths to either cap-and-trade or a carbon tax: One, Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress and the White House, and feel more pressure to address climate change than they did in 2010, when they let the opportunity slip away. Or, two, Republicans come to accept climate science and decide they want to save the world from burning. But until Republicans come around to acknowledge the reality of climate change, they’re not going to agree to a carbon tax.

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Stop Dreaming. Republicans Are Not Going for a Carbon Tax.

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Charts: Kids Are Paying the Price for America’s Prison Binge

by TobyS98xuae Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

As students return to the classroom this fall, one large group of children will be more likely than their peers to suffer learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, behavioral problems, chronic school absence, and a host of other health concerns. These are the 2.7 million US children coping with the stress of parental incarceration.

In a new study, University of California-Irvine sociologist Kristin Turney analyzes data from the 2011-12 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) to determine the mental and physical health effects of having a parent in jail or prison. The results are striking:

The NSCH surveyed 95,677 children. Turney’s analysis found that children with a parent in jail or prison had worse health across all but three tested health outcomes. They were more than three times as likely to suffer depression (6.2 percent vs. 1.8 percent) and behavioral problems (10.4 percent vs. 2.6 percent), compared to kids without an incarcerated parent. Perhaps more surprisingly, parental incarceration was related to higher levels of asthma, obesity, speech problems, and overall poor physical health.

Factors that affect health are often interrelated, making it difficult to isolate and study just one: Families already in poverty are more likely to be affected by incarceration, but incarceration can also destabilize family finances. Even when Turney controlled for a host of other factors—including parental employment and income, ethnicity, parents’ relationship status, safety of neighborhood, and parental health—the relationship remained between parental incarceration and health concerns like learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, and developmental delay.

In fact, Turney found that children with parents behind bars are as likely to suffer certain health problems—including learning disabilities and developmental delay—as children who experience divorce or the death of a parent, witness parental abuse, or share a home with someone with a drug or alcohol abuse problem.

“Results suggest that children’s health disadvantages are an overlooked and unintended consequence of mass incarceration,” Turney writes, “and that incarceration, given its unequal distribution across the population, may have implications for population-level racial-ethnic and social class inequalities in children’s health.”

One study found that a quarter of black children born in 1990 saw a parent go to jail or prison by age 14, as opposed to 3 percent of white children.

Parental incarceration introduces significant stress into a child’s life, Turney tells Mother Jones, which “leads to negative health effects, especially mental-health conditions.” But on top of inherent psychological stress, incarceration can hit a family from all directions: The destabilization of family finances, relationships, and other elements of daily life can cause indirect stress that further impacts a child’s health, Turney explains.

The NSCH data does not make clear the extent to which direct and indirect stress contribute to poor health, but Turney says she hopes future research will help figure that out: “Because that’s really important for where to best invest, in terms of intervening in these kids’ lives and where we might be able to develop public policies.”

She says children can be overlooked as policymakers focus on the health of the inmates themselves. “And while there are certainly a host of negative things that go along with that, we should be thinking about how these consequences can really have spillover effects on families and on children.”

Incarceration’s impact on family life is made worse by facilities located far from cities, exploitative phone rates, lack of official policies to address children’s needs, and excessively long sentences. Two-thirds of incarcerated parents are nonviolent offenders.

Turney has previously studied the way in which teachers’ perceptions of children with incarcerated fathers can make it more likely for these children to be held back a year in school. She says there is a growing interest in studying parental incarceration, but that researchers are stymied by a lack of good data.

Its not just academics who are starting to think about this issue: Sesame Street recently reached out to children coping with parental incarceration by introducing a puppet whose father is in jail. As one little girl says in the clip, it gets hardest “when I see children with their mothers, and playing and everything, and I just wonder how it feels to be like that.”

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Charts: Kids Are Paying the Price for America’s Prison Binge

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Drought Weighing You Down? Nope, It’s Lifting You Up

by VictoriaPethebr Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a odd piece of news: According to a study published Thursday in Science, the water loss due to this year’s drought has caused the entire western side of the United States to literally rise. After examining data from nearly 800 GPS stations across the country, researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that the area west of New Mexico has risen by an average of four millimeters this year. In the Sierra Nevadas and along California’s coast—two areas that have received far less precipitation this year than normal—the land rose 15 millimeters.

Adrian Borsa, a coauthor of the study, explained what’s happening: “The earth is an elastic material just like a block of rubber. If you put a water load on it, the earth deforms, if you take the water away, the earth will come back.” Using the GPS data, the researchers estimated that the Western United States has lost 62 trillion gallons of water to the atmosphere this year because of the drought. That’s enough water to cover the entire Western US in six inches of water.

The earth rising seems not only vaguely biblical, but also counterintuitive; one might expect the earth’s surface to fall if water is being taken from it. In fact, the ground is falling in some places: Some GPS stations in California had to be left out of the study because farmers are extracting so much groundwater that the ground is literally caving in. But this study didn’t examine the ground at a surface-level—it showed that the earth’s crust and mantle are responding elastically to the drought. So while some areas may be falling because of man-made changes at a local level, the West as a whole is rising.

As it turns out, the rise and fall of the earth due to water loss actually happens a little each year with the change of the seasons: Land is heavier in the winter and spring, and when water evaporates in the summer and fall, land is a little lighter. But the annual variation in California’s mountains is about 5 millimeters—not this year’s 15. The difference “sounds tiny,” said Borsa, but from a geological standpoint, “it’s a whopping signal” of the amount of water lost to the drought.

Contrary to most drought news these days, this rise of the West doesn’t have looming disastrous effects in and of itself: The researchers, for example, don’t think that this change will cause more extreme earthquakes.

But Borsa says that using GPS data on the rise of the earth could help regulators to understand how much water is being used in the West—particularly in California. California is the only Western state that doesn’t measure or regulate major groundwater use; if you can drill down to it, it’s all yours. A report produced for the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture estimated that California’s farmers will pump about 13 million acre-feet of groundwater this year—enough water to put a piece of land the size of Rhode Island 17 feet underwater.

With no regulatory system in place, though, it’s challenging for officials to know if these estimates are lining up with reality. “The extractions aren’t monitored, so no one really knows how to monitor the water supply,” says Borsa. Using GPS data “could be a great tool for water managers.”

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Drought Weighing You Down? Nope, It’s Lifting You Up

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