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On Thursday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a very important message for anyone planning to swim this summer: Don’t poop in the pool. Also, try not to be in a pool where someone else has pooped. At least, if you can avoid it, don’t swim with your mouth open in a pool if you, or someone else, has pooped nearby.
These are just a few of the ways you can try to avoid getting norovirus—a nasty and highly contagious stomach virus that sometimes makes its way onto cruise ships—as you enjoy all sorts of aquatic activities that are not limited to pools. Lakes have high levels of poop-related-risks it seems, as the CDC announcement describes how some people in Oregon swam in a lake last year and ended up getting the virus, which causes vomiting and diarrhea. The outbreak ended up sickening 70 people, some of whom didn’t even swim in the lake (state health officials found, however, that swimmers were over twice as likely to get sick).
Other important tips include not peeing in the water, not vomiting in the water, and maybe skipping swimming that day if there’s a chance you might do any of those things.
This important message comes in honor of Healthy and Safe Swimming week and is mostly geared toward children (or parents of children) who are not only more at risk for norovirus but are also prime suspects of doing things in water that one shouldn’t do. They also, apparently, are bad at swimming with their mouths closed. Per the CDC’s press release:
“Children are prime targets for norovirus and other germs that can live in lakes and swimming pools because they’re so much more likely to get the water in their mouths,” said Michael Beach, Ph.D, the CDC’s associate director for healthy water. “Keeping germs out of the water in the first place is key to keeping everyone healthy and helping to keep the places we swim open all summer.”
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Cesar Millan’s Short Guide to a Happy Dog – Cesar Millan
After more than 9 seasons as TV’s Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan has a new mission: to use his unique insights about dog psychology to create stronger, happier relationships between humans and their canine companions. Now in paperback, this inspirational and practical guide draws on thousands of training encounters around the world to present 98 essential lessons. Taken together, they will […]
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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up – Marie Kondo
This New York Times best-selling guide to decluttering your home from Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes readers step-by-step through her revolutionary KonMari Method for simplifying, organizing, and storing. Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles? Japanese cleaning consultant […]
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White Dwarf Issue 65: 25th April 2015 – White Dwarf
White Dwarf 65 is the biggest issue of weekly White Dwarf yet! But what could demand such lavish, extra special treatment? Why, the brand new Assassinorum Execution Force boxed game and the deadly Imperial Assassins it contains, of course! We’ve got full details of this great new game, a playthrough so you can see how […]
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Dataslate – Officio Assassinorum – Games Workshop
Assassins are the deadly agents of the High Lords of Terra and among the most feared of the Imperium’s weapons. Each one is created for a single purpose: to kill their target, no matter the odds or obstacles in their way. Utterly dedicated to their cause, an Assassin will not quit once they have been […]
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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo – A 15-minute Summary & Analysis – Instaread
PLEASE NOTE: This is a summary and analysis of the book and NOT the original book. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo – A 15-minute Summary & Analysis Inside this Instaread: Summary of entire book, Introduction to the important people in the book, Key Takeaways and Analysis of the Key Takeaways. […]
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The Stolen Dog – Tricia O’Malley
When Briggs, a Boston terrier, is stolen from his family’s deck and shoved into a waiting car, a chain of events unfold that shakes the city. The Stolen Dog follows Tricia and Josh, Briggs’ owners, as they fight a force unknown, enduring death threats, psychic interventions, false leads, fake set-ups, and the threat of dog […]
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Codex: Craftworlds (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop
Inscrutable and deadly, the craftworld Eldar are the remnants of a once-great galactic empire who cross the stars on ships so vast they are able to house entire civilisations and the armies which defend them. When the craftworld Eldar go to war, lithe-limbed Aspect Warriors slay the foe with breathtaking speed and skill, while sleek-hulled […]
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Gardening Basics For Dummies, Mini Edition – Steven A. Frowine & National Gardening Association
Your green-thumb guide to planning, planting, and cultivating a garden With some basic knowledge, the right tools, and a little work, anyone can transform a boring old yard into a beautiful garden. This friendly guide tells you how. From improving your soil to selecting plants and caring for them, you get just the information you […]
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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier
From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, […]
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Codex: Craftworlds (eBook Edition) – Games Workshop
Inscrutable and deadly, the craftworld Eldar are the remnants of a once-great galactic empire who cross the stars on ships so vast they are able to house entire civilisations and the armies which defend them. When the craftworld Eldar go to war, lithe-limbed Aspect Warriors slay the foe with breathtaking speed and skill, while sleek-hulled […]
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This story originally appeared on Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Ever year around the end of February, after a long winter, Arctic ice reaches its maximum extent. This year that happened around Feb. 25, when it encompassed 14.54 million square kilometers of ice around the North Pole.
Sound like a lot? It’s not. Really, really not. This year’s maximum extent was the lowest on record.
Ice extent (area covered at least 15 percent by ice) for 2015 (solid blue line) compared with 2012 (dashed) and the average from 1981–2010 (black line). Diagram by the NSIDC
The plot above shows the situation. The solid line shows the average ice extent over the year (measured from 1981–2010) and the gray area represents a statistical measure of random fluctuations; anything inside the gray is more or less indistinguishable from the average (in other words, an excursion up or down inside the gray area could just be due to random chance).
The dashed line was the extent in 2012, when unusual conditions created the lowest minimum extent in recorded history. The solid blue line is 2015 so far. As you can see, it’s already reached maximum, and it’s well below average. It’s also outside the gray zone, meaning it’s statistically significant. It’s the earliest the peak has been reached as well. Both these facts point accusingly at global warming—more warmth, and shorter winters.
We have to be careful here, because individual records can be misleading. The trend is what’s important. However, the trend is very, very clear: Ice extent at the North Pole is decreasing rapidly over time. Note that this record low extent is about 1 percent lower than the previous record…which was last year.
Here’s a NASA video describing this year’s low maximum:
The implications of losing Arctic ice are profound. First, high latitudes are more affected by warming; the temperature trends in the extreme north are twice what they are at lower latitudes.
Melting ice does contribute to sea level rise, though not as much as melting glaciers on land. The bad news: Those glaciers are melting faster than ever. This has a second effect that may prove just as disastrous, too. All that fresh water dumped into the salty ocean changes the way the water circulates around the world. This circulation is one of the key ways warmth gets redistributed around the planet. Disrupting this cannot possibly be good news for us. You can read more about this at RealClimate, and climatologist Michael Mann discussed it in a recent interview.
At the other pole, Antarctic land ice is melting at a fantastic rate, and the slight increase in sea ice is not even coming close to making up for it. Deniers love to point at the sea ice, but that comes and goes every year and is roughly stable; the land ice is melting away at huge rates. Claiming global warming is wrong because Antarctic sea ice is increasing is like pointing toward a healing paper cut on your finger when your femoral artery has been punctured.
Arctic ice is like the fabled canary in a coal mine; it’s showing us very clearly what we’re in for. And what’s headed our way is a warmer planet, an even more disrupted climate, and a world of hurt if we do nothing about it.
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Climate change could make deadly diseases like rotavirus even worse. A doctor administers measles vaccinations to children displaced by flooding in northern India in 2008. Manish Swarup/AP Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has suggested that vaccines cause ”profound mental disorders.” Paul has also said he’s “not sure anybody exactly knows why” the climate changes. So the likely presidential contender would probably find this fact pretty confusing: According to leading scientists, vaccines are among the “most effective” weapons in our arsenal for combating the threats that global warming poses to human health. In its landmark report (PDF) last year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that global warming poses a range of health threats—especially in the developing world. Warmer temperatures and changes in rainfall will reduce crop production, leading to malnutrition. Foodborne and waterborne illnesses will become a bigger problem. And, some scientists argue, diseases like malaria will spread as the insects that carry them migrate to new areas. So how should humanity adapt to these dangers? The IPCC report lays out a slew of public health interventions, including widespread vaccination: The most effective measures to reduce vulnerability in the near term are programs that implement and improve basic public health measures such as provision of clean water and sanitation, secure essential health care including vaccination and child health services, increase capacity for disaster preparedness and response, and alleviate poverty. There are a number of reasons that vaccines will play an important role in our efforts to adapt to a warming world. The most obvious is their ability to protect vulnerable populations from diseases that will be made worse by climate change. A prime example is rotavirus, a vaccine-preventable disease that can cause severe diarrhea. It killed roughly 450,000 children in 2008—mostly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organization. “There is evidence that case rates of rotavirus are correlated with warming temperatures and high rainfall,” according to Erin Lipp, an environmental health professor at the University of Georgia and a contributor to the IPCC report. This is particularly true in developing countries with poor sanitation and drinking water sources, Lipp explained in an email. There are other, less direct, ways in which climate change can exacerbate a wide range of existing public health problems. Take measles, which is currently making a comeback in the United States—thanks in large part to the unscientific claims of the anti-vaccination movement. Measles killed nearly 150,000 people worldwide in 2013; it’s particularly common in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia that have extremely low vaccination rates—areas that will be hit especially hard by the impacts of climate change. Unlike with rotavirus, there’s no direct relationship between measles and global warming. But Kirk Smith—an environmental health expert at UC, Berkeley, and a lead author of the IPCC chapter on health impacts—points out that “a child weakened by measles is more likely to die from the malnutrition caused by climate change.” In other words, anything we can do to reduce the impact of existing health problems will be even more important in a warming world. And vaccinating children, he says, is one of the most cost-effective public health tools we have. Diseases like measles pose another threat, as well, says Alistair Woodward, who is also a lead author of the IPCC chapter. Woodward, an epidemiologist at the University of Auckland, points out that extreme climate events—crop failures in Africa, flooding in Bangladesh, and even storms like Hurricane Katrina—can displace large numbers of people. “In these circumstances, with crowding and poor living conditions, all the basic public health services are put under great strain,” said Woodward in an email. “The risks of infection go through the roof, for all communicable diseases…So ensuring that people are vaccinated is a logical thing to do as part of managing the risks of a rapidly changing climate.” Of course, making sure people are inoculated against deadly diseases isn’t easy. In the developing world, vaccination campaigns have to overcome transportation and security issues, as well as poor local health care systems. And these challenges, says Woodward, can dwarf the problems caused by the anti-vaxxer movement. Taken from: Vaccines Are One of Our Best Weapons Against Global Warming
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I recently wrote a piece about growing interest in California farmland by massive investment funds. But almonds and other tree nuts, the main focus of my article, aren’t the only commodities drawing interest from the smart-money crowd. From what I can tell, a successful California farmland investment require these two conditions: 1) a sought-after commodity, preferably one with a booming export market; and 2) access to water for irrigation—increasingly important as California’s drought lurches on.
Harvard University’s famed $36 billion endowment fund, the biggest of any US university, has found just such a sw in California’s coastal Paso Robles wine region, north of Los Angeles. Reuters reports that the Harvard fund “has spent more than $60 million to purchase about 10,000 acres in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties since 2012, making it one of the top 20 growers in Paso Robles.”
The move would seem to meet my two conditions swimmingly. US wine exports (90 percent of which originate in California), are booming, up 16.4 percent in 2013, the most recent year with numbers. And as with almonds, US wine exports to China have been surging for years, as this chart I assembled last year with colleagues Jaeah Lee and Alex Park shows. And wines from grapes grown in Paso Robles should have no trouble finding buyers—Wine Enthusiast deemed Paso Robles the 2013 “Wine Region of the Year,” and rival Wine Spectator has declared that it’s “emerging as most dynamic wine region in California.”
As for water, while making its land buys, Harvard’s investment company “acquired rights to drill 16 water wells of between 700 and 900 feet deep, two or three times deeper than the average residential well, according to county records,” Reuters reports. ‘Deeper wells will continue to give them access to water as shallower wells run dry.”
Obtaining those permits turned out to be a great move. Reuters reports that the fund acquired rights to drill seven of those wells on August 21, 2013, while “local lawmakers were trying to figure out how to deal with the worsening water shortage” in the region. Soon after the Harvard fund got its pumping permits, the county placed a “ban on new pumping from the hardest-hit part of the basin,” Reuters reports.
Reuters adds that “no environmental advocacy group has accused Brodiaea a Harvard-owned investment firm of trying to profit from the drought.”
In an item last year, the veteran analyst Michael Fritz of the Farmland Investor Center noted the timing of Harvard’s move:
Some market observers have wondered if Brodiaea was a well-timed water play in light of the region’s worsening groundwater shortage. Last August, the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors adopted an “urgency” ordinance that prohibits any new development or new irrigated crop production unless the water it uses is offset by an equal amount of conservation. Water levels in the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin have fallen sharply in recent years—two to six feet a year in some areas—causing wells to go dry and forcing many vineyards and rural residents to drill deeper wells, according to local accounts.
Fritz adds that a local investor involved with managing the Harvard wine project told him that “the timing of Brodiaea’s irrigated land purchases in San Luis Obispo County and the subsequent moratorium on new irrigation development was ‘pure coincidence.’”
California isn’t the only region upon which Harvard is placing farmland investment bets, Fritz reported. The fund also has such investments in New Zealand, Romania, Latvia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Panamá, Fritz notes.
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Harvard is Buying Up Vineyards in Drought-Ridden California Wine Country
By Sam Blisson 20 Jan 2015commentsShare
Remember the guys who poisoned the drinking water of 300,000 West Virginians last January? They’re back polluting again.
Freedom Industries, the company that leaked a toxic chemical into the Elk River, declared bankruptcy just days after the spill. But some of the villains behind that environmental disaster formed a new company called Lexycon, which has been cited for environmental violations by state regulators eight times since September, according to the Associated Press.
Last month, six former officials of Freedom Industries were indicted by a federal grand jury for what the prosecuting attorney called “flagrant disregard for the law,” which ultimately resulted in the “completely preventable” spill near Charleston, W.Va. Here’s the last paragraph of the post I wrote about those charges:
But unfortunately, Freedom Industries has risen from the dead in a new form. In May, this new company called Lexycon LLC was registered as a business with the same addresses, phone numbers, execs, and even mission statement as Freedom. Uh oh.
Little did I know that even as I wrote those words, Lexycon was already busy racking up infractions “for pouring chemicals without a permit, lacking proper ‘last-resort’ walls to contain spills, and hosting tanker-trailers full of unknown chemicals, among other infractions.”
Even crazier, government inspectors found the same nasty “coal-cleaning” chemical that Freedom spilled last year, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, even though Lexycon’s president had sworn to a federal judge that his company would not touch it. But the hammer has still yet to come down on these irresponsible handlers of super-dangerous substances. From the AP story:
So far, the strongest action the state has taken against Lexycon came in September, when regulators ordered the company to stop storing certain chemicals until it obtained a permit, which it eventually did.
For real, though, it’s time for the regulators to shut down this operation, which consistently fails to meet even the most basic requirements of the Clean Water Act, or even make a good-faith effort to comply. And let’s hope the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial is respected for former Freedom officials now associated with Lexycon, and they’re all locked up soon.
Source:
Company with chemical spill ties cited 8 times
, The Associated Press.
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A worker watches an almond harvesting machine dump nuts near the town of Kerman, California.
Photographer Matt Black remembers the moment in December 2013 when he realized the drought in California had begun. The brown-hills in the horizon stretched into a cloudless blue winter sky. It was quiet. Too quiet.
“It was just this, yawning kind of silence,” Black says. “And that’s when I started working. It was just clear that this was going to be really bad.”
More stories about the almond boom and what it means for California.
Invasion of the Hedge Fund Almonds
Charts: Almonds Suck as Much Water Annually as LA Uses in 3 Years
Photos: The Story Behind California’s Nut Boom
It Takes How Much Water to Grow an Almond?!
Lay Off the Almond Milk, You Ignorant Hipsters
Black has spent the better part of the last year documenting the drought. “For most of it I felt like I was coated in dust—in my eyes, my ears, my cameras—everywhere.” In the summer, the temperature rose well above 100 degrees. “One day I was taking pictures of abandoned fields near I-5. It was a 114 degrees and the dust was blowing and there was not a single bit of green in sight,” he says. “At that moment, it felt like the entire Valley was about to catch fire.”
His photos, which have appeared in The New Yorker, Time, and National Geographic, among other publications, offer a glimpse into the lives and livelihoods of the Central Valley. In black and white, Black, who was recently named Time‘s Instagram Photographer of the Year, aims to capture “the flatness, uniformity and to a certain extent monotony of this way of farming. He adds, “It’s not a land of quaint little farms and pastoral scenes. These are factories, and that’s why they are important—because they feed millions.”
But it is the people who reside in the communities hit hardest that Black hopes to highlight with his work—those who are forced to drink water from bottles, who cannot flush a toilet, or take a shower without the use of a bucket. “Yes, the drought is huge and catastrophic and all those things that everyone by this point is pretty much aware of,” he says. “But what people aren’t aware of is how that filters down to some of these towns. What photos are really best suited for is to try to put a face on the problem—to make it concrete and real.”
All photos by Matt Black.
Near the town of Ducor, California, a newly planted pistachio orchard.
A worker loads crates of almonds at a processing plant near Los Banos, California.
A worker sorts almonds at the processing plant near Los Banos.
A worker drives an almond-harvesting machine in an orchard near the town of Kerman, California.
A pistachio tree in a newly planted orchard near the town of Alpaugh, California.
A worker checks pistachio trees in a newly planted orchard near the town of Alpaugh, California.
Workers repair a well near Alpaugh, California.
Water pumped from wells fills a storage canal in a newly planted orchard near Alpaugh, California.
A home in the town of Alpaugh. Overpumping in nearby orchards has forced the closure of one of the town’s wells, and Alpaugh’s water supply now has high levels of arsenic contamination.
Jorge Cruz collects water from his kitchen sink at his home in Alpaugh.
Jorge Cruz stores drinking water at his home in Alpaugh.
An almond shaker knocks nuts from a tree in an orchard near Firebaugh, California.
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By Liz Coreon 10 Dec 2014commentsShare
You know how ocean temperatures have been on the rise lately? Well, it might mean a more comfortable day at the beach, but if you’re in the Pacific Northwest, I have some bad news for you: According to a new study, because of the temperature rise, we could see a huge release of deep-sea methane off the coast of Washington state.
One of the researchers compared the amount of methane currently being released to the amount of oil that gushed from the BP oil spill. “We calculate that methane equivalent in volume to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is released every year off the Washington coast,” said Evan Solomon, a coauthor of the study, which was published in Geophysical Research Letters. And if the water in the region warms by 2.4 degrees C by 2100, the size of that annual methane release could quadruple.
The deep ocean floor hides a massive amount of methane hydrates, which are complexes of methane trapped in buried ice. A brief reminder on methane: The greenhouse gas is 86 times more potent at trapping heat than CO2 over a 20-year timescale. Which means it’s a particularly bad thing when those hydrates melt and the methane is released into the atmosphere.
“Methane hydrates are a very large and fragile reservoir of carbon that can be released if temperatures change,” Solomon told ClimateWire. “I was skeptical at first, but when we looked at the amounts, it’s significant.”
The ocean off Washington’s upper continental slope has been warming, perhaps due to a current from a warming sea between Russia and Japan. Great neighbors you two are.
Though the researchers say they want more information to better understand the scope of the problem, I think we can all surmise that whatever’s going on with methane under the sea in the Pacific Northwest isn’t pretty, and it sure ain’t getting prettier. So, uh, how about them Seahawks?
Source:
Mysterious Seafloor Methane Begins to Melt Off Washington Coast
, ClimateWire via Scientific American.
Warming Ocean May Be Triggering Mega Methane Leaks Off Northwest Coast
, KUOW.
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A BP spill’s worth of methane is leaking from the ocean off of Washington every year
on the level
By Amelia Urryon 1 Dec 2014commentsShare
Here’s a fun fact about “sea-level rise”: The seas aren’t actually level to begin with. Because of predictable, long-term patterns in climate, global winds push more water into some oceans than others. This leaves the seven seas (not really a thing) divided into six “basins” (actually a thing). Water in these interconnected systems can slosh around to different areas while the overall volume stays the same — much like water in a bathtub.
Or so we thought!
Last month in the super-sexy-sounding journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists published research suggesting that changes to the Earth’s climate are driving changes in the way sea level rises in some of these ocean basins. Historically, the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere operate as a closed system, with an inverse relationship between the Indian and South Pacific basin and the South Atlantic basin: When one goes up, the other must come down. Using satellite measurements of sea level to track the flux in level, the researchers were surprised to find that, starting in the late ’90s, both basins began to rise in unison.
This is a map of the ocean basins — those big blue and purple blotches at the bottom of the map have been behaving strangely, thanks to climate change. Click to embiggen. Philip R. Thompson and Mark A. Merrifield
The total increase in this basin is about 2 millimeters a year — for you Americans, that adds up to a little more than an inch since 2000. It’s not weird that the oceans are rising, obviously, but it is strange to see such a distinct shift in the way they rise. The scientists trace this weirdness back to changes in the east-west wind patterns — changes for which they have several hypotheses, all of them linked to climate change.
Meanwhile, the other oceans seem to be behaving normally. Though let’s be clear: By “behaving normally,” we mean “rising in predictably terrifying ways as opposed to new weirdly terrifying ways.”
Source:
Science Graphic of the Week: Rising Sea Levels Show Strange Patterns
, Wired.
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