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Let Us Now Praise Baby Boomers. And Berate Them Too.

by LeiaBaltes Posted on November 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over at the Washington Post, it’s time for some intergenerational griping. Jim Tankersley kicks things off with a piece blaming boomers for our economic woes. Really? Here’s an economic history of the past 70 years: The US economy boomed for about three decades after the end of World War II, but ever since the mid-70s productivity growth has slowed down. That’s pretty much it. It’s not the fault of any particular generation. (Also: Tankersley should replace about half of his references to “boomers” with “Republicans.” This would improve the accuracy of his piece considerably.)

Heather Havrilesky picks up the ball by blaming boomers for forcing our nostalgia on all the rest of you. Sure. I guess. I’m not quite sure how this makes boomers different from any other generation, but whatevs.

Finally, Sally Abrahms gamely tries to fight back, arguing that boomers aren’t really all that rich, or healthy, or selfish, or technophobic, or sterile.

(Technophobic? Where does that come from? We’re the generation of the IBM PC, the Apple II, the internet, and the Palm Pilot.1 Please.)

I guess this is all good fun, but you know what? Every generation has its highs and lows. The generation that freed the slaves also brought us Jim Crow. The generation that brought us the gilded age also invented the telephone. The generation that invented relativity and quantum mechanics brought us World War I.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the highs and lows of the baby boomers. Then I’ll apologize:

President Bill Clinton. President George W. Bush. Plus a half claim to president Barack Obama.
Endless ads for pharmaceuticals on TV. The Sopranos.
Gay rights. Angry white men.
Star Wars. Star Wars prequels.
The rise of evangelical Christians. The rise of atheism.
Protesting the Vietnam War. Starting the Iraq War.
Sex. Drugs. Rock and roll.
John McEnroe. Dorothy Hamill.
Windows. The Macintosh.
Rolling Stones. Abba.
Feminist movement. Men’s rights movement.
Collapse of labor unions. Obamacare (half credit).
Doting on our kids. Complaining about coddled kids these days.
Giving a shit. Selling out.

Seems like a draw. Just like with every other generation. That goes for all you Greatest Generation folks too, who won World War II and then elected Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. We all have some stuff to answer for. So on behalf of boomers everywhere, I apologize for disco. Are you happy now?

1I was in a Microsoft store recently, and as long as I was there I asked about a problem I’d been having. The guy who helped me seemed knowledgeable enough, but was unable to diagnose my problem and rather blithely suggested I just blow everything away and reinstall Windows. I wasn’t too excited about this, and he gave me a look as if I were some pathetic oldster who just didn’t understand how easy it was. I felt like telling him that I bought my first Windows upgrade before he was born. (Windows 3.1. TrueType fonts!) Like military force, reinstalling Windows is a last resort, not a first option.

A day later I fixed the problem myself by deleting a directory and letting OneDrive start its initial sync from scratch.

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Let Us Now Praise Baby Boomers. And Berate Them Too.

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Congratulations on a Great Century, Gravity

by Dell5263rfxvkgv Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Science News has a big package in the current issue about Gravity’s Century. I’d just like to add a personal note of congratulations to this. I think gravity has had a great century. It has kept me from floating into space for 57 years. It’s kept our atmosphere intact so we can all breathe. It’s remained weak enough that Earth hasn’t spiraled into the sun. It’s helped produce thousands of adorable kitten videos. And black holes! Those are just awesome.

All in all, terrific job, gravity. You deserve all the kudos you’re getting. What’s more, I hope this makes up for our inexcusable neglect of your first big century in 1787. We’re really sorry about that. You deserved better. I guess we were busy with the whole Constitution thing and it slipped our minds. It won’t happen again, I promise.

On the constructive criticism side, though, what’s with all the fancy math? It makes you seem a little elitist. A little KISS could go a long way. Just a thought.

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Congratulations on a Great Century, Gravity

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Here’s What You Need to Know About President Obama’s Decision to Reject the Keystone XL Pipeline

by Myrna Posted on November 6, 2015

Watch Climate Desk’s explainer video. In the year’s biggest victory for environmentalists, President Barack Obama announced Friday that he will reject an application from Canadian company TransCanada to construct the Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline, which would allow crude oil from Canada’s oil sands to reach ports and refineries in the US, has been a major controversy for Obama ever since he took office. The White House spent years deliberating on the issue. During that time, environmental groups accused Obama of not backing up his rhetoric on climate change with real action, and Republicans in Congress accused him of blocking a job-creating infrastructure project. In his announcement today, the president said the State Department’s analysis had shown the pipeline would not significantly benefit the US economy. “The State Department has decided that the Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the national interests of the United States. I agree with that decision,” Obama said. The timing of the announcement is significant, as it comes just weeks before the beginning of major international climate negotiations in Paris. Obama’s decision will “reverberate” with other countries and sends a strong message that the United States is serious about taking action to stop climate change, said Jennifer Morgan, director of the global climate program at the World Resources Institute. Obama said that pipeline had been given an “overinflated role in the political discourse” by both its supporters and detractors. Still, he framed his decision as a key element of his climate legacy. “America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change,” he said. “Today we continue to lead by example.” Watch the full speech below: Master image: The White House/Facebook Read original article:  Here’s What You Need to Know About President Obama’s Decision to Reject the Keystone XL Pipeline ; ; ;

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Here’s What You Need to Know About President Obama’s Decision to Reject the Keystone XL Pipeline

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The Great Mystery of Commute Time and Income Mobility

by SantoColeman Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s something I ran across accidentally today. In a working paper released a few months ago, Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren try to estimate the effect on low-income children of moving to better neighborhoods. In particular, which traits correspond to higher incomes 20 years later?

All the usual suspects have high correlations: segregation, social capital, crime, income inequality, population density, etc. But the very highest correlation—by quite a bit—is for commuting time. Moving to a neighborhood where most people commute less than 15 minutes has a big impact:

Twenty years of exposure to a commuting zone with a 1 standard deviation higher fraction of people with commute times less than 15 minutes increases a child’s income by 7%….These correlations with commute times are unlikely the direct effect of being closer to jobs….It is likely some characteristic of places correlated with commute times that drives the underlying pattern.

In other words, this doesn’t mean that if mom or dad gets a job closer to home, junior will enjoy a higher income when he grows up. It means that if the family moves to a neighborhood that’s close to where its residents work, junior’s income will benefit.

This seems a little unlikely, though it’s not impossible to imagine that neighborhoods where parents are home more of the time have a beneficial effect on kids. Still, the authors are most likely right: commute time is probably standing in for something else. Perhaps neighborhoods that are close to lots of jobs have certain characteristics that are good for kids, and short commutes are just an accidental bonus.

Either way, this sure seems interesting enough to follow up on. Is it really commute time that matters? If not, what is it a proxy for?

NOTE: The chart shows the effect on boys whose parents have incomes in the bottom quarter. The effect is pretty much the same for girls.

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The Great Mystery of Commute Time and Income Mobility

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This Film Could Change How the Right Wing Feels About Guns

by AugustaHerndon Posted on October 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Evangelical Pastor Rob Schenck was a radical anti-abortion activist who hadn’t put too much thought into gun rights. But rattled by a mass shooting at Washington’s Navy Yard, something inside him shifted; he soon began to question gun culture from a moral standpoint and later preached about the human cost of gun violence instead.

His pivot drew the attention of filmmaker Abigail Disney, grandniece of legendary entertainment mogul Walt Disney. In her gripping directorial debut, The Armor of Light, Disney follows Schenck’s self-exploration into the muddied world of gun control in America. Disney accompanies Schenck to shooting ranges, a National Rifle Association convention, and even a memorable meeting with Lucia McBath, whose son Jordan Davis was shot and killed at a Florida gas station. Along the way, she finds herself wading with Schenck into a moral conflict at the heart of the debate: whether it’s possible to be both anti-abortion and pro-gun.

Mother Jones spoke with Disney about her family’s relationship with the NRA, her friendship with Schenck, and how the documentary shaped her own views on the polarizing gun debate.

Mother Jones: At the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival this summer, you mentioned you had a completely different documentary in mind. What was that original idea, and how did it shift to the documentary you eventually made?

Abigail Disney: It was that conservatives and conservative values aren’t really reflected in the radical values of the NRA. And the other idea was that the NRA is not what you think it is: It’s an evolving, ever-changing organization, and it has not always been this radical, right-wing arm of the Republican Party, and that the history of the NRA is in fact really interesting.

All of that really fell away because there’s a real difference between a documentary that was all about facts and history and information. People just don’t get as engaged in that kind of documentary—they don’t fall in love, they don’t cry, they don’t forget who they are, they don’t ride with you. As we realized we had richer, vérité kind of people, what we wanted to do is focus in on the vérité story.

MJ: That original idea delved more into your own family background. Can you tell me a bit about that?

AD: That’s right. I almost forgot about that. When I sat there in 1971 and watched my grandfather open Walt Disney World, I was a little 11-year-old girl who worshiped the ground he walked on. You probably couldn’t have found much daylight between the NRA and the Disney company. They probably would’ve had had identical demographics for the people who really loved those companies. Then in 2008, in Florida, you have them up against each other in a court, because one of the Disney employees has decided to, because he’s an NRA member, challenge Disney’s no-gun policy for employees. How does it happen in not very long, 38 years, that you go from two companies with almost identical constituencies to fighting each other in a court of law about a fundamental issue?

Abigail Disney John L.

MJ: What drew you then to Rob Schenck’s story in particular?

AD: While we were looking at how we were going to talk about Florida, that’s how we met Lucy McBath. We met Rob, and he was such an interesting story. His whole life was interesting. He ended up being such an eloquent man and a deeply thoughtful and sweet person, which was not what I expected when I first met him. That upended the whole project.

MJ: Why choose this evangelical pastor as the subject through which you’re examining the national gun control debate?

AD: There are very few people who have committed more to the pro-life discourse than Rob has. He’s spent time in jail. He has really lived it. He has committed everything he’s had to it. If in fact he believes that every human life was sacred, I knew that if he had his conscious awakened, I knew he wouldn’t be able to close his eyes to it.

MJ: Was he receptive to you focusing on his internal debate?

AD: Oh my God, yeah. It’s a tough subject for him to talk about. It was almost all risk and not a lot of reward. But he recognized that right out of the gate, because he knows how high feelings run on this issue. He saw the writing on the wall. Yeah, of course, he was reluctant. We met over dinner in Union Station in Washington. We had a three-hour conversation that first time. And he said, “Thanks a lot. Now I have to go home and think about this. I’m going to go pray on this and we’ll get in touch.” Laughs. I checked with him every Monday for five weeks, and every week he would say, “I’m still praying.” By the end of the five weeks, I was pretty sure he was going to say no to being in the documentary. So I was pretty shocked when he said, “There’s a deep moral failing in the center of my community, and I can’t pretend I don’t see it anymore. So with or without you I have to go forward.”

MJ: How did you get him to agree to let you act as a fly on the wall as he went through this self-exploration?

AD: I keep wondering if everybody on the political left had someone who they were separated at birth from. Wouldn’t that be interesting if that were true? Once we got to know each other, we had such similar impulses. We saw in a similar way, and we developed a strong friendship. We would talk on the phone for hours, philosophically and theologically, about all of these issues. Around the edges of the film, this lovely friendship started to form. And that’s why he was willing to trust me. He signed a release right away, and I said to him, “I think you’re signing this because you’re afraid you’ll chicken out.” And he said yes. Laughs. He could’ve stopped cooperating, but he trusted me. I feel so grateful for that.

MJ: You mentioned that you and Rob disagreed on a few things. Did that disagreement factor into the documentary at all?

AD: It didn’t, but it impacted the world around the edges of the documentary, and it continues to affect us. Now that we have a friendship, we can engage in those issues. It’s not like dropping an atomic bomb in the middle of everything because we’ll stay friends no matter how we disagree. We do tease each about the things we disagree about. I don’t judge him, and he doesn’t judge me. It’s powerfully important for me as a pro-choice person and person who supports Planned Parenthood to have Rob accept me as not a baby-killing horrible person. That’s actually a massive step away from his original position, and he’s taking a lot of heat in his world just for being my friend, just for hanging around with me.

MJ: One of the most poignant moments in the documentary was the one when Lucy McBath meets Rob at his place. How did that moment come together?

AD: I get very close to people when I’m shooting them. We would go and shoot a scene with Lucy, and I would spend the whole time telling her about Rob. Then I would go shoot a scene with Rob and tell him all about Lucy. Eventually they wanted to know each other. These are two people who would never have overlapped in any other way or context. We brought to the garden at Rob’s office and just sat and watched what unfolded. I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected.

MJ: What is Rob Schenck up to now? How has his life changed since the documentary’s release?

AD: He’s definitely lost funders to his not-for-profit. He’s lost friendships. He’s a really relational person, so that’s really hard on him. He takes that personally. He’s been surprised by the amount of support we’ve gotten. I’ll tell you: I’ve taken heat from lefties. It’s like, “How dare you let these people speak for themselves? How dare you not make fun of them? You let Rob off too easily for his abortion work. You don’t show us the whole depth of what a horrible person he is. Why are you letting him off so easy?” I’ve taken it from feminist friends, and I’ve taken it from lefty friends too. But that reassures me. If the right is attacking us and the left is attacking us, that’s exactly where we want to be.

MJ: Do you and Rob still differ in the way you approach gun control issues?

AD: He would talk about it as an Evangelical. I could develop every argument that I had for gun control, but I could never have done what Rob did, which was to say: In respecting the Second Amendment, you have to be very careful not to violate the Second Commandment. Only an evangelical could’ve arrived at that. When you say the Second Commandment, you will not take any image before me, which means you can’t worship the image or the crucifix itself. You have to worship God. When you worship an idol, you’re substituting a thing for the ultimate. So therefore, in worshipping the Second Amendment and taking your orders from the Constitution over and above your orders from the Bible, are you in fact violating the Second Commandment? Evangelical ears perk up when you suggest the Second Commandment is being violated. That gets their attention. I never would’ve known that nuisance about these people, so Rob’s able to get under their skin in a way that I never could have.

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This Film Could Change How the Right Wing Feels About Guns

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A Few Unanswered Questions From Last Night’s Debate

by JinaByles825 Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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After reviewing the transcript of last night’s debate I realized I had a few leftover questions. Nothing hard. Just some simple, easy-peasy stuff:

Carly Fiorina: You say you want to reduce the tax code to three pages using normal 11-point type. I’m tired of paying our CPA every year to prepare our tax returns, so this sounds terrific. It also sounds short enough that you can produce draft legislation for us pretty quickly. How hard can three pages be? When do we get to see it?

Mike Huckabee: You say we can save Medicare by focusing on cures for four big diseases that apparently we’ve been ignoring: cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease. Since I happen to have bone cancer, this sounds like a great idea to me. In fact, I’d be OK with pauperizing the whole country in order to speed up cures for multiple myeloma. So what’s the plan? I checked out your website, but the only mention of cancer I could find was a blog post comparing Iran to cancer. This makes me concerned about how serious you are. Do you have some ideas about research priorities? How much money will you spend on this? Inquiring minds want to know.

Donald Trump: Some of your luxury resorts have policies that ban guests from carrying guns. You said you’d change this, and since you’re the boss I assume you can do it with the stroke of a pen. When are you going to do this?

Marco Rubio: You might have been confused about John Harwood’s tax question last night. I think he agrees that your tax plan is generous to the very poor. But now that we have that straight, why does your plan increase middle-class income by only 15 percent compared to 28 percent for the top earners? As he said, that really does seem kind of backward for a guy who’s so dedicated to average workers like your parents.

Ben Carson: Last night you said that our economy is doing poorly because it’s “tethered down right now with so many regulations.” But then you failed to make the obvious blimp joke. What’s up with that?

Ted Cruz: Carl Quintanilla rudely refused to let you talk about the debt ceiling even though that was what he asked you about. But it sure seemed like you had something you wanted to get off your chest about that. So: what do you think about the debt ceiling? And one other thing: are you serious about returning to the gold standard? Really?

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A Few Unanswered Questions From Last Night’s Debate

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Let Us Now Shed a Tear For Marco Rubio’s Brutal Treatment at the Hands of the Republican Establishment

by Lawrenc8856 Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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I got a fundraising email from Marco Rubio this morning:

Last night, in the latest Republican presidential debate, one of the moderators actually asked me if I should “slow down.” That’s exactly what the establishment has been telling me for years. That I should “wait my turn.”

….P.S. I couldn’t believe it when one of the moderators misled about my tax plan — despite having to correct a story earlier this month where he made the exact same claim!

Poor Marco. Speaker of the Florida House at age 35. US Senator at age 39. Lionized presidential candidate at age 44. He’s really had a rough time with the GOP establishment.

Oh, and John Harwood was precisely correct in his debate question about Rubio’s tax plan. He didn’t mislead anyone. It’s true that a couple of weeks ago Harwood corrected a tweet about Rubio’s tax plan, but he didn’t repeat that mistake last night. His characterization of the Tax Foundation’s analysis of Rubio’s plan was 100 percent accurate. It’s Rubio who seemed either confused or deliberately deceptive about the whole thing.

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Let Us Now Shed a Tear For Marco Rubio’s Brutal Treatment at the Hands of the Republican Establishment

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Kansas Is Still the Land of Make Believe

by AidaClunie Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kansas governor Sam Brownback has been leading an epic battle to turn his state into a supply-side nirvana. So how’s it going? A new poll—possibly the greatest poll in American history—suggests that Kansans are a wee bit confused:

When it comes to Brownback’s tax policy, which has featured heavy cuts in income taxes and taxes on businesses, three-fifths (61 percent) of respondents felt the policy had been “a failure” or “a tremendous failure” in terms of economic growth. About one-third of respondents said it was “neither a success nor failure” and 7 percent said they felt it was at least “a success.” Only 0.2 percent agreed it was “a tremendous success.”

But at the same time, 61 percent of respondents favor “somewhat lower” or “much lower” taxes and spending in Kansas. And yet…about 63 percent of respondents felt taxes on top income earners should be increased while 6 percent felt they should be decreased.

What does this mean? That tax cuts have been a failure, but maybe they’ll work if we just cut them more? That tax cuts have been a failure, but Kansans just want low taxes anyway? That Kansans don’t really care if their economy is any good?

I do not know.

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Kansas Is Still the Land of Make Believe

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This Could Be the Worst Climate Crisis in the World Right Now

by RockyHTUNv Posted on October 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday afternoon, Indonesian President Joko Widodo cut short a visit to the United States and headed home to oversee efforts to extinguish a rash of epic wildfires that have engulfed his country.

Joko was in Washington, DC, for a photo op with President Barack Obama, to talk about climate change, and to promote Indonesia as a choice venue for foreign investors. His trip was also supposed to include a stopover in San Francisco for meetings with tech industry executives. But Joko’s decision to return to Indonesia early underscores the challenges his country faces in stopping the worst deforestation on Earth—deforestation that is playing a critical role in global climate change.

There’s more to global warming than pollution from cars and power plants. In the United States, coal-fired power plants are the No. 1 source of carbon dioxide emissions, followed by tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. That’s why the Obama administration has focused its climate policies on those sources; Obama’s signature plan aims to reduce power-sector emissions by one-third by 2030. Those policies get some natural help from the ecosystem, as trees and soil soak up carbon out of the atmosphere. In the United States, thanks to forest conservation and climate-friendly farming practices, land use (a term climate wonks use to describe emissions that come from the land rather than from man-made infrastructure and vehicles) actually offsets about 13 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from the rest of the economy.

But on a global scale, land use is a source of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than a sink. The biggest culprit is deforestation: Living trees store carbon; dead trees release it back into the atmosphere as they decompose. Emissions from crop soil, fertilizer, and livestock also play a major role. Overall, land use accounts for about one-quarter of the world’s total greenhouse gas footprint.

In Indonesia, the situation is even more dire. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), land use represents 61 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. That means deforestation causes far more climate pollution than all of the country’s cars and power plants combined.

In fact, Indonesia has the world’s highest rate of deforestation, even higher than Brazil, which contains most of the Amazon rainforest. From 2000 to 2012, according to research published in Nature, Indonesia lost more than 23,000 square miles of forest to logging, agriculture, and other uses. That’s roughly the size of West Virginia. In 2010, the government attempted to put the brakes on deforestation by exchanging a two-year moratorium on new logging permits for $1 billion in aid from Norway and the United States. But according to Susan Minnemeyer, a forest analyst at the WRI, that policy appears to have had the “perverse impact of accelerating deforestation, because those with permits felt that they had to take action quickly or they would no longer be able to.”

This all adds up to global-scale pollution: Indonesia is the world’s fifth-ranking greenhouse gas emitter, coming in just behind Russia and India. In other words, we can’t stop climate change without saving Indonesia’s rainforests.

Indonesia is in the middle of a public health crisis from forest fire haze. The problem isn’t just deforestation, but how that deforestation is happening. In Indonesia, forests are often cleared out with fire. This can be done legally with a permit, but it’s often carried out illegally as well. This year, forest fires are also being fueled by El Niño-related weather patterns. The combination of El Niño and intentional deforestation has proven incredibly dangerous: The country has experienced nearly 100,000 fires so far this year, the worst since the last major El Niño in 1997. Fire activity typically ramps up in September and October, the end of the dry season, and over the last couple of weeks the conflagrations have grown to crisis proportions—hence Joko’s hasty return. The fires are so big they can be seen from space.

The greenhouse impact from those fires is staggering: On several days over the last month, emissions from Indonesian forest fires have exceeded all emissions from the US economy:

World Resources Institute

To make matters worse, more than half of those fires occur on land made of peat, the thick, soil-like material made from decomposed plant matter. Peat is packed with carbon, and fires that occur on peatland can have a global warming impact 200 times greater than fires on normal soil, according to the WRI. Last week, Joko said the government would stop issuing new permits for commercial development on peatland, but that won’t stop the fires that are already burning.

Climate pollution is just part of the problem. Firefighting costs are pushing $50 million per week. The impact of this fire season on Indonesia’s economy could reach $14 billion. And the thick blanket of haze that is stretching from the country across Southeast Asia has caused at least 10 deaths from haze-related illness and 500,000 cases of acute respiratory illness.

Your snacks and makeup are part of the problem. Of course, Indonesians aren’t just chopping and burning down trees for fun. Besides logging, one of the main uses for cleared land is to plant African oil palm, the fruits of which are used to produce palm oil. Palm oil is the world’s most popular form of vegetable oil, and half of it comes from Indonesia. It’s also found in about half the processed food you encounter in a grocery store (as well as many cosmetics).

Palm oil has some advantages over other oils: It’s cheap to produce and doesn’t contain trans fats, and the trees yield far more oil in the same land area—using fewer chemical fertilizers—than soybeans or sunflowers. According to the World Bank, the increase in global demand for cooking oil by 2020 could be met with palm oil using one-seventh the land area that would be required to fill that demand using soybeans. For that reason, it could actually have many environmental advantages over other types of oil.

Unfortunately, much palm oil production now happens in highly vulnerable ecosystems, often in the former habitats of endangered animals such as tigers and orangutans. Pressure is growing on Indonesia’s palm oil producers to stop deforestation and stay out of sensitive areas. A handful of major US food processors, including Nestlé and PepsiCo, have adopted commitments to rid their supply chains of palm oil linked to deforestation, according to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. But that report also that found many fast-food chains are lagging behind. Last year, an Indonesian court ordered the first-ever major fine—$30 million—for a palm oil company found to have cleared forest in protected orangutan habitat.

Indonesia’s climate test. For the international climate negotiations coming up soon in Paris, Indonesia has pledged to increase its emissions over the next 25 years by 29 percent less than it would have under a “business as usual” scenario. That won’t be possible without curbing forest fires and deforestation. So for Indonesia, getting a grip on palm oil producers will be even more important than going after power plants, as Obama is doing. Joko has been moving in the right direction, Minnemeyer said, but it’s unclear how his promises will hold up.

“Across the board, there has been very weak enforcement of Indonesia’s environmental laws,” she said. If they’re going to meet their climate target, “the fires are going to be a key part.”

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This Could Be the Worst Climate Crisis in the World Right Now

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Check out some of the prettiest (and most depressing) climate change data out there

by RoccoRaine9478 Posted on October 24, 2015

7 ways of looking at a climate

Check out some of the prettiest (and most depressing) climate change data out there

By on 24 Oct 2015commentsShare

Given ever-worsening hurricane news, the hottest September on record, and GOP obstructionism, it can be hard to get a handle on what’s even going on with our climate. There’s a lot of data out there — sometimes it can seem like too much — and a lot of it is unreliable. Climate data visualizations can help you sort through the noise to get at the signal.

Over at Climate Home, Megan Darby has compiled a veritable cornucopia of climate change data tools. It’s a stellar list, and if you’re looking for a deep data dive, you’d do well to check it out. But here at Grist we love data, too, and so we decided to put together our own compilation for your visualizing pleasure.

Without further ado, here are seven tools to help you hold a climate conversation without having to lean on the weather. (Unless, of course, you’re talking about NOAA’s Climate and Weather Toolkit, in which case you’ll really be talking about the weather.)

The 30,000-Foot View: Global Top 10 Greenhouse Gas Emitters (World Resources Institute)

The World Resources Institute’s CAIT project is the classic starting spot for historical emissions data. One tool we’re particularly fond of is the global emissions profiler embedded above. It’s particularly useful if you’re trying to get a sense of scale. How much is a hundred million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, anyway? Scroll around the wheel — it’s about the same size as the entire Chilean economy. CAIT also hosts a domestic state-by-state comparison tool.

The Bare Bones: The Keeling Curve (Scripps Institution of Oceanography)

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

In the world of climate data, there are technocrats and there are Luddites. The classic Keeling Curve is of the latter variety. It’s nothing fancy, but it gets to the root of the climate dilemma. The Mauna Loa Observatory started collecting atmospheric CO2 data in 1958, and the numbers have been climbing ever since. Wondering about that 350 ppm number people are always tossing around? We’re well past it.

The Metavisual: A World of Change (Google)

This is what we talk about when we talk about climate change. Google’s A World of Change tool allows people to get a handle on global search trends for environmental information. In addition to being rather pretty, the tool offers several crucial insights into the way different countries approach the idea of global warming. “We wanted to show how this big issue looks when viewed through the lens of Google search data,” Simon Rogers, data editor of Google News Lab told the Washington Post. “Google data is so big — there are over 3 billion searches a day — that our challenge was how to make those huge numbers meaningful.” You can decide whether or not they succeeded.

The Wonk’s Paradise: Energy Policy Simulator (Energy Innovation)

Energy Innovation

Climate Home also flagged this bad boy. Fresh off the press (the tool launched earlier this week), Energy Innovation’s Energy Policy Simulator lets you design your own U.S. energy policy suite and come to grips with the resulting emissions projections. What’s truly astounding about the simulator is the staggering degree of detail. “The desktop version allows even more policy options,” wrote POLITICO’s Eric Wolff in Morning Energy. “Considering that the web tool allows users to devote research money to reducing livestock flatulence, ME’s mind boggles at what would be more detailed.”

The Tree Hugger’s Terror: GFW Interactive Map (Global Forest Watch)

Global Forest Watch

Worried about deforestation? About land and resource rights? Carbon stocks and biodiversity? Global Forest Watch has got you covered. Earlier last month, the NGO reported that the Google-hosted tool helped pinpoint new hotspots of tree-cover loss. They’re constantly updating the data, so keep checking back for all your arboreal needs.

The Pretty One: Global Land Temperatures (Halftone)

Halftone

Halftone’s land temperature visualizer might not be the most practical tool in the world, but it’s divinely gorgeous. Visit the online version for all the beautiful, time-dependent, temperature-indicating Voronoi tessellations you could ever want.

The Doozy: Weather and Climate Toolkit (NOAA)

NOAA

And then there’s the tool for the hotshots. The big guns. Want the real deal? Access to more or less every climatic and meteorological variable under the sun? Then you want the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate and Weather Toolkit. Warning: It’s not for beginners. But you’re no beginner, are you? Check out this video introduction to the software.

That’s all for now, team. Let us know what we missed.

Source:

7 climate change data tools and what they tell you

, Climate Home.

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Check out some of the prettiest (and most depressing) climate change data out there

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