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Here are the worst places to live in the U.S., and climate change isn’t helping

by MervinValenti Posted on November 6, 2014

House Warming

Here are the worst places to live in the U.S., and climate change isn’t helping

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6 Nov 2014 6:07 PM

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From wildfires and drought in the Southwest to hurricanes and floods on the Eastern seaboard, sometimes it seems like there’s nowhere left to hide from climate change. Well, we can’t (read: don’t want to) tell you where you should go, but at least now we can name the 50 places to live in the U.S. where you are MOST at risk for natural disaster — including the sorts of disasters climate change is expected to throw at us in the coming years.

The Weather Channel, despite some unfortunate early ties to the climate-denying grandpa you never had, can do some pretty impressive stuff from time to time. For example, sifting though 18 years worth of data from every county or parish in the U.S. — all 3,111 of them — taking into account everything from flood and fire risk, to how much it costs to heat or cool a home, to how many weather-related property damages and deaths occur on average. And while none of this could have made for cheering subject matter, 50 places definitely came out on top of this Olympic podium of suck. Let’s take a fly-by tour of a few of them:

Orleans Parish, La.

Saving the worst for first, Orleans Parish, La., tops this terrible list of places, with a whopping $21.6 billion in damage, most of that supplied by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Even more significant are the hundreds of people (around 215) who died in their homes in New Orleans during the storm — a tragic combination of natural fury and poor disaster preparedness.

Before we move on, it’s worth mentioning that five of the counties on this list are in Louisiana, and a full eight are in Mississippi. We won’t go through all of those, because they are bummers of a similar sort, But know that when it comes to flood damage and struggling infrastructure, the low-lying lands of the lower 48 have the stage set for disaster

Ocean County, N.J.

Bossi

When Superstorm Sandy made landfall in Ocean County, in 2012, it brought desolation down on the Jersey Shore to the tune of $10 billion, and earned the area sixth place in this terrible race. While plenty of towns on the East Coast had it just as bad, including Monmouth County just to the north, Ocean County faces a second set of risks as well — these ones from land. Just inland from the hurricane-wrecked shore are the Pine Barrens, a bizarrely pristine forest with a moderate risk of wildfire. Between all that water and fire, you might want to just keep taking that turnpike outta Dodge.

Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area, Alaska

Wikimedia Commons

Coming in at No. 13 on the list of worst places to be, this large swath of Alaska is the most sparsely populated county in America, with about 6,000 people spread across an area the size of Germany. And no wonder so few people want to live there — 99.8 percent of the days in Yukon-Koyukuk are “heating degree days” with average temperatures below 65 degrees F. Couple the cost of keeping warm with risk of wildfires in the summers AND plenty of miscellaneous weather-related damage, and you get one hell of an inhospitable landscape.

Bright side, bright side … uh, if the polar vortex keeps wobbling around, maybe the Yukon-Koyukukans will catch a bit of a break this winter.

Marin County, Calif.

John Kim

Marin County is one of the wealthiest places in the U.S. — with the fifth highest income-per-capita in 2009 — but it is also, trust us, one of the WORST places you could possibly live (the 17th worst place, to be specific). Not only will your view of the Bay be marred by a sprawling multimillion-dollar mansion, but you will also be living on a spiderweb of several major faults that pass under this region. Massive earthquakes in 1989 and 1906 caused billions of dollars of damage and cost hundreds of Marin residents’ lives, and they could do so again.

What’s more: All that ocean-front property and flood-prone picturesque valleys leave Marin vulnerable to all kinds of water risks, especially during rain-heavy winter storms.

Oh, yeah, and though wildfires haven’t plagued the county too badly in the past, the historic ongoing drought in California will almost certainly make this whole region a little hotter-under-the-collar.

Washoe County, Nev.

Jay

There are lots of reasons not to live in Reno, but here’s another: Despite being smack-dab in the middle of a desert state, Washoe County is so chock-full of lakes and snow-fed rivers that it is expected to experience a disastrous flood every 50 years, a fact which earns it spot 22 out of 50 on this list. The last flood in 1997 inundated countless homes as well as the airport, and cost the district $500 million. If that was a 50-year flood, that means you still have 30 years and change to pick up roots and move somewhere a little less extreme. Then again, why wait — any place whose official motto is “The Biggest Little City In The World” doesn’t need climate change’s help to make it suck more.

—-

For the rest of the list, you’ll have to turn to the professionals. Let’s just hope when it comes to the terrible futures in store for the stars-and-stripes, these weather forecasters are as famously wrong as ever.

Source:
Worst Places to Own a Home

, Weather Channel.

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Here are the worst places to live in the U.S., and climate change isn’t helping

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California’s Insane Nut Boom, In 3 Simple Charts

by HungNewbigin Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

California has entered the age of King Nut: The state produces more than 80 percent of the world’s almonds, and roughly 30 and 40 percent of the world’s pistachios and walnuts, respectively. Most of the production takes place in the Central Valley, a swath of farmland in California’s midsection.

A single almond requires a gallon of water to grow—bad news in the midst of California’s worst drought in half a millennium. But with ever-rising demand in a nut-crazed world, farmers continue to expand orchards, pumping water out of the ground to make up for the dried-up surface water. These charts tell the story:

By Lei Wang and Julia Lurie

As my colleague Tom Philpott recently reported, Since 2011, central California has lost “more water than all 38 million Californians use for domestic and municipal supplies annually—over half of which is due to groundwater pumping in the Central Valley.”

Groundwater is the stuff of centuries: rain percolating for ages through pores of soil and rock, coming to rest in aquifers. In wet seasons, water generally begins its slow trickle-down journey to replenish the aquifers (the small upward spikes in the third chart above). But as Jay Famiglietti, the NASA water scientist who gathered the groundwater data, has stated, “The downs are way bigger than the ups, which means that groundwater levels are on a one-way journey to the very bottom of the Central Valley.”

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California’s Insane Nut Boom, In 3 Simple Charts

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These wearable air monitors fight pollution from the streets

by KristyEZTL Posted on October 31, 2014

These wearable air monitors fight pollution from the streets

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31 Oct 2014 5:21 PM

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Here’s a Kickstarter that got our attention this month: The AirBeam, a wearable air monitor designed by Brooklyn-based environmental justice nonprofit HabitatMaps. The device costs $200 to produce, fits in your palm (if you’re Sasquatch), and is designed to measure particulate pollution on city streets, as well as temperature and humidity. It’s also kinda adorable — which is good, considering that the group is counting on hundreds of people wearing them around NYC in the near future.

But don’t let those cute blue Mickey ears fool you — the AirBeam is a response to a very real problem: Air pollution costs the U.S. $78 billion a year, HabitatMaps claim on their Kickstarter page:

The negative impacts of air pollution rank it among the most serious and widespread human health hazards in the world. Breathing dirty air causes chronic illnesses such as asthma and bronchitis and contributes to terminal illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Unfortunately, despite the very real impacts air pollution has on our every day lives, it often goes unnoticed because it is largely invisible. In addition, because government-run air quality monitoring networks are sparse, publicly available air quality measurements don’t translate into an accurate assessment of personal exposure. The answer? Low-cost, portable air quality instruments.

Most official air monitoring occurs well above street level, where the air tends to be cleaner. The AirBeam monitors — once fully deployed by a team of citizen scientists — will measure pollution where it counts: where you actually breathe it. From GigaOm:

Michael Heimbinder, executive director at HabitatMaps, said that the nonprofit had developed the cheapest, portable air quality monitoring sensor it could in hopes of gathering data that it can then use to make policy arguments in the city. It’s also helpful for individuals who may want to change their own habits.

That is, if you know that levels of air pollution are pretty bad at a certain time and place on your commute, you might be able to tinker with your habits to limit your own exposure. But the real solutions will come from the sum total of all the data — cities will be able to identify hot spots for pollution, and then (er, hopefully) be better equipped to address them.

If you pledge $200, you’ll get an AirBeam of your own come launch — and a healthy dose of civic engagement to boot.

Source:
See how a Brooklyn nonprofit is using the internet of things for environmental justice

, GigaOm.

AirBeam: Share & Improve Your Air

, Kickstarter.

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Sorry, but your shrimp platter didn’t come from the Gulf

by WilmerBelanger Posted on October 30, 2014

shrimply appalling

Sorry, but your shrimp platter didn’t come from the Gulf

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30 Oct 2014 6:50 PM

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We already knew about the mangroves. We knew about the bycatch and habitat destruction. Heck, we knew about the whole SLAVERY thing, but that didn’t stop us from gobbling shrimp scampi like they’re going extinct. And, still, we hoped there might be a better way.

Now, clearly sensing we might need another deterrent to stop eating ALL THE SHRIMP all the time, the world sent us some new bad news about the tasty, tasty crustaceans: They’re probably not what you think they are.

In a report released Thursday, ocean-advocacy group Oceana conducted a survey of 111 restaurants and grocery stores across the U.S., and found that more than a third of the sampled shrimp were vaguely labeled, or else mislabeled entirely.

The confusion begins with the fact that there are 41 species of shrimp sold in the U.S., but any of them may just be labeled as “shrimp.” It deepens when it turns out that many of those labeled “Gulf” or “wild-caught” were really a species of farmed shrimp. It’s easy to prawn off these crustaceans as more valuable versions of themselves when more than 90 percent of the U.S. shrimp is imported, and only a small percent of that is ever inspected. Still, the depth and variety of deception is shrimply staggering. Consider this from the Guardian:

Unexpectedly, some of the shrimp that were identified in the survey were genetically unknown to science, and one sample taken from a bag of frozen seafood even turned out to be a banded coral shrimp — a species renowned on reefs and coveted as a ‘pet’ shrimp by aquarium enthusiasts, but certainly not as food. “It’s one of the things you look for on a reef,” Warner says. “How it ended up in a bag of salad-size shrimp, I have no idea.”

New York had one of the highest rates of shrimp-fraud, with 43 percent of samples misrepresented — but no one got off scot-free.

The only possible way to feel WORSE about eating shrimp is to go eat 101 of them at Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp promotion. That’s REALLY going to hurt.

Source:
A third of US shrimp is ‘misrepresented’

, Guardian.

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What Can the Developer of the Polio Vaccine Teach Us About Ebola?

by Sylvest1344 Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

This story was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

Had he lived, Dr. Jonas Salk would have turned 100 this week. Salk was a young man when in the spring of 1955 he announced his discovery of a vaccine that could prevent polio. He was hailed as a modern miracle worker. He went on to lead scientists from from around the world in studies of cancer, heredity, the brain, the immune system and AIDS at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

In this age of Ebola, it’s enlightening and inspiring to hear Salk talk about the lessons he learned in developing the polio vaccine, and how they might be applicable to the AIDS crisis, which was raging at the time of this interview with Bill Moyers recorded in 1990.

Salk died five years after this interview was broadcast. His memorial at the Salk Institute reads: “Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”

TRANSCRIPT

SALK: What we’re doing now is trying to think like nature, in the sense that we are aware that species that have gone before us have disappeared from the face of the Earth. We’d like to use our intelligence and our creative capacity to prolong our presence on the face of the Earth as long as possible. It requires, therefore, that we develop the kinds of tactics and strategies amongst ourselves so as to assure that this can occur, to assure that we will not destroy ourselves or the planet, to make it uninhabitable and to allow the fullness of the potential of the individual to be expressed, to flower. That is—

MOYERS: What is—

SALK: —awfully ideal. The question now is how can we translate this, how can we make this operative? If you want me to give you an example—

MOYERS: Yeah.

SALK: —of how people can solve problems for themselves? When the problem of polio confronted this nation, confronted the world, there was an organization that formed in this country called the March of Dimes. Volunteers. They were not government-directed or -led. They didn’t ask the government to do anything. They did it themselves. That’s just a small illustration of what has happened in the past and can happen again and is happening continuously now here and, I think, in other parts of the world.

MOYERS: I read the other day, coming out here, in fact, that by the year 2000, which is not very far from now, there will be some 20 million people in the world carrying the AIDS virus. Is that a comparable challenge to what you faced with polio 50 years ago?

SALK: Well, it’s an even more difficult challenge, but that’s what evokes a response on the part of those who want to solve the problem, who are addressing themselves to just that question and philosophically, in approaching it. The virus, if it prevails, then we will lose. But if we are able to reduce the damage caused by the virus and, at the same time, try to enhance the immune response to the virus and establish a more favorable balance between the two, then we will be doing in relation to that problem what we want to do in relation to the world and that is to reduce the negative and enhance the positive at one and the same time.

MOYERS: The good news would be that there is a vaccine that protects us and immunizes us, against the AIDS virus. Are we going to have that good news, do you think, in your time and mine?

SALK: My expectation is that we will solve the problem. It’s just a matter of time and just a matter of strategy. Now, why do I say that this is the case? It’s because I think solutions come through evolution. It comes through asking the right question, because the answer pre-exists. But it’s the question that we have to define and discover, to discover and to define.

MOYERS: You mean, when you asked the question about how to defeat polio, the answer was already there?

SALK: Mm-hmm, in a way. If you think of David and Michelangelo, it was in the stone, but it had to be unveiled and revealed. You don’t invent the answer. You reveal the answer.

MOYERS: From nature.

SALK: From nature.

MOYERS: From the life process.

SALK: Yes.

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What Can the Developer of the Polio Vaccine Teach Us About Ebola?

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GDP Increases At Not-Bad 3.5% Rate in Third Quarter

by MelanieXFI Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Today’s economic news is fairly good. GDP in the third quarter grew at a 3.5 percent annual rate, which means that the slowdown at the beginning of the year really does look like it was just a blip. Aside from that one quarter, economic growth has been pretty robust for over a year now.

At the same time, inflation continues to be very low, which you can take as either good news (if you’re an inflation hawk) or bad news (if you think the economy could use a couple of years of higher inflation).

We could still use some higher growth after five years of weakness, but at least we’re providing a bit of a counterbalance to Europe, which appears to be going off a cliff at the moment. Count your blessings.

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GDP Increases At Not-Bad 3.5% Rate in Third Quarter

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Here’s What Democrats and Republicans Are Afraid Of

by CarissaLindquis Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Wonkblog regales us this morning with the chart on the right, which summarizes a recent Chapman University survey about what we’re afraid of. Basically, it suggests that Democrats are more afraid of things than Republicans. This goes against the conventional wisdom a bit, and it especially goes against the conventional wisdom in the “strangers” category. Supposedly, liberals are more open to strangers and outsiders than conservatives, but this survey suggests the opposite.

So that’s interesting. But what’s probably more interesting is the cause of all this fear. Here’s what the researchers say are the prime causes of fear:

Low education
Talk TV
True Crime TV

These all make sense. People with low levels of education tend to be poor and to live in poor areas. I don’t know why they’re so afraid of clowns, but it makes perfect sense that they’d have relatively high levels of economic anxiety as well as fears for their personal safety. As for talk TV, that makes sense too. “It is a simple, straight-line effect,” the researchers says. “The more one watches talk TV, the more fearful one tends to be.”

So turn off the doofus TV, OK? And tell your friends and family to turn it off too. It’s making our lives worse.

And for the record, the rest of survey suggests that Democrats tend to be afraid of crime, pollution, and man-made disasters. Republicans tend to be afraid of today’s youth, the government, and immigrants.

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Here’s What Democrats and Republicans Are Afraid Of

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After Supreme Court Decision, Patent Trolls Getting Cold Feet?

by CamilleDby Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A few months ago, in Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court struck a modest blow against patent trolls. The court ruled that merely programming a computer to carry out a well-known process isn’t enough to qualify for a patent. There has to be more to it.

So how has that affected the patent troll business? Joff Wild reports on a new analysis of third-quarter patent litigation activity:

According to the research, which covers the third quarter of this year (June to September), there was a 23% drop in the number of suits filed compared to the second quarter, and a 27% year-on-year reduction.

The findings come just weeks after data released by Lex Machina showed that there had been a 40% fall in patent suits in September 2014 as compared to the same month in the previous year….The data shows that the decline can be almost completely explained by a drop-off in NPE suits in the high-tech sector. Litigation initiated by operating companies fell by just 19 quarter on quarter, but actions launched by NPEs dropped by 301, from 885 in Q2 to 554 — a fall of 35%.

An NPE is a “non-practicing entity”—that is, a company that doesn’t actually make use of a patent in a product of its own, but has merely purchased it for the purpose of strong-arming payments out of other users. In other words, a patent troll. So what these numbers show is that generic patent litigation fell a bit in Q3, but that patent troll litigation fell by a lot.

It’s too early to jump to conclusions about this, but it seems reasonable that this decline is at least partly related to Alice. This is good news, though Alex Tabarrok sensibly warns that before long there will probably be an uptick in patent suits as people learn the new system. So hold off on the cheering.

Still, we’ll take good news where we can get it, and this is a step in the right direction. It will be even better if Alice is a sign that the Supreme Court plans to rein in the federal circuit court that handles patents, which in recent years seems to have been far more friendly toward software patents than the Supreme Court ever intended. Stay tuned.

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After Supreme Court Decision, Patent Trolls Getting Cold Feet?

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Which World Series Team Has the Less Obnoxious Owner, Giants or Royals?

by FloreneGKQN Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Game 6 of baseball’s World Series is tonight in Kansas City, and the stakes are high: The San Francisco Giants could clinch their third championship in five years with a win, while the hometown Royals need a win to stay alive. Don’t have a rooting interest, or looking for another reason to tune in? Check out Mother Jones‘ report from last year on the political and business dealings of Major League Baseball’s owners. If you like Karl Rove, you may want to pull for the Giants—but if rationalizing child labor is more your taste, go Royals!

Here’s the dish on the Giants’ Charles B. Johnson:

Johnson, a mutual-funds baron and the 211th-richest person in the world according to Forbes, spent some $200,000 to try to defeat California’s Proposition 30, the sales and income tax increase that included elements of the state’s millionaire’s tax initiative. (Prop. 30 passed in November.) Other political expenditures: $50,000 for Prop. 32, which would have kept unions and corporations from using automatic payroll deductions to bankroll political activity, and $200,000 for Karl Rove’s American Crossroads.

And the Royals’ David Glass:

In 1992, when he was still president and CEO of Walmart, Glass was confronted by NBC’s Dateline with evidence of child labor at a T-shirt factory in Bangladesh. His response: “You and I might, perhaps, define children differently.” As Glass explained, looks can be deceiving—Asians are short. Then he ended the interview. Meanwhile, as the Royals’ owner he’s pocketed profits without making any discernible investment in the on-field product. He also once revoked press credentials of reporters who asked critical questions.

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Which World Series Team Has the Less Obnoxious Owner, Giants or Royals?

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Question of the Day: Does Obama Plan to Flood America With Ebola Patients?

by Madelai90A Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

From Fox anchor Megyn Kelly to Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee:

So do you believe that the administration is planning on bringing Ebola patients from overseas here to America?

Yes, that’s an actual question, and I probably don’t have to tell you what Goodlatte’s answer is. The only thing missing is whether Goodlatte also believes Obama is planning to naturalize these folks by executive order so they can vote in Tuesday’s election.

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Question of the Day: Does Obama Plan to Flood America With Ebola Patients?

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