Salt beds half a mile beneath the surface are being targeted as a possible repository for radioactive material left over from power reactors and weapons. Continued: Nuclear Waste Solution Seen in Desert Salt Beds ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: A Conversation on Tobacco and Coal Exports and Moral ResponsibilityDot Earth Blog: A Martian View of Our Pale DotWorld Briefing: Italy: Toxic Waste Law Enacted ;
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Go from thinking to doing–from imagining a new life to putting it into practice–starting right now. Inspirational author and speaker, Heather McCloskey Beck, wants you to know that there's nothing more important than figuring out what makes your heart sing and doing that–every day. We've been trained to think it's not "responsible" to think this way, that there are more important things to life than feeling fulfilled. Yet we yearn for a more creative, engaged life–to feel the rush that comes from doing what we love to do, without worry. Beck, a popular Huffington Post columnist and creator of the global peace movement, Peace Flash , offers guidance, stories, and dozens of practical suggestions for how to take the leap into the kind of life you've always dreamed of. If you've forgotten what makes you tick, Heather will help you find out. If you know what it is but aren't doing it, she'll help you clear a path. With Heather's help, you can take the leap from thinking about what life would be like if you could do what you love to doing it. Starting with just 15 minutes. Today. Heather McCloskey Beck is an inspirational author and speaker, musician and founder of the global peace movement, Peace Flash . Dedicated to creating Dynamic Peace within our world, Heather is a columnist for The Huffington Post and frequently speaks to audiences across the United States, and is now expanding her reach internationally. With a growing following on her Facebook pages that has surpassed One Million fans, Beck offers both virtual and on-site workshops and events to inspire people to create lives they truly love. If you would like to connect with Heather, you can visit her at her Facebook pages. Here are a few: www.facebook.com/HeatherMcCloskeyBeckAuthor, www.facebook.com/PeaceFlash, www.facebook.com/TaketheLeapBook Praise: "Heather McCloskey Beck is a spiritual visionary. Read this book and feel your life transform in amazing ways." — Pat Benatar , four-time Grammy winner and author of Between a Heart and a Rock Place "Heather McCloskey Beck rocks a great life. She walks it, she talks it—she's the real deal. When I first set eyes on her she absolutely glowed with vibrance, exuberance, and inspiration. If you want to be that kind of person, read this book. Heather will show you how to create a life that will make you feel joyful, inspired, and deeply fulfilled, every single day." — Colette Baron-Reid , bestselling author of The Map , CEO and Founder of The Invision Project
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It’s mighty dry out there …
Floods get a lot of attention in our warming world. They can kill people and livestock, inundate crops, destroy infrastructure and homes — and they make great photo ops. Less attention — and less international aid — is directed to victims of intense heat waves that are also linked to climate change.
But it is these heat waves that are most responsible when Pakistanis leave their villages, new research suggests.
Pakistan is a depressing climate case study because its residents are so vulnerable to global warming. The country is poor, it floods easily, and it can be hotter than hell (if your idea of hell is, say, Afghanistan, just to Pakistan’s north).
Researchers analyzed weather records and 21 years worth of survey data of 522 households in rural Pakistan in an attempt to figure out which extreme weather phenomena might be driving villagers from their homes. Migration rates were rather low — about 1 or 2 percent of residents left their villages during the 21 years. But when they did leave, the reason for the migration was often linked to a heat wave. Heat waves are worsening in the region as the climate changes.
Women and men were found to respond to heat waves by leaving their villages, but men were more likely to move vast distances. From the scientists’ new paper, published last week in the journal Nature Climate Change:
Pakistan is highly vulnerable to climate change and involuntary displacement. …
Agricultural income suffers tremendously when temperatures are extremely hot — wiping out over a third of farming income. Non-farm income also experiences losses from heat stress, but to a lesser extent (16%). …
We find that flooding — a climate shock associated with large relief efforts — has modest to insignificant impacts on migration. Heat stress, however — which has attracted relatively little relief — consistently increases the long-term migration of men, driven by a negative effect on farm and non-farm income.
Floods play better than heat waves on television, but this research, combined with growing scientific alarm over skyrocketing numbers of deaths around the world linked to heat stress, highlights why we also need to be paying attention to some of the less photogenic symptoms of a warming globe.
Source
Heat stress increases long-term human migration in rural Pakistan, Nature Climate Change
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Which is more likely to drive people from their homes — floods or heat waves?
Perhaps climate skeptics should be forced to walk the plank — so they can feel for themselves where so much of the globe’s extra heat is ending up.
The mainstream media repeatedly uttered the false but reassuring-sounding phrase “global warming pause” last year, a reference to an unexpected decline in the rate at which land temperatures have been recently warming, but meanwhile temperatures in the world’s oceans were spiking.
Just check out this graph from NOAA, which shows the rise in the amount of energy in the top 2,300 feet (700 meters) of the world’s oceans:
Click to embiggen.
Skeptical Science puts the chart into some context:
Long-term the oceans have been gaining heat at a rate equivalent to about 2 Hiroshima bombs per second, although this has increased over the last 16 or so years to around 4 per second. In 2013 ocean warming rapidly escalated, rising to a rate in excess of 12 Hiroshima bombs per second — over three times the recent trend.
Rising ocean temperatures might not seem as significant for us humans as rising land temperatures, but they actually affect us in lots of ways. Warming marine environments are disturbing wildlife the world over, driving fish to cooler and deeper waters — and that is affecting fishing industries.
The heating waters can also fuel hurricanes and other wild storms. Water temperatures around the Philippines rose nearly 2 degrees F last year just before Typhoon Haiyan hit, which helped whip up the monster storm.
And it’s worth remembering that water expands when it heats up, which leads to rising seas. In some subtropical areas, increasing water temperatures are believed to be responsible for sea-level rise of as much as a millimeter every year. Here’s the latest NOAA graph showing how much seas are rising, on average, due to warming oceans (this is called steric sea-level rise):
Click to embiggen.
So the next time somebody bends your ear about a supposed “global warming pause,” just show them these two graphs.
Source
Global Ocean Heat and Salt Content, NOAA
The Oceans Warmed up Sharply in 2013: We’re Going to Need a Bigger Graph, Skeptical Science
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Mother Jones
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This month, McDonald’s announced that it plans to start transitioning to sustainable beef by 2016, with the goal of eventually making all of its burgers from sustainable meat. But the fast food chain has yet to specify what, exactly, it means by “sustainable.” The company is working with the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, a stakeholder group that includes Walmart and the World Wildlife Fund, to come up with a definition, and expects to announce further details of its plans in the spring. But food experts say that unless McDonald’s stops purchasing cows that are fed antibiotics to ward off disease in overcrowded feed lots, the promise will be an empty one. It’s not an unattainable goal—other chains that buy antibiotic-free beef, including Chipotle and Shake Shack, say they’ve been able to do so without significantly raising costs. But McDonald’s isn’t on board yet.
When Mother Jones asked McDonald’s whether it plans to cease using antibiotic-fed beef, a spokesman said, “McDonald’s will continue to rely on the sound science derived from this group of expert advisors including academia, suppliers, animal health and welfare experts and the FDA, as we continue to review our policy​.” According to Hal Hamilton, founder of the Sustainable Food Laboratory, who is helping McDonalds develop its sustainability plan, the company “definitely cares about antibiotics and other feed additives, and they would like to achieve a system that avoids things that worry consumers, but I don’t think they’ve made any specific policies.”
Food experts say that could be a problem. “You can’t have sustainable production if you’re using antibiotics other than very, very occasionally, and only when there’s a diagnosed clinical disease,” says David Wallinga, M.D., the founder of Healthy Food Action, a network of health professionals. “In the case of cattle, they shouldn’t be in feed at all.” McDonalds has a written policy that aims to reduce antibiotic use, but the policy has been criticized for having major loopholes—such as allowing farmers to feed cows antibiotics for disease prevention, rather than merely treatment. (The McDonald’s spokesman says, “We take seriously our ethical responsibility to treat sick animals, using antibiotics to treat, prevent and control disease in food producing animals.”)
Last December, the Food and Drug Administration ruled that “it is important to use these drugs only when medically necessary,” given that 80 percent of antibiotics in the United States go to livestock farms, and overuse of these drugs poses a demonstrated threat to public health. For example, some women have been afflicted by antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infections that have been linked to overuse of antibiotics in poultry. But sustainability experts say the FDA’s new guidance is weak, since not only does it allow antibiotics to be used for prevention, but the recommendations are voluntary.
“The government kind of punted on this issue, when it announced voluntary standards,” says Michael Pollan, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, noting that it’s hard for the government to tackle two big industries at the same time—Big Agriculture and Big Pharma. “But if McDonald’s committed to getting rid of antibiotics, that would be a huge deal, it would change the industry.”
Industry experts say that it’s definitely possible for McDonalds to make this change. When Chipotle switched to sustainable, antibiotic-free beef, in increased prices by only about 25 to 50 cents per burrito (the price of antibiotic-free pork is a bit higher.) “Our customers are willing to pay a little more for food they recognize as being better,” says Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold. He notes that Chipotle does have some trouble getting the antibiotic-free supply to meet its demand, but adds: “Having more companies use this kind of meat would likely result in faster changes within the supply system, and that could be a good thing.” Shake Shack, which has been serving antibiotic-free beef since the chain opened, says it only costs 15 to 20 percent more than regular beef. The costs are higher, spokesman Edwin Bragg says, but notes that McDonalds could change that. “If a restaurant company of McDonalds’ size could do this on a large scale, it could change the paradigm.”
And Pollan says that this change needs to come sooner, rather than later: “I think it’s just hitting us. We’re now dealing with infectious microbes that are resistant to most antibiotics we have. We’re already paying a price and it’s going to get worse.”
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Mother Jones
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As the world gears up for the Sochi Games, we reached out to these three amazing women to talk about everything from their first runs to high-speed crashes to race and gender politics. The opening ceremonies take place on Friday, February 7. Here’s the complete schedule of events.
Erich Schlegel/Zuma
A lot of people think I’m on the Jamaican bobsled team. It’s a question every black bobsledder gets, even if you’re wearing a USA shirt. My dad used to love watching Cool Runnings with me. When I told him I got an invite to try out for the US bobsled team, his first words were: “Sanka! You dead, mon? Let me kiss your lucky egg!” Growing up biracial, I never really thought about things: I mean, you have some acceptance issues, but I grew up in a predominately white town. The side of my family I’m closest with is all white, so it’s not necessarily a topic of conversation. You get a lot of naive questions, but I welcome those. The more people I can teach and tell about bobsled, the more cheers we’ll have in Sochi. Not many people can relate to bobsled, and it’s hard to spectate. It’s a grueling, blue-collar sport. To support my bobsled habit, I’ve sometimes worked three jobs in the offseason. We do all the work on our sleds. We carry our sleds. There’s no caddy, there’s no pit crew. We handle all those things on top of trying to be the best athletes within our sport in the world.
Click here to read our extended interview with Fenlator. Women’s “bobsleigh” heats begin on February 18.
Erich Schlegel/Zuma
I always challenged men in foot races or whatever as a kid growing up, because it was a way of challenging myself—but you have to accept that men are born with testosterone. You can beat them for so long, but eventually they’re gonna catch up. There is a double standard: My father was a major league baseball player, and I grew up thinking I could have the same attitude on the field that he did. When I did that in real life, people thought I was a total bi-atch. Laughs. Women are held to a different standard, but there’s a reason. Because we are mothers, we have a different role in society. There are certain benefits we get being women—and we deserve them! But don’t take advantage of them. You have to walk the line and show that you have self-worth. If you lose yourself, then no one’s going to respect you. Miley Cyrus, the girl crossed the line! You can be sexy without licking a hammer.
Click here to read our extended interview with Uhlaender. Women’s skeleton commences on February 13.
Mitchell Haaseth/NBC
Some people don’t understand that you can ski in the halfpipe. They think it’s cool and kinda crazy. It’s like a polar bear-grizzly bear mix—a pizzly. It’s a new species and it’s super badass! I was a racer before, but it felt a little too serious. My parents were a little resistant, but then they skied with us and realized we think about things before we jump off of stuff. They definitely get nervous. You can’t have my mom video a run at all because it’s so shaky—she always misses it! The first time I ever did a “left nine”—it’s two and a half spins, and I’m spinning down the wall, rotating to the left—I was so excited I completely forgot the rest of my run; I just sort of made it up. Most skiers, we can think pretty quickly on our feet—or off our feet if we’re falling. We like to push the limits, but when the limits push back, it’s always a rude awakening. Concussions and injuries are something everyone worries about. But you can’t be out there worrying about getting hurt, or else you’re more likely to get hurt. If I got hurt, knock on wood, I don’t know what I would do. Maybe I’d actually be a real college student.
Click here to read more about Bowman. The women’s halfpipe competition is on February 20.
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First plant STDs, and now this? Bees these days just can’t catch a break: New research shows that bumblebees that have been exposed to neonic pesticides are hopeless when it comes to gathering food.
British scientists reared commercial bumblebees for two weeks on sugar and pollen laced with imidacloprid, which is one of the world’s most commonly used insecticides. The pesticide concentration mimicked that found in farmed oil seed rape, which is grown for biofuel, vegetable oil, and animal feed. Similar colonies were fed pesticide-free sugar and pollen.
After the colonies were released into Scottish gardens to forage for their own food, the scientists monitored how much pollen and nectar the bees gathered and brought back to their hives. When it came to pollen, which is the main part of the bees’ diet, the differences between the pesticide-fed bees and those from control hives was striking. From the paper, published this month in the journal Ecotoxicology:
Whilst the nectar foraging efficiency of bees treated with imidacloprid was not significantly different than that of control bees, treated bees brought back pollen less often than control bees (40 % of trips vs 63 % trips, respectively) and, where pollen was collected, treated bees brought back 31 % less pollen per hour than controls.
This study demonstrates that field-realistic doses of these pesticides substantially impacts on foraging ability of bumblebee workers when collecting pollen. …
Pollen is the main protein source for bumblebees and is particularly important for the rearing of young to replace older workers. It has been suggested that foraging for pollen is more challenging than foraging for nectar, and it is usually restricted to dry, sunny weather, whereas nectar can be collected in most conditions except heavy rain, so that pollen rather than nectar shortages are more likely to limit colony success
The research was conducted on buff-tailed bumblebees — not on the more familiar honeybees. It’s “quite likely” that neonics have similar effects on the pollen-gathering ability of honeybees, researcher Dave Goulson told Grist. “But, obviously, we can’t say for sure.”
Previous research has shown that honeybee behavior is also affected by neonics — and scientists fear that those behavioral changes could be linked to the growing problem of colony collapse disorder. “Nonlethal exposure of honey bees to thiamethoxam (neonicotinoid systemic pesticide) causes high mortality due to homing failure at levels that could put a colony at risk of collapse,” French scientists wrote in a paper published in the journal Science.
Source
Field realistic doses of pesticide imidacloprid reduce bumblebee pollen foraging efficiency, Exotoxicology
A Common Pesticide Decreases Foraging Success and Survival in Honey Bees, Science
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Mother Jones
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Last week, billionaire investor Tom Perkins of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers sent a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal likening criticism of the 1 percent to Nazi attacks on the Jews. He’s not an outlier. As Paul Krugman pointed out on Sunday, the rich have been lamenting the “demonizing” and “vilifying” of the 1 percent for years. “I…suspect that today’s Masters of the Universe are insecure about the nature of their success,” Krugman wrote. But the wealthy are not just afraid of losing their money to an angry middle class. Class warfare also makes the rich uncomfortable because they worry the non-rich are judging their character and personality by how much money they have, according to therapists who counsel the rich.
“I think that with Occupy Wall Street there was a sense of the heat getting turned up and a feeling of vilification and potential danger,” Jamie Traeger-Muney, a psychologist who counsels people who earn tens of millions of dollars a year, told Politico on Thursday. “There is a worry among our clients that they are being judged and people are making assumptions about who they are based on their wealth.”
In 2012, Mother Jones reported on how banks, including Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley, are increasingly hiring psychotherapists like Traeger-Muney to help their extremely wealthy clients deal with the complications that come with being extremely wealthy. Here’s a bit more of what wealth therapists can tell us about how the rich may be feeling right now:
Although wealth counseling has existed for years, the 2008 financial crisis really sent the aristocracy sprinting for the therapist’s chair. The 2010 Capgemini/Merrill Lynch World Wealth Report, a survey that takes the pulse of zillionaires around the world, found that after the crisis, spooked clients were demanding “specialized advice.” Financial advisers must “truly understand the emotional aspects of client behavior,” the report warned…
“Any time there’s an outside focus on wealth,” it’s not fun for the wealthy, Traeger-Muney says. Heirs, she adds, have it the worst: “They feel like they’re in this 1 percent position. They get bad press from people who make fun of them. It feels like their worst nightmare coming true: the idea that they’re now responsible for other people’s unhappiness and lack of wealth, when they didn’t ask for their millions.”
Ultimately, having lots of money shouldn’t be cause for alarm. “There’s a difference between money causing problems and a lack of ability to explore feelings around money,” Traeger-Muney says. “That’s what leads to psychological issues.” She just tries to get her clients to acknowledge the fact that they’re rolling in dough and learn how to enjoy it. “What would life be like if they didn’t have any restraints and could really create what they wanted?”
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Therapist to the 1 Percent Weighs in on the Psychological Hardship of Being Rich
Mother Jones
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Jonathan Bernstein reports on Republican efforts to shorten the primary season:
If all goes according to plan, the result will be votes in the first four (“carve-out”) states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina — in February, followed by votes in rapid succession in March and April, with the primary season finishing up in May. That’s a lot more compressed than the January-to-June schedule of the past few cycles.
….The 2012 cycle, the theory goes, just went on too long, with eventual nominee Mitt Romney taking too many shots from other candidates. My feeling, however, is that the hits Romney took almost certainly didn’t matter for the fall campaign. The real lesson of 2012 that Republicans should worry about is that virtually any crank, no matter how little qualified for president, can have a very good two weeks….It’s essentially the stories of Michele Bachman, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum in 2012.
By compressing the calendar, you increase the danger that a mediocre or worse candidate could get hot at just the right time and wrap up the nomination before the party has time to stop it….The March crunch could get so momentous that it overwhelms the rest of the schedule. In other words, if crunch time in March takes on the air of a de facto national primary — even one spread out over two or three weeks — it could mean trouble.
I agree that compressing the actual voting might not matter much. These days, primary campaigns start early: we’ll almost certainly have several declared candidates by early 2015 and a full field by the middle of the year. Those guys are going to be out on the trail taking shots for a very long time no matter what. Besides, primary season is almost always effectively over by March or April anyway, even if there are a few Ron Paul-esque stragglers who refuse to concede for PR reasons. It rarely lasts more than 14 or 15 weeks.
So what about Bernstein’s theory that the real problem is beefing up the invisible primary so that fringe candidates are booted out early? I’m not so sure about that either. The clown show of 2012 was truly sui generis, something that’s never really happened before. And I’m not so convinced that any of the fringe folks would have had better odds in a compressed primary season, as he suggests. Sure, they each got hot for a week or two, but they typically got hot in one or two states. I don’t think they could have replicated that performance if they’d been competing in lots of different states at once.
But I could be wrong! Generally speaking, my advice to both parties is simple: Make your primaries as similar to a general election as possible. That would mean, for example, ditching the Iowa caucuses, since the kind of retail politics that win in Iowa are irrelevant to success in November. What you want is a candidate that can raise lots of money; appeal to lots of people; and has a good media presence. That’s what wins general elections these days, and a successful primary season is one that gives the advantage to those qualities. The quaint notion that New Hampshire is a great place to start because it’s a small state and gives everyone a chance is ridiculous. No modern political party should want a process that gives everyone a chance. They should want a process that brutally winnows out the vanity candidates and narrows the field to folks who know how to win on the big stage.
It won’t happen because it would require the parties to play massive hardball with the Iowas and New Hampshires of the world, something they won’t do. But they probably should.
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Mother Jones
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The New York Times reports that Medicaid expansion has been a huge success in West Virginia:
Enrollment in private insurance plans has been sluggish, but sign-ups for Medicaid, the federal insurance program for the poor, have surged in many states. Here in West Virginia, which has some of the shortest life spans and highest poverty rates in the country, the strength of the demand has surprised officials, with more than 75,000 people enrolling in Medicaid….In West Virginia, where the Democratic governor agreed to expand Medicaid eligibility, the number of uninsured people in the state has been reduced by about a third.
It’s not just West Virginia, either. Probably not, anyway. Charles Gaba, who is basically the Nate Silver of Obamacare numbers, writes today that he’s now pretty sure the total number of enrollments in Medicaid since October 1st isn’t the 4 million or so that we previously thought, but more likely 6.2 million. We still don’t know for sure how many of these represent new enrollments vs. re-enrollments, but the higher number makes it pretty likely that a very large chunk of this 6.2 million are new enrollees. Anecdotal evidence backs this up, and preliminary figures from the states that break out new enrollees separately suggest that roughly two-thirds of total signups are new enrollees.
If that’s true, it means that about 4 million new people have signed up for Medicaid since October 1st. That’s 4 million people who feel like this:
Waitresses, fast food workers, security guards and cleaners described feeling intense relief that they are now protected from the punishing medical bills that have punched holes in their family budgets. They spoke in interviews of reclaiming the dignity they had lost over years of being turned away from doctors’ offices because they did not have insurance.
“You see it in their faces,” said Janie Hovatter, a patient advocate at Cabin Creek Health Systems, a health clinic in southern West Virginia. “They just kind of relax.”
We’re the richest country in the world. We can afford this.
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