Month: May 2017

New Bloomberg piece profiling Amber Sullins, a Phoenix TV Meteorologist I met and interviewed last year for my piece on how America’s weather people are attacking climate change, and denial.

Americans are realizing that, in a Trump administration, if they don’t deal with climate, no one will. (Watch for new video this week on that one..)

Meanwhile, more and more TV mets are being forced to look seriously at the underlying causes of the increasingly bizarre weather events they are covering.

Bloomberg:

Amber Sullins gets a minute or two to tell up to two million people about some extremely complicated science, using the tools of her trade: a pleasant voice, a green screen, and small icons denoting sun, clouds, rain, and wind. She is the chief meteorologist at ABC15 News in Phoenix, so her forecasts mostly call for sunshine. Within this brief window, however, Sullins sometimes manages to go beyond the next five days. Far beyond.

“We know climate change could affect everything about the way we live in the future, from agriculture and tourism to productivity and local business,” she once noted. “But at what cost?”

The answer came from a University of Arizona economist whose work is meant to improve understanding about how climate change may affect markets. “Weather will become more variable,” he replied, “and that will then act to make [gross domestic product] more variable. So we’ll bounce around more, from year to year.”

Your local news forecaster is the face of what the National Weather Service estimates is a $7 billion weather-prediction industry, a largely invisible operation that stretches across some 350 public- and private-sector organizations in the U.S. At its center are the 5,000 employees of the National Weather Service, whose efforts at forecasting generate about $32 billion in annual benefits to American households, according to federal estimates.

Continue reading “Amber Sullins has a Bully Pulpit on Climate Communication”

Much to do about the Trump administration’s announced plans to open up large new areas to offshore drilling.
Yeah, well, good luck with that off the US coast with an aroused populace ready to tar and feather local lawmakers who go along with the Trump’s earth-killing agenda.

Also, important to remember – just because ice is going away in the arctic, doesn’t mean it’s getting any easier up there.  See the interview with Arctic sea ice expert David Barber that starts about 1:25 in above – as ice pulls back, areas that were once predictable have now become hazardous in ways unexpected a few years ago.

Add that to sluggish oil prices, and the incentive for drillers is not as great as one might think.

GreenPeace:

Anchorage, AK —Conservation and Alaska Native groups today filed a lawsuit against President Trump, challenging his decision to jettison a permanent ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.

The groups, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Alaska Wilderness League, Defenders of Wildlife, Northern Alaska Environmental Center, REDOIL (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands), Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace and The Wilderness Society, represented by attorneys at Earthjustice and Natural Resources Defense Council, issued the following joint statement:

“President Trump’s April 28 executive order exceeds his constitutional and statutory authority and violates federal law. Responding to a national groundswell of opposition to expanded offshore drilling, President Obama permanently ended oil and gas leasing in most of the Arctic Ocean and key parts of the Atlantic Ocean in December, using his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA). Until Trump, no president has ever tried to reverse a permanent withdrawal made under OCSLA, which does not authorize such a reversal.

Trump’s executive order could open up more than 120 million acres of ocean territory to the oil and gas industry, affecting 98 percent of federal Arctic Ocean waters and 31 biologically rich deepwater canyons in the Atlantic Ocean. Offshore drilling in these undeveloped regions threatens to harm irreplaceable wildlife, sensitive marine ecosystems, coastal residents and the businesses that depend on them, and our global climate.”

Scientific American: 

As sea ice in the warming Arctic retreats more and more during summer, the fabled Northwest Passage is becoming a greater temptation. The route—actually a series of straits across northern Canada—would cut 3,000 miles off the voyage from New York City to Shanghai via the Panama Canal. But in practice, lingering ice is so unpredictable that a crossing remains risky and expensive. Arctic scientists think it will be many years before ships can make the passage regularly.

Continue reading “Arctic Drilling Won’t be a Slam Dunk for Trump”

Seattle Beer drinkers are known for liking their beer bold and hoppy.
Now there’s a snack to match – and it might be the start of a new trend in earth friendly protein.

ESPN:

After surprisingly selling out of grasshoppers at a concession stand for the first three games of the season, the Seattle Mariners have called in an emergency order so that they last throughout this weekend. The team is also imposing a per-game order limit for the rest of the season.

Mariners spokeswoman Rebecca Hale told ESPN that the team sold 901 orders of the insects over the first three home games. The grasshoppers are toasted in a chili lime salt and come in a four-ounce cup for $4.

“We’ve sold roughly 18,000 grasshoppers,” Hale said. “That’s more than the restaurant [that runs the stand], Poquitos, sells in a year.”

Sports Illustrated:

For the low low price of $4, you can grab yourself a big cup of grasshoppers tossed in chili lime salt—a Mexican culinary tradition and staple—at any Mariners home game this year. “They are a one-of-a-kind snack that the fans will really love—either on a taco or on their own,” Steve Dominguez, Centerplate general manager at Safeco Field, told ESPN’s Darren Rovell. “One of a kind” is being generous; it’s safe to say that most MLB and minor league teams probably aren’t venturing into the edible insect space (though it would be a good way for Cleveland to reduce its midge population).

But for as gross as it may seem to settle into a seat at Safeco Field cradling a bowl of warm Schistocerca americana, it’s worth noting that grasshoppers offer benefits that your average ballpark concession item doesn’t. For one, grasshoppers (and most insects) are loaded with protein and low on fat. They’re also a very environmentally friendly animal to raise for food, given that they don’t require any of the infrastructure that livestock do.

Continue reading “Move Over Beer Nuts, this Earth Friendly Snack Trend has Legs…”

Once again, climate change is a threat multiplier in unexpected ways.

I’ve covered the spread of brain eating amoebas several times. 
There’s more. So much more.

BBC:

Throughout history, humans have existed side-by-side with bacteria and viruses. From the bubonic plague to smallpox, we have evolved to resist them, and in response they have developed new ways of infecting us.

We have had antibiotics for almost a century, ever since Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. In response, bacteria have responded by evolving antibiotic resistance. The battle is endless: because we spend so much time with pathogens, we sometimes develop a kind of natural stalemate.

However, what would happen if we were suddenly exposed to deadly bacteria and viruses that have been absent for thousands of years, or that we have never met before?

We may be about to find out. Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years, and as the soils melt they are releasing ancient viruses and bacteria that, having lain dormant, are springing back to life.

Guardian:

In fact, climate change is already affecting personal human health around the world. This subject was the focus of a summary report just published by the Medical Society Consortium. What I really liked about this report is that it breaks down some of the key impacts by region. Unfortunately, the report is limited in scope to the USA. However, the general conclusions and trends can be illuminating for people outside the USA as well.

What was also welcome is that this report was prepared by physicians (not climate scientists) of major medical societies and the conclusions are based on the best available and current information of both the climate and health fields.

So what did they find? Perhaps most importantly they find that climate change is already affecting our health. This isn’t a future problem for the next generation. It is a problem that is present and growing. They also report that some populations are more susceptible to climate change effects. Among the most vulnerable groups are children, student athletes, pregnant women, elderly, people with chronic health conditions, and the impoverished. A third key takeaway is that the problems will get much worse as climate change continues.

The study reports that if you live on the West Coast, wildfires, extreme temperatures, poorer air quality, extreme weather events, and agricultural risks are occurring. On the East Coast, you can add vector-borne diseases as a risk area. The central USA region is also similarly being affected.

Continue reading “Threat Multiplier: Climate Change Brings Deadly Health Surprises”

The conservative, climate science denying, American Enterprise Institute scored an own goal with this tweet, proving that solar energy creates 79x as many jobs as coal.

Now, you see, from their perspective, representing the fraction of one percent “job creators” that the current administration is trying to please – this makes sense. Who wants to have to hire a bunch of expensive, unpredictable human beings?

CNBC:

Solar jobs in America increased at an “historic” pace in 2016 on “unprecedented” consumer demand as the cost of solar panels declined, according to The Solar Foundation’s National Solar Jobs Census 2016.

The report – now in its seventh edition – found that the solar industry accounted for two percent of all jobs created in the U.S. over the past year, with solar jobs increasing in 44 of the 50 states.

As of November 2016, 260,077 solar workers were employed by the industry, “representing a growth rate of 24.5 percent since November 2015.” Over the 12 month period, the solar industry was responsible for more than one in every 50 new jobs created in the U.S.

Continue reading “Climate Deniers Bash Solar for Creating Jobs”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

On the eve of a vitally important political event, a sudden release of stolen documents, provided to the press in a “weaponized” format, either with built in distortions, or with cherry picked phrases highlighted to create confusion and doubt.

Press cluelessly parrots set-up lines from unknown hackers.

Reuters:

French presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team said it had been the victim of a massive and coordinated hacking operation which led to the leaking of hundreds of its internal documents just hours before the end of the official campaign.

It added that the documents only showed the normal functioning of a presidential campaign but that authentic documents had been mixed on social media with fake ones to sow “doubt and misinformation”.

“Their publication makes internal documents public but has no reason to worry us as far as the legality and conformity of the documents is concerned,” Macron’s “En Marche!” (Onwards!) party said in a statement.

“The seriousness of this event is certain and we shall not tolerate that the vital interests of democracy be put at risk,” it added.

Continue reading “The Climate Gate MO: UK Climate Hacking a Template for Russiagate”

Hard to watch, but essential to understand. What we knew and when we knew it.

Leo Hickman in Carbon Brief:

On the evening of Tuesday, 8 December, 1981, the UK’s only commercial TV channel, ITV, broadcast an hour-long documentary called “Warming Warning”.

It was among the earliest occasions – possibly the earliest – anywhere in the world where a major broadcaster aired a documentary dedicated solely to the topic of human-caused climate change.

The documentary, which was made by the now-defunct Thames Television, has sat in the archives largely unseen ever since. Until now.

Carbon Brief has tracked down the copyright holder, FremantleMedia Ltd, and persuaded it to release into the public domain a selection of key clips from the documentary.

The clips provide a poignant, historical insight into what scientists knew about climate change almost four decades ago – and how the world was beginning to react in terms of the resulting geopolitical, technological and societal ramifications. Many of themes still resonate strongly today.

To put it in context, the documentary was broadcast seven years before Dr James Hansen’s famous “it is already happening now” Senate testimony in 1988, nine years before the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report was published, and 25 years before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released. After it first aired in 1981, Warming Warning went on to be broadcast in the US (in 1990 on PBS), Greece, Japan and Israel, according to FremantleMedia.

I got an inquiry today about whether this was the earliest major documentary on climate science.  In my archive I have a mention of the problem towards the end of an NBC Network News broadcast on the original Earth Day in 1970.

Continue reading “Is this the Earliest Full Climate Documentary?”

State’s rights are all fine and good if all you want to do is keep black people from voting.

But burning less coal, that’s serious.

Putin/Trump regime planning to use “national security” as an excuse to block state renewable energy goals.  The scam is that maintaining “baseload power” is critical and can only be attained with good old Mr Coal.  Thing is, Germany, which is rapidly moving toward more renewable energy, has a grid that is 10x as reliable as the US, – reliability being more a function of, like, taking care of infrastructure – and complicated stuff like that.

Think Progress:

Lawmakers are questioning the motives behind the Department of Energy’s decision to study whether government support for renewable energy resources are threatening the reliability of the nation’s power grid and contributing to the closure of coal-fired and nuclear power plants.

In a letter sent to Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Monday, several Democratic senators called the request for the grid reliability study “a thinly disguised attempt to promote less economic electric generation technologies, such as coal and nuclear, at the expense of cost-competitive wind and solar power.”

The study appears intended to blame wind and solar power for the financial difficulties facing coal and nuclear generators and suggest that renewable energy resources threaten the reliability of the grid, the senators said.

In a memo to his chief of staff last month, Perry requested DOE investigate how federal subsidies boost one form of energy at the expense of baseload generation. The memo specifically directed the agency to look at the extent to which “continued regulatory burdens, as well as mandates and tax and subsidy policies, are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants.”

Continue reading “Putin/Trump Regime Plotting to Undermine State Renewable Standards”

Senator Brian Schatz (D – HI) gives some good perspective.
Still plenty of levers for the resistance to pull. (video from Big Island Video News)

Example below in Eric Boehlert’s tweet – new budget is a spectacular rebuke to the Trumpers.