While I was in Miami producing a video with Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell, (see above and below) I got caught in a tropical downpour only slightly less intense than the one that happened a couple weeks ago.
I was catching a cab from Miami to Miami Beach across the Causeway – in the space of a few minutes a light sprinkle turned into blinding sheets of falling water. It was the worst timing, with evening high tide impending. In the time it took to drive across Biscayne Bay, the streets of Miami Beach flooded to curb level, and I had to jump from the cab to sidewalk, dragging camera bags, to avoid being soaked to half-calf level.
Shot the quick video below as the water was receding.
Local news from a day later commented on the situation.
The double whammy for low lying areas is that intense flash rains like this will continue to become more common – even as sea level rises, squeezing communities in between.
During the afternoon hours Tuesday, torrential rain drenched parts of Miami and Miami Beach. Four to seven inches of rain fell in a matter of a few hours before and during the evening rush, causing extensive flooding and gridlock.
This region is no stranger to tropical downpours, but this amount of rain falling in a short time will create flash flooding just about anywhere. And in some ways, because it is so low-lying, this region is more vulnerable to flooding than many as it depends on storm drains being able to drain into nearby Biscayne Bay. Unfortunately, in this case, the water had nowhere to go as the heaviest rain came as the tide was rising. It couldn’t drain until the tides began to go back down hours later. Continue reading “Dress Rehearsal for a Drowned Miami”
Post-Charlottesville, the Trump administration has protested that they have never supported racism or racist beliefs. The President’s own history of pushing Birther conspiracy theories belies that, of course – but it might help if they dropped their latest nomination for a US Dept. of Agriculture Science post – a “Chief Scientist” who is not a scientist, and traffics in racist birther memes himself.
President Donald Trump has chosen a new nominee to serve as chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture (USDA). Were that the whole story, it would be but a mere droplet in the firehose of politics news that has come to define life in 2017.
Instead, it turns out that Trump’s pick, Dr. Sam Clovis, is no ordinary nominee—assuming that, you know, “ordinary” is even a thing anymore.
Here’s a quick list of facts you may want to know about Clovis as he goes before the Senate for his confirmation hearing.
A former public policy and business professor at Morning Side College in Iowa, Clovis is not a scientist. For comparison’s sake, the USDA’s chief scientist under former President Barack Obama, Dr. Catherine Woteki, was the global director of science affairs for Mars, Inc. (the candy company), where she oversaw its research into health and nutrition; served as dean of agriculture at Iowa State University; and served as first Under Secretary for Food Safety at USDA from 1997 until 2001. She holds an M.S. and Ph.D in human nutrition from Virginia Tech and a B.S. in biology and chemistry from Mary Washington College.
Clovis is not a farmer, although he is from the agriculture-heavy state of Iowa.
Back in 2013, Clovis rejected the idea that climate change is “settled science” and asserted that it is instead a “nonsensical theory” invented by liberals to give the impression that they can create “perfect weather.” At a Farm Foundation Forum last October, he told E&E News that “we need more science” before Trump could craft policy. As chief scientist, Clovis would oversee the USDA’s climate change research.
Clovis currently serves as the White House adviser to the USDA.
Don’t laugh, this guy could have been Governor of Texas.
Well, Ok, do laugh.
I learned this one back in the day when I used to play open-mic at the local Holiday Inn. Seemed appropriate for current events. Non-PC language warning.
This is an unabashed endorsement of an important group. I have no affiliation with them or conflict of interest. They are great, period.
The ability to convey complex climate science to a wide-ranging audience is a golden attribute, something very few can achieve. This characteristic makes the Yale Climate Connections group unique.
The Yale Climate Connections effort comprises several interrelated efforts whose end result is captivating science education for the rest of us.
What is most exciting to me are their daily radio spots that focus on a current issue of climate change. The Yale group includes a team of editors, radio producers, and freelance reporters nationwide to record and post short (90-second) spots that are both interesting and informative.
From someone who works in climate communication, I am surprised that a group can have this high of a throughput. It means your reporters have to be identifying relevant topics, finding experts to interview, learning enough to ask informed questions, and then perform audio edits. And this happens five days a week. The breadth and width of the topics can be seen at the group’s website. The radio spots are currently carried on almost 350 radio stations across North America and are hosted by Dr Anthony Leiserowitz, well known for his research on public opinions related to climate change, the “Six Americas.”
In addition to the short radio segments, the group produces original feature articles and a monthly series of videos that explore topics in much more detail than the short radio spots. These longer videos are produced by award-winning videographer Peter Sinclair.
In addition to its public outreach, the Yale group has worked behind the scenes to provide training workshops to help reporters, editors, and television weathercasters become more familiar with and comfortable discussing climate change with their audiences. I have worked with weathercasters quite a bit myself, and they are under a lot of pressure to provide well-watched weather forecasts and to avoid conflict that might turn off audiences. They are also confined to very short televised segments, so delving into complex climate topics is challenging.
Fake News and the “Alt Right” is nothing new to Climate Scientists.
See this 2010 item from ABC News – the same folks celebrating the elevation of Donald Trump and Richard Bannon to the White House have been threatening scientists for most of a decade.
Tesla and wind farm developer Deepwater Wind are planning to team up to create the largest project in the world that combines an offshore wind farm with large-scale electricity storage, the companies announced Tuesday.
The project, called the Revolution Wind Farm, would generate electricity about 12 miles off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and store some of it in large batteries built by Tesla. The project would have the capacity to generate 144 megawatts of wind power, or enough electricity to power 80,000 homes, according to Deepwater Wind.
If approved by the state, the wind farm would begin operating in 2023. It is expected to be built next to another wind farm proposed by Deepwater Wind called the South Fork Wind Project. That project would serve Long Island, N.Y.
The companies proposed Revolution Wind as part of a call in Massachusetts for new sources of renewable energy across the state. The state hopes to generate more clean energy to meet its climate goals by cutting the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. Electric power plants running on coal and natural gas have historically been America’s largest source of carbon pollution contributing to climate change.
Revolution Wind brings together two new industries in the U.S. — offshore wind and electricity storage. The expansion and scalability of renewables depends in part on new ways to store wind and solar power, which today can only be used when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Big batteries are seen as a solution to that problem because they allow renewable energy to be used whenever it’s needed.
So far, batteries are most often used to store solar power. Tesla has teamed up with electric companies in California to build batteries to help them use more solar, but it has not used the batteries for offshore wind power anywhere in the U.S.
This month, for example, the Danish utility Dong announced the installation of a 2-megawatt battery system at its 90-megawatt Burbo Bank offshore wind farm, which is connected to the U.K. grid.
The battery system will be operational by the end of the year and will be used for frequency response. “It will be the first time an offshore wind farm is integrated with a battery system to deliver frequency response to the grid,” said Dong in a press release.
Person of interest is an overweight man of approximately 70 years of age with orange hair who was reported to be repeatedly riding up and down the escalators in a gaudy midtown Manhattan skyscraper. When approached by local authorities, subject claimed to be a prominent billionaire, the host of a wildly successful television game show and the president of the United States. Given the grandiose nature of these claims, subject was detained for observation.
During a rambling interview, subject decried the presence of “haters and losers” who were out to get him, contrasting this with his own perceived status as “a winner,” which he credited to a possibly unique genetic makeup. To wit: “I have great genes and all that stuff, which I’m a believer in”; “God helped me by giving me a certain brain”; “I have like a very, very high aptitude”; “Maybe it’s just something you have. You know, you have the winning gene.”
When questioned about his unusual hair configuration, subject replied in a somewhat long-winded fashion with various statements, such as “You know you’re not allowed to use hair spray anymore because it affects the ozone … ’cause you know hair spray’s not like it used to be, it used to be real good…. If I take hair spray, and I spray it in my apartment, which is all sealed, you’re telling me that affects the ozone layer?”
Subject further claimed to be in possession of a Twitter account followed by tens of millions of people, all of whom recognize his greatness. He said he has used Twitter to explain, among other things, that climate change is a fiction. Examples of his beliefs on this topic include:
“Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air—not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense”; “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive”; “Well, I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax…. And I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China. Obviously, I joke. But this is done for the benefit of China, because China does not do anything to help climate change.” When challenged on these statements, subject responded: “I did not. I did not. I do not say that” but also said he abandoned the Paris climate accord to stop other countries from “laughing at us.” Continue reading “Trump’s Equal Opportunity Ignorance”
