Month: October 2020

Music Break: Shelby Lynne – Mother

John Lennon song I did not remember.

Powerful.

Comment on video from viewer “Augusto”:
Lennon wrote this while he was undergoing “Primal Scream” therapy, where he was dealing with a lot of issues that were detailed in the lyrics: He lost his mother at a crucial period in his life to a drunk-driving, off-duty policeman who ran her over in a crosswalk, and his aunt Mimi raised him, which explains the line, “Mother you had me, but I never had you.” His father, a merchant seaman, left him for the sea and for work. “I wanted you, you didn’t need me” explains his feelings about his dad. Lennon’s primal screaming on this song expresses the pain of his childhood.

Below Lennon Live:

Continue reading “Music Break: Shelby Lynne – Mother”

Social Media a Sewer of Science Denial

Forbes:

According to a newly published Pew Research Center report 55% of U.S. adults now get their news from social media either “often” or “sometimes” – an 8% increase from last year. About three-in-ten (28%) said they get their news “often,” up from 20% in 2018.

As the Pew Research’s reporters noted, “social media is now a part of the news diet of an increasingly large share of the U.S. population.”

Climatewire:

Climate denial groups have used Facebook to spread disinformation to millions of people in the lead-up to the 2020 elections, according to a new report.

And they did it on the cheap.

The report by InfluenceMap, a London-based nonprofit that tracks climate lobbying, highlighted 51 climate disinformation ads that ran this year on Facebook. They found the ads were targeted to older men in rural areas and that they were viewed an estimated 8 million times.

All for the cost of $42,000.

InfluenceMap tracked nine groups that spread climate disinformation: PragerU, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the CO2 Coalition, Turning Point USA, the Capital Research Center, the Clear Energy Alliance, the Washington Policy Center, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

One of those groups, the CO2 Coalition, has told E&E News that it is using Facebook to reach an audience outside conservative media.

The findings prompted an outcry from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and longtime climate activist. He told E&E News that Facebook is “somewhere between complicit and helpless” in stopping the spread of climate disinformation.

“This is the company in the last election that didn’t have any bells ring when political ads were being paid for in Russian rubles, so their capacity to make appalling, dumb decisions is pretty robust, and in this case they failed to screen out fraudulent propaganda,” Whitehouse said.

The InfluenceMap analysis also provided a window into the audience that climate denial groups are trying to win over, in this case older white men.

Broadly, the Facebook ads were targeted more to men across all age groups. They had the highest number of views per person in Texas and Wyoming.

The price was right, too.

For example, it cost three groups a little more than $1,000 to reach more than 2 million people with false claims, the group found.

In April, Turning Point USA paid less than $300 for an ad that said, “Climate change is a HOAX!”

It reached more than a million people, according to Facebook ad data.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has several former staffers in the Trump administration, spent less than $100 to reach up to 500,000 people with an ad that stated: “Hurricane season is here. Think manmade climate change is going to make severe weather worse? Think again.”

PragerU paid less than $700 to reach more than a million followers with the message that politicians and environmentalists are only in it for the money, Facebook data shows.

The ads are in line with the general strategy of these groups, which is to muddy the public’s understanding of climate change.

Continue reading “Social Media a Sewer of Science Denial”

Delta Follows Rapid Intensification Pattern

AP:

Hurricane Delta, gaining strength as it bears down on the U.S. Gulf Coast, is the latest and nastiest in a recent flurry of rapidly intensifying Atlantic hurricanes that scientists largely blame on global warming.

Earlier, before hitting Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and temporarily losing strength, Delta set a record for going from a 35 mph(56 kph) unnamed tropical depression to a monstrous 140 mph (225 kph) Category 4 storm in just 36 hours, beating a mark set in 2000, according to University of Colorado weather data scientist Sam Lillo.

“We’ve certainly been seeing a lot of that in the last few years,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate and hurricane scientist Jim Kossin. “It’s more likely that a storm will rapidly intensify now than it did in the 1980s … A lot of that has to do with human-caused climate change.”

Over the past couple decades, meteorologists have been increasingly worried about storms that just blow up from nothing to a whopper, just like Delta. They created an official threshold for this dangerous rapid intensification — a storm gaining 35 mph (56 kph) in wind speed in just 24 hours. 

Delta is the sixth storm this year and the second in a week to reach the threshold, Lillo calculated.

Hurricanes Hannah, Laura, Sally and Teddy and tropical storm Gamma all gained at least 35 mph (56 kph) in strength in 24 hours. And a seventh storm, Marco, just missed the mark. Laura, which jumped 65 mph (105 kph) in the day before landfall, tied the record for the biggest rapid intensification in the Gulf of Mexico, said former hurricane hunter meteorologist Jeff Masters. 

The run of killer hurricanes in 2017 featured a lot of rapid intensification, especially Harvey, Kossin said.

Continue reading “Delta Follows Rapid Intensification Pattern”

Is Puss Caterpillar Latest Climate Invasion?

Escaped Trump hairpiece? or invasive threat?

CNN:

It’s small, hairy and you don’t want to get anywhere near it. It is considered to be one of the most venomous caterpillars in the US, and there have been multiple reports of the puss caterpillar appearing in “parks or near structures” in eastern Virginia. 

The Virginia Department of Forestry is warning residents to stay away from the caterpillar because it has venomous spines across its thick, furry coat. “There are little hollow hairs in that fluffy, hairy material,”

Theresa Dellinger, a diagnostician at the Insect Identification Lab at Virginia Tech University, told CNN. “It’s not going to reach out and bite you, but if someone brushes up against that hair, it’ll release toxins that you’ll have a reaction to.”

That reaction can include an itchy rash, vomiting, swollen glands and fever, according to the University of Michigan. It’ll also put you in a world of pain. A Richmond, Virginia, resident described the feeling like a scorching-hot knife. A Florida mother said her teenage son began screaming when “stung” by one.

The caterpillar isn’t commonly found in the state. Sightings are more likely farther south, in states like Texas and Missouri. No one is entirely sure why there have been so many recent reports in Virginia.

 “With changes in our climate, we’re seeing some insects change their population,” Dellinger told CNN. “But it’s too soon to tell. Caterpillars, moths and butterflies all have cyclical periods, it’s all about the right time, and the right conditions.” 

While scientists expect that the caterpillar’s natural predators will help keep it in check, they’ll intervene if its population size gets out of control.

What Kamala Should have Said

Just posted this as a twitter thread:

Kamala Harris missed a great opportunity to explain the way forward on climate and energy.

Banning Fracking is beside the point. No one banned coal mining, but it’s going away,  because the market is killing it. 

Not all of Trump’s bluster about coal, even appointing a coal lobbyist to head the EPA, could keep that industry from collapsing even faster under Trump than it did under Obama.

The same path is ahead for #fossilgas , ban or no ban.

We understand that there is a technological revolution underway that will sweep away fossil fuels. Solar and wind are now the cheapest source of new energy, and the EV/Solar/Battery company Tesla has a higher market cap than Ford, GM and Fiat/Chrysler combined.

Exxon has been dropped from the Dow Jones average, not because of radical greens, but because the market, smart money, and yes, greedy capitalists, have gotten it that fossil fuels are going away. A wise man said “We did not leave the stone age because we ran out of stones”

The Auto industry is moving to EVs, that’s not a policy choice, it’s a technological transition that’s already baked into the cake. And it’s going to help some communities and hurt others. We have to mitigate those impacts just like we mitigate Covid-19 impacts

A more relevant question is, how will we prepare young people for the transition, and cushion the impact for those communities that are losing long time sources of livelihood. The Green New Deal , if there is one, is just that. 

For example the Fracking industry in the US has been massively hurt by the #covid-19 crisis,  tens of thousands skilled jobs are gone with uncertain prospects of returning. But we can immediately put their skills to work plugging orphaned frack wells ( there are millions leaking toxic waste and greenhouse gases)

Idled offshore drilling companies have the skills and tools to transition to building offshore wind power, and many are moving in that direction.  Drillers will also be needed to ramp up geothermal energy, which can be much larger than it currently is.

The future is bright if we pro-actively grasp it. Our competitors in Europe and Asia get this, and are moving ahead smartly. We would be wise to take the chance to lead, while we still have it.

Trailer: Minamata

The photographic record created by W. Eugene Smith of Japan’s Minamata disaster is one of the seminal creation stories of the environmental movement.

Looks like someone has made a movie of it, and I’m here for it.

Wikipedia:

Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath is a photograph taken by American photojournalist W. Eugene Smith in 1971. Many commentators regard Tomoko as Smith’s greatest work. The black-and-white photo depicts a mother cradling her severely deformed, naked daughter in a traditional Japanese bathroom. The mother, Ryoko Uemura, agreed to deliberately pose the startlingly intimate photograph with Smith to illustrate the terrible effects of Minamata disease (a type of mercury poisoning) on the body and mind of her daughter Tomoko. Upon publication the photo became world-famous, significantly raising the international profile of Minamata disease and the struggle of the victims for recognition and compensation.

Bag the Carbon Calculators. You Didn’t Cause This.

“But what can I do to fight climate change?” is a frequently asked question for anyone that does communication on this topic – and I used to have a ready list of everyday things one can do around the house, changing light bulbs and appliances, efficient appliances and transportation, yada yada – but a few years in, I realized that was a lot of nibbling around the edges.

In the current pandemic, we can each do something by wearing a DAMN MASK to avoid getting infected or infecting others, but the larger solutions require massive scale action on the part of governments, industry, and society.
Similar with climate.
Industry, of course, figured this out long ago, and has worked to keep you thinking that we’re in this fix because of something you alone did, or that somehow if you lived in a tree stump eating pine nuts and beetles, that would solve things.

Mashable:

In a dark TV ad aired in 1971, a jerk tosses a bag of trash from a moving car. The garbage spills onto the moccasins of a buckskin-clad Native American, played by Italian American actor Espera Oscar de Corti. He sheds a tear on camera, because his world has been defiled, uglied, and corrupted by trash. The poignant ad, which won awards for excellence in advertising, promotes the catchline “People Start Pollution. People can stop it.” What’s lesser known is the nonprofit group Keep America Beautiful, funded by the very beverage and packaging juggernauts pumping out billions of plastic bottles each year (the likes of The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and Anheuser-Busch Companies), created the PSA.

The real message, underlying the staged tear and feather headdress, is that pollution is your problem, not the fault of the industry mass-producing cheap bottles.

Another heralded environmental advertising campaign, launched three decades later in 2000, also won a laudatory advertising award, a “Gold Effie.” The campaign impressed upon the American public that a different type of pollution, heat-trapping carbon pollution, is also your problem, not the problem of companies drilling deep into the Earth for, and then selling, carbonaceous fuels refined from ancient, decomposed creatures. British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals.

It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life — going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling — is largely responsible for heating the globe. A decade and a half later, “carbon footprint” is everywhere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a carbon calculator. The New York Times has a guide on “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint.”Mashable published a story in 2019 entitled “How to shrink your carbon footprint when you travel.” Outdoorsy brands love the term.

“This is one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever,” said Benjamin Franta, who researches law and history of science as a J.D.-Ph.D. student at Stanford Law School.

Continue reading “Bag the Carbon Calculators. You Didn’t Cause This.”