Somewhere nestled deep in the Ozarks, I’m spending a week helping my son as he boots up an organic farming operation. Posting may be somewhat sporadic this week, we’ll see. For the moment I have a connection.
No need for a gym to be getting my workouts – he’s a tough work boss, and there are endless things to be done that involve digging, pulling, carrying, reaching, stretching, sweating and puffing. This is high touch, hands on farming.
I half-joke he should start advertising a “Farm boy functional strength” workshop. Charge some city slickers handsomely to push their cores to new undreamt of levels. You’d have to be willing to swing a shovel with him till 1:15 am under a head lamp, just sayin’.
In a shocking turn of events, Hurricane #Otis in the Eastern Pacific has unexpectedly, explosively intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane in just 12 hours.
Even worse, the storm is expected to make a catastrophic landfall tonight as a Category 5 hurricane near Acapulco, Mexico, home to 1 million people. Only 18 hours ago, people were expecting a tropical storm at landfall, and now a devastating Category 5 storm is likely.
This is pretty much a worst-case scenario, as residents have little time to find a safe shelter and protect life and property from this life-threatening storm.
A major hurricane (Category 3+) has never made landfall within 50 miles of Acapulco, let alone a Category 5 hurricane. Otis could become the first Eastern Pacific hurricane ever recorded to make landfall as a Category 5 in Mexico.
Anyone in or near Acapulco should rush storm preparations to completion as their is little time left to shelter from #Otis.
With warmer oceans serving as fuel, Atlantic hurricanes are now more than twice as likely as before to rapidly intensify from wimpy minor hurricanes to powerful and catastrophic, a study said Thursday.
Last month Hurricane Lee went from barely a hurricane at 80 mph (129 kph) to the most powerful Category 5 hurricane with 155 mph (249 kph) winds in 24 hours. In 2017, before it devastated Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria went from a Category 1 storm with 90 mph (145 kph) to a top-of-the-chart whopper with 160 mph (257 kph) winds in just 15 hours.
First, a look back at the good old days of 2018, when there was a social media site called “Twitter” that was, at least somewhat, trying to do something about the spread of misinformation.
A new study published in Science finds that false news online travels “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth.” And the effect is more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.
Falsehoods are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth, researchers found. And false news reached 1,500 people about six times faster than the truth.
The study, by Soroush Vosoughi and associate professor Deb Roy, both of the MIT Media Lab, and MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral, is the largest-ever longitudinal study of the spread of false news online. It uses the term “false news” instead of “fake news” because the latter “has lost all connection to the actual veracity of the information presented, rendering it meaningless for use in academic classification,” the authors write.
To track the spread of news, the researchers investigated all the true and false news stories verified by six independent fact-checking organizations that were distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. They studied approximately 126,000 cascades — defined as “instances of a rumor spreading pattern that exhibits an unbroken retweet chain with a common, singular origin” — on Twitter about contested news stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. Twitter provided access to data and provided funding for the study.
Now, an educator is trying a new approach to making students social media literate.
Our beliefs inform our decisions and actions, so being misinformed can have serious consequences. Yet while protecting ourselves from misinformation is essential, trying to debunk every false claim after it pops up can feel like an overwhelming and endless game of Whack-A-Mole.
Thankfully, inoculation theory may provide one solution (McGuire and Papageorgis 1961). Similar to how a vaccine builds immunity to a pathogen by exposing our bodies to a weakened form of the pathogen, we can build immunity to misinformation by exposing our minds to a weakened form of misinformation. We can deliver misinformation in a weakened form by combining two elements: a warning of the threat of being misled and counterarguments or refutations explaining how the misinformation is misleading (Traberg et al. 2022). A growing body of evidence shows that inoculation can train our minds to identify (and therefore not fall for) misinformation and has the potential for large-scale use with long-term protection (Traberg et al. 2022).
There are a variety of types of inoculation (see Table 1). The primary inoculation methods are either fact-based or technique-based (a less studied type is source-based). Fact-based inoculation corrects misinformation with factual explanations and is therefore limited to a particular topic. Technique-based inoculation explains the strategies used to mislead, such as logical fallacies or rhetorical techniques, providing resistance against the same techniques in different types of misinformation (Cook et al. 2017).
Inoculation delivery mechanisms can be either passive or active (another less studied type is experiential). Passive inoculation occurs when the facts or techniques used to mislead are explained to the audience, while active inoculation builds mental immunity by getting people to actively create the misinformation themselves (Roozenbeek and van der Linden 2019).
By the end of this August, the U.S. had already set a new record for the annual number of billion-dollar disasters, which continues a trend toward more and costlier calamities occurring since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began tracking such data in the 1980s. At that time, a disaster causing at least $1 billion in damage hit the U.S. about every three months; now they happen about every three weeks, says Adam Smith, a NOAA climatologist who helps track the data.
And the costs of such disasters are almost certainly underestimates, underscoring how far behind the U.S. is in preventing and preparing for disasters at a time when climate change is exacerbating many of them. “It’s not a sustainable situation,” Smith says.
Through the end of August, NOAA’s tally showed 23 disasters that were confirmed to have cost at least $1 billion so far this year, which surpasses the record of 22 that was set in 2020. That latter number “shattered” the record of 16 events that happened in 2011 and in 2017, Smith says. He remembers thinking in 2017, “‘This record’s going to last for quite a while,’” only to be proven wrong just three years later.
I’m on the road, helping my son on his organic farm in Arkansas, so posts will be irregular this week. Meantime, one of the most important things you could watch this morning is this Australian 60 Minutes report on Donald Trump’s widely reported relationship with an Australian billionaire, which adds depth and detail. It’s not reassuring.
I’m not a stock picker, but Motley Fool wrote this week that Small Modular Reactor company Nuscale stock has been getting “thrashed”. Which would not be good, as this is one of the industry’s leaders.
NuScale Power (NYSE:SMR) -10.5% in Friday’s trading and down 21% in the two days to an all-time low after short seller Iceberg Research released a negative report, saying “a fake contract and a major contract in peril cast doubt” on the company’s viability.
Earlier this month, NuScale (SMR) shares surged on news that Standard Power chose its small modular reactor technology to power two facilities it plans to develop, one in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania.
Iceberg said the contract has “zero chance” of being executed, since Standard Power does not have the means to fulfill contracts of such size, and said Standard Power’s managing director was found guilty of securities fraud in the past.
NuScale (SMR) has a “more credible contract” with the Carbon Free Power Project for Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, but the company was given only until January 2024 to raise project commitments to 80%, or 370 MWe, from the existing 26%, or 120 MWe, or risk termination.
“We are three months to the deadline and subscriptions have not moved an inch,” Iceberg said.
NuScale (SMR) has ~15 months before its cash runs out, according to Iceberg, which said it expects further shareholder dilution, as “completion of the CFPP remains an iffy prospect with its constant cost overruns.”
NuScale’s (SMR) “delusional contract with Standard Power seems more like an act of desperation to shore up investor confidence, rather than a strategic move,” the report said, adding the company has “little to no value without government support. Even if that support continues, the DoE’s usual policy is that costs have to be shared with the private sector, meaning that existing shareholders will be diluted.”
NuScale (SMR) has not yet issued a response to the report, but Standard Power said it disagreed with Iceberg’s “unsubstantiated allegations” and “inaccurate information.”
Fossil Fuel’s game of intimidation is global. Slovakia’s new President rejected a candidate for a Cabinet level Environmental post because that individual was a climate science denier, and was associated with threats of violence against Environmentalists and hateful statements against the LGBTQ community. Also, Putin connections – do we get it yet?
Slovakia’s president announced Thursday that she is postponing the appointment of a new Cabinet following last month’s parliamentary election because she cannot accept the nomination of a person who doesn’t believe in the threat of climate change as environment minister.
Liberal President Zuzana Caputova said Rudolf Huliak, who was nominated by the ultranationalist and pro-Russian Slovak National Party, could not ensure the proper functioning of the ministry because he opposes the government’s long-term environmental policies and Slovakia’s international obligations.
“A candidate who has not recognized the scientific consensus on climate change and asserts no real climate crisis exists cannot be in charge and represent a ministry whose main role is the protection of nature, landscape and the Earth’s climate system,” Caputova said in a statement.
She also mentioned Huliak’s advocacy of violence against environmentalists as a reason not to swear him in. Huliak, the mayor of the town of Ocova in central Slovakia, has also attacked LGBT+ people, the European Union and expressed pro-Russian views.
When Očová mayor Rudolf Huliak’s name first appeared on the list of potential candidates for ministries in Robert Fico’s fourth government, eyebrows were immediately raised.
Known for previously spreading conspiracy theories, making hateful statements against conservationists and the LGBT+ community, and climate change denial, two petitions were immediately launched – one against the potential controversial appointment, and one supporting his nomination.
I started interviewing climate scientists 15 years ago, who were being harassed and threatened after their research showed the need to end dependence on fossil fuels. In the past year, while interviewing farmers in the midwest, who wanted to site clean energy on their land, I heard accounts of abuse that reminded me very much like those of the scientists.
Now, it’s Congress people in the US House on the receiving end. Common thread? At bottom, it’s the serious threat to the power of the fossil fuel industry. Get it now?
Shortly after Representative Nick LaLota, a first-term Republican from New York, voted against Representative Jim Jordan’s bid for speaker, the threats began pouring in.
“If I see your face, I will whip all the hair out of your head you scumbag,” read one expletive-laden email.
The wife of Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska has begun sleeping with a loaded gun after receiving increasingly menacing anonymous calls and texts. Representative Drew Ferguson of Georgia on Thursday joined a growing cadre of holdouts against Mr. Jordan’s candidacy who said they had received death threats — and added that members of his family had become targets as well.
We know that the very same organizations that targeted scientists a decade ago, have been involved organizing the threats against farmers and landowners today. In 2012, The Guardian published documents describing a conference in Washington DC that brought together right wing activists from across the country, and trained them in a set of tactics to deploy against clean energy in their communities. The conference organizer, then known as the American Traditions Institute, had been active in harassing and persecuting climate scientists. ATI has since been rebranded as “E & E Legal”. One of the leading organizers of anti clean energy activity in the midwest, Kevon Martis, was one of the original trainees, and continues to be extremely active in this space. Mr Martis had made legal threats against me and several others I know who have had the temerity to question him.
A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama’s energy agenda.
A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.
More than 80% of ships are speeding through “go slow” zones set by environmental regulators along the U.S. East Coast to protect endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, according to a report released on Thursday by environmental group Oceana.
North Atlantic Right Whales are on the brink of extinction, numbering just 340, with ship strikes among the top causes of death.
Oceana said it analyzed boat speeds from November 2020 through July 2022 in slow zones established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) along the East Coast and found that 84% of boats sped through mandatory slow zones, and 82% sped through voluntary slow zones.
Cargo ships schlep thousands of millions of tons of cargo around the world every year, belching out 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions as they traverse the seas. But the real damage is done by the contents of their holds. By weight, 40% of maritime trade consists either of fossil fuels on their way to be burned or of chemicals derived directly from fossil fuels.
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — Federal environmental and energy officials moved Wednesday to quell a growing controversy over whether work done by the offshore wind power industry is killing whales in the northeastern U.S., saying there is no evidence this is happening.
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NOAA officials said they have been studying the phenomenon of humpback whales dying at elevated rates along the East Coast since January 2016. During that period, 178 of the animals have washed ashore dead between Maine and Florida.
Postmortem examinations were able to be done on about half the animals, and of those, 40% showed evidence of “human interaction,” such as entanglement with fishing gear or being struck by vessels, said Lauren Gaches, a NOAA spokesperson. In other cases, the animals were too decomposed for an effective investigation.
In no case, authorities said, has a whale been proved to have been killed by offshore wind activity. “I want to be unambiguous: There is no information supporting that any of the equipment used in support of offshore wind development could directly lead to the death of a whale,” said Benjamin Laws, deputy chief for permits and conservation with NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources. “There are no known connections between any offshore wind activities and any whale strandings.”
