Monday’s tornado chain:
Category: Environmental
Massive tornado outbreak
Massive damage and at least 18 dead through Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma last night. Tornado warnings issued this morning in Tennessee and here we are, waiting to see what this imaginary global warming will inflict on the rest of the country this week:
At least 31 tornadoes ripped through the Plains and South on Sunday, leaving at least 18 people dead and forecasters warning that the worst may be yet to come.
Rescuers in Arkansas searched through the rubble overnight in suburban Little Rock where a tornado that was up to half a mile wide touched down just west of the city on Sunday, flattening homes and flipping cars and trucks in its path.
At least 16 people were killed in the state as the twister touched down at dusk and left behind a miles-long path of destruction. Deaths were also reported Oklahoma and Iowa.
“It is utter and sheer devastation”
The towns of Mayflower and Vilonia in Arkansas’ Faulkner County — which has population of just above 100,000 — were hardest hit, with at least 10 dead and dozens of homes destroyed.
“What I’m seeing is something that I cannot describe in words,” Sheriff Andy Shock told NBC News. “It is utter and sheer devastation.”
He said rescue crews were trying to be optimistic, but expected the death toll could climb once daylight hits.
“We’re praying not but there’s no telling,” he said, adding local landmarks were leveled and that at a “bare minimum” 150 homes were destroyed.
By the way, they’re predicting ice on Lake Superior into June. That’s the new normal!
Oil exec: Fracking technology is ‘dangerous and untested’
See, this guy actually believes that the truth has something to do with these decisions. Isn’t that cute?
“In a message “straight from the horse’s mouth,” a former oil executive on Tuesday urged New York state to pass a ban on the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, saying, ‘it is not safe.’
“Making fracking safe is simply not possible, not with the current technology, or with the inadequate regulations being proposed,” Louis Allstadt, former executive vice president of Mobil Oil, said during a news conference in Albany called by the anti-fracking group Elected Officials to Protect New York.
Up until his retirement in 2000, Allstadt spent 31 years at Mobil, running its marketing and refining division in Japan and managing Mobil’s worldwide supply, trading and transportation operations. After retiring to Cooperstown, NY, Allstadt said he began studying fracking after friends asked him if he thought it would be safe to have gas wells drilled by nearby Lake Otsego, where Allstadt has a home. Since that time, he’s become a vocal opponent of the shale oil and gas drilling technique.
“Now the industry will tell you that fracking has been around a long time. While that is true, the magnitude of the modern technique is very new,” Allstadt said, adding that a fracked well can require 50 to 100 times the water and chemicals compared to non-fracked wells.He also noted that methane, up to 30 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, is found to be leaking from fracked wells “at far greater rates than were previously estimated.”
No big deal
Just move along, nothing to see here:
Scientists are monitoring an iceberg roughly six times the size of Manhattan — one of the largest now in existence — that broke off from an Antarctic glacier and is heading into the open ocean.
NASA glaciologist Kelly Brunt said on Wednesday the iceberg covers about 255 square miles (660 square km) and is up to a third of a mile (500 meters) thick. Known as B31, the iceberg separated from Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier last November, Brunt added.
“It’s one that’s large enough that it warrants monitoring,” Brunt said in a telephone interview, noting that U.S. government organizations including the National Ice Center keep an eye on dozens of icebergs at any given time.
The iceberg’s present location is not in an area heavily navigated by ships.
“There’s not a lot of shipping traffic down there. We’re not particularly concerned about shipping lanes. We know where all the big ones are,” she said.
Scientists are especially interested in this iceberg not only because of its size but because it originated in an unexpected location.
Frack you, too
A family claiming they were sickened because of pollution from hydraulic fracturing operations near their home should be awarded $2.95 million for their troubles, a jury ruled on Tuesday.
The Parr family had sued Aruba Petroleum Inc. in 2011, alleging the oil and gas producer exposed them to hazardous gases, chemicals and industrial waste that seeped into the air from 22 wells drilled near the family’s 40-acre plot of land, which sits atop the Barnett Shale.
The jury returned a 5-1 verdict saying Aruba “intentionally created a private nuisance,” awarding $275,000 for losses on property value, $2 million for past physical pain and suffering, $250,000 for future physical pain and suffering, and $400,000 for mental anguish.
“They’re vindicated,” David Matthews, one of the Parr’s attorneys, wrote on his firm’s blog Tuesday. “I’m really proud of the family that went through what they went through … It’s not easy to go through a lawsuit and have your personal life uncovered and exposed to the extent this family went through.”
Uh oh
Massive tornado outbreak this weekend:
Spring 2014 has been a quiet tornado season thus far, but that’s about to change this weekend, if the predicted forecasts that meteorologists are looking at hold true. Weather experts say conditions are lining up for a series of powerful tornadoes to hit an area ranging between Tennessee and Texas from Saturday through Monday. The National Weather Service predicts a “significant multi-day severe event” in the South plains on Sunday, moving into the Mississippi Valley on Monday.
The extreme warnings stem from an interaction between an East-moving low-pressure system over the Rockies mixing with wetness from the Gulf of Mexico. That will cause the creation of supercell thunderstorms, Slate’s Eric Holthaus explains, all kept in place in the South-Southwest by a high-pressure system in Canada. That makes the area ripe for a “big severe threat” this weekend, according to The Weather Channel, an extra level on top of today’s “severe threat.”
Holthaus notes that the best historical comparisons to a weather pattern like this point to some of the worst tornado outbreaks in U.S. history. That includes the April 26, 1991, stretch of tornadoes from Texas to Iowa that caused a billion dollars in damage and included a rare F5-strength tornado. For those in need of a refresher, here are FEMA’s guidelines for how to prepare for tornadoes.
The local fight to save the Chesapeake Bay goes national
As you already know, I love the Chesapeake Bay. I remember how the waters were far too frequently too tainted for swimming, and how a moratorium on construction in the watershed brought the bay back to life. Now the contamination is creeping back, and of course big business will have its way:
So, in 2009, the Obama administration stepped in with an executive order, requiring the EPA to use a provision of the Clean Water Act to put together the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint. The Blueprint would set a “Total Maximum Daily Load,” or TMDL, an upper limit for the amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment pollution that can enter the Bay each day. The plan reduced nitrogen and phosphorus loads by about 25 percent and sediment loads by 15 percent from 2009 levels (though the exact goals vary by state).
The six states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed — Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia — as well as Washington, DC, submitted proposals to meet those TMDL deadlines by 2025. If they missed those deadlines, the EPA would take action against them. For the first time, regulators had an enforceable plan for reducing pollution in the Bay.
But then monied interests made their voices heard.
Continue reading “The local fight to save the Chesapeake Bay goes national”
Kochs go after solar panels
Can’t be cutting into their oil bidness, you know!
Homeowners and businesses that wish to generate their own cheap, renewable energy now have a force of conservative political might to contend with, and the Koch brothers are leading the charge. The L.A. Times, to its credit, found the positive spin to put on this: Little old solar “has now grown big enough to have enemies.”
The escalating battle centers over two ways traditional utilities have found to counter the rapidly growing solar market: demanding a share of the power generated by renewables and opposing net metering, which allows solar panel users to sell the extra electricity they generate back to the grid — and without which solar might no longer be affordable. The Times reports on the conservative heavyweights making a fossil fuel-powered effort to make those things happen:
The Koch brothers, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and some of the nation’s largest power companies have backed efforts in recent months to roll back state policies that favor green energy. The conservative luminaries have pushed campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina and Arizona, with the battle rapidly spreading to other states.
…The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a membership group for conservative state lawmakers, recently drafted model legislation that targeted net metering. The group also helped launch efforts by conservative lawmakers in more than half a dozen states to repeal green energy mandates.
“State governments are starting to wake up,” Christine Harbin Hanson, a spokeswoman for Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, said in an email. The organization has led the effort to overturn the mandate in Kansas, which requires that 20% of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources.
“These green energy mandates are bad policy,” said Hanson, adding that the group was hopeful Kansas would be the first of many dominoes to fall.
The group’s campaign in that state compared the green energy mandate to Obamacare, featuring ominous images of Kathleen Sebelius, the outgoing secretary of Health and Human Services, who was Kansas’ governor when the state adopted the requirement.
What’s especially disappointing is that for a while now, we’ve been hearing about how solar power is actually gaining traction in red states, with conservatives switching the focus from that liberal scourge, renewable energy, to something their base hates even more: taxes. Even Barry Goldwater Jr. has spoken out against the idea of allowing utilities to charge a monthly fee to the owners of rooftop solar panels, or what he and other advocates refer to as a “solar tax.”
Perfect storm coming?
Kate Weinberger, a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Health Sciences at Mailman School of Public Health in Columbia University studying the effects of climate change on pollen, said studies have shown that wet and warmer winters have resulted in earlier and longer allergy seasons and that the past few stormy months may be a sign that allergy sufferers will soon need to reach for the antihistamines.
“There were all of these storms and there’s been a lot of tree growth,” Weinberger said of the severe winter. “[Scientists] are theorizing that because we’ve had a wet winter the pollen season will be worse.”
Additionally, allergy seasons are usually separated into distinct seasons, with trees causing problems in the spring and grasses causing issues in the summer. However, Weinberger said there is a chance that if the weather warms very quickly it could mean plants that normally bloom at different times over a period of weeks to months will bloom all at once.
“[Trees] need to experience a certain amount of heat over a certain period before they will start flowering, so if it stays colder in the spring it will be later when they reach the threshold,” Weinberger said. “People are speculating that everything is going to show up all at once [as the plants flower] in the warm temperatures.”
Ho hum
The highest levels in 800K years? Hmm. Maybe someone should pay attention, or something:
The concentration of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that drives climate change, hit 402 parts per million this week — the highest level recorded in at least 800,000 years.
The recordings came from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which marked another ominous milestone last May when the 400 ppm threshold was crossed for the first time in recorded history.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels spike every spring but this year the threshold was crossed in March, two months earlier than last year. In fact, it’s happening “at faster rates virtually every decade,” according to James Butler, Director of NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division, a trend that “is consistent with rising fossil fuel emissions.”
400 ppm was long considered a very serious measurement but it isn’t the end — it’s just a marker on the road to ever-increasing carbon pollution levels, Butler explained in an interview on NOAA’s website. “It is a milestone, marking the fact that humans have caused carbon dioxide concentrations to rise 120 ppm since pre-industrial times, with over 90 percent of that in the past century alone. We don’t know where the tipping points are.”
When asked if the 400 ppm will be reached even earlier next year, Butler responded simply, “Yes. Every year going forward for a long time.”
While atmospheric CO2 levels never approached 400 ppm in the 800,000 years of detailed records scientists have, there is evidence that the last time the Earth experienced such high concentrations was actually several million years ago. Writing about the 400 ppm recording last year, climatologist Peter Gleick pointed to UCLA research “that suggested we would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels approaching today’s levels” and another article in the journal Paleoceanography “on paleoclimatic records that suggest CO2 concentrations (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) may have been around 400 ppm between 2 and 4.6 million years ago.”