LOS ANGELES — The discovery of missing links between earthquake faults shows how a magnitude 7.4 earthquake could rupture in the same temblor underneath Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, a new study finds. Such an earthquake would be 30 times more powerful than the magnitude 6.4 earthquake that caused the 1933 Long Beach earthquake,… Continue reading “Earthquake on the beach: Scientists think a 7.4 temblor could reach from L.A. to San Diego”
Last week, second-term Kansas governor Sam Brownback lost a legal battle over underfunding schools. The state’s Supreme Court has ordered him to rethink his method of funding schools, further highlighting the Republican governor’s fiscal failures. Taking conservative policies to the extreme, the governor cut taxes on the wealthiest citizens in his state by a whopping 29… Continue reading “Gov. Brownback’s tax cut ‘experiments’ have failed: $893M needed to fix schools”
Digby on the efforts to preserve government data before the Trump administration blows it all up:
Many of the programmers who showed up at UCLA for the event had day jobs as IT consultants or data managers at startups; others were undergrad computer science majors. The scientists in attendance, including ecologists, lab managers, and oceanographers, came from universities all over Southern California. A motley crew of data enthusiasts who assemble for projects like this is becoming something of a trend at universities across the country: Volunteer “data rescue” events in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Michigan over the last few weeks have managed to scrape hundreds of thousands of pages off of EPA.gov, NASA.gov, DOE.gov, and whitehouse.gov, uploading them to the Internet Archive. Another is planned for early February at New York University.
Hackers, librarians, scientists, and archivists had been working around the clock, at these events and in the days between, to download as much federal climate and environment data off government websites as possible before Trump took office. But suddenly, at exactly noon on Friday as Trump was sworn in, and just as the UCLA event kicked off, some of their fears began to come true: The climate change-related pages on whitehouse.gov disappeared. It’s typical of incoming administrations to take down some of their predecessor’s pages, but scrubbing all mentions of climate change is a clear indication of the Trump administration’s position on climate science.
“We’re having a heart attack,” said Laurie Allen on Friday afternoon. Allen is the assistant director for digital scholarship in the University of Pennsylvania libraries and the technical lead on a recent data-rescuing event there. “In the last four days I think we’ve been working 22 hours a day, because we were hearing that these precise changes were going to happen.”
As Digby points out, these are not paranoid people. Go read the whole thing.
Donald Trump’s transition team is instructing the Department of Energy (DOE) to hand over the names of all of the agency’s contractors and employers who have worked on key climate policies under President Barack Obama, raising concerns that a witch hunt is being orchestrated by the incoming administration. The request was included in a 74-question internal… Continue reading “Witch hunt: Trump demands list of civil servants who worked on climate policy”
Jesse Berney for Rolling Stone:
We know the next president of the United States uses his powerful platform to take revenge on individual citizens. He attacked Alec Baldwin for parodying him on Saturday Night Live, threatened to cancel a contract with Boeing because its CEO questioned his trade policy and called a union leader “terrible” for pointing out Trump lied in his characterization of the Carrier deal.
We know he doesn’t understand or care about the most fundamental constitutional rights, after he threatened to revoke the citizenship of anyone who burned a flag. We know he’s suggested using the power of his office to go after the press for vigorously reporting on what he says and does. (Quote him, and he’ll call you a liar.)
Add it all up, and what do you see? A child who reacts to the slightest perceived attack with vicious vitriol. A vengeful president who is willing to violate basic rights. A government run by incompetents, racists, bullies and conspiracy-mongers.
It’s a formula for tragedy.
No one can predict the future – we learned that lesson the hard way a month ago. But if you were to imagine what impending American fascism would look like, you couldn’t place the pieces on the board any more neatly than they’ve been placed in the last year.
Continue reading “A soon-to-be American tragedy”
Proposed new rules for oil trains:
Two federal agencies have proposed new safety regulations for oil trains. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) and the Federal Railroad Administration, both divisions of the Department of Transportation, announced the proposals Wednesday, which are aimed at sharing information with state emergency management agencies. The agencies also want to require a new test for the flammable liquids.
“This rule goes one step further to hold industry accountable to plan and prepare for the worst case scenario,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in a release. ”It would help to ensure that railroads have comprehensive plans to respond to derailments when they occur and better ensure the safety of communities living near railroads.”
The rules would require railroads to boost their current response plans from “basic” to “comprehensive” under the federal Clean Water Act, as well as prepare for the worst case scenario.
Each month, the railroads would have to provide state and tribal emergency managers with information on the number of high-hazard flammable trains expected to travel each week through each county, along with the routes of the trains and a description of the flammable liquids onboard.
WASHINGTON — As the waters from Hurricane Matthew recede, coastal residents from Florida to the Carolinas may have something else to worry about: Zika. The high winds broke through screen doors and windows, knocked out power and left behind small and large bodies of standing water that could be new breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Scientists raised… Continue reading “As Hurricane Matthew moves out, Zika could move in”
I’m very worried about my good friend Wendy, who moved earlier this year to West Palm Beach. She lives one half-block past the evacuation zone — she says you’re not allowed out on the road unless you’re in the official zone. I’m worried because she’s in a one-story ranch house.
We were already having trouble when I talked to her on the phone earlier today; the signal kept dropping. She promised to let me know she’s okay when it’s all over.
No, really. Because who cares about something as silly as food safety?
Since it’s only been a few weeks since I had food poisoning, I do care. (And probably those parents whose kids have died from e.coli in their food.)
So we just had the hottest month in the past 1,000 years, and the scientists say just five more years of carbon dioxide emissions at current levels will destroy any chance of restraining temperatures to a 1.5C increase and avoid runaway climate change.
https://twitter.com/PeterGleick/status/765422779986423810
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says we’ve had 14 months of record-breaking temperatures. That means global warming is closer to the point where scientists predict devastating, irreversible consequences.
A few weeks ago, we had a “rare” late-August tornado outbreak in Indiana. Yes, notice the increase in the use of the word “rare” in weather stories – also “unusual,” “unprecedented,” and “record-breaking.”
Chris Field, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said in a recent interview, “The scary thing is that we are moving into an era where it will be a surprise when each new month or year isn’t one of the hottest on record.”
Everything gets more unusual by the minute.
You will be surprised, I am sure, to know that the Republicans still aren’t doing squat. I suppose they all have spaceships to take their families to a better place, amirite?
Fortunately, President Obama just signed the Paris climate change agreement — with China. This is a big fucking deal, and I’m hopeful the next President Clinton will take it even further.
It's official: The U.S. and China have entered into the #ParisAgreement: https://t.co/RQIMfGp7rg pic.twitter.com/7IPK6WAeZD
— White House Archived (@ObamaWhiteHouse) September 3, 2016
