Wildfire that closed key California highway explodes in size

Associated Press

 Associated Press       September 9, 2018

Climate Change Could Completely Transform Earth’s Ecosystems

Climate Change Could Completely Transform Earth’s Ecosystems

By Olivia Rosane       September 1, 2018

Lake Atescatempa in Guatemala has dried up due to drought and high temperatures. MARVIN RECINOS / AFP / Getty Images

Fifty two million years ago, crocodiles swam in the Arctic. Twenty thousand years ago, an ice sheet covered Manhattan. Earth’s ecosystems have changed dramatically as the climate has shifted, and now scientists are trying to determine how they might respond to the current era of human-caused climate change.

Forty-two scientists contributed to a study published in Science Friday that examined how land-based plants had responded to temperature changes of four to seven degrees Celsius since the height of the ice age in order to predict how land-based ecosystems might respond to similar temperature changes predicted for the future.

They found that, if we do not act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the earth’s entire terrestrial biome is 75 percent likely to change completely, impacting biodiversity and making life difficult for anyone whose livelihood is based around an ecosystem as it exists now.

“Having this kind of change occur at such a massive scale in such a short period of time is going to create unprecedented challenges for natural-resource management,” study author and U.S. Geological Survey climate scientist Stephen Jackson told The Atlantic.

The researchers looked at 594 examples of ecosystem change over time to get an understanding of what sorts of changes we could expect from unmitigated global warming.

“Five miles from where I sit is the middle of the Sonoran Desert and Saguaro National Park,” Jackson told The Atlantic from his desk in Tucson, Arizona. “Today, there’s big saguaro cacti, mesquite trees, ironwood trees. If we were to roll back the calendar 20,000 years, and we went to the same place, we would find a woodland of evergreen trees.”

But while the period the researchers studied spanned around 21,000 years, similar temperature changes could occur within the next 100, and the speed of change could have a major impact.

“If you’re a wildlife manager and your ecosystem changes, if you’re a forest manager trying to respond to wildfires, if you’re a water manager who is responsible for converting rainfall estimates into reservoir levels,” Jackson told The Atlantic, “then the old rules are not necessarily going to apply.”

Another study, published Thursday in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, looked at how the individual species within ecosystems might respond to these dramatic temperature changes.

The study, led by the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, looked to the past to see how plants and animals had responded to changes in their environment over the past million years.

“From fossils and other biological ‘archives,’ we have access to a nearly limitless number of case studies throughout Earth’s history. This provides us with valuable knowledge of how climate changes of various rates, magnitudes and types can affect biodiversity,” Jackson, who also co-authored the second study, said in a University of Copenhagen press release.

Scientists had previously believed species would simply migrate in response to changing climates, but the historical examples reviewed for this study showed they often adapted over time by changing their behavior or body color or shape.

However, researchers were concerned the pace of current climate change might be too fast for evolution to keep up.

“We know animals and plants have prevented extinction by adapt or migrate in the past. However, the models we use today to predict future climate change, foresee magnitudes and rates of change, which have been exceptionally rare in the last million years,” co-author Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) said in the university release.

Rodriquez-Sanchez said more research was needed to predict how species might respond to current climate change, but hoped the past examples of successful adaptation could help policy makers craft effective conservation decisions.

Stunning Victory for Indigenous Nations as Canada Halts Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion

EcoWatch

Stunning Victory for Indigenous Nations as Canada Halts Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion

By Lorraine Chow         August 30, 2018

Pipeline intended to cross Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Robert McGouey / Getty Images

A Canadian court “quashed” approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion on Thursday, a major setback for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose government agreed to purchase the controversial project from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion Canadian dollars (U.S. $3.5 billion) in May.

It’s a stunning victory for Indigenous groups and environmentalists opposed to the project, which is designed to nearly triple the amount of tar sands transported from Alberta to the coast of British Columbia.

The Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the National Energy Board’s review—as explained by the Canadian Press—”was so flawed that the federal government could not rely on it as a basis for its decision to approve the expansion.”

The project has been at the center of widespread protests from environmental groups and First Nations ever since November 2016, when Trudeau approved a $7.4 billion expansion of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline that would increase the transport of Alberta tar sands oil from the current 300,000 barrels per day to 890,000 barrels per day and increase tanker traffic nearly seven-fold through the Burrard Inlet.

Specifically, the court said it was an “unjustifiable failure” that the National Energy Board did not consider the environmental impacts of the increased tanker traffic.

The court additionally concluded that the government “fell well short” with properly consulting with the Indigenous groups involved in the case, including the Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish on British Columbia’s south coast.

The ruling will force the National Energy Board to redo its review of the pipeline and the government to restart consultations with the Indigenous groups. It also means that the construction that has already began in central Alberta must cease.

In effect, the court has halted the 1,150-kilometer project indefinitely and it will remain in “legal limbo until the energy regulator and the government reassess their approvals to satisfy the court’s demands,” CBCwrote about today’s decision.

Notably, the decision was made the same day Kinder Morgan’s shareholders voted to approve the $4.5 billion sale to Canada, which means the country owns a proposed pipeline project that could be subject to years of further review, the publication pointed out.

The court’s judgment could be appealed a final time to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Minister of Finance Bill Morneau said that the government has received the ruling and will review the decision.

Largest offshore wind farm opens off England’s coast

engadget

Largest offshore wind farm opens off England’s coast

It can power nearly 600,000 homes.
By Mallory Locklear      September 7, 2018
Ørsted 

The largest offshore wind farm to date has officially opened off of the Cumbrian coast in the Irish Sea and it has the ability to power 590,000 homes. The 659-megawatt Walney Extension takes up an area roughly the size of 20,000 soccer pitches and is made of 87 wind turbines. “The UK is the global leader in offshore wind and Walney Extension showcases the industry’s incredible success story,” said Matthew Wright, the UK managing director at Ørsted, the Danish company that developed the wind farm. “The project, completed on time and within budget, also marks another important step towards Ørsted’s vision of a world that runs entirely on green energy.”

While Walney Extension may currently be the largest offshore wind farm in the world, it won’t be for long. A number of other larger projects are in the works including ScottishPower’s East Anglia One and Ørsted’s Hornsea Projects One and Two. East Anglia One and Hornsea Project One, which have capacities of 714 megawatts and 1,200 megawatts, respectively, are both scheduled to be operational in 2020. The 1,400-megawatt Hornsea Project Two is scheduled to be operational by 2022 and will be capable of powering 1.8 million homes.

Bob Woodward’s Reporting Shows Trump’s Very Good Brain Is Trapped in the 1980s

Esquire

Bob Woodward’s Reporting Shows Trump’s Very Good Brain Is Trapped in the 1980s

Most of Donald Trump’s “knowledge” is just fragments of reality that have been fermenting, completely unexamined.

By Jack Holmes       September 5, 2018

Donald J. Trump;Kate Wollman [Misc.]Getty ImagesTed Thai.

As the President of the United States flails about wildly in response to a new book on his White House, desperately insisting that he has never called his own attorney general “mentally retarded,” there’s somehow a school of thought that there’s nothing much to see here. We already knew Donald Trump was a vindictive know-nothing, the thinking goes. We knew members of his staff work to prevent him from wreaking even more havoc on the world. But in addition to the revelations about how senior staffers literally steal documents off Trump’s desk to stop him from unleashing chaos on a whim, there are further insights into how the president’s brain works.

Surprise, surprise: it doesn’t work all that well. Axios also got its hands on a copy of Bob Woodward’s Fear:

“Several times [chief economic adviser Gary] Cohn just asked the president, ‘Why do you have these views [on trade]?’ ‘I just do,’ Trump replied. ‘I’ve had these views for 30 years.’ ‘That doesn’t mean they’re right,’ Cohn said. ‘I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.'”

This is a stunning reminder that what constitutes Donald Trump’s knowledge is mostly just fragments of reality he internalized around 1982. They have been fermenting there ever since, continually filtering through his kaleidoscopic reasoning faculties as he dispenses crank observations at cocktail parties, never to be altered or removed because the governing forces of his psyche are almighty stubbornness and delusional ego. The president’s views on trade are his views because they’ve been his views for 30 years. They’re right because they’re his views and always have been. For Christ’s sake, this is trade. No wonder he’s said climate change is a Chinese hoax.

President Trump Holds Listening Session With Business Leaders

He also just doesn’t believe in reality. He’s also incredibly lazy.

Trump to Tom Bossert, the president’s adviser for homeland security, cyber security and counterterrorism, who asked Trump if he had a minute: “I want to watch the Masters. … You and your cyber … are going to get me in a war — with all your cyber shit.”

Jesus Christ almighty, the man thought that once you get elected the job basically involves watching TV coverage about how great you are. Plenty of time for golf, too. And there’s even golf on the teevee!

It’s easy to take a more passive approach when you genuinely don’t care about what happens to people you’re not related to—which is what longtime Trump chronicler Tim O’Brien highlighted in Bloomberg this morning:

Trump – about to be on the receiving end of a potentially damaging book written by a Washington insider with bipartisan, established credentials – is utterly calm on the recording. And he’s calm, despite daily temper tantrums over media coverage, because he generally doesn’t care about the long-term damage he might inflict on himself or those around him as long as he’s the center of attention.

This plays out in larger and more troubling ways as well, according to Woodward’s book, and history may judge most of Trump’s White House team and political party harshly for enabling the president’s radical solipsism. After Trump criticizes the U.S.’s military commitment to South Korea, one White House adviser asks Trump what he would “need in the region to sleep well at night.”

“I wouldn’t need a [expletive] thing,” Trump replies. “And I’d sleep like a baby.”

He knows nothing about anything and cares less. That’s just as true if the thing is a person. It’s even debatable whether he’d bat an eye if the kid who shares his name is thrown in the slammer. Meanwhile, he’s retweeting his chief of staff and Secretary of Defense as they boldly deny ever calling him “unhinged,” an “idiot,” or having the mental sophistication of a “sixth-grader.” It’s all about him, and anything in the world can be contorted, however implausibly, to keep the air in his heaving balloon of an ego. It’s all as it seems, but that doesn’t make it any less horrifying.


Trump blasts critical op-ed from anonymous senior official

Yahoo News – Associated Press

Trump blasts critical op-ed from anonymous senior official

Zeke Miller and Catherine Lucey, Associated Press,    September 5, 2018
Trump blasts critical op-ed from anonymous senior official

President Donald Trump listens to Emir of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a striking anonymous broadside, a senior Trump administration official wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times on Wednesday claiming to be part of a group of people “working diligently from within” to impede President Donald Trump’s “worst inclinations” and ill-conceived parts of his agenda.

Trump said it was a “gutless editorial” and “really a disgrace,” and his press secretary called on the official to resign.

Later, Trump tweeted: “TREASON?”

The writer, claiming to be part of the “resistance” to Trump but not from the left, said, “Many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” The newspaper described the author of the column only as a senior official in the Trump administration.

“It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room,” the author continued. “We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.”

A defiant Trump, appearing at an unrelated event at the White House, lashed out at the Times for publishing the op-ed.

“They don’t like Donald Trump and I don’t like them,” he said of the newspaper. The op-ed pages of the newspaper are managed separately from its news department.

The essay immediately triggered a wild guessing game as to the author’s identity on social media, in newsrooms and inside the West Wing, where officials were blindsided by its publication.

And in a blistering statement, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused the author of choosing to “deceive” the president by remaining in the administration.

“He is not putting country first, but putting himself and his ego ahead of the will of the American people,” she said. “The coward should do the right thing and resign.”

Sanders also called on the Times to “issue an apology” for publishing the piece, calling it a “pathetic, reckless, and selfish op-ed.”

A “House of Cards”-style plot twist in an already over-the-top administration, Trump allies and political insiders scrambled late Wednesday to unmask the writer.

The text was pulled apart for clues: The writer is identified as an “administration official”; does that mean a person who works outside the White House? The references to Russia and the late Sen. John McCain — do they suggest someone working in national security? Does the writing style sound like someone who worked at a think tank? In a tweet, the Times used the pronoun “he” to refer to the writer; does that rule out all women?

The newspaper later said the tweet referring to “he” had been “drafted by someone who is not aware of the author’s identity, including the gender, so the use of ‘he’ was an error.”

Hotly debated on Twitter was the author’s use of the word “lodestar,” which pops up frequently in speeches by Vice President Mike Pence. Could the anonymous figure be someone in Pence’s orbit? Others argued that the word “lodestar” could have been included to throw people off.

Showing her trademark ability to attract attention, former administration official Omarosa Manigault Newman tweeted that clues about the writer’s identity were in her recently released tell-all book, offering a page number: 330. The reality star writes on that page: “many in this silent army are in his party, his administration, and even in his own family.”

The anonymous author wrote in the Times that where Trump has had successes, they have come “despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.”

The assertions in the column were largely in line with complaints about Trump’s behavior that have repeatedly been raised by various administration officials, often speaking on condition of anonymity. And they were published a day after the release of details from an explosive new book by longtime journalist Bob Woodward that laid bare concerns among the highest echelon of Trump aides about the president’s judgment.

The writer of the Times op-ed said Trump aides are aware of the president’s faults and “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.”

The writer also alleged “there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment” because of the “instability” witnessed in the president. The 25th Amendment allows the vice president to take over if the commander in chief is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It requires that the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet back relieving the president.

The writer added: “This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.”

Greener growth could add $26 trillion to world economy by 2030: study

Reuters

By Alister Doyle and Nina Chestney, Reuters      September 4, 2018
FILE PHOTO: A man kite surfs in front of the Burbo Bank wind farm near New Brighton
A man kite surfs in front of the Burbo Bank wind farm near New Brighton, Britain, September 3, 2018. REUTERS/Phil Noble/File Photo

By Alister Doyle and Nina Chestney

OSLO/LONDON (Reuters) – Strong action to combat climate change could cumulatively add at least $26 trillion to the world economy by 2030, according to a study on Wednesday which seeks to dispel fears that a shift from fossil fuels will undermine growth.

President Donald Trump, for instance, said last year that he will pull the United States out of a global climate pact called the Paris Agreement because it would impose what he called “draconian financial and economic burdens” on his country.

By contrast, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, which includes former heads of government, business leaders and economists, said there was “unprecedented momentum” toward greener growth that would boost jobs and countries’ economies.

Bold climate action could deliver at least $26 trillion in net cumulative benefits from now until 2030 compared with business as usual, it said.

“There’s still a perception that moving toward a low-carbon path would be costly,” lead author Helen Mountford told Reuters. “What we are trying to do with this report is once and for all put the nails in the coffin on that idea.”

The commission’s study adds detailed projections since it first issued a report in 2014 to highlight economic opportunities from a shift away from fossil fuels.

Smarter investments in cleaner energy, cities, food and land use, water and industry could generate 65 million new jobs in 2030, equivalent to the workforces of Egypt and Britain combined, the study said.

A shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energies such as wind and solar power would avoid 700,000 premature deaths from air pollution in 2030, it added.

The report recommended high prices on carbon dioxide emissions of $40-$80 per tonne by 2020 in major economies.

Subsidy reforms in the energy sector, coupled with higher carbon prices, could raise $2.8 trillion a year in government revenues in 2030, it said.

Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, honorary chair of the Commission, said it was “a manifesto for how we can turn better growth and a better climate into reality”. Co-chairs include Paul Pohlman, chief executive of consumer goods group Unilever, and Professor Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics.

Trump, who doubts that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are the prime cause of climate change and wants to promote the coal industry, has said the 2015 Paris Agreement could cost 2.7 million U.S. jobs by 2025.

But the report predicted that U.S. jobs lost in fossil fuels can be more than offset by a rise in employment in renewables and construction. It said 476,000 people were now employed in wind and solar power in the United States.

Despite signs of climate action the report said “we are not making progress fast enough” to limit a rise in temperatures linked to more floods, heat waves, wildfires and rising sea levels.

(editing by David Stamp)

If Trump Ever Got Impeached?

Randy Rainbow

August 27, 2018

***NEW VIDEO***

Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking.

IF YOU EVER GOT IMPEACHED – Randy Rainbow Song Parody

***NEW VIDEO***Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking. 🌪🌈🎵❤️🧠

Posted by Randy Rainbow on Monday, August 27, 2018

One of the best political ads of the season!

NowThis Politics

August 13, 2018

Watch one of the most viral political ads of 2018

MJ Hegar Has One of the Most Viral Ads of 2018

Watch one of the most viral political ads of 2018

Posted by NowThis Politics on Monday, August 13, 2018