White House Launches Climate Change Communication Tool that Treats Citizens Like Adults

Screenshot of an interactive map accessible from data.gov/climate showing expected inundation of areas of New York City based on different projections of sea level. (Source: NOAA and data.gov/climate)

A day after a major scientific organization released an embarrassingly ineffective report aimed at communicating the realities of climate change, the White House has launched something entirely different — and better.

For now, it is a web portal that serves as a kind of clearinghouse for all manner of information on how sea level rise is remaking our coasts and posing risks to those who live and work along them.

The screenshot above shows one of the interactive tools available on the site, data.gov/climate. In stunning graphic detail, it shows areas in the New York metro area that would become inundated in the future based on different projections of sea level rise. It’s one of just dozens of such tools available right now on the site.

And according to the White House, it is just the start of a major effort at climate change communication. The effort is designed to enable citizens to see how climate change is affecting them where they live and work, and what they might expect in the future, through interactive, graphics-based digital tools.

Yesterday’s report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science was, at its heart, a “We’re scientists, so listen to what we say” effort. In contrast, the initiative launched by the White House today treats people like grownups and gives them powerful tools to learn for themselves what’s happening. And unlike the AAAS report, its ultimate goal is to take full advantage of the power of digital technology — and visual communication — to empower people to plan for a future of climate change.

I’ve only had time to scratch the surface of the new web site. But so far, I’m impressed. And I know that it will be helpful in my future reporting on climate change.

To offer just one example, the web site offers access to an online, interactive tool from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that allows users to select a county and get a quick snapshot of its demographics, infrastructure and environment within flood zones. The results include a floodplain map, and graphics showing the overall population in floodplains, as well as the population over 65 years of age and in poverty that live in these areas, along with a plethora of other useful statistics and information.

I’ll be poking around the new site in coming days, and I may come back with an update on what I find.

View the original article here

Washington Post Co to change name to Graham Holdings Co

Washington Post (R) and Washington Times newspaper boxes are pictured outside the entrance to the Washington Post headquarters in Washington, August 5, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Stelios Varias

View the original article here

[News Focus] Climate Change: In the Hot Seat

Science 8 November 2013:
Vol. 342 no. 6159 pp. 688-689
DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6159.688 Climate Change Climate Change For climate scientists, extreme weather is risky territory. There is no question that global warming is real, but the science linking any one hurricane, drought, or flood to climate change is shaky. And yet laypeople, politicians, and activists inevitably seize on vivid, easy-to-grasp weather events to make points about abstract, long-term climate. But climate researchers aren't giving up. With more research and new methods for gauging the links between climate change and weather, they may be able to answer the "Is this climate change?" question on the spot—and turn extreme weather events into moments of teachable science.

View the original article here

Faculty Discuss Pending Climate Change Regulations

In an attempt to address global changes in climate, the Obama administration plans to use the Clean Air Act to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The first set of proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations -- aimed at reducing power plants' carbon emissions -- is due by Sept. 20.

In a live webcast conversation at 1:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 16, three Duke scholars will preview the legal, political, environmental and economic implications of the proposed regulations.

Watch the "Office Hours" conversation live on Duke's YouTube channel. To pose a question to the participants, post it on Twitter with the hashtag #dukelive or email it to live@duke.edu.

Participating in the conversation will be Jonas Monast, director of the Climate and Energy Program at Duke's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions; Robert Brenner a senior fellow at the Nicholas Institute; and Jonathan Wiener, the William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School.

In announcing this summer his intention to use the Clean Air Act to limit greenhouse gas emissions, President Obama said, "For the sake of our children, and the health and safety of all Americans, I'm directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants, and complete new pollution standards for both new and existing power plants."

The Duke researchers will comment on what to look for in the EPA's upcoming proposal, what the regulations could mean for long-term climate policy and what technological innovations might affect climate change.

"Office Hours" is a live webcast series for the university community and others to engage with Duke scholars and their research. Watch archived episodes on YouTube or iTunes.

Go to the gallery
View Videos, Slideshows & More

View the original article here

Science Podcast - Psychology of change, negative absolute temperature, & the death of a star (4 Jan 2013)

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

View the original article here

Wisconsin's health-care fight illustrates challenges as states change leadership

MADISON, WIS. - Two weeks after President Obama signed the nation's health-care overhaul into law, then-Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D) issued an executive order creating an Office of Health Care Reform.

Over the next eight months, the Badger State made more headway than virtually anywhere else in the country at preparing to carry the statute out. It designed - and presented at the White House - the country's only prototype for how people and small businesses could navigate a new health insurance marketplace online. It produced a 205-page blueprint envisioning that marketplace as a "transformative force," steering people toward care of high quality and low cost.

Then, in late January, Doyle's Republican successor, Scott Walker, issued his own executive order, dissolving the health reform office and replacing it with the Office of Free Market Health Care.

"We view this as a fundamentally different approach than what the past [Wisconsin] administration was doing - and what . . . the Obama administration is pushing," Walker said in the first interview he has given about health-care reform since assuming office.

Wisconsin's U-turn, as sharp as anywhere in the country, illustrates how the views of state leaders are shaping the way the health-care overhaul envisioned by Congress will work on the ground. It illustrates, too, the treacherous terrain the Obama administration and congressional Democrats are walking by entrusting states to carry out major parts of the plan now that 29 governors are Republicans, including 18 who - like Walker - have taken office this winter. In Wisconsin, as in five other states, both chambers of the legislature also have just switched to GOP control.

"We've gone from one kind of boldness to another," said Robert Kraig, executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin and a leading liberal activist on health care in this university town with its granite-domed state Capitol.

But being dead set against the health law is not proving to be a simple matter of saying no to everything it contains. The new opposition is subtler but no less profound - a process of picking and choosing provisions to embrace or reject, of taking some grants offered by the federal government while spurning others, of striving to kill the law in Congress or the courts while preparing a conservative alternative.

Walker, best known for his effort to demolish rights to collective bargaining for government employees, thinks that the health-care statute is unconstitutional and that the government has no business influencing people's health-care choices. Doyle's aides estimated that the law would save Wisconsin $850 million by the end of the decade; Walker's estimate that it would cost $433 million.

Where Wisconsin is coming from

With states required by 2014 to carry out the law's core features - among them, widening access to private and public insurance - Wisconsin is in a more auspicious starting place than most. Just 6 percent of its residents lack health coverage, the second-lowest proportion in the country. And over the years, Wisconsin repeatedly has expanded Medicaid, called BadgerCare here, so that an unusually large share of people already has public insurance.

Those distinctions are part of the Walker administration's justification for resisting federal requirements. "Wisconsin . . . already has accomplished much of what [the law] aspires to do," said Dennis G. Smith, the new secretary of the state's Department of Health Services.

Smith, the driving force behind Wisconsin's about-face, arrived from Washington in January with a reputation as a mild-mannered, highly conservative thinker on health policy. Under President George W. Bush, he was in charge of Medicaid at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. More recently, he was at the Heritage Foundation, writing criticisms of the new federal law. He said in an interview that he did not have ties to Wisconsin or know Walker before mutual acquaintances, including Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, suggested to both men that they should talk.

In a primary example of obeying the law selectively, Walker and Smith said they will create, as the statute envisions, one or more marketplaces called exchanges to help individuals and small businesses buy insurance. But the exchanges will not do everything the law says. "We believe it's got to be free-market driven, not government driven," Walker said.

View the original article here

Oceans may explain slowdown in climate change: study

The tide comes in as the sun sets on the seafront in Scarborough, northern England February 26, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Dylan Martinez

By Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle

OSLO | Sun Apr 7, 2013 1:04pm EDT

OSLO (Reuters) - Climate change could get worse quickly if huge amounts of extra heat absorbed by the oceans are released back into the air, scientists said after unveiling new research showing that oceans have helped mitigate the effects of warming since 2000.

Heat-trapping gases are being emitted into the atmosphere faster than ever, and the 10 hottest years since records began have all taken place since 1998. But the rate at which the earth's surface is heating up has slowed somewhat since 2000, causing scientists to search for an explanation for the pause.

Experts in France and Spain said on Sunday that the oceans took up more warmth from the air around 2000. That would help explain the slowdown in surface warming but would also suggest that the pause may be only temporary and brief.

"Most of this excess energy was absorbed in the top 700 meters (2,300 ft) of the ocean at the onset of the warming pause, 65 percent of it in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans," they wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Lead author Virginie Guemas of the Catalan Institute of Climate Sciences in Barcelona said the hidden heat may return to the atmosphere in the next decade, stoking warming again.

"If it is only related to natural variability then the rate of warming will increase soon," she told Reuters.

Caroline Katsman of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, an expert who was not involved in the latest study, said heat absorbed by the ocean will come back into the atmosphere if it is part of an ocean cycle such as the "El Nino" warming and "La Nina" cooling events in the Pacific.

She said the study broadly confirmed earlier research by her institute but that it was unlikely to be the full explanation of the warming pause at the surface, since it only applied to the onset of the slowdown around 2000.

THRESHOLD

The pace of climate change has big economic implications since almost 200 governments agreed in 2010 to limit surface warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial levels, mainly by shifting from fossil fuels.

Surface temperatures have already risen by 0.8 C. Two degrees is widely seen as a threshold for dangerous changes such as more droughts, mudslides, floods and rising sea levels.

Some governments, and skeptics that man-made climate change is a big problem, argue that the slowdown in the rising trend shows less urgency to act. Governments have agreed to work out, by the end of 2015, a global deal to combat climate change.

Last year was ninth warmest since records began in the 1850s, according to the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, and 2010 was the warmest, just ahead of 1998. Apart from 1998, the 10 hottest years have all been since 2000.

Guemas's study, twinning observations and computer models, showed that natural La Nina weather events in the Pacific around the year 2000 brought cool waters to the surface that absorbed more heat from the air. In another set of natural variations, the Atlantic also soaked up more heat.

"Global warming is continuing but it's being manifested in somewhat different ways," said Kevin Trenberth, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. Warming can go, for instance, to the air, water, land or to melting ice and snow.

Warmth is spreading to ever deeper ocean levels, he said, adding that pauses in surface warming could last 15-20 years.

"Recent warming rates of the waters below 700 meters appear to be unprecedented," he and colleagues wrote in a study last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The U.N. panel of climate scientists says it is at least 90 percent certain that human activities - rather than natural variations in the climate - are the main cause of warming in recent decades.

(Reporting by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent; Editing by Peter Graff)

View the original article here