2011 November 28

‘Boardwalk Empire’ Open Thread: Loss

This post contains spoilers for the Nov. 20 and Nov. 27 episodes of Boardwalk Empire.

I apologize for the delay in writing last week’s recap, but in a sense I’m glad I get to consider both of these episodes, in their predictability and very strong moments together. I also appreciate a chance to highlight Matt Zoller Seitz’s excellent essay on Boardwalk Empire‘s misplaced priorities when it comes to gender, privileging fairly conventional if convoluted gangster stories over the richer domestic dramas that the show mostly uses as pretty window dressing.

Working backwards, I agree with him that Angela’s death at the hands of Manny Horvitz, who has arrived in Atlantic City intending to kill Jimmy and shoots Louise, stealing a clandestine night with Angela, instead, was emotionally striking. Manny’s shock, and his recovery via the intensely cold like, “Your husband did this to you,” was one of the more precisely-executed emotional moments of the season. And yet, I’m disgruntled by the decision on two levels. First, it’s the equivalent of J.K. Rowling killing Remus and Tonks in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, a moment when a piece of art needs some deaths to winnow the cast and illustrate emotional costs, but its creators don’t have the guts to lower a truly devastating blow on the audience by killing a main character. Second, there’s something really distasteful about the show’s regression to the norms of the past, where gay relationships inevitably end in death. It’s of a piece, I suppose, with the show’s generally punitive attitude towards sex. But I resent both the specific decision to kill off Angela and with her, one of the show’s legitimately interesting avenues of social exploration, and the general decision to default to killing the depressed lesbian.

The decision to have one of Margaret’s daughters struck down by polio seems to come from a similarly vengeful place. Whether she needs to confess that she’s sheltering with the man who murdered the father of her children, or that she’s betraying Nucky, Margaret clearly believes her sin is responsible for her misfortune. But at least that plotline gives rise to a more interesting speculation: in living with Nucky, has Margaret lost not just the health of one child, but the moral direction of another? Teddy plays a cruel joke on her when he pretends he’s stricken, too, and earns himself a slapping for it, while a weeping Margaret tells Nucky, “God help me, but he has his father’s cruelty,” only to have Nucky insist that he just wants attention, and knowing that his sister’s hospitalized “isn’t the same as understanding” the true magnitude of what’s befallen his family. But on their father-son trip to New York, Nucky realizes that something deeper than genetics or the loneliness of a little boy may be at play when Teddy reveals that he witnessed Nucky burn his own father’s house down, a poisonous revelation that ends with a deceptively sweet, “Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t tell.” Maybe Teddy’s just a child. But maybe in Nucky’s house, he’s learned that secrets are powerful, that there is something to be earned by keeping them.

The other fascinating moral evolution — even if it’s temporary — is that of Don Pernsley from Chalky White’s tormentor to his right-hand man in organizing the black strike on Atlantic City businesses. “What if we all say, we ain’t gonna eat this slop, we ain’t gonna work for this wage?” he asks his colleagues in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant, with their support telling the manager. “We want a raise. Every single last one of us. And a lunch you’d eat yourself.” In a moment before the Civil Rights movement, before the establishment of non-violence as a core principal and tactic, there’s something striking about the flying China in the restaurant, the beautiful color of the fruits and vegetables that go flying as the workers tear the kitchen apart. The attack on the picket lines is more in keeping with the established images we have of white repression of peaceful black protestors, and it presages a day when white power brokers wouldn’t be able to crack, as Jimmy’s cronies do, “These jigaboos think they’re Moses.” “Half of them are named that anyway.” Chalky and Don may not know how to shape a narrative to their national advantage yet, but they are trampling down a path that others will follow. And it remains to be seen if Don is in the movement for the chance to do right, or to inflict damage.

And there’s the prospect of another future in a pitch Jimmy isn’t smart enough to accept. “No bottles. No barrels. A million bucks in a suitcase,” one of his confederates tells him about heroin. “You got your artist types. People uptown.” Another chimes in: “That number’s small right now, but they’re very enthusiastic.” Al Capone may complain about Jimmy “moving Chink drugs now.” But Mr. Wu and Al Swearengen seem to have seen the future more clearly half a century earlier than their dapperer counterparts in Atlantic City.

Rick Scott Says ‘I Care Completely’ About Homelessness After He Proposed Cutting All Funding For Homeless Programs

Photo Credit: Naples News

In a state that is near the top of the national chart in food insecurity, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) took time this holiday to pass out Thanksgiving dinner to about 1,000 families at a shelter in East Naples. The shelter’s program fed about 7,000 families last week, with roughly 200 volunteers packing and distributing meals.

“I care completely about all these programs,” said Scott while handing out food. However, he possesses a singular way of showing it, as his sweeping budget cuts this year “slashed funding to some veteran and farm surplus programs that helped the homeless.” To justify those cuts, Scott simply explained, “all the programs are very important, but nobody wants their taxes to go up”:

“I care completely about all these programs,” said Scott, whose budget cuts earlier this year slashed funding to some veteran and farm surplus programs that helped the homeless.

“All the programs are very important, but nobody wants their taxes to go up,” Scott explained, noting that businesses also can help spur the economy. “They’ve got to grow. We’ve got to make this a place people can do well.”

One Jacksonville homeless shelter official noted that Scott “zeroed out all homeless funding” — $7 million worth — in his budget proposal. That funding supported programs dedicated to homelessness prevention, housing initiatives, and programs that “re-house” people once they’re on the street. “Not only that, he took out the line items so it can never be funded again,” said the official.

To show how much he cares about the homeless, Scott went further by vetoing $12 million in funding that state legislature had passed to support homeless veterans. There are an estimated 17,000 homeless veterans in Florida — the second highest in the nation. Overall, a record 17.2 million Americans went hungry last year.

In France, "Resource Stores" Recycle, Repair, Upcycle and Resell "Waste"

Cain On Libya Stumble: ‘Yes, I Was Embarrassed By That’

GOP presidential contender Herman Cain was on CNN today defending against another charge of an inappropriate relationship with a woman other than his wife, this time, an alleged 13-year affair with a woman whom Cain said “is an acquaintance who I thought was a friend.”

But also during the CNN interview, host Wolf Blitzer asked Cain about his infamous rambling and incoherent response to a question from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about where he stands on Libya. Cain claimed the Sentinel “pulled out 40 seconds” from his answer (actually it was five minutes) and conceded the incident was “embarrassing”:

CAIN: Was it embarrassing? Yes. Was I caught off guard? Yes. Because of a number of factors. That was a forty minute interview and they pulled out 40 seconds to embarrass me and they did. Yes I was embarrassed by that but that doesn’t mean that I did not know the answer. What I was doing was gathering my thoughts so I wouldn’t state anything incorrectly.

No one has said I said something wrong, they just questioned the pause and the fact that, yeah I was exhausted I was probably too tired to do that particular editorial board that particular day. And it ended up biting me and I ended up having a very embarrassing moment that went all over the place.

Watch the clip:

Cain has used the “I was probably too tired” defense with many of his embarrassing foreign policy gaffes throughout the campaign, raising suspicions as to whether he’d be ready for that “3 A.M phone call.” But if Cain wins, he says he’ll get a chance to sleep it off and start fresh. “The day after the Election Day, when I win the presidency, the day after, I’m gonna take a nap,” he said recently.

Radiation Covers 8% of Japan, Fukushima Crisis “Stunting Children’s Growth”

Japan’s science ministry says 8 per cent of the country’s surface area has been contaminated by radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

It says more than 30,000 square kilometres of the country has been blanketed by radioactive cesium.

The science ministry defines places with a concentration of more than 10,000 becquerels per square meter as “areas affected by the nuclear accident”….  The science ministry fine-tuned its methods by subtracting levels of naturally existing background radiation.

Fukushima, like most international stories, has a very short half life in the U.S. media — a lot shorter than that of radioactive cesium.  As the NY Times noted back in March, “Over the long term, the big threat to human health is cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years.”

So the two stories that make today’s mash up headline come from ABC — the Australian Broadcasting Company, that is.  The lead story is “Radiation covers 8pc of Japan”:

The ministry says most of the contamination was caused by four large plumes of radiation spewed out by the Fukushima nuclear plant in the first two weeks after meltdowns.

The government says some of the radioactive material fell with rain and snow, leaving the affected areas with accumulations of more than 10,000 becquerels of caesium per square metre.

As you can see from the map above (posted here), a large fraction of the affected area received 60,000 to 600,000 becquerels per square meter, which is a range that, I think, should cause concern and be avoided if one can.

The NYT noted the danger of cesium:

Cesium-137 mixes easily with water and is chemically similar to potassium. It thus mimics how potassium gets metabolized in the body and can enter through many foods, including milk. After entering, cesium gets widely distributed, its concentrations said to be higher in muscle tissues and lower in bones.

Climate Progress previously reported on one of the impacts of all that radiation (see Fukushima Surprise: Radioactive Rice “Far Exceeding” Safe Levels Found in Japan).

It must be pointed out that according to the best scientific evidence, it is prudent to avoid even low levels of radiation:

A preponderance of scientific evidence shows that even low doses of ionizing radiation, such as gamma rays and X-rays, are likely to pose some risk of adverse health effects, says a new report from the National Academies’ National Research Council.

Now, ABC reports, “Fukushima crisis ‘stunting children’s growth’ ” — but the cause may surprise you:

“Thousands of children living in the fallout zone are confined indoors because of radiation fears” (Photo: Reuters)

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

Eight months on from the nuclear meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima plant the long-term cancer risks for children are in the spotlight, but a new study has highlighted more immediate problems.

Thousands of children living in the fallout zone are confined indoors because of radiation fears, and doctors worry they are not growing at a sufficient rate.

“The kids just can’t play in the dirt or enjoy nature,” teacher Junko Akanuma said. “They may look cheerful enough but they are building up tremendous amounts of stress inside.”

According to doctors stress in children can lead to physical problems.

Shintaro Kikuchi is a paediatrician who has been tracking the weight of 250 kindergarten children in Koriyama, less than 60 kilometres from the crippled nuclear plant.

His findings are startling. They show there was an average weight gain of 0.8 of a kilogram over the past year.

The year before children in the same age group put on 3.1 kilograms, or nearly four times as much weight.

“We can blame this low-growth rate on the disruption to hormone production caused by stress” Dr Kikuchi said.

Looks like the Japanese will be living with the direct and indirect impacts of the Fukushima radioactivity for a very, very long time.

Are the Japanese being irrational in their desire to avoid radioactivity?  First off, many no longer trust the government or the nuclear industry in its claims about how much radiation there is — and with good cause, given how much the public was lied to during the course of this disaster.

And again, the literature on radiation strongly suggests that it is prudent to avoid even low levels of radiation.

Let’s return to National Academies’ National Research Council 2006 report. The NRC is traditionally quite conservative when it comes to these sorts of analyses, doing a full literature review and generally requiring a very strong consensus by the committee participants for any major conclusions — in this case 17 MDs or PhDs:

“The scientific research base shows that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial,” said committee chair Richard R. Monson, associate dean for professional education and professor of epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston. “The health risks — particularly the development of solid cancers in organs — rise proportionally with exposure. At low doses of radiation, the risk of inducing solid cancers is very small. As the overall lifetime exposure increases, so does the risk.”

The research is based on empirical data. You can read the whole NRC report, the seventh in a series on this subject dating back decades, here.

This post has been updated.

Newt Gingrich’s Latest Assault On The Constitution: Drug Test Americans Before They Get ‘Any Kind Of Federal Aid’

Across the country, Republican governors are pushing policies that mandate drug-testing for all welfare recipients and marginalize low-income Americans in the process. Now, the latest GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich is trying that idea on the national stage. When asked by Yahoo News’ Chris Moody for his thoughts on how to reform the U.S.’s failed war on drugs, Gingrich declared that “we need to consider taking more explicit steps to make it expensive to be a drug user.” His first and foremost step? Drug test Americans “before you get any kind of federal aid“:

[MOODY:] Speaking of Ron Paul, at the last debate, he said that the war on drugs has been an utter failure. We’ve spent billions of dollars since President Nixon and we still have rising levels of drug use. Should we continue down the same path given the amount of money we’ve spent? How can we reform our approach?

[GINGRICH:] I think that we need to consider taking more explicit steps to make it expensive to be a drug user. It could be through testing before you get any kind of federal aid. Unemployment compensation, food stamps, you name it.

It has always struck me that if you’re serious about trying to stop drug use, then you need to find a way to have a fairly easy approach to it and you need to find a way to be pretty aggressive about insisting–I don’t think actually locking up users is a very good thing. I think finding ways to sanction them and to give them medical help and to get them to detox is a more logical long-term policy.

Gingrich’s first step would likely run headlong into the Constitution. As UCLA Professor Adam Winkler noted, random drug testing is a “suspicion-less search” and “the Supreme Court has upheld the ability of government to mandate random drug tests in a few limited circumstances,” most often in “high-risk public safety environments.” In fact, courts have struck down such policies again and again.

The fact that Gingrich’s first thought regarding drug users points to federal aid recipients should not be surprising given his low opinion of Americans who are struggling to make ends meet. He once insisted that an unemployed mechanic receiving jobless benefits was made lazy by that “welfare.” Nearly one-third of America’s 14 million unemployed have been unable to find work for a year or more. And yet, to Gingrich, “it is fundamentally wrong” to give these people jobless aid “for doing nothing.” Unless, of course, we drug test them first.

Gay Americans, Censorship, And ‘After The Gold Rush’ At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art

I spent a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over the holiday, and saw two terrific exhibits: the reopened Islamic art wing, about which much more to come, and “After the Gold Rush,” a contemporary photography show. Two pieces in the latter exhibit struck me in particular.

First, Philip-Lorca diCorcia took his 1991 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and used it to tweak conservatives who were hysterical over NEA funding for a traveling show of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. He parceled out the money in small sums to male prostitutes and drug addicts, paying them posing fees and producing a series of tender, lovely portraits. In my favorite, a young man named Todd M. Brooks, appears washed in blue through a cheap motel window, framed in red window trim, and against a patterned blue bedspread. It’s not Picasso, and diCorcia’s approach isn’t a perfect solution to the problem of artists exploiting vulnerable subjects. But it’s a creative political stunt, with better results than usually come from those sorts of origins.

In the second, Robert Gober superimposes a man’s hand between two newspaper articles, clipped neatly and placed on a shell-strewn beach. Below his hand, the article refers to Matthew Shepard’s death. Above it, a letter to the editor argues that “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others have a right to speak out against homosexuality without being placed in the category of thuggery.” While the piece obviously precedes Jonathan Rauch’s provocative and important piece in the December issue of the Advocate arguing that gay people should tolerate a certain amount of anti-gay sentiment as a sign that they’re legally and socially secure enough to practice tolerance, it’s a useful encapsulation of the dilemma behind that argument. It’s hard to cast off past threats if you’re not entirely sure they’re past.

Berkeley Police Defend Actions By Sensationally Claiming Protesters Could’ve Used Lethal Violence

On Nov. 9, UC Berkeley campus police used heavy-handed tactics to suppress protests that ended up injuring numerous students. In a statement released today, the UC Berkeley Police Officers’ Association sensationally rationalized these tactics by saying that the protesters could have used lethal force:

Society has changed significantly since 1964 when peaceful UC Berkeley student protesters organized a 10-hour sit-in in Sproul Hall and 10,000 students held a police car at bay – spawning change and the birth of our nation’s Free Speech Movement.

However proud we can all be of UC Berkeley’s contribution to free speech in America, no one can deny this: Our society in 2011 has become an extremely more violent place to live and to protect. No one understands the effects of this violence more than those of us in law enforcement.

Disgruntled citizens in this day and age express their frustrations in far more violent ways – with knives, with guns and sometimes by killing innocent bystanders. Peaceful protests can, in an instant, turn into violent rioting, ending in destruction of property or worse – the loss of lives. Police officers and innocent citizens everywhere are being injured, and in some instances, killed.

In the back of every police officer’s mind is this: How can I control this incident so it does not escalate into a seriously violent, potentially life-threatening event for all involved?

While students were calling the protest “non-violent,” the events on November 9th were anything but nonviolent. In previous student Occupy protests, protesters hit police officers with chairs, bricks, spitting, and using homemade plywood shields as weapons – with documented injuries to officers.

At a moment’s notice, the November 9th protest at UC Berkeley could have turned even more violent than it did, much like the Occupy protests in neighboring Oakland.

Noticeably absent from this rationalization is any evidence that student protesters were on the verge of using lethal violence against police officers.

Ultra-Orthodox ‘Torah Declaration’ Calls For Ex-Gay Therapy For All Who ‘Struggle’ With Homosexuality

Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky

A group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders have secretly passed around a “Torah Declaration” on “The Torah Stance on Homosexuality.” It rebukes homosexuality as being “not an acceptable lifestyle or a genuine identity” and assumes that gays are by definition “unable to find happiness in a loving relationship.” To abide by the Torah, the Declaration stridently demands ex-gay therapy, including of teenagers, to repair “childhood emotional wounds”:

We emphatically reject the notion that a homosexually inclined person cannot overcome his or her inclination and desire. Behaviors are changeable. The Torah does not forbid something which is impossible to avoid. Abandoning people to lifelong loneliness and despair by denying all hope of overcoming and healing their same-sex attraction is heartlessly cruel. [...]

The therapy consists of reinforcing the natural gender-identity of the individual by helping him or her understand and repair the emotional wounds that led to its disorientation and weakening, thus enabling the resumption and completion of the individual’s emotional development…There is no other practical, Torah-sanctioned solution for this issue. [...]

It requires tremendous bravery and fortitude for a person to confront and deal with same-sex attraction. For example a sixteen-year-old who is struggling with this issue may be confused and afraid and not know whom to speak to or what steps to take. We must create an atmosphere where this teenager (or anyone) can speak freely to a parent, rabbi, or mentor and be treated with love and compassion. Authority figures can then guide same-sex strugglers towards a path of healing and overcoming their inclinations.

This declaration is incredibly more dismissive of the lives of gays and lesbians than the more affirming Statement of Principles many Modern Orthodox rabbis signed in July 2010. These theology-based therapies, along with the notion that gays are incapable of love and doomed to loneliness, present an incredible potential for harm to young people. Jayson Littman, who published the declaration publicly for the first time today, shared a quote from ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Chaim Rapoport: “I am not obligated to believe in a failed therapy because it fits my theology better.” Point in fact, these rabbis are using their theology to deny decades worth of scientific knowledge, oblivious to the incredible threat they pose to young people’s mental health in doing so.

Banana and Coconut French Toast (Vegan)

Myth of ‘Global Cooling’ Debunked in 4 Minutes (Video)

Erratic, Extreme Day-to-Day Weather Puts Climate Change in New Light and Creates Potential New Amplifying Feedback

JR:   Here’s yet more research on how our weather is becoming more extreme and how that could lead to higher CO2 levels than expected.

Princeton researchers found for the first time that day-to-day weather conditions have become more erratic in the past generation. Days have increasingly fluctuated between sunny and dry, and cloudy and rainy with little in-between, which can have negative consequences for ecosystems, plants, solar-energy production and other factors that depend upon consistent weather.  From 1997 to 2007, rainfall became highly erratic for much of the globe, particularly in tropical areas. Green areas indicate that the day-to-day variability increased so that those areas experienced more days at one extreme or another, either dry or a downpour with little weather variation in-between.

by Morgan Kelly, Princeton University

The first climate study to focus on variations in daily weather conditions has found that day-to-day weather has grown increasingly erratic and extreme, with significant fluctuations in sunshine and rainfall affecting more than a third of the planet.

Princeton University researchers recently reported in the Journal of Climate that extremely sunny or cloudy days are more common than in the early 1980s, and that swings from thunderstorms to dry days rose considerably since the late 1990s. These swings could have consequences for ecosystem stability and the control of pests and diseases, as well as for industries such as agriculture and solar-energy production, all of which are vulnerable to inconsistent and extreme weather, the researchers noted.

The day-to-day variations also could affect what scientists can expect to see as the Earth’s climate changes, according to the researchers and other scientists familiar with the work. Constant fluctuations in severe conditions could alter how the atmosphere distributes heat and rainfall, as well as inhibit the ability of plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, possibly leading to higher levels of the greenhouse gas than currently accounted for.

Existing climate-change models have historically been evaluated against the average weather per month, an approach that hides variability, explained lead author David Medvigy, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton. To conduct their analysis, he and co-author Claudie Beaulieu, a postdoctoral research fellow in Princeton’s Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, used a recently developed computer program that has allowed climatologists to examine weather data on a daily level for the first time, Medvigy said.

“Monthly averages reflect a misty world that is a little rainy and cloudy every day. That is very different from the weather of our actual world, where some days are very sunny and dry,” Medvigy said.

“Our work adds to what we know about climate change in the real world and places the whole problem of climate change in a new light,” he said. “Nobody has looked for these daily changes on a global scale. We usually think of climate change as an increase in mean global temperature and potentially more extreme conditions — there’s practically no discussion of day-to-day variability.”

The Princeton findings stress that analysis of erratic daily conditions such as frequent thunderstorms may in fact be crucial to truly understanding the factors shaping the climate and affecting the atmosphere, said William Rossow, a professor of earth system science and environmental engineering at the City College of New York.

“It’s important to know what the daily extremes might do because we might care about that sooner,” said Rossow, who also has studied weather variability. He had no role in the Princeton research but is familiar with it.

Rossow said existing climate-change models show light rain more frequently than they should and don’t show extreme precipitation. “If it rains a little bit every day, the atmosphere may respond differently than if there’s a really big rainstorm once every week. One of the things you find about rainstorms is that the really extreme ones are at a scale the atmosphere responds to,” he said.

Although climate-change models predict future changes in weather as the planet warms, those calculations are hindered by a lack of representation of day-to-day patterns, Rossow said.

“If you don’t know what role variability is playing now, you’re not in a very strong position for making remarks about how it might change in the future,” he said. “We’re at a stage where we had better take a look at what this research is pointing out.”

Medvigy and Beaulieu determined sunshine variation by analyzing fluctuations in solar radiation captured by the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project from 1984 to 2007. To gauge precipitation, the researchers used daily rainfall data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project spanning 1997 to 2007.

Medvigy and Beaulieu found that during those respective periods, extremes in sunshine and rainfall became more common on a day-to-day basis. In hypothetical terms, Medvigy said, these findings would mean that a region that experienced the greatest increase in sunshine variability might have had partly cloudy conditions every day in 1984, but by 2007 the days would have been either sunny or heavily cloudy with no in-between. For rainfall, the uptick in variation he and Beaulieu observed could be thought of as an area experiencing a light mist every day in 1997, but within ten years the days came to increasingly fluctuate between dryness and downpour.

The researchers observed at least some increase in variability for 35 percent of the world during the time periods analyzed. Regions such as equatorial Africa and Asia experienced the greatest increase in the frequency of extreme conditions, with erratic shifts in weather occurring throughout the year. In more temperate regions such as the United States, day-to-day variability increased to a lesser degree and typically only seasonally. In the northeastern United States, for instance, sudden jumps from sunny to bleak days became more common during the winter from 1984 to 2007.

In the 23 years that sunshine variability rose for tropical Africa and Asia, those areas also showed a greater occurrence of towering thunderstorm clouds known as convective clouds, Medvigy said. Tropical areas that experienced more and more unbalanced levels of sunshine and rainfall witnessed an in-kind jump in convective cloud cover. Although the relationship between these clouds and weather variations needs more study, Medvigy said, the findings could indicate that the sunnier days accelerate the rate at which water evaporates then condenses in the atmosphere to form rain, thus producing heavy rain more often.

Storms have lasting effect on daily weather patterns

Although the most extreme weather variations in the study were observed in the tropics, spurts of extreme weather are global in reach, Rossow said. The atmosphere, he said, is a fluid, and when severe weather such as a convective-cloud thunderstorm “punches” it, the disturbance spreads around the world. Weather that increasingly leaps from one extreme condition to another in short periods of time, as the Princeton research suggests, affects the equilibrium of heat and rain worldwide, he said.

“Storms are violent and significant events — while they are individually localized, their disturbance radiates,” Rossow said.

“Wherever it’s raining heavily, especially, or variably is where the atmosphere is being punched. As soon as it is punched somewhere in the tropics it starts waves that go all the way around the planet,” he said. “So we can see waves coming off the west Pacific convection activity and going all the way around the planet in the tropical band. The atmosphere also has the job of moving heat from the equator to the poles, and storms are the source of heat to the atmosphere, so if a storm’s location or its timing or its seasonality is altered, that’s going to change how the circulation responds.”

These sweeping atmospheric changes can interact with local conditions such as temperature and topography to skew regular weather patterns, Rossow said.

“Signals end up going over the whole globe, and whether they’re important in a particular place or not depends on what else is happening,” he said. “But you can think of storms as being the disturbances in an otherwise smooth flow. That’s why this is a climate issue even though we’re talking about daily variability in specific locations.”

The impact of these fluctuations on natural and manmade systems could be as substantial as the fallout predicted from rises in the Earth’s average temperature, Medvigy said. Inconsistent sunshine could impair the effectiveness of solar-energy production and — with fluctuating rainfall also included — harm agriculture, he said. Wetter, hotter conditions also breed disease and parasites such as mosquitoes, particularly in tropical areas, he said.

On a larger scale, wild shifts in day-to-day conditions would diminish the ability of trees and plants to remove carbon from the atmosphere, Medvigy said. In 2010, he and Harvard University researchers reported in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that erratic rain and sunlight impair photosynthesis. That study concluded that this effect upsets the structure of ecosystems, as certain plants and trees — particularly broad-leafed trees more than conifers — adapt better than others.

In the context of the current study, Medvigy said, the impact of variability on photosynthesis could mean that more carbon will remain in the atmosphere than climate models currently anticipate, considering that the models factor in normal plant-based carbon absorption. Moreover, if the meteorological tumult he and Beaulieu observed is caused by greenhouse gases, these fluctuations could become self-perpetuating by increasingly trapping the gases that agitated weather patterns in the first place.

“We have not yet looked for direct ties between weather variability and increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, but I would not be surprised if they are connected in some way,” Medvigy said.

“Increases in variability diminish the efficiency with which plants and trees remove carbon dioxide from the air,” he said. “All of a sudden, the land and the atmosphere are no longer in balance, and plants cannot absorb levels of carbon dioxide proportional to the concentrations in the environment. That will affect everybody.”

The study was published online Oct. 14 by the Journal of Climate, and was funded by grants from the Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative and the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies.

— Morgan Kelly is a science writer for the Office of Communications at Princeton University. This piece was originally published at the Princeton University website.

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Congress Tries To Undercut Wall Street Reform Provision Aimed At Regulating Risky Financial Instruments

For months, Republicans have been trying to undermine the Dodd-Frank financial reform law — passed in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis — by cutting budgets for market regulators, obstructing nominees, and advancing bills that would weaken the law’s key provisions. But sometimes efforts to dismantle the law take on a more bipartisan flavor.

One of the key sections of the Dodd-Frank law has to do with swaps, the complex financial instruments that felled, among others, insurance giant American International Group. Before the 2008 financial crisis, the swaps market was totally opaque, giving neither customers nor regulators any sense of what the instruments actually cost or how much risk was building up in the financial system.

Dodd-Frank brings transparency to this market by forcing swap trades onto open exchanges — where they can be seen by everyone — rather than allowing backroom wheeling and dealing in the instruments to continue. But a bill authored by Reps. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), as the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgensen explained, would take these bits of the bill out at the knees:

Representative Scott Garrett , a New Jersey Republican, has teamed up with Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat, to introduce the Swap Execution Facility Clarification Act. It would bar the Securities and Exchange Commission and the C.F.T.C. from requiring swap execution facilities to have a minimum number of participants or mandating displays of prices. Both mechanisms promote transparency.

Mr. Garrett said the bill directed regulators “to provide market participants with the flexibility” they need to obtain price discovery. This means maintaining the old system that can keep prices in the shadows.

On Nov. 15, a House subcommittee approved the bill by a voice vote.

As Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler — whose agency is charged with regulating swaps under Dodd-Frank — explained, “economists for decades have shown that transparency lowers margins, leads to greater liquidity and more competition in the marketplace.” “Transparent pricing is also a critical feature of lowering the risk at the banks, and at the derivatives clearinghouses as well,” he said.

As David Min and I explained back in April, 2010, opacity in the swaps market “means that no one — regulators, investors, or even the dealers themselves — has a good handle on the systemic risk these instruments pose, or who is bearing the risk. This prevents regulators from being able to take steps to reduce systemic risk and creates the conditions for financial panics.” Dodd-Frank did a lot to deal with this problem, but Congress now seems to be aiming to undo that progress.

Calling Keystone XL Opponents ‘Naive,’ Austan Goolsbee Bets On Climate Destruction

Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, believes the activists who successfully opposed the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline are “naive.” “It’s a bit naïve to think the tar sands would not be developed if they don’t build that pipeline,” Goolsbee said today in Toronto at the Economic Club of Canada, reports Bloomberg. “Eventually, it’s going to be built. It may go to the Pacific, it may go through Nebraska, but it’s going to be built somewhere.” Goolsbee’s bet that the carbon bomb of Canada’s tar sands will be developed is a bet for climate destruction.

Santorum Signs Pledge Defending Christian Influence Over Society

Right Wing Watch notes that Rick Santorum is so far the only presidential candidate to sign Open Doors Ministry’s “Pledge for Religious Freedom.” The pledge claims that “religious freedom includes the right to employ religious arguments…when contending for or against laws and policies, such as laws designed to protect the unborn and traditional marriage.” Likely referencing Catholic Charities’ adoption services, it also demands “the right of individuals and of religious communities not to be forced to participate in, or to forfeit their employment because of refusal to participate in, activities that deeply offend their religious conscience.” It’s no surprise Santorum signed the pledge without hesitation, given he has frequently called for laws to be bound by religious morals, even if people suffer in the Christian tradition.

Scientific Study Reveals Link Between Skepticism and Inaction. Or, Why Koch & Exxon Spread Climate Lies

Kansas Still Criminalizes ‘Unnatural’ Sex Eight Years After This Law Was Declared Unconstitutional

Eight years ago, in its landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court held that it is almost never the government’s business what consenting adults do in the bedroom. Among other things, this law sounded the death knell to so-called sodomy laws that criminalized same-sex coupling. Nevertheless, the state of Kansas has yet to repeal its unconstitutional law criminalizing “‘unnatural’ sexual activities, like oral and anal sex.” In response, a civil rights group known as the Kansas Equality Coalition is petitioning Gov. Sam Brownback to erase this blight on his state’s legal code. Given Brownback’s long history of anti-gay activity, however, it is unlikely that he will be swayed by something as insignificant as the Constitution.

Global Warming Hates Beer

Like coffee and chocolate, beer is one of the common pleasures of life being damaged now by global warming. Good beer depends on water, barley, and hops — all of which are being disrupted by greenhouse pollution from burning fossil fuels. Jenn Orgolini, sustainability director for Colorado’s New Belgium Brewery, the third-largest craft brewing company in the United States, warns that climate change is hurting beer quality today:

This is not a problem that’s going to happen someday, and this is not a problem that’s just going to impact some industries. If you drink beer now, the issue of climate change is impacting you right now.

“For our brewery, growth depends on abundant clean water and quality barley and hops—and climate change puts those ingredients at risk. Our supply chain—including barley, hops and water—is especially vulnerable to weather in the short-term and to climate change in the long-term,” Orgolini told Forbes.

Heavy rains in Australia and drought in England have hurt malting barley crops this year.

Climate change has caused the quality and yield of Saaz hops — the key ingredient in Czech pilsner lager — to decline. Global warming pollution will cause further declines, scientists found in 2009. Yields of malting barley will also decline in coming years as droughts increase because of carbon pollution.

‘The Walking Dead’ Open Thread: Suffer The Little Children

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 27 episode of The Walking Dead.

I’ll admit to having felt like this season of The Walking Dead has spent a lot of time with the characters, human and formerly human, stewing in the same juices: the endless hunt for Sophia, the secrets of Hershel’s farm, the insecurities of Dale, Glen, Darryl and Andrea, the question of whether Rick or Shane is better suited to lead and to love Lori. Fortunately, the stunning final scene of this episode tied all of those threads neatly together. After massacring the walkers in the barn, who they’ve convinced themselves aren’t human, one more emerges: Sophia, changed and ravening. And Rick finds a bridge between Shane’s harsh moral view of the apocalypse and Hershel’s idealism, shaped by isolation from the outside world, and shoots the girl in an act of self-protection and mercy.

I thought the scene did a wonderful job of giving everyone a human moment that addressed, if not resolved, their arc. Glenn steps up to protect Maggie, and she protects her father, grieving with him, but doesn’t try to stop her lover. Darryl, after rejecting Carol’s profession of affection with a brutal, “Leave me be. Stupid bitch,” earlier in the episode, holds her as she sees what’s become of her daughter, and as she witnesses her death. Carl, who told his mother, “I’m not leaving until we find Sophia…I was thinking, she’s going to like it here, this place. It could be a home,” who tried on a man’s cursing to go with a man’s hat earlier in the episode, is reduced to childhood by his friend’s transformation and execution, sobbing in Lori’s arms. Andrea steps up to the front lines with Shane, unaware that Shane’s emotions and his move to start the massacre are deeply engaged with Lori, who is off to the side here. T-Dog is, for once, unconflicted and part of the firing line. And Dale is late to the slaughter, protected from his own dehumanization by fate if not design.

So is the conclusion that Rick is right? Do the reasons you do things matter as much as the fact that you do them? Does Hershel’s determination to see the humanity in the walkers redeem the risks he’s taken, his denial of outside reality? Does the murder Rick commits out of a profound sympathy for the little girl his community’s lost mean something different than the brutal executions carried out by the other members of that community? And does Lori’s declaration to Shane that “Even if it’s yours, it’s not gonna be yours. And it’s never gonna be yours. And there’s nothing you can do to change that,” actually make it so? The Walking Dead is very good at posing moral questions, though I’m not sure it’s as good at knowing what its own answers to them are. Even if the show doesn’t reveal them to us all at once, I’d like a sense that they have a coherent and decisive worldview.

How a "Turkey Asteroid" Represents the Consolidation of Food in the U.S. (Infographic)