National Political Updates
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UPDATE: Komen confirms continued involvement of Ari Fleischer on Planned Parenthood strategy
Yesterday, ThinkProgress exclusively reported Ari Fleischer’s involvement — dating back at least to December — with the Komen Foundation, including issues related to Planned Parenthood. Tonight, the Washington Post reports that Komen is now publicly confirming that Fleischer, a prominent right-wing pundit and former press secretary for George W. Bush, will help “on crisis communications” related to Planned Parenthood. Komen stressed that Fleischer, who is a long-time critic of Planned Parenthood, “had nothing to do with the funding decision.”
Nevada Caucus Results: Live Updates
Democracy In Action
VIDEO: Protester Struck By Police During OccupyDC Raid, At Least Eight Arrested
Police officers at McPherson Square Park
United States Park Police bearing riot gear and on horse back raided Occupy DC this morning and throughout the day, removing tents that were deemed to be in violation of a no camping rule at McPherson Square. Park Police spokesperson Sgt. David Schlosser said the raid did not constitute an eviction and that protesters would be allowed to continue activities at the park as long as they complied with the no camping rule.Six protesters had been arrested as of about four o’clock this afternoon — two for crossing a police barricade and four for violating police orders — but the majority were “very cooperative” as police moved through the park, Schlosser said. Two more were arrested later, according to various reports. Park Police moved methodically through the park, closing sections at a time while the rest remained open, using riot shields and sticks to move protesters as Park Service employees in hazardous materials suits cleared and removed tents.
At different times, small groups of protesters collided with police, who pushed protesters back with riot shields. One police officer was struck by a brick in the face and taken to the hospital. At one point, multiple protesters were struck by riot sticks as they clashed with police moving through the park. Watch:
One protester said Police had offered a compromise, telling Occupy DC that if they removed the giant tarp covering the statue at the center of the park — known as the tent of dreams — police would not confiscate tents. Schlosser would not confirm or deny that such a deal had been proposed, saying only that notices had been provided to protesters telling them that noncompliant tents were subject to removal.
According to the notice, tents must be free of sleeping materials and remain open on one side at all times to stay in compliance with Park Police regulations.
LOOK: Real-Time Map Of Nevada Caucus Results
Nevada Exit Polls Indicate Overwhelming Result
Feel The Buzz
Thomas Lane
Conservatives Drive Nevada Caucus Results
William Astore: The Peril of Idolizing Our Military
Not A Witch
Michael Shank: What Nevada, Florida and South Carolina Have in Common & What Republican Candidates Ignored: A Credible Economic Cure
Sharron Angle Won't Rule Out Another Run
Republican Indiana Secretary Of State Convicted Of Voter Fraud
Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White (R)
Though President Ronald Reagan called the right to vote the “crown jewel of American liberties,” many Republicans around the country have begun demanding increased voting restrictions in the name of fighting “voter fraud.” Though actual cases of voting fraud are so rare that a voter is much more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit fraud at the polls, one Republican official in Indiana has proved that lightning can strike himself.Yesterday, a jury found Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White (R) guilty on six felony counts of voter fraud, theft, and perjury. The conviction cost White his job, though he plans to ask the judge to reduce the charges to misdemeanors and hopes to perhaps regain the position.
In a statement, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) announced White’s deputy will take over on an interim basis:
I have chosen not to make a permanent appointment today out of respect for the judge’s authority to lessen the verdict to a misdemeanor and reinstate the elected office holder… If the felony convictions are not altered, I anticipate making a permanent appointment quickly.
But a second court case could ultimately give the job to Democrat Vop Osili, who lost to White in November 2010. A judge’s December 2011 ruling — currently on hold, pending appeal — held that due to the voter fraud charges, White’s election was invalid. Should that ruling survive the appeals process, Osili would assume the office.
Ironically, White’s now-removed 2010 campaign website listed election integrity as among his top concerns, and promised he would “protect and defend Indiana’s Voter ID law to ensure our elections are fair and protect the most basic and precious right and responsibility of our democracy-voting.”
Update
In 2005, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed “the strictest voter ID requirements in the nation,” and Republicans said at the time that it was “needed to guard against voter fraud.”
WATCH: Maddow's Brutal Take On Romney's Mistakes
Drought May Cause Shutdown of Texas Rice Production
By Andrew Freedman, in a Climate Central repost
Although recent rains have put a dent in the Texas drought, a day of reckoning looms for the state’s long-grain rice growers, who pump millions into the economy in Southeast Texas each year and account for about 5 percent of America’s rice production. Come March 1, if there is less than 850,000 acre-feet of water in reservoirs along the Lower Colorado River, water managers will be forced to take the unprecedented step of withholding water from agricultural users, which will mean severe cuts to Texas rice production this year.
According to Bob Rose, chief meteorologist with the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), it’s unlikely that enough rain will fall between now and March 1 to reach the 850,000 acre-feet threshold that was established by a recent agreement between the authority and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. An acre-foot is the amount of water required to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot, and it amounts to about 326,000 gallons.
As of January 30, the highland lakes that serve as the area’s reservoirs held about 758,000 acre-feet.
“This is going to be a huge, huge deal,” Rose said during a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in New Orleans. “What’s going to happen is that there will be no water for rice irrigation in the Lower Colorado River Basin this year.”
Driving the Lower Colorado River Authority’s decision-making is the need to ensure there is enough water to meet the demand from Austin, the rapidly growing state capital that is completely reliant on water from the Lower Colorado River, as well as other municipalities and users, such as electric utilities that need water to run power plants.
The agricultural water restrictions would hit three Southeast Texas counties the hardest: Colorado, Matagordo, and Wharton. According to a 2011 analysis by the Texas AgriLife Extension Service, the combined direct and indirect economic benefits of rice production and processing in these three counties alone amounts to $675 million, including the support of nearly 9,000 jobs.
“This will be a huge blow to the region’s economy,” Rose told Climate Central. “We have never had a year where we have curtailed their [rice growers’] water or cut them off” completely, he said.
The 2011-12 drought ranks as the state’s most intense one-year drought since records began in 1895. The drought has had major impacts on agriculture in the Lone Star State, particularly for cattle ranchers, causing at least $5.2 billion in agricultural losses during 2011. This includes $1.8 billion in cotton losses, $750 million in lost hay production, and $243 million in wheat losses.
Texas is the largest cattle ranching state in the country, and the dry weather, combined with record summer heat and shortage of affordable feed this year caused many ranchers to cull their herds early or move their cattle to ranches in other states. The Texas cattle herd dropped by 11 percent during 2011, which translates to more than a million head of cattle.
Scientists say the drought is a likely result of a La Nina event in the Pacific Ocean, which tends to depress rainfall totals in Texas, particularly during the winter. However, global warming has likely exacerbated the drought and led to more heat extremes last summer, according to Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon.
Brent Batchelor, who works for Texas AgriLife Extension Service in Matagorda County, said rice growers there are “hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.”
“They’re very apprehensive because we’re a long ways from getting any water,” he said. He added that even if the reservoirs do rise above 850,000 acre-feet, rice growers would still receive less water than normal through a system of Lower Colorado River Authority-managed canals.
Although it boosted morale, an unusually heavy January rainstorm was not enough to significantly raise reservoir levels, which remain about 100,000 acre-feet shy of the threshold, according to Rose. “We still have about five weeks till March 1, so it’s possible we could see another storm like this. But the overall pattern still looks drier than normal. I’m not very optimistic at this point,” he said.
The Weather Service’s Murphy said the long-range weather outlook calls for a drier than average February, although he noted that dry weather was forecast for December and January, and both months turned out to be wetter than average.
– By Andrew Freedman, in a Climate Central repost
Related Posts:
- Catastrophic $5.3 Billion Texas Drought Hits Global Cotton, Beef, Peanut Butter and Even Pumpkin Market
- With No End in Sight for Texas Drought, ABC News Explains: “Every Farmer in the World Will Be Affected by Climate Change.
- Water. Coal. Fracking. Texas. Sanity. One of These Words Does Not Belong
- In Drought-Stricken Texas, Drillers Use Billions Of Gallons Of Water For Fracking: The Texas Water Development Board estimates the total amount of water used for fracking statewide in 2010 was 13.5 billion gallons. That’s likely to more than double by 2020
- As Texas Withers, Gas Industry Guzzles: … in the Upper Trinity Groundwater Conservation District (UTGCD) west of Fort Worth, the share of groundwater used by frackers was 40 percent in the first half of 2011, up from 25 percent in 2010.
“Obviously, that’s a pretty heavy draw on an aquifer when we’re in the midst of a drought,” says Bob Patterson, UTGCD’s general manager. In his water district, 40 to 50 wells have run dry and many municipalities have declared stage two or stage three drought conditions, which involve severe restrictions on residential outdoor water use. But natural gas drillers can still pump as much water from the district as they want….
Critics of fracking claim the industry actually uses far more water than it lets on. Because water used in the fracking process becomes contaminated with hydrocarbons and other toxins, frackers typically sequester it deep underground, removing that wastewater permanently from the hydrologic cycle. Unlike the water used for irrigation or daily living, it doesn’t reenter rivers, aquifers, or the atmosphere. “Fracking water is typically not recycled,” says Paul Hudak, a hydrologist with the University of North Texas. “It’s not really economical.”
Non-Traditional Newt
Thomas Lane
Apparently Unaware of Global Warming, L.A. Times Remains “Perplexed by the Mild Weather Across the U.S.”
One thing you can say about the Los Angeles Times, they are consistent in their miscoverage of global warming.
On January 27, they committed “journalistic malpractice,” as climatologist Michael Mann tweeted, for omitting any mention of global warming whatsoever in their article seeking to explain why the U.S. “seems to have largely escaped winter.”
On Groundhog day, coincidentally enough, they did it again. Hmm. Maybe this is like the movie and they are just going to keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again…..
As the L.A. Times “explains” in the article:
“It’s mild,” said Pastelok, a meteorologist from AccuWeather, in one of the bigger understatements of the season.
“The departures have been way above normal this season, maybe in a top five or top 10 category,” he said when asked to rank how unusual the winter from the Plains eastward had been in terms of temperatures and lack of snow.
The situation has stymied forecasters, who study previous years’ patterns to predict the future. This year has been unique because even when there have been cold snaps, they have been extremely brief and followed by long, mild stretches.
If only scientists had predicted years ago that spewing billions and billions of tons of heat trapping greenhouse gases into the air would cause more frequent extreme heat waves — ones that covered a bigger area and lasted far longer than before.
And no, confusionists and their enablers, those scientists didn’t say that global warming would be responsible for 100% of all heat waves. But we are now pushing so far beyond the historical norm that we are seeing unprecedented uber-extreme heat waves (see Hansen et al: “Extreme Heat Waves … in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 Were ‘Caused’ by Global Warming”).
The good news is that while the L.A. Times remains clueless, NBC news got the story just right — global warming piles the heat on top of whatever natural variability, like La Niña, we see. Here’s their excellent story on the heat wave so unusual, people were “calling it JUNuary”:
Again, one can always tell the difference between good journalism and not so good journalism by whether they quote real climate scientists who have actually studied the issue in question.
In this case, they went to the source, Dr. Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). You can read about his work here: “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.” NCAR explained their findings in a news release:
Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.
“Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.”
Of course, it’s not warm winters that cause the big problem, it’s the blistering summers.
Here’s a Stanford release for Climatic Change study (PDF here) I wrote about in June:
Stanford climate scientists forecast permanently hotter summersThe tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience an irreversible rise in summer temperatures within the next 20 to 60 years if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, according to a new climate study by Stanford University scientists….
“According to our projections, large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that, by the middle of this century, even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years,” said the study’s lead author, Noah Diffenbaugh, The study, based on observations and models, finds that most major countries, including the United States, are “likely to face unprecedented climate stresses even with the relatively moderate warming expected over the next half-century.”
I interviewed Diffenbaugh for my book, Hell and High Water, and in 2008 wrote about his earlier work in a post titled, “When can we expect very high surface temperatures?”
Bottom line: By century’s end, extreme temperatures of up to 122°F would threaten most of the central, southern, and western U.S. Even worse, Houston and Washington, DC could experience temperatures exceeding 98°F for some 60 days a year.
The peak temperature analysis comes from a Geophysical Research Letters paper that focused on the annual-maximum “once-in-a-century” temperature. The key scientific point is that “the extremes rise faster than the means in a warming climate.”
The results, depicted above (in °C), are quite remarkable, especially when you consider that this is just the A1B scenario. In 2100, A1B hits about 700 ppm with average global temperatures “only” about 3°C (5 F) warmer than today.
In fact, on our current emissions path, a 3C temperature rise will happen much sooner (see Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path and M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F). And remember, the worst-case scenario is that this happens by mid-century [see Royal Society special issue details ‘hellish vision’ of 7°F (4°C) world — which we may face in the 2060s!]
On our current emissions path, these record temperatures could be seen closer to 2060 than 2100:
… values in excess of 50°C [122°F] in Australia, India, the Middle East, North Africa, the Sahel and equatorial and subtropical South America.
As you can see from the map, extreme temperature peaks are only slightly lower over large parts of this country. The study notes:
Such temperatures, if lasting for some days, are life threatening and receive relatively little attention in the climate change debate.
On our current emissions path, we may well exceed the A2 scenario and hit A1FI, 1000 ppm (see here). In a terrific March 2010 presentation, Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe has a figure of what the A1FI would mean:
Mother Nature is just warming up.
The time to act is yesterday.
Related Post:
- Science stunner — On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter: Paleoclimate data suggests CO2 “may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models”
Woman Wins $975K Years After Giving Birth In Jail
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