MVCAC July 2015

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The Case for Divestment
by Duane Nichols 22 Jul '15

22 Jul '15

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7842740?ir=Politics Sent from my iPhone

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WV MetroNews – The EPA’s fish story
by Duane 22 Jul '15

22 Jul '15

http://wvmetronews.com/2015/03/25/the-epas-fish-story/ The EPA’s fish story Commentary by Hoppy Kercheval, MetroNews Talkline, March 25, 2015 Fifteen percent of all babies in utero in West Virginia have mothers who are subsistence fisherwomen — each of whom eats up to 300 pounds of fish every year that they or their family caught themselves from lakes. Well, at least that is the contention of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Today the U.S. Supreme court takes up challenges to the EPA’s proposed new standards for emissions of mercury and other toxic air pollutants from power plants. The agency proposes that those emissions be cut by between 75 and 90 percent starting next year. That would seem to be a good thing. As the New York Times opined this week, “One of the most toxic of these pollutants is mercury, a heavy metal that accumulates in waterways and the fish American’s eat.” It can be dangerous for young children and fetuses. The EPA argues that the potential health benefits justify the new rules, which will be yet another blow to the coal industry and coal-fired power plants. But the EPA has strained mightily to try to explain how domestic power plant emissions, which account for about one-half of one percent of all mercury in the atmosphere, are so dangerous that they justify spending almost $10 billion per year to reduce them. And that brings us back to the fisherwomen. The EPA has created a hypothetical population of women of child-bearing age who catch and ingest huge amounts of lake fish that contain high levels of mercury to try to demonstrate the risk. According to the agency’s calculations, there are about 240,000 pregnant women per year in America who supposedly live off of fish caught by themselves or their families in lakes. The agency then further calculates that the IQ of children born to these fisherwomen would be lowered by an average of 0.009 of a point because of neurotoxins in mercury, an utterly insignificant number when you consider the error range for IQ tests is between five and ten points. The EPA model contends the diminished IQ will result in an annual loss of future earnings of about $6 million per year for all individuals. The EPA even breaks out the alleged impact by state. According to the agency’s numbers, about 15 percent of all births in West Virginia in 2005 (3,042 babies) were to subsistence fisherwomen who caught and ate up to six pounds of lake fish a week. As one person tweeted to me yesterday, “It’s no wonder I can’t catch any fish lately; all the pregnant women are catching/eating them.” But there’s more. The EPA says when power plants are forced to install equipment to reduce mercury there will be “co-benefits” from the removal of other pollutants that will generate up to $90 billion annually in additional health benefits. However, as attorney Brian Potts pointed out in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, “The EPA has acknowledged that more than 90 percent of the mercury rule’s ‘co-benefits’ occur at air-quality levels the EPA itself says are already safe.” The EPA’s numbers sound official enough, but they’re clearly absurd to everyone… except the EPA and its acolytes who keep searching for ways to expand the agency’s authority to shut down coal-fired power plants. That’s something to contemplate the next time you are wetting a line and chatting with the pregnant woman next to you. Duane Nichols, www.FrackCheckWV.net

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GASP Alerts Have a New Look!
by Duane 16 Jul '15

16 Jul '15

Rachel Carson Clean Power Hike The Sierra Club invites you to "explore, enjoy, and protect the planet" with them this Saturday morning along the Rachel Carson Trail. Hear from them and others about large pollution sources, such as the coal-fired power plant in Rachel Carson's hometown--and how the Clean Power Plan can help protect us from the dangerous emissions these sources create. Learn more and RSVP here. Begin forwarded message: > From: Group Against Smog and Pollution <jamin(a)gasp-pgh.org> > Date: July 14, 2015 4:31:14 PM EDT > To: <duane330(a)aol.com> > Subject: GASP Alerts Have a New Look! > Reply-To: Group Against Smog and Pollution <jamin(a)gasp-pgh.org> > > Rachel Carson Clean Power Hike > > The Sierra Club invites you to "explore, enjoy, and protect the planet" with them this Saturday morning along the Rachel Carson Trail. Hear from them and others about large pollution sources, such as the coal-fired power plant in Rachel Carson's hometown--and how the Clean Power Plan can help protect us from the dangerous emissions these sources create. Learn more and RSVP here.

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Why Parts of the World Are Experiencing Record-Breaking Rainfall
by Duane 14 Jul '15

14 Jul '15

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/13/record-breaking-rainfall/ Why Parts of the World Are Experiencing Record-Breaking Rainfall By Alex Kirby, Climate Network, News, July 13, 2015 If you think you’re getting an unusually hard soaking more often when you go out in the rain, you’re probably right. A team of scientists in Germany says record-breaking heavy rainfall has been increasing strikingly in the last 30 years as global temperatures increase. Before 1980, they say, the explanation was fluctuations in natural variability. But since then they have detected a clear upward trend in downpours that is consistent with a warming world. The scientists, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), report in the journal Climatic Change that this increase is to be expected with rising global temperatures, caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. High-impact flooding Short-term torrential rains can lead to what the team calls “high-impact” flooding. For example,extreme rainfall in Pakistan in 2010 brought devastation that killed hundreds of people and led to a cholera outbreak. In the same year, rainstorms in Texas caused dozens of flash floods. And no fewer than three “once-in-a-century” floods in Germany all happened in just a couple of years from 1997. “In all of these places, the amount of rain pouring down in one day broke local records—and while each of these individual events has been caused by a number of different factors, we find a clear overall upward trend for these unprecedented hazards,” says the lead author, Jascha Lehmann, a PIK researcher into climate impacts and vulnerabilities. Statistical analysis of rainfall data from 1901 to 2010, derived from thousands of weather stations around the globe, shows that from 1980 to 2010 there were 12 percent more of these intense events than would be expected in a climate without global warming. In the last year of the period the team studied, there were 26 percent more record-breaking daily rainfall events globally. Not all parts of the world are experiencing a similar pattern of soaking. The PIK scientists found that—possibly not surprisingly—wet regions generally saw a bigger increase in deluges and drier regions a smaller one. In southeast Asia, the observed increase in record-breaking rainfall events is as high as 56 percent, in Europe 31 percent, and in the central U.S. it is a more modest, but still worrying, 24 percent. In marked contrast, some regions have experienced significantly fewer record-breaking daily rainfall events. In the Mediterranean, the reduction is 27 percent, and in the western U.S. it is 21 percent. Both regions are at risk from severe droughts. The team says there is a simple scientific explanation for what they report. They compared their findings with existing knowledge about how much more water the atmosphere can store when temperatures rise, described by what they call the well-known Clausius-Clapeyron equation. Put simply, warmer air holds more moisture, which can be released during short-term heavy rainfall. The scientists show that the observed increase in unprecedented heavy rainfall generally fits with this thermodynamically expected increase under global warming. Upward trend “One out of 10 record-breaking rainfall events observed globally in the past 30 years can only be explained if the long-term warming is taken into account,” says co-author Dim Coumou, a PIK researcher into the links between atmospheric circulation and extreme weather events. “For the last year studied, 2010, it is even one event out of four, as the trend is upward.” There are, of course, qualifications to the broad picture. For instance, the scientists allowed for the fact that the quality of historic weather data differs from one place to another. Unsurprisingly, rainfall measurements from the Sahara desert are scarce, so the team avoids drawing conclusions for the region. But rainfall in regions such as Europe and the U.S. has been carefully monitored for over a century, allowing the authors to draw conclusions with high levels of confidence “The pronounced recent increase in record-breaking rainfall events is, of course, worrying,” Coumou says. “Yet since it is consistent with human-caused global warming, it can also be curbed if greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are substantially reduced.” 5 Extreme Weather Events Impacting the Planet June 2015 Smashes Heat and Rainfall Records in U.S. See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

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Science Magazine: Our oceans are being impacted, more and more
by Duane 02 Jul '15

02 Jul '15

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6243/aac4722.full?utm_campaign=email-… CONTRASTING FUTURES FOR OCEAN AND SOCIETY FROM DIFFERENT ANTHROPOGENIC CO2 EMISSIONS SCENARIOS The ocean moderates anthropogenic climate change at the cost of profound alterations of its physics, chemistry, ecology, and services. Here, we evaluate and compare the risks of impacts on marine and coastal ecosystems—and the goods and services they provide—for growing cumulative carbon emissions under two contrasting emissions scenarios. The current emissions trajectory would rapidly and significantly alter many ecosystems and the associated services on which humans heavily depend. A reduced emissions scenario—consistent with the Copenhagen Accord’s goal of a global temperature increase of less than 2°C—is much more favorable to the ocean but still substantially alters important marine ecosystems and associated goods and services. The management options to address ocean impacts narrow as the ocean warms and acidifies. Consequently, any new climate regime that fails to minimize ocean impacts would be incomplete and inadequate. Science -- July 3, 2015: Vol. 349 no. 6243 See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

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MVCAC July 2015