http://www.sciencedaily.com/releas

es/2013/05/130510075502.htm

May 10, 2013 — Professor Colin Pritchard’s latest research published in journal Public Health has found that the sharp rise of dementia and other neurological deaths in people under 74 cannot be put down to the fact that we are living longer. The rise is because a higher proportion of old people are being affected by such conditions — and what is really alarming, it is starting earlier and affecting people under 55 years.

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Of the 10 biggest Western countries the USA had the worst increase in all neurological deaths, men up 66% and women 92% between 1979-2010. The UK was 4th highest, men up 32% and women 48%. In terms of numbers of deaths, in the UK, it was 4,500 and now 6,500, in the USA it was 14,500 now more than 28,500 deaths.

Professor Pritchard of Bournemouth University says: “These statistics are about real people and families, and we need to recognise that there is an ‘epidemic’ that clearly is influenced by environmental and societal changes.”

Tessa Gutteridge, Director YoungDementia UK says that our society needs to learn that dementia is increasingly affecting people from an earlier age: “The lives of an increasing number of families struggling with working-age dementia are made so much more challenging by services which fail to keep pace with their needs and a society which believes dementia to be an illness of old age.”

Bournemouth University researchers, Professor Colin Pritchard and Dr Andrew Mayers, along with the University of Southampton’s Professor David Baldwin show that there are rises in total neurological deaths, including the dementias, which are starting earlier, impacting upon patients, their families and health and social care services, exemplified by an 85% increase in UK Motor Neurone Disease deaths.

The research highlights that there is an alarming ‘hidden epidemic’ of rises in neurological deaths between 1979-2010 of adults (under 74) in Western countries, especially the UK.

Total neurological deaths in both men and women rose significantly in 16 of the countries covered by the research, which is in sharp contrast to the major reductions in deaths from all other causes.

Over the period the UK has the third biggest neurological increase, up 32% in men and 48% in women, whilst women’s neurological deaths rose faster than men’s in most countries.

Professor Pritchard said, “These rises in neurological deaths, with the earlier onset of the dementias, are devastating for families and pose a considerable public health problem. It is NOT that we have more old people but rather more old people have more brain disease than ever before, including Alzheimer’s. For example there are two new British charities, The Young Parkinson’s Society and Young Dementia UK, which are a grass-roots response to these rises. The need for such charities would have been inconceivable a little more than 30 years ago.”

When asked what he thought caused the increases he replied, “This has to be speculative but it cannot be genetic because the period is too short. Whilst there will be some influence of more elderly people, it does not account for the earlier onset; the differences between countries nor the fact that more women have been affected, as their lives have changed more than men’s over the period, all indicates multiple environmental factors. Considering the changes over the last 30 years — the explosion in electronic devices, rises in background non-ionising radiation- PC’s, micro waves, TV’s, mobile phones; road and air transport up four-fold increasing background petro-chemical pollution; chemical additives to food etc. There is no one factor rather the likely interaction between all these environmental triggers, reflecting changes in other conditions. For example, whilst cancer deaths are down substantially, cancer incidence continues to rise; levels of asthma are un-precedented; the fall in male sperm counts — the rise of auto-immune diseases — all point to life-style and environmental influences. These `statistics’ are about real people and families, and we need to recognise that there is an `epidemic’ that clearly is influenced by environmental and societal changes.”

I worked for years as an editor at Pantheon Books. Its publisher, maybe the most adventurous in the business, was André Schiffrin. Among his many accomplishments, he “discovered” Studs Terkel (already a well-known Chicago radio personality), published his first oral history (Division Street: America), and made him a bestseller.  Sometime after I arrived at Pantheon in the mid-1970s, he asked me to take a last look at a new manuscript by Studs. It was the equivalent of sending the second team onto the field, but it began my own long relationship with the famed oral historian. He was an experience — a small man who, when he wasn’t listening professionally in a fashion beyond compare, never stopped talking. In doing so, he had an almost magical way of making those around him feel larger than life. Later, I would be the editor for two of his oral histories, one on death and the other on hope (in that splendid order and the second with the Studs-appropriate title Hope Dies Last).

Last October, Bill Moyers interviewed me about the dismal state of American politics.  As our conversation was ending, he suddenly asked: “What keeps you going against all the evidence?” At that moment, Studs came to mind. I mentioned editing “one of the greats of our world” and responded this way: “It turned out that when he wrote his book about hope, it was all about activists and the basic point he made was: in good times you could just be hopeful about your life. You didn’t have to be an activist. You didn’t have to be an anything.  In bad times, if you want to be hopeful, you have to take a step. You’ve got to take some step to do something in the world. And in that sense, TomDispatch is my medicine against despair.  So what makes me hopeful is doing TomDispatch.”

All true. But I realize now that it wasn’t quite a full response. I had left out one crucial figure in my life: Rebecca Solnit, who taught me how to hope in a world that seemed dismal indeed.  She was the one who — I’ve written about it before — slipped through the barely ajar door of my life in May 2003, at a moment as grim and dreary as any in my political experience. The largest antiwar movement ever to protest a war that had yet to happen had just packed its tents and gone home in despair, while Baghdad was occupied by American troops and George W. Bush and his top officials were in their “mission accomplished” triumphalist mode.  Many activists then feared that they would remain so forever and would have dismissed out of hand someone who suggested that their Pax Americana dreams of domination would begin unraveling in mere weeks (as happened), not decades or centuries.

Ten years ago, exactly to the day, I published Rebecca’s miraculous piece “Acts of Hope,” which she would later expand into her book Hope in the Dark. It was written to welcome that “darkness” which seemed already to be enveloping us.  It was written with a sense of how the expectable unravels, of how the future surprises us, often enough with offerings not of horror but of hope.

With few people can you ever say, she (or he) changed my life, changed the very way I understand our world. For me, she’s one of the few — and she’s still doing it with her miraculous new book (out in June), The Faraway Nearby.  She taught me how to look into that future darkness with hope. Like Studs, she taught me that acting, even while not knowing, is a powerful antidote to despair. So it means the world to me that she’s returned to the subject of hope to celebrate the tenth anniversary of her arrival in my life and at TomDispatch. Tom

Too Soon to Tell
The Case for Hope, Continued
By Rebecca Solnit

Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home — and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present.  If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better — a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either — the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space. They assumed — like the neoconservatives themselves — that those neocons would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and renounced around the world; the Republicans’ demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country; the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies most of our hope and some of our fear.

I’ve seen extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights movement, but still lacked a meaningful environmental movement, women’s movement, or queer rights movement (beyond a couple of small organizations founded in California in the 1950s). Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as mentally ill or criminal. That 12 states and several countries would legalize same-sex marriage was beyond imaginable then. It wasn’t even on the table in 2003.  San Francisco’s spring run of same-sex weddings in 2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.

Unstoppabilities

Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present. Hopelessness often comes out of that amnesia, out of forgetting that everything is in motion, everything changes. We have a great deal of history of defeat, suffering, cruelty, and loss, and everyone should know it. But that’s not all we have.

There’s the people’s history, the counterhistory that you didn’t necessarily get in school and don’t usually get on the news: the history of the battles we’ve won, of the rights we’ve gained, of the differences between then and now that those who live in forgetfulness lack. This is often the history of how individuals came together to produce that behemoth civil society, which stands astride nations and topples regimes — and mostly does it without weapons or armies. It’s a history that undermines most of what you’ve been told about authority and violence and your own powerlessness.

Civil society is our power, our joy, and our possibility, and it has written a lot of the history in the last few years, as well as the last half century. If you doubt our power, see how it terrifies those at the top, and remember that they fight it best by convincing us it doesn’t exist. It does exist, though, like lava beneath the earth, and when it erupts, the surface of the earth is remade.

Things change. And people sometimes have the power to make that happen, if and when they come together and act (and occasionally act alone, as did writers Rachel Carson and Harriet Beecher Stowe — or Mohammed Bouazizi, the young man whose suicide triggered the Arab Spring).

If you fix your eye on where we started out, you’ll see that we’ve come a long way by those means. If you look forward, you’ll see that we have a long way to go — and that sometimes we go backward when we forget that we fought for the eight-hour workday or workplace safety or women’s rights or voting rights or affordable education, forget that we won them, that they’re precious, and that we can lose them again. There’s much to be proud of, there’s much to mourn, there’s much yet to do, and the job of doing it is ours, a heavy gift to carry. And it’s made to be carried, by people who are unstoppable, who are movements, who are change itself.

Too Soon to Tell

Ten years ago I began writing about hope and speaking about it. My online essay “Acts of Hope,” posted on May 19, 2003, was my first encounter with Tomdispatch.com, which would change my work and my life. It gave me room for another kind of voice and another kind of writing. It showed me how the Internet could give wings to words. What I wrote then and subsequently for the site spread around the world in remarkable ways, putting me in touch with people and movements, and deeper into conversations about the possible and the impossible (and into a cherished friendship with the site’s founder and editor, Tom Engelhardt).

For a few years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe. I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden, as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to one’s own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice versa).

Despair is often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou En-Lai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly answered, “Too soon to tell.” Some say that he was talking about the revolutions of 1968, not 1789, but even then it provides a generous and expansive perspective. To hold onto uncertainty and possibility and a sense that even four years later, no less nearly two centuries after the fact, the verdict still isn’t in is more than most people I know are prepared to offer. A lot of them will hardly give an event a month to complete its effects, and many movements and endeavors are ruled failures well before they’re over.

Not long ago, I ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great upwelling in southern Manhattan in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a description of how Occupy was over and had failed.

But I wonder: How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and we won’t reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043. Maybe the seeds of something more were sown, as they were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and Charter 77, for the great and unforeseen harvest that was the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the nonviolent overthrow of the Soviet totalitarian state in that country.

Second, Occupy began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things were said out loud. I can’t say exactly how, but I know it mattered. So much that matters is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and beyond price. Laws around banking, foreclosure, and student loans are changing — not enough, not everywhere, but some people will benefit, and they matter.  Occupy didn’t cause those changes directly, but it did much to make the voice of the people audible and the sheer wrongness of our debt system visible — and gave momentum to the ongoing endeavors to overturn Citizens United and abolish corporate personhood.

Third, I only know a little of what the thousands of local gatherings and networks we mean by “Occupy” are now doing, but I know that Occupy Sandy is still doing vital work in the destruction zone of that hurricane and was about the best grassroots disaster relief endeavor this nation has ever seen. I know that Strike Debt, a direct offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, has relieved millions of dollars in medical debt, not with the sense that we can fix all debt this way, but that we can demonstrate the malleability, the artifice, and the immorality of the student, medical, and housing debt that is destroying so many lives. I know that the Occupy Homes foreclosure defenders have been doing amazing things, often one home at a time, from Atlanta to Minneapolis. (Last Friday, Occupy Our Homes organized a “showdown at the Department of Justice” in Washington, D.C.; that Saturday, Strike Debt Bay Area held their second Debtors’ Assembly: undead from coast to coast.)

Fourth, I know people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never imagined they would be involved in, and I’m friends with remarkable people who, but for Occupy, I would not know existed. People connected across class, racial, and cultural lines in the flowering of that movement.  Like Freedom Summer, whose consequences were to be felt so far beyond Mississippi in 1964, this will have reach beyond the moment in which I write and you read.

Finally, there was great joy at the time , the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself. In a sense, it’s worth everything, even if it’s always fleeting, though not always as scarce as we imagine.

Climates of Hope and Fear

I had lunch with Middle East and nonviolence scholar Stephen Zunes the other day and asked him what he would say about the Arab Spring now. He had, he told me, been in Egypt several months ago watching television with an activist. Formerly, the news was always about what the leaders did, decided, ordained, inflicted. But the news they were watching was surprisingly focused on civil society, on what ordinary people initiated or resisted, on how they responded, what they thought. He spoke of how so many in the Middle East had lost their fatalism and sense of powerlessness and awoken to their own collective power.

This civil society remains awake in Egypt and the other countries.  What will it achieve? Maybe it’s too soon to tell. Syria is a turbulent version of hell now, but it could be leaving the dynasty of the Assads in the past; its future remains to be written.  Perhaps its people will indeed write the next chapter in its story, and not only with explosives.

You can tell the arc of the past few years as, first, the Arab Spring, then extraordinary civil society actions in Chile, Quebec, Spain, and elsewhere, followed by Occupy. But don’t stop there.

After Occupy came Idle No More, the Canada-based explosion of indigenous power and resistance (to a Canadian government that has gone over to the far right and to environmental destruction on a grand scale). It was founded by four women in November of 2012 and it’s spread across North America, sparking new environmental actions and new coalitions around environmental and climate issues, with flash-mob-style powwows in shopping malls and other places, with a thousand-mile walk (and snowshoe) by seven Cree youth this winter. (There were 400 people with them by the time they arrived at Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa.)

Idle No More activists have vowed to block the construction of any pipeline that tries to transport the particularly dirty crude oil from the Alberta tar sands, whether it heads north, east, or west from northern Alberta. Each of those directions takes it over native land. This is part of the reason why tar sands supporters are pushing so hard to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Thankfully, the push back is also strong. Our fate may depend on it. As climate scientist James Hansen wrote a year ago, “Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.”

The news just came in that we reached 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the highest level in more than five million years. This is terrible news on a scale that eclipses everything else, because it encompasses everything else. We are wrecking our world, for everyone for all time, or at least the next several thousand years. But “we” is a tricky word here. Some of the people I most love and admire are doing extraordinary things to save the world, for you, for us, for generations unborn, for species yet to be named, for the oceans and sub-Saharan Africans and Arctic dwellers and everyone in-between, for the whole unbearably beautiful symphony of life on Earth that is imperiled.

Part of what sustains me in the face of this potential cataclysm is remembering that, in 2003, there hardly was a climate movement. It was small, polite, mostly believed the troubles were decades away, and was populated with people who thought that lifestyle changes could save the planet — rather than that you have to get out there and fight the power. And they were the good ones.  Too many of us didn’t think about it at all.

Only a few years later, things have changed. There’s a vibrant climate movement in North America.  If you haven’t quite taken that in, it might be because it’s working on so many disparate fronts that are often treated separately: mountaintop coal removal, coal-fired power plants (closing 145 existing ones to date and preventing more than 150 planned ones from opening), fracking, oil exploration in the Arctic, the Tar Sands pipeline, and 350.org’s juggernaut of a campus campaign to promote disinvestment from oil, gas, and coal companies.  Only started in November 2012, there are already divestment movements underway on more than 380 college and university campuses, and now cities are getting on board.  It has significant victories; it will have more.

Some countries — notably Germany, with Denmark not far behind — have done remarkable things when it comes to promoting non-fossil-fuel renewable energy. Copenhagen, for example, in the cold gray north, is on track to become a carbon-neutral city by 2025 (and in the meantime reduced its carbon emissions 25% between 2005 and 2011). The United States has a host of promising smaller projects.  To offer just two examples, Los Angeles has committed to being coal-free by 2025, while San Francisco will offer its citizens electricity from 100% renewable and carbon-neutral sources and its supervisors just voted to divest the city’s fossil-fuel stocks.

There are so many pieces of the potential solution to this puzzle, and some of them are for you to put together. Whether they will multiply or ever add up to enough we don’t yet know. We need more: more people, more transformations, more ways to conquer and dismantle the oil companies, more of a vision of what is at stake, more of the great force that is civil society. Will we get it? I don’t know. Neither do you. Anything could happen.

But here’s what I’m saying: you should wake up amazed every day of your life, because if I had told you in 1988 that, within three years, the Soviet satellite states would liberate themselves nonviolently and the Soviet Union would cease to exist, you would have thought I was crazy. If I had told you in 1990 that South America was on its way to liberating itself and becoming a continent of progressive and democratic experiments, you would have considered me delusional.  If, in November 2010, I had told you that, within months, the autocrat Hosni Mubarak, who had dominated Egypt since 1981, would be overthrown by 18 days of popular uprisings, or that the dictators of Tunisia and Libya would be ousted, all in the same year, you would have institutionalized me.  If I told you on September 16, 2011, that a bunch of kids sitting in a park in lower Manhattan would rock the country, you’d say I was beyond delusional.  You would have, if you believed as the despairing do, that the future is invariably going to look like the present, only more so.  It won’t.

I still value hope, but I see it as only part of what’s required, a starting point.  Think of it as the match but not the tinder or the blaze.  To matter, to change the world, you also need devotion and will and you need to act. Hope is only where it begins, though I’ve also seen people toil on without regard to hope, to what they believe is possible. They live on principle and they gamble, and sometimes they even win, or sometimes the goal they were aiming for is reached long after their deaths.  Still, it’s action that gets you there. When what was once hoped for is realized, it falls into the background, becomes the new normal; and we hope for or carp about something else.

The future is bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won; you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who need you.

You don’t stop walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to possibility.  That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.

Rebecca Solnit’s first essay for Tomdispatch.com turned into the book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages. Portions of this essay began life as the keynote speech at the National Lawyers’ Guild gala in honor of attorney and human rights activist Walter Riley, whose own life is a beautiful example of unstoppability. Solnit’s latest book, The Faraway Nearby, will be published in June. 

Copyright

The State Dept. hired a member of the American Petroleum Institute to write KXL’s environmental report. Demand Secretary Kerry throw out this report and investigate the shocking conflict of interest!

John Kerry wants to do the right thing on Keystone XL, but says he needs to base his decision on sound facts first.

If he’s serious, he should listen to Joe Biden — who told a Sierra Club volunteer he shares her views on Keystone XL¹ — instead of the official report written by Big Oil’s favorite contractors.

That’s right: The State Department hired ERM — a dues-paying member of the American Petroleum Institute — to write the latest draft of the Keystone XL environmental assessment. Then they tried to cover up that conflict of interest.

John Kerry has always been a climate champ, not a climate chump. Tell him not to flip-flop now, and to stand strong by throwing out Big Oil’s corrupt Keystone XL report!

We’ll also send your note to the department’s Inspector General. They don’t get many emails, and 20,000 letters from Sierra Club supporters like you will make a big splash.

There’s no two ways about it: Keystone XL would be a climate disaster. The tar sands it would carry would mean “game over for the climate,” ² the destruction of the pristine forests and First Nation lands in Canada, and an increasing frequency of disastrous pipelines spills. ³ TransCanada and API have repeatedly said Keystone XL is critical for expanding tar sands development, so it’s flat-out wrong for the State Department to say that the tar sands will be mined and burned the same way without Keystone XL. ⁴

And yet, that’s exactly the bogus talking point their report repeats. Now we know why — Big Oil’s favorite contractor literally wrote the report. Are you getting a sense of déjà vu? State did the exact same thing on a previous draft in 2011, hiring a contractor recommended by TransCanada.
But this time, it’s even worse: State Department employees explicitly tried to hide ERM’s ties to Big Oil from the public. ^{5, 6}

Tell John Kerry to halt the Keystone XL process until a full investigation of this conflict of interest and inexcusable cover-up can be completed.

John Kerry is better than this. It’s up to you to remind him of that fact.

Thanks for all you do for the environment,

Michael Marx
Sierra Club Beyond Oil Campaign Director

P.S. After you take action, be sure to forward this alert to your friends and colleagues — five comments will have even more impact than one!

References

[1] Cooper, Elaine. “Talking Keystone XL Pipeline with the Vice President.” South Carolina Sierra Club. 8 May 2013.

[2] Hansen, James. “Game Over for the Climate.” New York Times. 9 May 2012.

[3] Swift, Anthony. “Tar sands pipeline risks – examining the facts.” NRDC Switchboard. 30 March 2013.

[4] Olson, Brad and Jeremy van Loon. “Keystone Pipeline Decision May Influence Oil-Sands Development.” Bloomberg Businessweek. 7 March 2013.

[5] Rosenthal, Elisabeth and Dan Frosch. “Pipeline Review Is Faced With Question of Conflict.” New York Times. 7 October 2011.

[6] Kroll, Andy. “EXCLUSIVE: State Dept. Hid Contractor’s Ties to Keystone XL Pipeline Company.” Mother Jones. 21 May 2013.

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Andrew C. Revkin Dawn and dusk at Mirror Lake in Lake Placid, N.Y.

Earlier this week, I spoke at the 20th meeting of the Adirondack Research Consortium.* This coalition of scientists and institutions has focused on providing data and analysis that can help sustain the ecological and economic integrity of New York’s 6-million-acre, 120-year-old Adirondack Park.

In my talk, I described the park as a positive example of what the biologist Erle C. Ellis calls “anthromes” — “ecological patterns created by sustained direct human interactions with ecosystems.”

Environmental management in such places can succeed when there’s sustained scientific monitoring and engagement of diverse constituencies, I said, creating “zones of compromise, adaptability, and complexity.”

Consider that the Adirondack region has seen people as variegated as snowmobilers and wildlife defenders — not always easily — continue working to find common ground. Welcome to the ecology of the Anthropocene — this era of Earth history that is increasingly of our own making.

During a break, Tomeka Weatherspoon of Mountain Lake PBS recorded an interview in which I provided an update on why I blog and discussed the importance of the Adirondacks as a test case in how human-developed landscapes can sustain rich biological webs. As I explained:

It’s a park but it’s also a community — a bunch of communities. That’s a fairly unusual thing, but it’s representative of what we’re going to see more and more in the world… There are certainly special places that need to be protected, with entry fees and that kind of thing. But when you look at other parts of the world, where resources and land use is more constrained, the idea of these hybrid landscapes, where you have people living potentially in harmony with natural systems, with pockets of beautiful biodiverse forest or wetlands, but amid a human-managed landscape, that’s kind of where we’re headed…. The Adirondacks is really a great template or model for how that can be done.”

I encourage you to watch the chat and weigh in.

[*Disclosure: I received a modest fee to cover my time and

While most of Washington, D.C., is consumed with the faux scandals du jour, in a few corners of Congress, actual work is getting done. A day 329 days late and a dollar $20 billion short, perhaps, the farm bill, an every-five-years legislative train[wreck], lumbers slowly forward.

Both the House and the Senate agriculture committees have just passed their own versions of the massive piece of legislation that controls U.S. agricultural policy as well as the federal nutrition program formerly known as food stamps (now called SNAP). A full House and Senate vote is the next step. Congress tried and failed to pass a farm bill last year. The question now is whether Congress can do it this time.

Actually, the question really is whether Congress will ever pass a farm bill again. For the first time, those close to the legislative process are starting to have their doubts. And that may be a really bad thing.

Bah, humbug, you say! The farm bill is larded with bipartisan subsidies for the largest-scale farmers who grow commodities like corn, soy, and cotton. It’s also the bill that authorizes the federal crop insurance program, which has grown like gangbusters over the last decade. Last year (thanks to the drought) farmers received over $17 billion in insurance payouts — almost all of which benefited large-scale commodity agriculture. A chicken pox on all their coops!

That not an unreasonable reaction. But also at stake in the farm bill are billions of dollars for conservation programs that help farmers mitigate the environmental effects of their work, and pay them to set aside marginal farmland as wildlife habitat. It also contains millions in federal funds that support organic farmers, help younger and “new” farmers get their start, and prop up local food efforts, organic research, and farmers markets.

Admittedly, both bills are, by the standards of sustainable agriculture, horrible. The Senate’s is the more “benign” of the two. It “only” cuts food stamps by $4 billion and conservation funding by $3.6 billion. It reduces farm subsidies by $16 billion, but increases crop insurance by $5 billion — a huge gift to corporate ag.

The House hews to the Senate blueprint overall, though it’s even friendlier to agribusiness, if that’s possible. But the House wants to cut a whopping $20 billion from food stamps — dropping from the program up to 2 million hungry Americans who are still suffering the effects of the Great Recession.

Ag Committee members will applaud themselves for also ending the controversial and wasteful subsidy program known as “direct payments” whereby farmers who grow certain commodity crops get cash regardless of how much they actually plant. But almost all the savings harvested from this program are plowed back into the expansion of crop insurance — including the introduction of an outrageous new “revenue insurance” program that would pay farmers in the event of small drops in prices. This would come at a time when crop prices and farm revenue are at all-time highs (more on the history of this proposed policy is here).

There are a few bright spots. Senate Ag Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) managed to include a provision in the Senate version that would link participation in the crop insurance program with adoption of conservation practices, and includes additional protections for disappearing native grasslands. The House version boosts funding for “new farmer” programs and a few local food initiatives.

But the bill, as envisioned by both houses of Congress, continues to be a virtual giveaway to the largest farmers while leaving crumbs to sustainable agriculture and small and medium-sized farmers. On many counts, it’s even worse than its 2008 predecessor.

So will it pass in the end? The answer is somewhere between “Reply hazy try again” and “Cannot predict now.” Both the House and Senate leadership have promised a vote by the end of June — so that’s something. But getting it through Congress will be a trick.

House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) could use the same trick he used to avoid the “fiscal cliff” earlier this year: pass a harsher version of the bill through the Tea Party-controlled House with only Republican votes, and then turn around and pass a final compromise version — with lower cuts to food stamps — using mostly Democratic votes. But there’s reason to believe that the Tea Party wing may not stand for such a maneuver — and that the farm bill could die on the vine for the second time in a year.

It’s those food stamps cuts that threaten to doom the whole enchilada. The Senate passed a farm bill last year that included $4 billion in cuts and likely will again. But splitting the difference with the House version — say, adding another $8 billion in cuts to food stamps — is a non-starter in the Senate. Meanwhile, the Tea Party wing of the House killed the farm bill last year because food stamp cuts weren’t deep enough, so it is unlikely to support less than the $20 billion figure currently in the House version.

The death of such an abysmal farm bill would likely be greeted with cheers and confetti from some corners. After all, according to an analysis of federal data by the Environmental Working Group, 75 percent of crop subsidy payments go to the top 10 percent of farmers. A mere 10 percent of farmers also received just over half of the total crop insurance subsidies in 2011, including over two dozen farms that received $1 million each in insurance subsidies.

But Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, warns critics to be careful what they wish for. Reformers “would really be in big trouble” if the farm bill dies once and for all, Hoefner told me in an interview. While subsidies might still get tweaked here and there in a post-farm bill era, “the chance for investment in local food or farmers or organic or anything else will just go up in smoke.”

The reason is that the improvements to conservation policy and organic production and local food and farmers markets and so on have all been funded out of money pulled from the tens of billions of dollars spent on commodity crop subsidies. Without that “piggy bank,” as Hoefner called it, there’s no just no money for those programs, especially in the current era of federal budget sequestration.

If the farm bill fails, crop insurance would persist indefinitely without any further congressional involvement. The food stamps program does need minor adjustments every few years, but those can and have been handled outside of the farm bill. Every other component, however, would require new laws to be passed every few years. And as Hoefner observed, the parts of the farm bill most dear to sustainable agriculture advocates would be the parts least likely to survive as stand-alone bills.

Would the failure of the farm bill lead to a real shake-up in how the government makes farm and nutrition policy? Maybe. A crisis is also an opportunity and all that. But it’s also still a crisis. And very soon, farmers and eaters may find themselves in a big one.

Tom Laskawy is a founder and executive director of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a contributing writer at Grist covering food and agricultural policy. His writing has also appeared in The American Prospect, Slate, The New York Times, and The New Republic. Follow him on Twitter.

NEW YORK — In more than four years of office, President Barack Obama has frequently praised the idea of whistleblowing. He even signed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act into law in 2012. But has he actually praised any whistleblowers by name?

That’s a question The Huffington Post posed to several non-profits representing whistleblowers, and to the White House, in light of the news about the subpoenas the Justice Department used to obtain the phone records of journalists at the Associated Press. The revelation has renewed focus on the administration’s treatment of the press, along with its attitude toward whistleblowers.

“Sad to say, we can’t think of a single one,” Joe Newman, director of communications for the Project on Government Oversight, said when asked if Obama had ever praised a whistleblower.

“I’m not aware of him ever praising a whistleblower, or apologizing to a whistleblower who was wrongfully prosecuted,” said Jesselyn Radack, national security and human rights director for the Government Accountability Project. The closest Radack could think of was Lily Ledbetter, who spoke out against unequal pay for women in the workplace but did not work for the federal government.

The White House did not respond to a request for background on whistleblowers praised by Obama.

As a candidate in 2008, Obama praised instances of whistleblowing as “acts of courage and patriotism” that “should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration.” But since his election critics have repeatedly called into question his record on supporting whistleblowers, pointing to several individuals who have not only not been praised, but were prosecuted.

Obama’s Justice Department continued the Bush-era prosecution of Thomas Drake, a former NSA official who went to a reporter with news about massive overspending in an intelligence program. He took a plea deal for a minor misdemeanor. Thomas Tamm, a Justice employee who told The New York Times about the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, was investigated until 2011. John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst who spoke out against the use of torture against suspected terrorists, was likewise prosecuted and given a 30-month sentence.

Although he took a plea for a lesser charge, Kirakou was initially charged under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that critics have claimed the Obama administration is using as a cudgel against the press.

“What would really encourage whistleblowers is not threatening them with the Espionage Act when they step forward with information about corruption, waste or abuses of power,” said Newman. “But sure, if Obama praised whistleblowers, it would signal a significant paradigm shift.”

Over a four-week period before the November 2012 election, Gallup’s daily tracking poll showed Republican opponent Mitt Romney leading by margins ranging from 1 to 7 percentage points, including a 4-point Romney lead just 10 days before the election. Obama defeated Romney by a 51 to 47 percent margin.

Shortly after the election Gallup’s editor-in-chief Frank Newport pledged to conduct an internal review of Gallup’s telephone survey methodology. As promised, Newport reviewed on Saturday the kinds of studies conducted on issues including drawing samples, interviewing voters, and how to weight data and select the likely electorate. The company pledges to make the findings of its ongoing review publicly available.

Although much analysis is now complete and set to be unveiled June 4, the investigation awaits “a major experiment” in conjunction with the gubernatorial campaigns in the fall.

“We take it seriously” when polls misfire, Newport explained on Saturday. “We’ve been doing presidential polling since 1936 which is what put George Gallup on the map …The results [in 2012] certainly were not what we wanted them to be from Gallup’s perspective.”

Newport’s remarks came during a private, on-the-record briefing in Boston attended by The Huffington Post, and a handful of other pollsters and academic researchers at the annual American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conference.

Michael Traugott, a University of Michigan political scientist and survey methodologist retained by the company for the review, said he recommended broadening the scope and timing of the inquiry.

“Early on,” Traugott said, “Frank and I had a conversation, about trying to learn what we could from an investigation of the data” collected during the 2012 campaign, “but then using that information to design a series of experiments going forward.”

Traugott also said he recommended reviewing all of Gallup’s methods and assessing the data collected before the 2012 campaign. “We have been assembling data on presidential approval back to 2002 as a benchmark to look at the Gallup data in relations to other data and also party identification data going back.”

His analysis confirms, for example, that by “a small but consistent amount,” ratings of President George W. Bush “were a little bit higher than the average” of other pollsters “and the Obama ratings were a little bit lower than the average.” Those findings are consistent with a Huffington Post investigation of Gallup’s results published in June 2012.

Traugott also clarified that Gallup “has agreed to make all of this information publicly available.” He stressed that both he and Newport, as former presidents of AAPOR “are firmly committed to transparency. And this is an ongoing part of our relationship as well.”

When pressed on whether that included releasing raw respondent-level data, Newport said that although they are “still making the final decisions, we think we’ll try to make the data available as well.” Such data will allow other scholars and researchers to attempt to replicate Traugott’s findings and test other theories. On Saturday, Newport also asked assembled AAPOR researchers for further input on a list of 20 specific parts — virtually every aspect — of Gallup’s methodology included in the review.

While Newport declined to reveal specific findings from the review ahead of the June 4 announcement, he shared some new information.

One of the experiments, for example, checked on potential bias associated with the Gallup brand name by running a full “shadow” sample to a recent Gallup poll in which respondents were told the polster was “Selection Research Incorporated,” rather than Gallup. “The Gallup name significantly increased the response rate,” Newport said, but without producing differences in the demographics of the resulting sample.

Newport also explained that earlier this year, the company changed how it asks respondents to describe their race, replacing yes/no questions critiqued in last year’s Huffington Post investigation with a question in which respondents could select more than one in a list of potential answers. That change allowed for a related modification to Gallup’s weighting procedure. “We think that’s already had some impact on our data,” Newport said.

It is difficult, Traugott explained, to reconstruct Gallup’s problems “retrospectively” using the data collected last fall. Instead, he convinced Gallup to conduct experiments to determine if alternative methods would have produced different and more accurate results.

Because such experiments only make sense “in the context of a campaign,” Traugott explained, they decided to undertake them during the upcoming gubernatorial campaigns in Virginia and possibly New Jersey. He stressed that the experiments would only be used for further analysis, and would not be released publicly before the election.

Three academic survey methodologists are joining Traugott in the investigation: Chris Wlezien from Temple University, an expert in likely voter models; James Wagner from the University of Michigan, an authority in telephone survey operations; and Frauke Kreuter from the University of Maryland, an expert on sampling and weighting.

Shortly after the election, Newport speculated that “it is likely that we could see significantly fewer polls conducted in the 2016 election.” Asked Saturday if he was signaling Gallup’s intention to withdraw from polling in the next presidential race, Newport replied, “Well, check back with us in 2016. I don’t know what any polling organization is doing in 2016,” given the increasing challenges to traditional pollster methods.

However, despite the months of criticism, Newport was upbeat about the potential for improvements with advances in technology. He spoke favorably about a future in which “polling is augmented by non-probability data, administrative data, social media data.”

“I think it is an exciting time,” he said later. “Rather than doing things the same way in any business, it’s always exciting when technology in particular opens up all these other opportunities

Alleged ‘PayPal 14′ Hackers Seek Deal To Stay Out Of Prison After Nearly 2 Years In Limbo

Before he was charged in July 2011 with aiding the hacker group Anonymous, Josh Covelli lived what he considered the life of an ordinary 26-year-old. He spent countless hours on the Internet. He had a girlfriend. He was a student and employee at Devry University in Dayton, Ohio.

But after federal authorities accused him and 13 other people of helping launch a cyberattack against the online payment service PayPal, Covelli faced potentially 15 years in prison, and his life began to unravel.

His girlfriend broke up with him. He struggled to find an employer willing to hire an accused computer hacker. His friends “wanted nothing to do with me,” he said, and he suffered from bouts of paranoia — “looking out windows, not sure who to trust” — before checking into a behavioral health center for three days.

“It was as if I got kicked off a cliff,” Covelli, now 28, told The Huffington Post in an interview.

Nearly two years after the charges made headlines, the case remains an anxiety-provoking daily reality for Covelli and his 13 co-defendants. Though they come from disparate worlds — drawn from different points on the map and stages in their lives — the defendants collectively share a sense of unsettling uncertainty, their plans and aspirations stuck in a limbo of indeterminate duration as they await a resolution of their case.

Their wait may be nearing a conclusion. This week, the defendants — known collectively as the “PayPal 14″ — attended a closed-door hearing in federal court in San Francisco in hopes of negotiating a settlement that could keep them out of prison. Lawyers for both sides declined to discuss the negotiations, but a joint court filing called the meeting “productive.”

“We’re at a delicate point,” one defense attorney said in an interview.

Such a deal would mark the final chapter in a case that has been seen as one of the first major salvos in the federal government’s war on Anonymous, a loose collective of hackers who say they are motivated by ideological beliefs, not financial gain. It would also bring to a close months of legal uncertainty that the defendants say has caused them both financial and emotional strain. One defendant in the case told The Huffington Post that she would “jump off the Hoover Dam” if convicted.

While the PayPal case has largely faded from public view, the law under which the 14 defendants were charged — the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — has come under increased scrutiny. The government used the same anti-hacking law to prosecute Internet activist Aaron Swartz, charging him with illegally downloading millions of articles from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer archive. Facing the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence, Swartz committed suicide, provoking claims of prosecutorial overreach and calls to reform the law. Critics say it is overly broad and excessively punitive, meting out stiff prison terms for some computer-related crimes they deem relatively innocuous.

The PayPal arrests appeared to have done little to deter Anonymous. Six months after the indictment was unsealed, in January 2012, Anonymous launched one of its largest attacks, knocking offline the Justice Department’s website in protest of the U.S. government’s arrest of leaders of Megaupload.com, a file-sharing site that allegedly facilitates Internet piracy. Since then, the group has taken credit for numerous other attacks on corporate and government websites.

But the charges in the PayPal case had one noticeable impact on the hacker group — its members became more careful. They began circulating manuals online on how to use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to shield their IP addresses from the watchful eye of law enforcement, said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University who has studied Anonymous. “The arrests led to a kind of moment of education,” she said.

The case against Covelli and the 13 other defendants stems from a series of cyberattacks in December 2010. In response to PayPal’s decision to cut off donations to the whistleblower site Wikileaks, Anonymous encouraged supporters to download software that bombards websites with traffic, causing them to crash. The resulting “denial of service attack,” which brought down PayPal’s site intermittently over four days, was nicknamed “Operation Avenge Assange” in reference to the Wikileaks founder.

On Jan. 27, 2011, the FBI executed 27 search warrants and seized more than 100 computers in 12 states in connection with the PayPal attack. That day, Covelli said he was awoken at 6 a.m. by FBI agents knocking at his door. “The FBI is here,” he recalled telling his girlfriend at the time. He opened the door and “got a pistol put to my face,” he said.

Six months later, authorities filed charges against 14 people, some of whom belie the stereotype of the teenage male hacker. The defendants are men and women ranging from 22 to 44 years old and living in small towns and big cities stretching from California to Florida. They include a real estate broker, a military veteran, a massage therapist and a single mother with two children.

Some knew each other before the indictment, but only by online nicknames such as “Anthrophobic” and “Reaper.” They had never met in person until Sept. 1, 2011, when they made their initial court appearance together.

One defendant, Tracy Ann Valenzuela, a single mother and massage therapist, told a local ABC station in 2011 that she got involved in the PayPal attack while reading the news online.

“I saw something about PayPal shutting down payments to Wikileaks, and I clicked on some other site and joined a protest,” she said. “And next thing I knew, my house was surrounded by guns.”

Although 14 people were charged, PayPal collected about 1,000 IP addresses of computers involved in the attack, according to an FBI affidavit. Some observers have questioned whether those arrested in the case were high-level members of Anonymous or merely unsophisticated activists who wanted to be associated with the group and were unaware of the consequences of their actions.

“There were a handful who were core participants and a handful who were there because they were outraged that day and didn’t know the consequences,” said Coleman, the McGill professor.

She said the nature of the PayPal attack made it seem innocent to the untrained eye. “They were just sitting there firing requests with a piece of software from their computers,” she said. “It doesn’t feel all that criminal. It doesn’t feel like you’re causing harm.”

But Mark Rasch, a former federal cybercrime prosecutor, said the Anonymous attack on PayPal should be considered a serious crime. He compared it to chaining a lock to the entrance of a store to prevent customers from entering. “If you do something illegal, the essence of civil disobedience is you run the risk of arrest and prosecution,” he said.

Still, Rasch said the 14 PayPal defendants should be considered individually. “You need to look at the nature of their participation. Were they leaders or not?” he said. “It may be appropriate for some of these people to not be prosecuted or be given probation.”

In interviews with The Huffington Post, defendants in the PayPal case said they have spent the past two years burdened by pre-trial conditions that restricted their Internet usage. Many also struggled to secure employment.

“When you’re applying for a job and someone Googles you, you have a lot of explaining to do when you want to point out that you were standing up for free speech and a worthy cause and the government says you’re a cyber terrorist,” said Graham E. Archer, an attorney who represents Ethan Miles, one of the defendants.

Archer said being on pre-trial release has been “extraordinarily stressful” for Miles. Court records note that he spent time at a mental health facility.

“You have a pre-trial services officer who is in your life constantly,” Archer said. “It’s a form of out-of-custody incarceration for a lot of people.”

Covelli, who went by the online aliases “Absolem” and “Toxic,” said a brief stretch in which he was barred from using the Internet was “like a muzzle.” A court-appointed officer routinely inspects his computer to ensure he is complying with pre-trial conditions that bar him from Internet chat rooms and knowingly communicating with other members of Anonymous.

Covelli said he has gone through various periods over the past two years during which “everything seemed dark and dim.” He has been diagnosed with depression that is “exacerbated by the threat of prison that hangs over him,” his attorney said in court filings.

“At first it was soul-crushing,” Covelli told The Huffington Post. “I was like, ‘Holy crap, everything is going to end. What am I going to do?’”

Today, Covelli is unemployed, living with his parents and volunteering 35 hours a week at a food pantry in Sidney, Ohio. He attended a drug treatment facility after violating pre-trial conditions by smoking marijuana, according to court records.

He now faces potentially 30 years in prison — much longer than his co-defendants — because he also has been charged in connection with a separate hacking case. Authorities say Covelli helped bring down Santa Cruz County’s website in December 2010 in protest of a local ordinance that barred people from sleeping outdoors.

Covelli said his only possessions are a laptop and an Xbox that he received as a gift. The U.S. Marshall’s Service pays for his flights to court hearings because his attorney has told the court that Covelli is indigent. “I ran out of money fast and have been living on almost nothing or from the generosity of my family,” he said in an interview.

He found some work painting in Ohio but said he missed out on other job opportunities because of the charges against him. He briefly worked at a McDonald’s restaurant, a gig he called “the best job I’ve had in two years.” He lost one job because he was forced to request time off to attend a court hearing, his attorney said in court filings.

On Monday, Covelli tweeted from court that he was “bored” and suggested that supporters organize a game of whiffle ball outside the courthouse.

Another defendant in the PayPal case, Mercedes Renee Haefer, a 22-year-old sociology major at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, told The Huffington Post that after the indictment was made public, one of her professors barred her from using her laptop in class, citing security concerns.

She said she didn’t speak to her sister or father for several months and was fired from her job at a Sony retail store because of the charges. She said she has been unable to find jobs beyond part-time paralegal work for her lawyer and IT work for nonprofits. “No one will hire me,” she said.

Haefer, a brunette who wears glasses and used the online aliases “No” and “MMMM,” said she still believes in Anonymous, especially when the hacker group organizes attacks in defense of freedom of speech or freedom of information. “Some things they do I agree with and some things they do I don’t agree with,” she said.

She spoke to The Huffington Post by phone while riding her bike in Las Vegas. When a reporter suggested that activity might not be safe, she replied, “Safety is for losers.”

Haefer said the case has brought her a small measure of fame, including an appearance in a recent documentary about Anonymous. “The day my indictment went public my name trended on Twitter,” she recalled.

Before Monday’s court hearing, she used the social media service to write: “Really excited that people are coming out to support us for court on the 13th. Makes the whole thing a little less dehumanizing. #paypal14″

In an interview, Haefer declined to discuss the PayPal attack beyond saying, “I was speaking out about an issue I feel passionate about.”

She said she tries not to think about the possibility of going to prison.

“If I wake up every day thinking about 15 years in prison, I’m not really going to live my life,” she said. “You can’t sit and wait on your hands for three years.”

Is Climate Change Increasing Tornado Intensity?

Lightning strikes from a storm illuminate a home damaged by a tornado on Hyde Park Lane at Country Club Rd. in Cleburne, Wednesday night, May 15, 2013.

By Marlene Cimons, Climate Nexus:

Marlene Cimons of Climate Nexus contributed this article to LiveScience’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

With at least 10 tornadoes ripping through North Texas in one night this week — leveling neighborhoods, killing six and injuring dozens — it might be tempting to call the twisters yet another instance of climate-fueled weather. But not so fast.

While most climate scientists agree that global warming is driving record heat waves, widespread drought, heavy rain and floods, intense hurricanes, and even monster snowstorms, tornadoes — at least for now — are a different story.

“With tornadoes, what we don’t know is as much as what we do know,” said Michael Wehner, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Global warming is making wet places wetter and dry places drier, and creating moisture-laden air that fuels hurricanes and snowstorms, making them much worse than they otherwise would be in a climate unchanged by human behaviors. [The New Normal: Deluge]

But we can’t necessarily say the same the same about tornadoes, at least not yet. The tornado connection to global warming is tenuous, and for several reasons. Chief among them is the fact that climate change apparently affects the two major factors influencing tornadoes — energy and wind shear — in completely opposite ways.

Tornadoes, violently rotating columns of air spawned by thunderstorms, occur when available energy — warm, moist air at low levels and cold, drier air above — meets vertical wind shear, which provides the source of the rotation. Climate change enhances the former, also known as “convective available potential energy,” or CAPE, and diminishes the latter.

As the planet warms, “the energy goes up, and the shear goes down,” said Harold Brooks, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Severe Storms Laboratory. “Thus, we have one ingredient expected to become more favorable and another expected to become less favorable.”

Furthermore, the enormous natural variability in tornadoes makes it difficult to sort out any viable climate trends. Also, what seems like an increase in excessive violent tornado activity in recent years may in fact be the result of other factors. [The Top 5 Deadliest Tornado Years in U.S. History]

“Tornadoes are small, and the observational record shows increases that are simply due to more people in more places seeing them,” said Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist in the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

There also is a dearth of information about what happens to tornadoes over time. Tornado reporting and record-keeping practices have been fraught with problems. “Our database for evaluating long-term changes in tornadoes is pretty awful, so we really don’t know how tornadoes might be changing,” said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground.

Brooks agreed. “Tornado data collection has never been intended as a climate data set,” he said. “Large changes have taken place in reporting procedures that make interpretation of the past very difficult.”

Tornadoes can be terrifying and destructive, causing about 70 deaths and 1,500 injuries in the United States annually, according to NOAA. The strongest ones feature rotating winds of more than 250 miles per hour; they can be as wide as 1 mile and stay on the ground for distances as far as 50 miles. The year 2011 brought an onslaught of vicious tornadoes, including a catastrophic twister that struck Joplin, Mo., in May, killing 161 people and destroying a third of the city.

They can happen anywhere there is enough moist air at low levels, cold dry air aloft and strong vertical wind shear. “Tornadoes are spawned in particular environments that occur more in the United States than anywhere else,” Trenberth said. “It relates to the Rockies running north-south and the Gulf of Mexico being where it is. “Tornadoes are small in scale and not modeled in global models,” he added, explaining why it is so difficult to link them to climate change. “Meteorologists can find two storms that look almost identical and in similar environments, and one spawns a tornado and one doesn’t, so there is a large element of chance, evidently.”

Tornadoes are further complicated by the fact that certain small-scale processes — friction at the ground, and where and how much rain evaporates within the parent thunderstorm — also are critical. “Those are beyond our large-scale observational capabilities or predictions,” Brooks said. [Team Tornado: Chasing Twisters for Science]

No one knows whether tornadoes have increased in number or intensity, since the aforementioned changes in reporting practices “make the intensity question harder to answer,” Brooks said, adding, “If you take the dataset of reports at face value, it appears intensity has decreased over the years, but there are a number of things that have led to lower ratings for the strongest tornadoes.”

There always have been strong tornadoes, but the intensity picture has become further muddled because “warnings are so much better now and houses are constructed better,” Trenberth said.

Most climate scientists believe that clearer answers will be forthcoming with better climate modeling tools — and patience.

“Better understanding of the relationships between the large-scale environments and tornadoes would help, but the big thing is waiting long enough to get better trend estimates,” Brooks said.

Wehner agreed. “We need bigger computers, and better models,” he said. “But what we really need is time. We don’t yet have an answer. But, that doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking about it.”

Read Cimons’ most recent Op-Ed: Homeowners Warm to Solar Power

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This article was originally published on LiveScience.com .

Geoffrey R. Stone

Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago

We’ve read a lot lately about the AP “scandal.” In short, on May 7, 2012, the Associated Press released a story that disclosed classified details of a CIA operation in Yemen that prevented an airliner bombing around the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

In an effort to determine the identity of the government employee who leaked the classified information to the AP, the Justice Department, after conducting an extensive investigation without success, subpoenaed from the AP’s phone company the records for more than twenty telephone lines used by the AP and its journalists. The hope was that, by examining the incoming and outgoing phone numbers, it could identify the leaker and prevent him or her from releasing additional classified information in the future.

According to the media (to say nothing of Republicans and Fox News), in pursuing this investigation the Obama administration brutalized the Constitution and flagrantly violated the law. The hysteria of the media’s response is predictably self-involved and self-interested and the reaction of Republicans is predictably hypocritical.

Let me say at the outset that I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU, a strong proponent of press freedom and a staunch believer in both a robust First Amendment and a vibrant Fourth Amendment. But I also care about rational public discourse, and the furious condemnation of the Department of Justice in this situation is way over the top.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Almost forty years ago, in a regrettable decision, the conservative justices on the Burger Court held that individuals have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in information we voluntarily reveal to third parties. The Court therefore held that for the government to obtain our financial records from our bank, or our phone records from our phone company, is not an “unreasonable search or seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

This understanding of the Fourth Amendment is regrettable because it ignores the reality that in the modern world we often, as a matter of practical necessity, expose what we quite reasonably regard as private information to third parties, such as banks, Internet providers and phone companies. That we reveal such information to those entities does not in any way suggest that we are indifferent to the privacy of the information.

Nonetheless, that is the prevailing interpretation of the Fourth Amendment and there is no possibility that the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court will change it. Thus, the subpoena of AP phone records from the phone company does not violate the Fourth Amendment.

The First Amendment prohibits government to abridge the “freedom of the press.” Does it violate the First Amendment for the government to gather information about the AP’s phone records? The media argue that because this action will reveal the identity of confidential sources, it abridged “the freedom of the press.”

Forty years ago, in another regrettable decision, the conservative justices on the Burger Court held that the government can constitutionally require reporters to disclose the names of confidential sources. The Court held, in effect, that the “freedom of the press” does not give members of the press any special rights not enjoyed by other individuals.

Although the government cannot constitutionally discriminate against the press (for example, by charging higher sales taxes for newspapers than for other products), the Court held that if other individuals can be compelled to disclose information relevant to law enforcement, then journalists can be compelled to do so as well.

This understanding of the First Amendment is regrettable because there are clearly circumstances in which the government should be constitutionally required to recognize and respect the distinctive harm its investigations might have on our ability to preserve a vibrant, robust public discourse. But, because of the settled state of First Amendment law on this question, it is clear that the Department of Justice’s action did not violate the First Amendment (despite the outraged complaints of the media).

In short, then, nothing the Department of Justice did in this investigation violated the Constitution as currently understood. Nor did anything it did violate federal law. Although proposals to enact legislation restricting the ability of the government to compel the disclosure of information about the identity of confidential sources — a so-called “Shield Law” — have been presented repeatedly in Congress over the past decade, Republican lawmakers have consistently — and shamefully — blocked such legislation on the theory that it might weaken the national security. Thus, it is also clear that the Department of Justice’s use of a subpoena to require the phone company to turn over the call records of the AP did not violate any federal law.

Legally, then, the Department of Justice could constitutionally and legally have sought the phone records of the AP at any time and in any manner it pleased. As a measure of good government, though, since Watergate, the Department of Justice has acted with self-restraint. For the past forty years, the Department has imposed upon itself specific, voluntary limitations on when it will exercise its lawful authority to ascertain the identities of confidential sources.

Thus, as set forth explicitly in Department of Justice regulations, the Department, “in recognition of the importance of freedom of the press to a free and democratic society,” has promulgated regulations providing that “the prosecutorial power of the Government should not be used in such a way that it impairs a reporter’s responsibility to cover as broadly as possible controversial public issues.” These regulations provide that the Department will not subpoena the phone records of a member of the news media unless certain conditions are satisfied, including

(a) balancing in each instance “the public’s interest in the free dissemination of ideas and information with the public’s interest in effective law enforcement,”

(b) “taking all reasonable steps to attempt to obtain the information through alternate sources or means,”

(c) fashioning the subpoena “as narrowly as possible to obtain the necessary information in a manner as minimally intrusive and burdensome as possible,” and

(d) negotiating “with the affected media” before resorting to a subpoena “unless such negotiations” might “pose a substantial threat to the investigation.”

Although these regulations are, in my view, insufficiently protective of the interests of a free press, they are as protective as the Department of Justice has ever been, and they are more protective than either the Constitution (as interpreted by conservative justices) or federal law requires.

It is, of course, possible that the Department of Justice did not comply with its own regulations in the AP investigations. Perhaps the subpoena could have been more narrowly drawn. Perhaps the Department should have negotiated with the AP before issuing the subpoena. I do not have sufficient information to speculate about these issues, but nor do the media. What is clear, though, is that the overblown claims that this investigation is some huge “scandal” that threatens the very foundations of our free society are nothing short of absurd.

Think Progress

By Zack Beauchamp on May 17, 2013 at 10:30 am

You may start seeing more people carrying James Bond’s gun around — by law. A new proposed federal law would require that all new guns, and eventually all guns for sale, would be required to have “smart” identification technology that only allows specially authorized users to fire it, something the silver screen saw recently in Skyfall. The law is intended to crack down on gun accidents, thefts, and suicides, but its critics — including a major gun violence prevention group — worry that it might make the problem worse.

Introduced by Rep. John Tierney (D-MA), the Personalized Handgun Safety Act of 2013 would require that all guns manufactured for sale or put up for sale, would have to have some kind of “personalized” technology that limited the ability to fire the gun to its owner and any individuals authorized. Since this technology is not widespread now, these requirements would kick in within two years for manufacturers and three years for sellers. Affected sellers include both federally licensed retailers and private sellers.

The bill is technologically feasible. Several possible ways of building “smart” guns include firearms that only activate when you press a special ring into it, guns that won’t work until you enter a key code, guns that only fire if they detect a specific radio signal, and guns that recognize biometric info like fingerprints. Some smart guns are already available abroad, including one Irish design that automatically disables guns when they’re brought into properly equipped schools.

There’s some reason to believe these measures could be effective in reducing gun violence. Roughly ten to fifteen percent of crime guns are acquired by theft; an average of 232,400 guns are stolen per year. Presumably, a smart gun couldn’t be used by a thief.

So long as parents don’t give their kids biometric “permission” or leave their gun key lying around, then kids also wouldn’t be able to fire the gun. Adam Lanza couldn’t have brought his mother’s guns to Newtown absent her say-so were they smart guns. Some of the 900 kids who died in gun accidents or suicides last year may not have lost their lives.

“Even if smart guns disarmed only our dumbest, laziest criminals and other unauthorized borrowers like kids,” wrote Dave Guston and Ed Finn, two professors at Arizona State University, “the savings in lives could be tremendous.”

But the Violence Policy Center (VPC), a major group supporting stronger gun regulations, is skeptical. A 2013 report on smart guns opposed “the use of any federal tax dollars in support of smart gun research,” though it didn’t take a position on a smart gun mandate of the sort Tierney is proposing. The report noted that most guns criminals use are acquired via personal sales from “straw purchasers” who initially acquired the gun legally, a distribution mechanism that wouldn’t be affected by smart guns. Moreover, the report finds, many children are allowed to use family guns by their parents, and the vast majority of guns in the United States are collected, not for sale, which means that most already-existing guns wouldn’t be covered by legislation like Tierney’s.

The VPC report even worries that smart gun laws might fuel gun sales. “Packaged with a strong sales pitch,” the VPC writes, “the technology could penetrate new markets for a gun industry that is facing long-term declines in household and personal gun ownership.”

The question may be moot. Some conservative commentators have already harshly criticized Tierney’s proposal, and the law can’t pass without GOP support.

Salon

Friday, May 17, 2013 11:32 AM PDT

Nirvana’s former bassist is working to end political dysfunction. Here’s his plan to make Congress more accountable

By Krist Novoselic

Krist Novoselic(Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson)

That Congress is totally dysfunctional is evident to most Americans, with just 16 percent telling pollsters they approve of the job the body is doing. The good news is there’s a constitutional solution that would dramatically improve its efficacy, boost participation, and curb partisan obstruction: switching to a form of proportional representation by electing multiple members in each district based on how it votes.

Legend and myth was important to ancient Roman society. They practiced augury, such as reading the way birds fly, then attributing bad situations to unhappy gods. In reality, their government (a republic, no less) was run by a few elites who made bad decisions. Americans tend to be similar in buying into myths, while a real culprit of our stagnant democracy is right before our eyes. Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but too many of us are focused on distractions — like blaming Citizens United v. FEC for everything wrong with politics — while political insiders rig the game.

I don’t have to tell Salon readers about gerrymandering. It is as plain as day that political insiders draw lines to protect their interests. However, there’s another effect of this process. Democrats tend to get packed into urban districts or disbursed in rural areas, and this causes distortions. For example, last November in liberal Seattle, Rep. Jim McDermott won over 79 percent of the vote. Where I live in the third Congressional district of Washington state, the Democrat who lost got almost 40 percent. Nevertheless, in Seattle, no matter how great the Democrat did (whether 80 percent or 50.1), the party won a single seat; meanwhile, in my district, a not too shabby 40 percent got no representation. It’s been noted that nationally the Democratic Party won more votes than Republicans but still lost the House by 233-201. That’s not democracy.

The solution is two-fold. First, Congress needs to pass a law mandating citizen-led independent redistricting commissions in each state for U.S. House elections. This will take the power away from the insiders who skew maps and let commissions of citizens independent of the legislature draw maps. California has such a system. But this alone is not enough to provide more fairness to our elections; these commissions still tend to determine which parties are winners or losers before any ballot is cast.

 Monsanto and Congress Move to Stomp on States’ Rights

• By Ronnie Cummins
  Organic Consumers Association, May 16th, 2013

Reliable sources in Washington D.C. have informed the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) that Monsanto has begun secretly lobbying its Congressional allies to attach one or more “Monsanto Riders” or amendments to the 2013 Farm Bill that would preempt or prohibit states from requiring labels on genetically engineered (GE) foods.

In response to this blatant violation of states’ rights to legislate, and consumers’ right to know, the OCA and a nationwide alliance have launched a petition to put every member of Congress on notice: If you support any Farm Bill amendment that would nullify states’ rights to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs), we’ll vote – or throw – you out of office.

On Wednesday, May 15, an amendment to the House version of the Farm Bill, inserted under the guise of protecting interstate commerce, passed out of the House Agricultural Committee. If the King Amendment makes it into the final Farm Bill, it would take away states’ rights to pass laws governing the production or manufacture of any agricultural product, including food and animals raised for food, that is involved in interstate commerce. The amendment was proposed by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), largely in response to a California law stating that by 2015, California will allow only eggs to be sold from hens housed in cages specified by California.  But policy analysts emphasize that the amendment, broadly and ambiguously written, could be used to prohibit or preempt any state GMO labeling or food safety law.

Will the King Amendment survive the Senate? No one can be sure, say analysts. However few doubt that Monsanto will give up. We can expect that more amendments and riders will be introduced into the Farm Bill–even if the King Amendment fails—over the next month in an attempt to stop the wave of state GMO labeling laws and initiatives moving forward in states like Washington, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and others.

Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) have admitted privately that they’ve “lost the battle” to stop GE food labeling at the state level, now that states are aggressively moving forward on labeling laws. On May 14, Maine’s House Ag Committee passed a GMO labeling law. On May 10, the Vermont House passed a labeling bill, 99-42, despite massive lobbying by Monsanto and threats to sue the state. And though Monsanto won a razor-thin victory (51 percent to 49 percent) in a costly, hard fought California GMO labeling ballot initiative last November, biotech and Big Food now realize that Washington State voters will likely pass I-522, an upcoming ballot initiative to label GE foods, on November 5.

If Monsanto can’t stop states from passing laws, then the next step is a national preemptive measure.  And all signs point to just such a power grab.  Earlier this year, Monsanto slipped its extremely unpopular “Monsanto Protection Act,” an act that gives biotech immunity from federal prosecution for planting illegally approved GE crops, into the 2013 Federal Appropriations Bill.  During the June 2012 Farm Bill debate, 73 U.S. Senators voted against the right of states to pass mandatory GE food labeling laws. Emboldened by these votes, and now the House Ag Committee’s vote on the King Amendment, Monsanto has every reason to believe Congress would support a potential nullification of states’ rights to label.

The million-strong OCA and its allies in the organic and natural health movement are warning incumbent Senators and House members, Democrats and Republicans alike, that thousands of health and environmental-minded constituents in their Congressional districts or states will work to recall them or drive them out of office if they fail to heed the will of the people and to respect the time-honored traditions of shared state sovereignty over food labels, food safety laws, and consumers’ right to know.

Trouble in Monsanto Nation.
Over the past 20 years Monsanto and the biotech industry, aided and abetted by indentured politicians and corporate agribusiness, have begun seizing control over the global food and farming system, including the legislative, patent, trade, judicial and regulatory bodies that are supposed to safeguard the public interest.

In the U.S., despite mounting evidence of the damage GE crops inflict on human health and the environment, approximately 170 million acres of GE crops, including corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, sugar beets, alfalfa, papaya, and squash, are currently under cultivation. These crops, untested and unlabeled, comprise 41 percent of all cultivated cropland, or 17 percent of all cropland and pastureland combined. According to the GMA, at least 70 percent of non-organic grocery store processed foods contain GMOs. And GE grains and mill byproducts now supply the overwhelming majority of animal feed on the factory farms that supply 90 percent to 95 percent of the meat, eggs and dairy products that Americans consume.

Yet despite their marketplace dominance, record profits and enormous political clout in Washington D.C., Monsanto and the biotech industry are in deep trouble. Evidence is mounting that Monsanto’s top-selling herbicide, Roundup, is a deadly poison, destroying important human gut bacteria and likely contributing to the rapid increase of food allergies and serious human diseases including cancer, autism, neurological disorders , Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), dementia, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Those most susceptible to poisoning by Monsanto’s Roundup are children and the elderly.

Scientists aren’t the only ones raising new questions about Roundup. Farmers are complaining that they’re being forced to spray more and more chemicals on crops increasingly under siege from a growing army of herbicide-resistant weeds.  The situation is so bad that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just raised the limits of Roundup residue allowed on grains and vegetables to even more dangerous levels. But just in case the EPA someday stops raising the limits, Monsanto, Dow and the biotech industry are working on a new “solution” to the onslaught of herbicide-resistant Superweeds: They’ve applied  for approval of a new and highly controversial generation of super toxic herbicide-resistant GE crops, including “Agent Orange”  (2,4-D and dicamba-resistant) corn, soybeans and cotton.

As a recent widely-circulated article points out,

• “The use of 2,4-D is not new; it’s actually one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. What is new is that farmers will now ‘carpet bomb’ staple food crops like soy and corn with this chemical at a previously unprecedented scale—just the way glyphosate has been indiscriminately applied as a result of Roundup Ready crops. In fact, if 2,4-D resistant crops receive approval and eventually come to replace Monsanto’s failing Roundup-resistant crops as Dow intends, it is likely that billions of pounds will be needed, on top of the already insane levels of Roundup being used (1.6 billion lbs were used in 2007 in the US alone).”

In addition to these Agent Orange crops, an expanded menu of genetically engineered organisms are awaiting approval. Next on the menu?  GE apples, trees, and salmon.

State Labeling Laws: The ‘skull and crossbones’ that terrify Monsanto
Monsanto’s greatest fear isn’t a federal government charged with protecting the health and safety of its citizens.  Congress and the White House seem only too happy to oblige the biotech industry’s unquenchable thirst for growth, power and dominance. No, it’s the massive, unstoppable (so far) grassroots movement of Millions Against Monsanto that strikes fear in the heart of the Biotech Bully. U.S. citizens are waking up. They’re demanding labels on genetically engineered foods, similar to those already required in the European Union. They’re calling for serious independent safety-testing of GE crops and animals, both those already approved (especially Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant crops) and those awaiting approval.

The anti-GMO movement has finally figured out, after 20 years of fruitlessly lobbying Congress, the FDA and the White House, that the federal government is not going to require labels on GE foods. Instead the movement has shifted the battleground on GMO labeling from Monsanto and Big Food’s turf in Washington D.C. to the more favorable terrain of state ballot initiatives and state legislative action—publicizing the fact that a state GMO labeling law will have the same marketplace impact as a national labeling law.

State laws spell doom for Monsanto. Companies like Kellogg’s, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Pepsi/Frito-Lay, Dean Foods, Unilever, Con-Agra, Safeway, Wal-Mart and Smuckers are not going to label in just one or two states.  Monsanto knows that U.S. food companies will go GMO-free in the entire U.S., rather than admit to consumers that their products contain GMOs.

As Monsanto itself has pointed out, labels on genetically engineered foods are like putting a “skull and crossbones” on food packages. This is why Monsanto and their allies poured $46 million into defeating a California ballot initiative last year that would have required labels on GMO foods. This is why Monsanto has lobbied strenuously in 30 states this year to prevent, or at least delay, state mandatory labeling laws from being passed. This is why Monsanto has threatened to file federal lawsuits against Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and Washington if they dare grant citizens the right to know whether or not their food has been genetically engineered or not.

And this is why Monsanto’s minions are trying to insert amendments or riders into the Farm Bill that will make it nearly impossible, even illegal, for states to pass GMO labeling laws. And there’s nothing to stop them when Congress is filled with pro-biotech cheerleaders who could care less that 90 percent of U.S. consumers want mandatory labels and proper safety testing of genetically engineered crops and foods.

Countering Monsanto’s Final Offensive: Throw the Bums Out!
Only a massive grassroots resistance will deter the U.S. Senate and House from stomping on our rights. Only an unprecedented campaign of public education, petition-gathering and grassroots pressure will be able to convince the ever-more corrupt and indentured politicians in Washington D.C. to back off.

Eighteen state constitutions have century-old provisions for state registered voters to collect petitions and recall state and local officials, forcing them to either resign or stand for reelection. But what very few Americans, and even members of Congress, realize is that 11 states have constitutional provisions to recall U.S. Senators and House of Representative members, as well as state elected officials.

It’s time we exercise the full power of direct democracy, not just state and municipal ballot initiatives. We must continue to support efforts like the current state ballot initiative to label GMOs in Washington state, and county ballot initiatives to ban GMOs, factory farms and other corporate crimes, in the 24 states and hundreds of counties and municipalities where these are allowed.  But we also need to use the power we have to recall and throw out of office our out-of-control Congressional Senators and Representatives as well.

If our elected officials in Congress continue to represent Monsanto and big corporations, rather than their constituents, then let’s throw the bums out! If the Washington political Establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, continue to trample on our inalienable constitutional rights and contemptuously disregard the 225-year principle of a shared balance of power between the federal government, the states and local government, then we have no choice but to recall them or throw them out of office.

Please join the nation’s organic consumers and natural health advocates in this strategic battle, the Food Fight of Our Lives. Please join this campaign to save, not only our right to choose what’s in our food, but our basic right to democratic representation and self-determination as well.  Sign the petition.  Tell your Congressmen and women, especially the 73 incumbents who voted last year to eliminate states rights’ to legislate on GMO labels, and those in the House this week who voted to support the King Amendment that “enough is enough,” “ basta ya.” Power to the People!

Ronnie Cummins is National Director of the Organic Consumers Association.