Yearly Archives: 2017

How to get rid of spiders in your house

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How do I get rid of the spiders???

We had a wet spring and summer in Minnesotan. This meant that insects did quite well at the start of the season. Spiders mainly eat insects (and each other, of course) so that meant that the first generation of spiders had a higher success rate than usual. After that, the compound interest effect kicked in so now, by the end of the season, it is said that many homes in the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota are loaded with the tiny eight-legged creatures.

Is it bad to have so many spiders? What if a spider bites me???

Keep in mind that the reason there are so many spiders in your house is that Continue reading How to get rid of spiders in your house →

Climate and energy are becoming focal points in state political races

Climate Change, Energy, Politics, , , , , ,

Just a pointer to my colleague John Abraham’s current post in The Guardian:

The latest example, Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Otto has a strong clean energy proposal

As soon as Donald Trump won the presidential election, people in the US and around the world knew it was terrible news for the environment. Not wanting to believe that he would try to follow through on our worst fears, we held out hope.

Those hopes for a sane US federal government were misplaced. But they are replaced by a new hope – an emerging climate leadership at the state level and a continuation of economic forces that favor clean/renewable energy over dirty fossil fuels. In fact, it appears that some states are relishing the national and international leadership roles that they have undertaken. Support for sensible climate and energy policies is now a topic to run on in elections.

This change has manifested itself in American politics. One such plan stems from my home state, but it exemplifies work in other regions. I live in the state of Minnesota where we are gearing up for a gubernatorial election, which is where this plan comes from.

My state is well known as somewhat progressive, both socially and economically. The progressive policies resulted in a very strong 2007 renewable energy standard, which helped to reduce carbon pollution and create 15,000 jobs.

As an aside, it is really painful for me to…

Click here to find out about John’s pain!

On that chilling law suit against the environmental groups

Environment,

… which I’ve posted on before … there are new developments, summarized at Inside Climate News:

Invoking the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a federal conspiracy law devised to ensnare mobsters, the suit accuses the organizations, as well as several green campaigners individually and numerous unidentified “co-conspirators,” of running what amounts to a giant racket.

“Maximizing donations, not saving the environment, is Greenpeace’s true objective,” the complaint says. “Its campaigns are consistently based on sensational misinformation untethered to facts or science, but crafted instead to induce strong emotions and, thereby, donations.” Dozens of the group’s campaign emails and tweets, it said, constituted wire fraud.

“As an NGO, that is a deeply chilling argument,” said Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), which joined eight other groups to file an amici curiae brief supporting a move to dismiss Resolute’s case.

ICN goes on to describe the background and details of the suits. And now, an important appearance before the courts is about to happen.

On Oct. 10, Greenpeace will ask a federal judge in California to dismiss the case. The group submitted a similar motion last year in Georgia, where the suit was originally filed. The Georgia judge later moved the case to California, where two of the defendants are based, saying Resolute had not provided any “factual basis from which to infer that defendants committed fraud or extortion” in Georgia. “Rather, the allegations in the complaint, at best, support the inference that the defendants organized and held a protest in Augusta.”

“It is very alarming that you can have plaintiffs like this, representing corporate interests attacking legitimate critics doing advocacy work by just drafting a complaint, throwing whatever in there, stretching racketeering law and going after constitutionally protected free speech by throwing labels out there basically trying to criminalize legitimate advocacy work,” said Tom Wetterer, Greenpeace’s general counsel.

Read all the details here.

More Guns Equals More Gun Deaths

Violence and Guns, , , ,

And lax legislation and elected representatives who run their elections using money from the gun industry make sure there are PLENTY of guns to go around. People who are running for office who have pro NRA positions and/or take gun money should be drummed out of politics.

The rate of gun ownership in a state predicts the rate of gun deaths in that state.


This works across countries as well.

Once again. Politicians who have voted in favor of NRA policies need to go.

Photo above from TIME

Vote Down The Guns

Violence and Guns, , , , , ,

First a word about our lovely press. If I hear one more reporter grovel and squirm about how we don’t really want to hurt the NRA or take away any gun rights or do anything unreasonable, no, no, we just want to assume there is a solution to the carnage that does not inconvenience any of the gun loving yahoos that watch our networks …. then I’m going to I just don’t know what. Reporters: Please leave open the possibility that a double digit percentage of Americans don’t care one whit how much restrictions there ends up being on guns. We just want the insanity to end, and if that means taking away all the guns, then, whatever. It was not our decision to make guns so available that they can be amassed in sufficient quantities to shoot over five hundred people in one sitting. We want results, we do not care, not one bit, who’s feelings are hurt.

But I digress.

You need to do this before any upcoming elections. Find out who is Continue reading Vote Down The Guns →

A Response to the Las Vegas Shooting

Violence and Guns, , , ,

From Americans for Responsible Solutions. I’m personally not sure about responsible solutions … I tend to read “responsible” as “watered down” when it comes to the gun debate. But, for what it is worth (and it is interesting) here it is:


Framework for Addressing the Loopholes that Led to the Las Vegas Shooting

October 5, 2017

We would support a proposal that would comprehensively address the loopholes that led to the Las Vegas shooting. More specifically, this proposal would include the following components:

1. Register existing bump stocks and other trigger activators under the National Firearms Act (NFA) and prohibit the manufacture, sale and transfer of such devices. Bump-fire devices are just one type of a variety of attachments sold in the United States to increase the rate of fire of semiautomatic firearms to mimic the firepower of a fully automatic machine gun. Such devices do not belong in civilian hands, and the future manufacture, sale and transfer of such devices should be prohibited. However, an unknown number of such weapons have already been manufactured and sold to civilians. In order to address these existing devices, we suggest requiring them to be registered to the current owners under the NFA. The NFA, enacted in 1934, prohibits possession of an NFA weapon — which currently include machine guns, silencers, destructive devices, and certain other highly dangerous firearms– unless it is registered in the person’s name with ATF. As a result, millions of NFA weapons currently exist in civilian hands, yet are rarely used in crime. The Las Vegas shooting is evidence of this fact: no registered machine guns were used in the attack. Yet, the shooter was able to fire very rapidly to kill or injure hundreds in just minutes, due to his use of bump stocks.
Continue reading A Response to the Las Vegas Shooting →

Watch Jeff Merkley Wipe Floor With Trump’s William Wehrum

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William Wehrum is a lawyer and once, apparently, worked for the EPA. Trump is trying to appoint him to be assistant administrator for air and radiation. This is a reasonably important job that concerns many aspects of the environment.

Watch:

The Republicans have already said they love this guy. Of course they do.

There is a The War on Science going on, and in Washington, the Republicans are winning it. They are winning it in over 30 states. When they have finished winning it, that is the end of civilization at least in this country.

Help!

100 megawats of solar in Minnesota

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Solar gardens in the state have just reached the 100 megawatt milestone.

This is actually something of a disappointment because a few years ago, Xcel, the main energy company involved in this, projected that we’d be at 200 megawatts by some time last year. On the other hand there are close to 180 new projects in design and construction phase. A current, revised estimate suggests that the statewide solar garden production will reach that 200 megawatt goal.

Currently, Minnesota plants are produce about 15,000 megawatts of electricity. So, the solar garden electricity is only 1% of our overall current production, and current electricity production is probably close to half of what it ultimately needs to be to replace liquid and gas energy used in homes and vehicles.

One percent may not sound like a lot, but this is one percent of the overall production that comes from pretty much nowhere. Just peopled deciding to fund a few solar panels. And, we are lucky that the state legislature in the past has not stood in the way of these efforts (though Republicans in the state legislature are now actively trying to stop solar).

There are a few large scale solar projects currently producing about 162 megawatts. Hardly anybody has solar on their roof, and all those flat topped public buildings, strip malls, etc. are sitting there unused. Most of them, anyway. If we fully deploy solar, this state, which by the way is fairly sunny, should be able to produce double a lot more electricity with solar.

The Energy East Pipeline Is Toast

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Witness the overall demise of fossil fuel pipelines, thanks in part to the hard work of amazing activists, and in part to the fact that the value of these pipelines is dropping fast, which in turn, can be attributed in no small part to the hard work of amazing activists. And now, the latest:

From The Globe and Mail:

TransCanada scraps controversial Energy East Pipeline project

TransCanada Corp. has pulled the plug on its controversial $15.7-billion Energy East Pipeline proposal, after slowing oil sands growth and heightened environmental scrutiny raised doubts about the viability of the project.

In a terse statement Thursday morning, TransCanada said it has reviewed the “changed circumstances” and would be informing the National Energy Board that it would no longer proceed with the project, including the related Eastern Mainline, a natural gas pipeline that complemented the crude-carrying Energy East.

Puerto Rico, now’s your chance!

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Puerto Rico can become the first significant size polity to rebuild itself from the ground up to be totally Carbon free. Or at least, that seems like a good idea. If only the US Government wasn’t so anti-Puerto Rico, owing to the president being, well, Trump.

Anyway, there is now a pile of money and effort pouring int Puerto Rico and this can be used in part to give Puerto Rico sigificantly more economic and energy security in its future, if only energy-smart decisions are made now. So let’s see what Get Energy Smart Now blog has to say about this!

Puerto Rico’s electricity system, prior to Maria, heavily relied on centralized diesel power generation with above-ground power transmission: very high cost electricity, dependent on continued fossil-fuel imports, with great vulnerability to disruption.

Post disaster, thoughtful policy and efforts would seek to maximize value in the Disaster 4R chain: relief, recovery, reconstruction, and resiliency against future impacts.

Rapid deployment/installation of solar-power centered micro-grids to Puerto Rico is a clear example of a Disaster 4R.

Here are some rapid thoughts as to such a Solar Disaster 4R package.

Go HERE to see the bullet pointed suggestions which could ultimately lead Puerto Rico into the next era of energy planning and development. As noted in the bullet points of the post, the success and validity of any such overhaul is based on it coming from the Puerto Rican society, economy, and local population.

Trump Loses Another Fight, or two

Politics

The Trump Administration, in the person of Interior Secretary Zinke, tried to eliminate Obama-era limitations on greenhouse gas emissions from the petroleum industry. The Administration tried to use the “Administrative Procedure Act to turn off provisions intended to reduce how much natural gas petroleum drillers could vent or burn on public or tribal lands. This would have been administered via the BLM. The federal government was sued by California, New Mexico, and various environmental groups, and yesterday, the court ruled in favor of the environment.

This is the second loss for Trump and Zinke in the same courtroom.

A third loss came in a Washington court where Trump tried to side step related methane emission restrictions using the EPA. A federal judge also nixed taht.

Joel Clement Resigned today

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You will remember Clement as the whistle blower at the Department of the Interior who was harassed for showing how climate change affects communities in Alaska. He was removed from his job by Fake Interior Secretory Zinke and given a new job removing staples from paperwork or something similar. Zinke similarly reassigned several others at around the same time. The inspector general has been investigating this but nothing has come of that yet.

Clement hung on for a long time but today he left his position. According to the Washington Post:

“Keeping my voice is more important than keeping my job,” he said. “I have not found another job yet. I have vast contacts inside the agency and outside. I do believe I can be a strong voice to resisting what the Zinke team is doing.”

Clement said workers at Interior are outraged by Zinke’s comment in a speech slightly more than a week ago that they are disloyal. “I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag,” Zinke said, adding that policy-decision positions should be shipped from Washington to Western cities, such as Denver.

“Everyone is pissed here about his comments about loyalty. It’s the buzz in the building. You hear snide remarks all day long at how ludicrous that was. They clearly have lost respect for the leadership of that organization,” Clement said.

Hurricane Nate Updated

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Update Thursday AM

As expected, Nate emerged as a named storm over night. The storm is now interacting withland in Central America and is therefore having trouble getting organized. And, as expected given the uncertainty this causes, the forecasts are unclear on future intensity. The most recent National Hurricane Center projection has Nate Maxing out as a much weaker storm than yesterday’s projection suggested. And, the center of the expected path of the storm has shifted west and is now centered roughly on New Orleans.

After leaving Central America, Nate is expected to pass just over the eastern Yucatan as a tropical storm. That’s thea rea of Cancune and the Maya Riviera, which has seen its share of bad storms. Nate will probably be departing that area and moving out over the Gulf, still as a tropical storm, early Saturday morning.

Between Saturday morning and Sunday Morning, Nate will have turned into an actual Hurricane, Category I, perhaps with maximum sustained winds of around 75 miles per hour. Then, during the day Sunday, the storm will come ashore with the center somewhere between a point west of New Orleans and a point west of Tallahasse. That would be the center of the storm, not the full effect.

The National Weather Service is not yet issuing information on storm surges.

When people hear about Nate they say, “Only a Category I, no big deal.” I was in a weak Category II/Category I hurricane once. I walked around in it. It seemed like a really strong Nor’easter, not much more. Meanwhile, some 60 miles away, my sister-in-law’s house, way up on a hill overlooking the ocean, was 100% covered with the sea. She had seaweed in her attic, crabs in her bathroom, and bluefish in kitchen. All I’m saying is that just because some hurricanes get called “major” does not mean that the other ones are “minor.”

Update Wed PM:

As expected, the intensification projected for this storm has been upgraded a bit but it still likely to stay in the Category 1 range, with landfall on the Gulf coast (tentatively) at around 5PM Sunday, so strong winds etc. affecting the coast starting any time over the weekend.

There are now some projected tracks that put the center of the storm right in New Orleans, others that keep it over the Florida panhandle. On one hand it is too early to say, but on the other hand, the storm is forming fairly quickly and will move fairly quickly to make a landfall in just a few days.

Original Post:

The next named storm in the Atlantic Hurricane Basin will be called Nate. There is currently a tropical depression located not far from Nicaragua that is expected to become a named storm pretty soon. It may pass over or interact with land between now and Friday, but if it does what the experts project, some time between Friday mid day and Saturday PM, it will be over very warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, heading mostly north, and turning into a hurricane. It will likely remain a Category I hurricane until making landfall on the Gulf Coast by the end of the day Sunday. Location of landfall of the center of the storm is between some point east of New Orleans and some point north of Tampa, with the general area of Tallahassee being the current, but subject to change, bulls-eye.

This is all fairly speculative at the moment. The track seems very likely but it can change. The most important change that could happen is that the storm turns out to be stronger than currently anticipated. I say this simply because unexpected strengthening seems to be association with warm deep waters, which is a fairly new phenomenon. As far as I know, meteorological science is silent on this issue, and this is just my gut feeling. But if a storm doing what this storm is doing is projected as having 80 mph winds near landfall, I’d leave open the possibility of stronger winds closer to 100 mph. If so, the storm would be a weak Category 2. Again, this is just a guess.

As indicated in the graphic above, an experimental NWS product, tropical storm force winds could arrive in the keys by late Friday PM, and along the gulf coast near NOLA and the panhandle overnight Saturday.

Cheap Science Books

Other,

Two science books cheap (Kindle version, two bucks):

The Male Brain: A Breakthrough Understanding of How Men and Boys Think

Dr. Louann Brizendine, the founder of the first clinic in the country to study gender differences in brain, behavior, and hormones, turns her attention to the male brain, showing how, through every phase of life, the “male reality” is fundamentally different from the female one. Exploring the latest breakthroughs in male psychology and neurology with her trademark accessibility and candor, she reveals that the male brain:

-is a lean, mean, problem-solving machine. Faced with a personal problem, a man will use his analytical brain structures, not his emotional ones, to find a solution.
-thrives under competition, instinctively plays rough and is obsessed with rank and hierarchy.
-has an area for sexual pursuit that is 2.5 times larger than the female brain, consuming him with sexual fantasies about female body parts.
-experiences such a massive increase in testosterone at puberty that he perceive others’ faces to be more aggressive.

The Male Brain finally overturns the stereotypes. Impeccably researched and at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge, this is a book that every man, and especially every woman bedeviled by a man, will need to own.

I’m not endorsing this book, but if you are a student of sex differences you may want to have a look even if you hate it. But also see by the same author: The Female Brain

Unlocking the Past: How Archaeologists Are Rewriting Human History with Ancient DNA

In Unlocking the Past, Martin Jones, a leading expert at the forefront of bioarchaeology—the discipline that gave Michael Crichton the premise for Jurassic Park—explains how this pioneering science is rewriting human history and unlocking stories of the past that could never have been told before. For the first time, the building blocks of ancient life—DNA, proteins, and fats that have long been trapped in fossils and earth and rock—have become widely accessible to science. Working at the cutting edge of genetic and other molecular technologies, researchers have been probing the remains of these ancient biomolecules in human skeletons, sediments and fossilized plants, dinosaur bones, and insects trapped in amber. Their amazing discoveries have influenced the archaeological debate at almost every level and continue to reshape our understanding of the past.

Devising a molecular clock from a certain area of DNA, scientists were able to determine that all humans descend from one common female ancestor, dubbed “Mitochondrial Eve,” who lived around 150,000 years ago. From molecules recovered from grinding stones and potsherds, they reconstructed ancient diets and posited when such practices as dairying and boiling water for cooking began. They have reconstituted the beer left in the burial chamber of pharaohs and know what the Iceman, the 5,000-year-old hunter found in the Alps in the early nineties, ate before his last journey. Conveying both the excitement of innovative research and the sometimes bruising rough-and-tumble of scientific debate, Jones has written a work of profound importance. Unlocking the Past is science at its most engaging.