Daily Quick Read - August 27, 2019

Suppression Is Trump's Science

Government scientists wrote a detailed report that outlined the environmental dangers of a Trump decision to divert more water to California's Central Valley farms. As soon as the report was completed, Trumps team scrapped it and the scientists who wrote it were reassigned. A “revised” report was ordered from more compliant, farming friendly sources.

Federal scientists pulled no punches in their report: The Trump administration’s plan to send more water to San Joaquin Valley farmers would force critically endangered California salmon even closer to extinction, and starve a struggling population of West Coast killer whales.

But the scientists’ findings weren’t adopted, nor were they released to the public.

Instead, two days after scientists passed their findings on to the Trump administration on July 1, his officials responded by calling in a strike team to redo the 1,123-page report, documents and emails show.

Environmentalists and salmon fishing groups call it a clear-cut attempt by the Trump administration to whitewash science in order to crank up water deliveries to a group of well-heeled farmers who used to have a top Trump administration official on their payroll — a charge the administration denies.

“The Department of the Interior is once again showing its true colors by subverting the scientific process to serve its clients in corporate agriculture, no matter which endangered fish or whales get in the way,” Noah Oppenheim, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, said in a statement. “Will the state of California let the Trump Administration strike a brutal blow in the water wars, one that it can see coming, or will it take a defensive stand?”

Industrial Strength Denial

More than half of 200 videos that show up in YouTube climate change related searches yield climate change denial videos. Of the 107 denial videos, 91 feature routinely debunked conspiracy theories.   

YouTube searches for climate change-related content are likelier to throw up videos about warming denial than about the climate crisis staring at the world, a study has found.

The study was conducted by a senior researcher at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and published last month in the journal Frontiers of Communication.

The study involved a search for videos on climate change using 10 keywords, including climate change, climate manipulation, and geoengineering. Two keywords commonly used by opponents of mainstream science — chemtrails and climate hacking — were included as well.

“Searching YouTube for climate-science and climate-engineering-related terms finds fewer than half of the videos representing mainstream scientific views,” said study author Joachim Allgaier in a press release.

“It’s alarming to find that the majority of videos propagate conspiracy theories about climate science and technology,” he added. 

Another alarming finding of the study is that both sets of videos received almost the same number of views, 17 million, with those supporting the consensus managing just a slim lead of about 2,000.

Ignorance is Contagious

Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth, who recently got married at one of Trump’s golf properties, lamented the state of education in the US.  On Fox & Friends, Hegseth expressed, to the shows approximately 1.5 million viewer, his amazement that US schools teach climate change, but ignore teaching Islamic extremism.  Trump routinely watches this show.  Is it any wonder that he is getting dumber by the day?

"The left says it all the time, it is their religion," Hegseth said Tuesday morning on Fox News morning show Fox & Friends after a clip of Sanders classifying climate change as the "major national security issue" for the U.S. was played. "They want to fight the weather. The rest of us want to deal with real threats that want to take away our freedoms."

"Whether it's hot or cold, the enemy is here as far as liberals are concerned," he continued. "And it's all about control for them. That's why climate change is the perfect enemy," Hegseth said, lamenting the fact that climate change is currently taught at American institutions of higher education.

"By the way, it's what they're learning at college. They're not learning about radical Islam, they're learning about environmentalism and radical environmentalism," Hegseth said. "That's why these messages catch on, because young kids voting believe it." 

This Is Weather 

Lightning flashes hundreds of miles long that last for more than 13 seconds.  Discovered from space.  Science, that's something we do teach in school.  At least for now.

One Evening while working, Michael Peterson found himself staring at an enormous spider. But Peterson, a remote sensing scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, wasn’t looking at a critter of the eight-legged variety. Instead the form crawling across his screen was a monstrous flash of so-called spider lightning—a twisting network of light stretching hundreds of miles across stormy skies.

His analysis revealed two record-breaking lightning flashes, the longest by length and by duration. One stretched over Brazil some 418 miles from tip to tail—slightly longer than Kansas is across. The second lit up skies for 13.5 seconds over the central United States. A third lightning flash over the southern United States sprawled some 44,400 square miles—nearly the area of Ohio.

What’s more, the identification of such large flashes of light demonstrates the power of NOAA’s newest weather satellites, GOES-16 and GOES-17. And the data is a proving ground for Peterson’s new automated processing system, published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, which tackles the most complex lightning data beamed back from space.

Some People Can't Afford Conservation

Fishers don’t over fish because they hate fish.  Poachers don’t poach because they hate wild animals.  Often they do these things because they have families to support and the countries they live in don’t offer opportunities for them in their economies.  Older Mexican fishers can’t afford to retire.  But, what if we helped them?

In Mexico, a person’s employer pays a portion of their social security payments, which cover things such as healthcare and pensions. But for self-employed people, contributions are optional. Almost 80 percent of local fishers work in the informal economy and many are unable to pay into the country’s social security services. Even if they are part of a cooperative, which can make payments for its members, few are profitable enough to cover the costs. Unable to rely on old-age pensions or medical coverage, many fishers are forced to catch more fish and stick at the job longer, amplifying the pressure on the ecosystem.

The Mexico branch of the Nature Conservancy (TNC), a charitable organization, is working on an ingenious way to address these challenges. The group is exploring using a financial tool called a debt-for-nature swap (DNS) that would pay off fishers’ social security debts if older fishers agree to retire, and younger fishers agree to fish more sustainably.