Cutting the budget of the already financially strapped National Weather Service as we're experiencing an increasing number of climate change related super storms, what could go wrong?

WaPo:

Budget cuts set to take effect on March 1 could seriously compromise the ability of the National Weather Service to provide timely, reliable weather forecasts government officials and industry leaders warn. Programs and staffing to support weather forecasting are set to be slashed.

An 8.2 percent across-the-board cut in spending, from the so-called sequester, will trim already financially-depleted programs critical for maintaining and improving the NWS’ weather capabilities.

“It’s not going to be pretty,” said outgoing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (according to Climate Central). “The sequester has the potential to wreak havoc with so many different things...”

The cuts loom large following a two-year onslaught of extreme weather, including Superstorm Sandy and continuing historic drought conditions in the Heartland. In 2011 and 2012, the U.S. experienced the most and second most number of billion dollar weather disasters on record.

Kevin Kelly, a lobbyist at Van Scoyoc Associates, who advocates for the weather enterprise told The Washington Post “This is a classic penny wise, pound foolish approach to deficit reduction that places lives and property in all parts of the country at greater risk."

Biologists say manatees in Peru's Amazon rainforest are in danger of extinction.

A wildlife organization is trying to save the animals, but one of the biggest threats to their existence is a part of Peruvian culture.

Even though legislation forbids it, people continue to capture the manatees for human consumption.

Via AlJazeera

Remember climate change? The issue barely came up during the presidential campaigns, and little has been said since. But bringing climate change back into our national conversation is as much a communications challenge as it is a scientific one. Scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, joins Bill Moyers to describe his efforts to do what even Hurricane Sandy couldn’t — galvanize communities over what’s arguably the greatest single threat facing humanity. Leiserowitz, who specializes in the psychology of risk perception, knows better than anyone if people are willing to change their behavior to make a difference.

“[A] pervasive sense up to now has been that climate change is distant — distant in time, and distant in space,” Leiserowitz tells Bill. “And what we’re now beginning to see is that it’s not so distant. It’s not just future generations. It’s us and it’s our own children. I have a nine-year-old son — he’s going to be my age in the year 2050. I don’t want him to live in the world that we’re currently hurtling towards.”

BILL MOYERS: So if the president asks you to suggest what he should say, to send him a draft of what he should say about climate change in his upcoming State of the Union message, what would you urge him to do?

ANTHONY LEISEROWITZ: I would ask him to do two things. One is to say I have consulted with the nation's leading climate scientists including the National Academy of Sciences which exists to guide the nation on science and science policy. And they all tell me, all of them tell me that this is real, that it's human caused, it's a serious problem but that we have the solutions in hand to do it. So, one, I would want him to carry that message.

But the second thing I would like to hear him say is that this issue has to stop being a partisan issue. The climate -- the earth's climate does not care whether you are a Democrat or a Republican. It doesn't care whether you're liberal or conservative. Sandy did not only destroy the homes of Democrats and not Republicans.

The terrible drought that has gripped the Great Plains and our nation's bread basket has not only gone after liberal farmers and ranchers, it's gone after all of us. The point is that climate change will affect all Americans no matter what your political beliefs, your religious beliefs, your race, class, creed, et cetera, okay. And in the end the only way we're going to deal with this issue is if we come together as a county and have a serious conversation not about is it real, but what can we do about it, okay. And I think that the effort to try to de-politicize this issue so it doesn't just become this knee-jerk-- identity politics: I'm a Democrat, therefore I believe in climate change, I'm a Republican, therefore I think climate change is a hoax. This is crazy, okay. I mean, again the climate system doesn't care.

A full transcript of the show is below the fold.

Continue reading »

Yet another instance in which a gun was a really bad idea.

Via:

A Denver mother who believed her daughter was being bullied at school drove into the school's parking lot and threatened four girls with a gun, according to an arrest document.

Monica Avila, 34, was charged Tuesday with four counts of felony menacing and one count of possession of a weapon on school grounds, also a felony. According to the probable cause statement accompanying her arrest paperwork, Avila drove into the parking lot at Lake Middle School on Thursday afternoon and confronted four girls, ages 13 and 14.

The statement says Avila began arguing with the girls about bullying. She then, while still sitting in her car, pulled out a black semi-automatic handgun and said, "Look what I have," the document states.

Now Monica is in jail in lieu of $50k bail, and with those felony charges, it could be a long while before she isn't behind bars. The "bullies" will still be at school with Monica's daughter, and there will no doubt be a "special" grudge there that could potentially last a lifetime. A gun in your face isn't something anyone would likely soon forget.

Even without firing a single bullet, this case of poor judgement with a gun will affect many more lives than just Monica's for years to come. It may only have been dumb luck that no one was killed this time.

The hacktivist collective Anonymous has released what it claims to be a cache of personal details of members of the Westboro Baptist Church, after members of the extremist religious group said on Twitter that they would picket Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the scene of a mass shooting where 26 children and adults were killed on Friday.

Supporters of Anonymous appeared to have taken down the extremist group’s website, most likely through a distributed denial of service, or DDoS attack. They also posted a YouTube video (above) threatening to “destroy” the group.

Westboro is a small extremist group based in Topeka, Kansas, notorious for picketing the funerals of soldiers and victims of shootings with signs and banners claiming tragic events are God’s punishment for the existence of homosexuality.

A document posted on Pastebin claims to reveal physical addresses of the group’s founding Phelps family, telephone numbers, even a social security number, and background information on the group. It's unclear how public these personal details already were for Westboro’s members, given their controversial activities.

A representative of Westboro, believed to be its regular spokeswoman Shirley Phelps-Roper, also carried out a Reddit IAmA, or “Ask Me Anything,” earlier Sunday under the nickname GodSentCTShooter, not surprisingly meeting few questions and plenty of irritation from Redditors.

This isn’t the first time Westboro and Anonymous have clashed. In February 2011 a supporter of Anonymous took part in a radio debate with Shirley Phelps-Roper, during which a small group of hackers surprised Roper by taking down several parts of Westboro’s site during the show.

Venetians and tourists wade through water almost waist-deep after the Italian city was hit by high tides this week, a strong southerly wind and heavy rain. More than 70% of Venice was flooded, with water reaching 149cm above sea level. Tourists attempted to cross St Mark's Square, desperately trying to keep themselves and their belongings dry.

Via The Guardian:

The floods that have devastated Italy over the past week could become even more severe in the future, threatening food production and destroying the country's natural beauty, experts warn.
...
In Venice water levels were receding after the city's sixth-worst flooding since records began in 1872.

Leading Italian meteorologist Mario Giuliacci said: "The Mediterranean has warmed up by 1C to 1.5C in the last 20 years, meaning that Atlantic weather fronts passing over it absorb more vapour and more heat, which means more energy. And that means ever more violent storms and more rain when the fronts hit Italy.

"An average of 80mm of rain should fall in Italy in November. In the last 40 years it has gone over 100mm 11 times, seven of which are since 1999," he added.
...
However, a clear pattern of climate change is emerging, and affecting Italy's agricultural output, an official from Italy's farmer's lobby, Coldiretti, said.

Italy's wine harvest dropped 6% to a 40-year low, while the apple harvest was down by 22%, pears by 13%, chestnuts by 50% and honey by 25%. Production of flour destined for making pasta dropped by 12%.

We haven't seen the last of Big Bird--or his Muppet friends. Around a thousand protesters turned out for the Million Puppet March on Capitol Hill on Saturday to demonstrate against Mitt Romney's promise to cut funding to Public Broadcasting Services. There were Big Birds, Kermits, Elmos, and Miss Piggies in attendance, along with some humans holding signs like “Puppets for Peace” and “Keep Your Mitts Off Big Bird.” “We’re just making it clear that public media matters, and it’s something that we want to see supported and we still want to see federal funding of,” said co-organizer Michael Bellavia.

Via:

It was a warning meant to remind Ecuador that Britain's patience has limits. But as the stalemate over Julian Assange settled in Friday, it appeared London's veiled threat that it could storm Ecuador's embassy and drag Assange out has backfired — drawing supporters to the mission where the WikiLeaks founder is holed up and prompting angry denunciations from Ecuador and elsewhere.

Experts and ex-diplomats say Britain's Foreign Office, which warned Ecuador of a little known law that would allow it to side-step usual diplomatic protocols, messed up by issuing a threat it couldn't back up.

"It was a big mistake," said former British ambassador Oliver Miles. "It puts the British government in the position of asking for something illegitimate."

Extradition expert Julian Knowles said that said British officials could arrest Assange once the diplomatic and media ferment faded.

"I think they'll take the view that within a few days or weeks it will all blow over," he said.

The U.S. state department chimed in with this: "The United States is not a party to the 1954 OAS Convention on Diplomatic Asylum and does not recognize the concept of diplomatic asylum as a matter of international law."

This will no doubt come as a shock to Chinese human rights campaigner Chen Guangcheng, who fled to the US embassy in Beijing after evading house arrest and beatings in May.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke spoke dire words during a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. Bernanke told senators that “economic activity appears to have decelerated somewhat” and that “the reduction in the unemployment rate seems likely to be frustratingly slow.” He did not say whether the Federal Reserve plans to do more to boost growth. He also warned lawmakers that federal spending cuts and tax hikes that automatically take effect in 2013 if Congress does not act to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, is the biggest threat to the nation’s economy. He urged lawmakers to “Do no harm.”

When the LA Youth Justice Coalition planned a community action project that involved cleaning an abandoned former Hyde Park Library, as well as hold workshops and distribute food within the community, they probably weren't prepared for the LAPD to threaten them with arrest while helicopters hovered above.

Via:

What should have been a warm 'n' fuzzy cleanup of the abandoned Hyde Park Library in South L.A. this morning went awry when responding LAPD officers reportedly mistook the Youth Justice Coalition for a faction of Occupy L.A.

Given the post-raid tension between cops and occupiers, the case of mistaken identity didn't bode well for the Inglewood youth group. "Despite the fact that this library has been abandoned since 2004, LAPD is here telling young people they have no right to access..."

... Tweeted blogger Maegan Ortiz. And she soon added: "Commander Green LAPD is giving young people at abandonded library 30 minutes to leave or be arrested with 5k bail."

Sound familiar? LAPD Officer Sara Faden told KPCC radio that cops believed the coalition planned to "occupy the building for demonstration purposes."

After problems arose with the police, negotiations were attempted but ended up with all of the coalition members giving up and leaving.

Hopefully the LAPD hasn't completely soured the children on community service actions altogether. We need more people who don''t solve all problems with weapons.