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Nine People Say Mike Flynn Lied About His Phone Calls With the Russian Ambassador

Mother Jones

The routine lying by the Trump administration is just beyond belief. Mike Flynn has consistently denied that he talked to the Russian ambassador in December about President Obama’s sanctions against Russia, but apparently he did exactly that. Here are Greg Miller, Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post tonight:

Flynn on Wednesday denied that he had discussed sanctions with Sergey Kislyak. Asked in an interview whether he had ever done so, he twice said, “No.” On Thursday, Flynn, through his spokesman, backed away from the denial. The spokesman said Flynn “indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

….The emerging details contradict public statements by incoming senior administration officials including Mike Pence…Nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

All of those officials said ­Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit. Two of those officials went further, saying that Flynn urged Russia not to overreact to the penalties being imposed by President Barack Obama, making clear that the two sides would be in position to review the matter after Trump was sworn in as president. “Kislyak was left with the impression that the sanctions would be revisited at a later time,” said a former official.

A third official put it more bluntly, saying that either Flynn had misled Pence or that Pence misspoke. A spokesman for Pence did not respond to a request for comment. The sanctions in question have so far remained in place.

Nine officials! And every one of them says Flynn explicitly talked about the sanctions that Obama levied on Russia as retaliation for their cyber-hacking during the campaign. The message: don’t worry about it. We’ve got your back.

Do these guys ever tell the truth? About anything?

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Nine People Say Mike Flynn Lied About His Phone Calls With the Russian Ambassador

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Meet the Computer Geek Who Took on Ken Cuccinelli—and Won

Mother Jones

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For climate researcher Michael Mann, the last few weeks have hardly been average ones in the life of a scientist and university professor.

On October 30, Mann introduced Bill Clinton at a campaign rally for Terry McAuliffe in Charlottesville, Virginia. A few days later, he listened as President Obama, also campaigning for McAuliffe in Virginia, brought up Mann’s high-profile struggles with McAuliffe’s gubernatorial opponent, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

Not exactly average—but then, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes put it when interviewing Mann back in August, “You didn’t come to politics, politics came to you.” The story of how Mann, a self-described math and computer nerd working in an esoteric field known as paleoclimatology, wound up front and center in a nationally watched political campaign is told on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast:

As Mann explains on the show, “The last thing I ever wanted to do was to get involved in politics, to me that was anathema.” But “because of the situation I found myself in,” Mann continues, “I ultimately did grow to embrace the role that I can have in informing this debate that we’re having about potentially the most significant challenge that human civilization has faced.”

The “hockey stick” as depicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001. IPCC Third Assessment Report

Mann’s situation traces back to the world famous “hockey stick” graph, originally published by Mann and his colleagues in a 1998 scientific paper, and then prominently displayed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2001 Third Assessment Report. Because of its stark depiction of just how dramatically humans have altered the climate in a relatively short time period, the figure may well be the most controversial chart in history. Not scientifically controversial, mind you: politically controversial.

“This curve became an icon in the climate change debate because it told a simple story,” says Mann of the hockey stick. “You didn’t need to understand a lot of physics and math to see what that curve was telling you: That there were unprecedented changes taking place in our climate today, and by inference, they probably have something to do with us.”

Columbia University Press

The saga of politicized attacks on the hockey stick is captured in Mann’s book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines, which is just out in paperback. Suffice it to say that it’s a long and sometimes enraging tale of congressional hearings, prying data requests, dubious scientific critiques, and personal attacks that stretches back to the early 2000s, and forward through the 2009 “Climategate” controversy and all the way up to the recently concluded Cuccinelli battle. Mann had to update the paperback edition of his book extensively just to capture the latest twists and turns.

Climategate, for example, centered in part on a leaked email that referred to “Mike’s Nature trick…to hide the decline.” This was erroneously taken to mean that Mann had been involved in trying to falsely show that temperatures are rising. (If you want to know what was really being discussed in this infamous email, read here.)

Multiple investigations have cleared Mann and the other scientists involved in Climategate. In 2010, however, Cuccinelli issued a “Civil Investigative Demand” to the University of Virginia, where Mann used to work, seeking Mann’s emails and other documents related to a number of his research grants. The demand cited the “hide the decline” email as well as other leaked emails from Climategate. The university resisted and, in a case that drew dramatic media attention and widespread denunciations of Cuccinelli’s “witch hunt,” was ultimately victorious at the Virginia Supreme Court.

Emerging from this broad story, in retrospect, are at least two large ironies:

(1) There are lots of hockey stick studies, not just Mann’s. So even as the issue was personalized and made all about Mann’s research and its validity, other scientists just kept on producing hockey sticks. Mann likes to joke that there is now a veritable “hockey team.” For other hockey stick studies see here and here.

(2) By attacking Mann in such a prominent way, climate skeptics have made him vastly more influential, politically and otherwise, than he might otherwise have been. For instance, Mann was just named one of the “50 Most Influential” people by Bloomberg Markets. Cuccinelli’s demands of the University of Virginia gave Mann a new stature that, in turn, empowered Mann to directly campaign against him.

To see how prominent Mann and his story ultimately became in the Virginia gubernatorial election, just watch this ad from the McAuliffe campaign:

Granted, the climate issue, and the issue of Cuccinelli’s pursuit of Mann’s files, did not tip the Virginia gubernatorial race all on their own. Overall, the most powerful electoral strike against Cuccinelli seems to have been his association with the government shutdown brought on by House Republicans. Still, Mann says, “the issue of ideologically driven anti-science, which was symbolized by Ken Cuccinelli, I think that did fit into a larger narrative of a dangerous candidate who was driven by ideology over logic and science, and substance. And I think in the end, that was the difference.”

Mann is well aware of how much of a departure campaigning against a Republican candidate is for a scientist. In the science community, there has long been discomfort with “advocacy” in its many forms, with the overtly political perhaps topping the list of scientific no-nos. Mann counters, though, that he’s no political operative: It’s just that this particular race, and this particular candidate, affected him so directly that he got involved.

“I felt like I had to fight back not just for myself, but to make it clear to other scientists that we do need to defend our science, not just because it’s the right thing to do scientifically, but because the implications are so profound in this case,” he says. How profound? “We are engaged in an unprecedented and uncontrolled experiment with the one planet that we have,” says Mann. Politicians who seek to undermine this reality now have something new to worry about: That scientists, inspired by Mann, may not simply sit by and watch it happen any longer.

To listen to the full interview with Michael Mann, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by best-selling author Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas, also features a discussion of the myth that left-brained people are logical and right brained people are creative, and the legacy of Carl Sagan and its lessons for today’s science wars.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Meet the Computer Geek Who Took on Ken Cuccinelli—and Won

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Were Your Dental Crowns, Retainers, and Dentures Made in Someone’s Dirty Cellar?

Mother Jones

Earlier this month, the ABC News affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, aired a strange story: Police in Springfield had received a call-in report that a man was standing on a street corner and “shooting a gun off all day.” After a five-hour standoff, they arrested the man and searched his house. They found guns, knives, swords, and in the basement, hot plates, pots and pans, and boxes of teeth. Perplexed, they investigated further and discovered that the man’s brother had been running a dental lab out of the home for about a year, supplying devices such as dentures to local dentists’ offices. The photos of the basement lab are sickening: paint peeling off the walls, dust everywhere, lots of clutter. Not exactly the kind of pristine environment you’d imagine for the manufacture of something that goes in your mouth.

Amazingly, the scuzzy basement lab was completely legal. In fact, I, Kiera Butler, could go home tonight and start making dentures in my basement and selling them to dentists. Ohio is one of many states where dental labs and their employees—who produce crowns, night guards, dentures, and your kids’ braces and retainers—don’t have to be trained, licensed, or certified in any way. Heck, they don’t even have to register with the state health department. While Ohio at least asks dental labs to disclose to clients what their products are made of and where they come from, most states have no such requirement. (You can check out the rules for individual states here.)

Is your dentist even aware of this? Perhaps not. In a 2008 survey by the American Dental Association, fewer than half of dentists knew whether their state regulates these labs, and 86 percent couldn’t say whether the federal government does. As it turns out, the manufacturers of many common dental devices are actually exempt from federal rules that medical-device makers have to follow. The FDA “handles questions associated with these dental-device exemptions on a case-by-case basis,” explains David Gartner, who heads the regulatory policy division of the agency’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

The National Association of Dental Labs (NADL) estimates that Americans spend around $7 billion on dental devices annually, and that there are some 10,000 dental labs in the United States. But the FDA has inspected only 146 of them during the last decade. Because most don’t have to register, state and federal authorities have no real record of their existence.

Domestic dental labs get a good portion of their materials (about 38 percent, the NADL estimates) from thousands of overseas labs, which are supposed to register with the FDA. But the agency has inspected only 113 of those labs in the last decade—even after lead was found in some imported Chinese crowns in 2008.

So are these unregulated devices creating problems for patients? Hard to say, says Eric Thorn, the NADL’s chief staff executive. “In the vast majority of these occurrences the patient would report it to their dentist and their dentist would address the issue,” he says. Dentists are not requires to file official reports of most problems with appliances.

The ABC reporters asked the Springfield man whether he had any training as a dental lab technician, and it turned out he did: He got certified in prison—which actually makes him more qualified than the law requires.

Both NADL and the American Dental Association are urging states to require dental labs to register. That way, at least authorities will be able to track them. “It’s really important that these devices get made in clean, hygienic labs, and that states require those labs to be registered,” says Bennett Napier, NADL’s executive director. “Otherwise, patients have no way of knowing their devices are made under acceptable conditions.”

Here are a few more pictures that the Springfield, Ohio, police took of the basement dental lab:

Police Department of Springfield, Ohio

Police Department of Springfield, Ohio

Police Department of Springfield, Ohio

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Were Your Dental Crowns, Retainers, and Dentures Made in Someone’s Dirty Cellar?

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U.N. climate talks will be all about the Benjamins

U.N. climate talks will be all about the Benjamins

PaulPaladin

To slow climate change and protect the world’s vulnerable poor from the effects of global warming, the West is going to have to give developing nations a hand. And that hand will need to come in the form of cold, hard cash.

Unfortunately, not a lot of that is on offer right now. That fact will take center stage during international climate talks in Poland over the next two weeks.

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change’s next Conference of the Parties, commonly known as a COP, begins Monday in Warsaw. Officials representing nearly 200 countries will bicker and beg as they try to move forward in the quest for a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol. That deal was struck way back in 1997. The U.S. never ratified it, Canada ultimately walked away from it, and the agreement expired last year. It’s been sticky-taped together through amendments to extend its life until a new agreement can be reached.

During COP talks in Durban, South Africa, in 2011, delegates struck a deal to strike a deal: They agreed to finalize an agreement by 2015 to replace the Kyoto Protocol. The new agreement would cap warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.7 Fahrenheit) and begin to take force in 2020 — and that’s under a best-case scenario. Which is also a horrible-case scenario, given that the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise every year.

The issue of equity is always one of the biggest sticking points in U.N. climate talks. How much should rich countries sacrifice and how much should developing countries sacrifice as they try to curb emissions together? It was during the talks in Durban that a solution to this conundrum was concocted: Rich countries would provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries reduce emissions and adapt to the warming world.

Guess how that’s going.

So far, the Green Climate Fund is nearly as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard: It has received $7.5 million to spread around to the entire developing world. Not only that, but some developed countries are starting to hem and haw about whether they should even contribute to the fund. At a conference held ahead of the Warsaw talks, a British representative suggested that businesses could be more involved and that the agreement could be more of a private-public-partnership type thing, as Responding to Climate Change reports

“I believe we need a new business partnership to tackle climate change, that does so with its eyes wide open, mindful of the costs and careful to catch the opportunities,” [said Greg Barker, minister of state for energy and climate change in the U.K.].

“We can only decarbonise the economy if business comes with us, as an active participant, and at least cost for consumers.”

But others expressed doubt that this system was an adequate response to the urgency of climate change, and urged the UN to push for a more top-down approach in order to mobilise the level of action needed.

The Green Climate Fund is a really big deal for the developing world. If it slumps, so too could hopes of worldwide cooperation on climate change.

($100 billion a year sounds like a lot of money, but compare that with the $500 billion a year that the world’s richest countries are spending on fossil fuel subsidies every year.)

India is a developing country that recently overtook Russia to become the world’s fourth-largest climate polluter — after China, the U.S., and the European Union. Just ask that country how cooperative it will be in curbing emissions from its fast-growing economy if the climate fund remains unfunded. Of course, you can’t ask an entire nation a question — let alone one that is home to 1.2 billion people speaking a cacophony of languages. But The Hindu newspaper found the right Indian to ask. Here’s what the country’s environment minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, hopes to see at the Warsaw meetings:

The most important milestone would be climate finance and capitalisation of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which has not happened at all. Developed countries that made a commitment earlier have now started talking of alternative sources of funding. Whereas in our view these are commitments of the parties to the COP. While others and alternate sources need not be excluded, I think the fundamental commitment is the provision of finance.

In other words, “show us the money.” It’s a call that many developing countries are making as we head into next week’s talks.

Thomson Reuters Foundation reports on another financial issue that will be front and center at the conference:

Developing countries and climate experts are calling for U.N. climate talks, which begin in Warsaw on Monday, to set up an international mechanism to deal with losses and damage linked to climate change, which a new report says are already harming vulnerable people.

The question of whether to establish a new global body was controversial at last year’s negotiations in Doha, with richer nations fearing it could be used to make them pay compensation for the consequences of their planet-warming emissions to poorer countries suffering the worst impacts of more extreme weather and rising seas.

After fierce last-minute wrangling, it was agreed the upcoming 2013 climate conference in Poland would “establish … institutional arrangements, such as an international mechanism … to address loss and damage associated with the impacts of climate change in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change”.

Quamrul Chowdhury, a lead negotiator for the group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs), told Thomson Reuters Foundation creating a mechanism is of “paramount importance” at the Nov. 11-22 Warsaw talks.

The world’s poor countries couldn’t be more clear: Rich countries started this problem, they say, and rich countries can best afford to fix it. It’s time to cough up the money. The next two weeks should provide a hint as to whether that is ever likely to happen.


Source
Warsaw climate talks expected to deliver loss and damage mechanism, Thomson Reuters Foundation
‘India is not a nay-sayer on climate change’, The Hindu
UN climate chief underlines Green Climate Fund concerns, Responding to Climate Change

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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U.N. climate talks will be all about the Benjamins

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Cow farts still stink up the climate — but relief is possible

Cow farts still stink up the climate — but relief is possible

Shutterstock

There’s your biggest problem right there.

The latest official estimate of the extraordinary role that livestock-rearing plays in global warming comes with a glimmer of hope: Switching over to established best practices could slash the sector’s emissions by a third.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations caused an international stir when it estimated in 2006 that livestock contributed 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Some critics derided the claim, saying T-bones and Big Macs couldn’t possibly be so bad. The FAO has since updated its numbers, checked its facts and performed new calculations based on newer standards. The latest conclusion is little different from the earlier one: Livestock contributes 16.5 percent of worldwide emissions.

Flatulent, manure-dropping cows are by far the largest contributors to the problem. Beef production is responsible for 41 percent of the sector’s emissions, and dairy farming can be blamed for 19 percent. Pig meat, poultry meat, and eggs are responsible for a little less than 10 percent apiece.

Why are cows so harsh on the climate? The same reason Auntie Flora doesn’t get invited to parties: Because they belch and fart so damned much. Only the FAO doesn’t say it like that. Rather, it blames the “enteric fermentation” of cattle and the methane that bovine rumination produces for 39 percent of the livestock industry’s emissions.

The news is bleak, it’s true, but at least there is this, from the FAO’s summary of its report:

Wider adoption of existing best practices and technologies in feeding, health and husbandry, and manure management — as well as greater use of currently underutilized technologies such as biogas generators and energy-saving devices — could help the global livestock sector cut its outputs of global warming gases as much as 30 percent by becoming more efficient and reducing energy waste.

The Guardian reports that reducing greenhouse gas emissions wouldn’t just be good for the climate — it would be good for the businesses and communities that farm the animals:

Specifically, the FAO said better-quality feed, improved breeding and good animal health helped to shrink the unproductive part of the herd. Many of the actions the FAO recommended to improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions would also boost production. This would provide people with more food and higher incomes. Livestock rearing supports hundreds of millions of people and represents an increasingly important source of protein in many regions that have long struggled with chronic hunger and malnutrition. …

The greatest potential for cuts in emissions are in low-productivity livestock systems in south Asia, Latin America and Africa. However, in developed countries, where emission intensities are relatively low but the overall volume of production and therefore emissions is high, the FAO said even small decreases in intensity could add up to significant gains.

And if you aren’t a farmer, you can still make a difference by cutting back on your meat consumption. Taking part in meatless Monday wouldn’t just slow global warming; it would drive some retrograde politicians insane with wildly misplaced rage.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Cow farts still stink up the climate — but relief is possible

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Season Four of "Boardwalk Empire": More Great Characters, Sleazy Politics, and Racial Tensions

Mother Jones

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As much critical acclaim as Boardwalk Empire has garnered over the last three years, there’s an argument to be made that the HBO drama remains underrated. The series dialogue is consistently some of the sharpest and memorable on television, almost on a casual basis. The casting, production values, music, and 1920s gangland confrontations are superb. The effortlessness with which the Boardwalk crew juggles seemingly dozens of intersecting storylines is admirable. And the creative involvement of Martin Scorsese (who executive-produced and directed the $18-million pilot episode), author Dennis Lehane, and Terence Winter certainly doesn’t hurt.

It’s all too easy to take the show’s greatness for granted at this point. The fourth season (premiering Sunday, September 8 at 9 p.m. ET/PT) shrewdly advances and improves upon the rich character development and Prohibition-era power struggles of the excellent third season. Nucky (Steve Buscemi), “Chalky” (Michael Kenneth Williams), Capone (Stephen Graham), Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg), Gillian (Gretchen Mol), and company are back performing another act of their seedy opera of money, sex, booze, and spilled blood. The first five episodes of the new season are as stirring in the hushed violence of tense conversation as they are in the decidedly louder violence of slain mobsters. The season’s fifth episode includes one of the most riveting, jaw-dropping death scenes in the history of television.

And Boardwalk Empire has always featured a healthy serving of political content, inspired by true stories of Jazz Age corruption and presidential, federal, and local politics. James Cromwell guest-starred last season as an exceedingly grumpy Andrew Mellon, who was Treasury Secretary under presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The series also depicts Gaston Means (Stephen Root), a real-life con artist who was tied to crooked politicos during the Harding era.

Season four draws from a similarly shady political history. Al Capone is shown subverting democracy before he becomes the infamous Chicago boss—Capone and his brother Frank (Morgan Spector) harass working-class residents of Cicero, Illinois, to ensure the election of a Republican mayor. It’s an exciting subplot based on something that actually happened in the mid-’20s. From History.com:

In 1923, when Chicago elected a reformist mayor who announced that he planned to rid the city of corruption, Johnny Torrio and Capone moved their base beyond the city limits to suburban Cicero. But a 1924 mayoral election in Cicero threatened their operations. To ensure they could continue doing business, Torrio and Capone initiated an intimidation effort on the day of the election, March 31, 1924, to guarantee their candidate would get elected. Some voters were even shot and killed.

Even Chicago’s tongue-in-cheek political saying, “vote early and vote often,” has been attributed to Capone.

This season also introduces Dr. Valentin Narcisse (Jeffrey Wright, a terrific actor who played Colin Powell in W. and blues legend Muddy Waters in Cadillac Records), a Trinidad-born, Harlem-based crime lord who is as ruthless as he is cultured and sophisticated. Narcisse refers to black Americans as “Libyans” and white Americans as “Nordic.” He works at the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a once-influential fraternal organization founded by the black nationalist Marcus Garvey. Narcisse is a charismatic criminal with “well-formed, proto-black-power politics,” as Slate notes. Here’s Wright talking to GQ about his character, and the racial politics that come with the territory:

Dr. Narcisse is a doctor of divinity, vice, and chaos. So, he walks into the room and he stirs things up but he’s an equal opportunity troublemaker…But his relationship to Chalky is one that’s based in the intra-racial relations of the time to a wonderfully detailed extent—at that time, there was something of a great debate within African-American society, among the great thinkers of the past: W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and within the Harlem Renaissance, about what was the way forward. Within that debate were some pretty vicious personal attacks over complexion, politics, between urbane and rural—a lot of those dynamics are fleshed out within the relationship between Dr. Narcisse and Chalky. It even further immerses the storyline in real history.

I’ll leave you with the season-four “Kings” trailer, which features Narcisse prominently:

Click here for more TV and film coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

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Season Four of "Boardwalk Empire": More Great Characters, Sleazy Politics, and Racial Tensions

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House GOP Cuts Funding for Lead Removal in Half

Mother Jones

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Earlier this year, when I wrote my big piece about lead and crime, I hoped that maybe someone important would see it and actually do something constructive. It’s always nice to make a difference, after all. But as Harry Stein points out today, that’s not exactly what happened. Here’s the House GOP budget for 2014:

Idiots. Stein explains the consequences: “Exposure to lead causes permanent brain damage, and half a million American children have elevated levels of lead in their blood. Lead poisoning is linked to lower IQs, learning disabilities, and even criminal behavior. The connection between lead poisoning and crime is so strong that scholars have even linked the prevalence of leaded gasoline to the overall crime rate…..Using the most conservative estimate of $17 in benefits for every dollar invested, the $6 million that sequestration already cut from lead removal programs will cost our country at least $102 million. The House Republican cut of $64 million below sequestration would cost over $1 billion.”

Of course, lead removal programs mostly benefit poor people and non-whites, and the Republican Party has made it extra clear lately that they don’t care about either group. I guess the only real surprise here is that they didn’t cut the program to zero.

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House GOP Cuts Funding for Lead Removal in Half

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Buying Plan B Will No Longer Require an ID or a Prescription

Mother Jones

The Obama administration did an about-face on emergency contraception Monday evening, announcing that it will allow women to obtain Plan B One-Step over the counter without age restrictions or ID requirements.

Last month, the Department of Justice had appealed an April 5 ruling by US District Court Judge Edward R. Korman, who said the Food and Drug Administration should make all forms of levonorgestrel-based emergency contraception, or EC, available over the counter to all women, regardless of age. Here’s the letter the DOJ sent Korman on Monday:

We write to advise the Court that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have complied with the Court’s April 10, 2013, judgment in the above-referenced case by granting the 2001 Citizen Petition and making Plan B One-Step (PBOS) available over-the-counter (OTC) without age or point-of-sale restrictions as described below. It is the government’s understanding that this course of action fully complies with the Court’s judgment in this action. Once the Court confirms that the government’s understanding is correct, the government intends to file with the Circuit Court notice that it is voluntarily withdrawing its appeal in this matter.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which had sued the administration to force universal availability of EC, welcomed the change, but noted that it still does not go far enough. “Now that the appeals court has forced the federal government’s hand, the FDA is finally taking a significant step forward,” said the group’s president, Nancy Northup. “But the Obama Administration continues to unjustifiably deny the same wide availability for generic, more affordable brands of emergency contraception.”

Northup added that CRR “will continue to fight for fair treatment for women who want and need more affordable options.”

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Buying Plan B Will No Longer Require an ID or a Prescription

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Slicing Open Stalagmites to Reveal Climate Secrets

Mother Jones

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If you’ve ever visited a cave, you know the rules: Stay on the path, and keep your greasy paws off the formations. So Stacy Carolin was a bit taken aback the first time she headed into a cave not as a tourist, but as a scientist, and took a step off the beaten path. “I was a city girl back then,” she recalls. “It was very muddy and slippery… and also completely pitch black.” Not exactly the setting you’d expect for cutting-edge climate change research.

A few years later, Carolin, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, is breaking ground in the field of paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climates, using an unconventional but increasingly prevalent tool: “speleothems,” a catch-all term for cave formations that includes stalagmites (remember the mnemonic: those that “mite” reach the ceiling from the floor) and stalactites (those that hold “tite” to the ceiling).

In a study released today in the journal Science, Carolin and her colleagues outline 100,000-year-old rainfall conditions in Borneo, mapped from chemical clues in cave formations there. Like most historic climate reconstructions, the goal is to compile real-life data against which to test predictive models; if scientists know how much rainfall there was in the tropics in the past, they can see how well their models are able to replicate those conditions, and tweak accordingly. But the most commonly-used “proxies” for ancient climates, including tree rings and ice cores, are notoriously inadequate in the tropics, leaving holes in scientists’ geographic picture of the past and making it difficult to measure historic changes in tropical weather systems, like monsoons, which can themselves have major impacts on global climate.

Deep inside caves in Mexico, Southeast Asia, China, and other limestone-rich locales worldwide, scientists have found rich troves of data in speleothems. Researchers look for formations that have already fallen over or broken off, so as not to damage the cave, haul these back to the lab, slice them open (“like a hot dog,” Carolin says), and study the ancient atoms within to discover how old they are and how much rainfall there was at different points in their past (speleothems form when rainwater drips through the limestone, picking up acid and minerals that pile up in the cave).

Tim McDonnell

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Slicing Open Stalagmites to Reveal Climate Secrets

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Quote of the Day: Cars Are Not Required to Have Drivers

Mother Jones

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From the New York Times, after telling us that California, Nevada, and Florida have legalized driverless cars:

They are not explicitly illegal in other states, because there is no law that says cars must have drivers.

This is just as the founders envisioned it. After all, they didn’t require that horses have riders, did they?

Source:

Quote of the Day: Cars Are Not Required to Have Drivers

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