Why us?

Here's Why Sea-Level Rise is Worse in the Northeast

By ecoRI News staff

Why is the Northeast experiencing higher levels of sea-level rise than other parts of the wold? Area scientists attribute it to two factors: a slowdown in the Gulf Stream and the melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.

The slowdown of the Gulf Stream is complicated, and conclusions for the cause have varied. The consensus cause is the warming of the North Atlantic. What is still being debated is the effect of the influx of fresh water. 

Nevertheless, the warming water is creating a “traffic-jam scenario” in ocean circulation. The slowdown causes offshore sea levels, which are higher than coastal sea levels, to flatten and send water inland to regions such as the Northeast.

We are not alone

Achieving sustainable and dignified life for all on an increasingly small planet

By Robyn Alders, Richard Kock for Environmental Health News

On March 5, 2017, novelist Paulo Coelho wrote on Twitter that "Save the planet" is just an expression of arrogance. The planet was here before we arrived, and will kick us out if we don't respect it. He’s absolutely correct.

It’s not only us humans who are in danger of being kicked out. Declines in wildlife populations and habitats have occurred in parallel with an increasing human population and expansion of ‘modern’ agriculture. 

Most of the damage has been done in our lifetimes—a direct result of the post-second world war push for global food security.

Pain as a Policy Choice

Preparing for the next recession

By Josh Hoxie

On average, our economy tanks every seven years or so. By now we should have a pretty good idea of why that tanking happens, how we can protect ourselves, and what the impact will be. 

Unfortunately, we don’t.

Recessions remain a bit like death, inevitable yet near impossible to predict. Like death, recessions also generate sadness. And the Great Recession, as a new collection of research papers from the Russell Sage Foundation shows, generated a great deal of sadness.

In 2010, one year after the official end of the recession, reported happiness hit its lowest level since researchers first started recording the measure in the mid-1970s.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. During this time, home prices tanked, unemployment skyrocketed, and retirement accounts shriveled up. And many of the hardest hit families still haven’t recovered financially, leaving millions of households now more susceptible to the next downturn, not less.

US nuclear regulators greatly underestimate potential for nuclear disaster

Nuclear spent fuel fire could force millions of people to relocate

Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

This image captures the spread of radioactivity from a hypothetical fire in a high-density spent-fuel pool at the Peach Bottom Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania. Based on the guidance from the US Environmental Protection Agency and the experience from the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents, populations in the red and orange areas would have to be relocated for many years, and many in the yellow area would relocate voluntarily. In this scenario, which is based on real weather patterns that occurred in July 2015, four major cities would be contaminated (New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.), resulting in the displacement of millions of people.

Credit: Photo courtesy of Michael Schoeppner, Princeton University, Program on Science and Global Security

EDITOR'S NOTE: This issue is of particular concern to Charlestown because we are only 20 miles downwind of the Millstone nuclear power plant near New London, CT. There are hundreds of tons of high-level nuclear waste stored on site at Millstone, prone to the accidents described in this article.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) relied on faulty analysis to justify its refusal to adopt a critical measure for protecting Americans from the occurrence of a catastrophic nuclear-waste fire at any one of dozens of reactor sites around the country, according to an article in the May 26 issue of Science magazine. 

Fallout from such a fire could be considerably larger than the radioactive emissions from the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan.

Published by researchers from Princeton University and the Union of Concerned Scientists, the article argues that NRC inaction leaves the public at high risk from fires in spent-nuclear-fuel cooling pools at reactor sites. 

The pools -- water-filled basins that store and cool used radioactive fuel rods -- are so densely packed with nuclear waste that a fire could release enough radioactive material to contaminate an area twice the size of New Jersey. 

On average, radioactivity from such an accident could force approximately 8 million people to relocate and result in $2 trillion in damages.

These catastrophic consequences, which could be triggered by a large earthquake or a terrorist attack, could be largely avoided by regulatory measures that the NRC refuses to implement. 

Using a biased regulatory analysis, the agency excluded the possibility of an act of terrorism as well as the potential for damage from a fire beyond 50 miles of a plant. 

Failing to account for these and other factors led the NRC to significantly underestimate the destruction such a disaster could cause.

Maybe this is reassuring. Maybe not.

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

Amen

ENDANGERED SCIENCE: NOAA's powerful new tool to improve hurricane forecasts

Superior physics will help revolutionize numerical weather prediction

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is yet another example of a practical science program that would be slashed by Trump's budget. This is also the kind of information the Trump regime has already begun to purge from governmental databases. 

NOAA will begin using its newest weather prediction tool -- the dynamic core, Finite-Volume on a Cubed-Sphere (FV3), to provide high quality guidance to NOAA’s National Hurricane Center through the 2017 hurricane season. 

Developed by Shian-Jiann Lin and his team at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), the FV3 will be used to power experimental hurricane forecast models that run parallel to the operational forecast models this season. This is the start of a major transition of the FV3 to NOAA operational weather forecasting, expected to be completed in 2019. 

Rethinking nutrition labelling

Food is not just the sum of its nutrients

Faculty of Science - University of Copenhagen

Traditionally investigations of a foodstuff's implications for human health focus on the content of individual nutrients such as proteins, fats, carbohydrates, etc. 

However, newer research shows that the health effects of a food product cannot be determined on the basis on the individual nutrients it contains. The food must be evaluated as a whole -- together with other foods eaten at the same time. 

The findings of the expert panel have been published in the scientific journal the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

We consume foods and meals -- not nutrients

Postdoc Tanja Kongerslev Thorning, PhD, from the Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports at the University of Copenhagen, is first author of the report. 

Tanja explains that scientists have long wondered why the actual effects of a food are at variance with the effects expected on the basis of its nutrition content. 

GOP Agita

Why Trumpcare is Giving Senate Republicans Heartburn

By Robert Reich

Very soon Senate Republicans will have to decide what to do about Trumpcare. Their choice is severely limited. 

The Congressional Budget Office has made it crystal clear that the House version of Trumpcare will cause 23 million Americans to lose their health coverage. 

Which means that unless Senate Republicans repudiate their own Congressional Budget Office (whose director they appointed), they’ll have to either vote to take away healthcare for 23 million people, or come up with their own plan. 

But if they try to come up with their own plan, they’ll soon discover there’s no way to insure those 23 million without (1) mandating that healthy people buy insurance, so that sick people with pre-existing conditions can afford it; and (2) keeping the existing taxes on rich people so that poor people can afford to buy health insurance. 

In other words, they’ll be back to the Affordable Care Act.

An assault on American values

Trump’s Cruel and Deviant Budget

By Robert Reich

For years, conservatives warned that liberals were “defining deviancy downward.” They said that by tolerating bad social behavior, liberals in effect lowered what was deemed acceptable behavior overall – allowing social norms to decline. 

There was never a lot of evidence for that view, but there’s little question that Donald Trump is actively defining deviancy downward for the nation as a whole – whether it’s by lying, denigrating basic democratic values, celebrating tyrants around the world, using his office to build his family wealth, or stopping at nothing to win the presidency. 

Now comes his budget. Budgets are overall expressions of values and priorities. Trump’s budget is cruel and deviant.

He proposes to cut federal spending by more than $3.6 trillion over the next decade, much of it for programs that help the poor (Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security disability, and health insurance for poor children) – in order to finance a huge military buildup and tax cuts for corporations and the rich.

Trump’s budget won’t get through Congress, but it defines deviancy downward in 3 respects:

Trump Presidential Library

The Seven Deadly Sins

Trading corporate world for a Charlestown farm comes with a cost

Living the American Dream Shouldn't be Bad for Your Health (Care)

By FRANK CARINI

Julie Taylor left a well-paying corporate job to work on a farm.
She and her family are happier, but their health-care coverage took a hit.
(Frank Carini/ecoRI News)

Julie Taylor recently escaped the hum of artificial light and stale air that dominates corporate America, when she traded in her well-paying job to pick weeds and fight off ticks.

But what made her decision so difficult wasn’t a fear of getting Lyme disease — though that is a concern of anyone who spends time outdoors. It was about health-care security for her family.

“Health-care costs were the big challenge,” the 40-year-old married mother of one said. “I had a great plan ... it’s not the same as before.”

ecoRI News recently spoke with Taylor at her new place of employment: Earth Care Farm. As birds chirped above and bees buzzed in the background, the Richmond resident was all smiles when discussing her mid-life career change. Her new job meshes nicely with her passions and allows the Virginia native to spend more time with her family.

Unfortunately, the Taylors had to sacrifice some of their health — a common problem in a country with a profit-focused system tied to employee health plans.

Just when you were starting to enjoy it

Health benefits of moderate drinking may be overstated, study finds

Penn State

The benefits of light alcohol consumption, as well as the risks associated with not drinking at all, might not be as great as previously thought, according to Penn State researchers who examined the drinking habits of middle-aged adults.

The researchers analyzed information about more than 9,000 people across England, Scotland and Wales born in 1958 who are participating in the longitudinal National Child Development Study. 

The study, based at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies, tracked changes in people's drinking and cigarette smoking habits from age 23 to 55, and linked these changes to mental and physical health.

Euphemisms, False Statements and Deleted Comments

Three Strategies to Defend GOP Health Bill: 
By Charles Ornstein for ProPublica

Earlier this month, a day after the House of Representatives passed a bill to repeal and replace major parts of the Affordable Care Act, Ashleigh Morley visited her congressman's Facebook page to voice her dismay.

"Your vote yesterday was unthinkably irresponsible and does not begin to account for the thousands of constituents in your district who rely upon many of the services and provisions provided for them by the ACA," Morley wrote on the page affiliated with the campaign of Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "You never had my vote and this confirms why."

The next day, Morley said, her comment was deleted and she was blocked from commenting on or reacting to King's posts. The same thing has happened to others critical of King's positions on health care and other matters. King has deleted negative feedback and blocked critics from his Facebook page, several of his constituents say, sharing screenshots of comments that are no longer there.