Shutdown delaying climate data, undercutting scientists

Locked doors this month at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association headquarters in Silver Spring, Md.CreditCreditMatt Roth for The New York Times

Kendra Pierre-Louis
Kendra Pierre-Louis reports for the New York Times

If you want official numbers on how 2018 ranks in the annals of recent record-breaking temperatures, you’ll have to wait.

One result of the government shutdown, now in its fourth week, is that NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are unable to issue their annual temperature analysis. And, because that data is so widely used, neither can some other governments.

For example, Britain’s national weather and climate monitoring service, the Met Office, publishes its own global temperature estimates that incorporate NOAA data but use a slightly different analytical method. That’s important because when many different analyses show the same trend — in this case, rising global temperatures — it helps give researchers confidence that their work is sound. But, the NOAA data that the Met Office needs is currently offline.

“Usually, we would have received it by now,” said John Kennedy, a scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, which specializes in climate research. “But this month, we haven’t.”

The global temperature numbers aren’t the only climate and environmental data we would have reported by now if not for the government shutdown.
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This time last year, for example, Americans knew that 2017 ranked as the most costly year on record for natural disasters, many of them — like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, and the drought that struck the Great Plains — linked to climate change.

NOAA has issued the disaster-cost estimate since 1980, but that information is not yet available for last year, which saw Hurricanes Michael and Florence, and a wildfire season that some call the deadliest and most destructive in California’s history.

Researchers say those data delays are mostly just a nuisance. It’s unlikely, for example, that when the temperature data is issued it will differ significantly from preliminary estimates that placed 2018 as the fourth-warmest year on record (The Japan Meteorological agency has issued its preliminary estimates saying as much).

They call the interruption of key scientific research, though, a much bigger problem that will have longer lasting repercussions.


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Economic star lineup supports federal carbon tax

Greenspan to Yellen, economic brain trust backs carbon tax


Jennifer A. Dlouhy reports for Bloomberg:

An all-star lineup of economists, from Alan Greenspan to Paul Volcker, is endorsing a plan to combat climate change by slapping a tax on greenhouse gas emissions and then distributing the revenue to American households.
All living former Federal Reserve chairs, several Nobel Prize winners and previous leaders of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers have signed on to a statement asserting that a robust, gradually rising carbon tax is “the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary.”
“A carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future,” the 45 economists say in the opinion piece, published by the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday.
The missive is a rare case of the economic establishment speaking with a single voice on a pressing social issue, albeit one that faces political challenges from conservatives, Republicans and the current White House. The signers include economists who have served every president going back to Jimmy Carter.
“This is one of the few ideas of economic policy that commands broad, bipartisan support,” former Harvard University President and U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said in an interview. “Nowadays on economic policy, we don’t see much of that.”
Other signers include former Fed Chairmen Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke as well as former White House economic advisers Austan Goolsbee and Christina Romer.
The economists’ endorsement could deliver momentum to a carbon tax-and-dividend plan devised by two former secretaries of state — James Baker and George P. Shultz — that has already drawn financial support from Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Exelon Corp.
Pressure is already mounting in Congress to take aim at climate change, following dire warnings about the growing consequences from a United Nations panel and the U.S. government. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, has promised the chamber will take up climate legislation. And some Democrats, led by freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, are advancing a so-called Green New Deal that calls for phasing out fossil fuels by 2030.

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An obscure company reaps profits choking our free press

This obscure company is doing more to destroy a free press in America than Trump | Will Bunch

    Will Bunch is a columnist for the Inquirer and Daily News

    The problem really hit home for Dave Krieger — the now-former editorial page editor of the Daily Camera in fast-growing Boulder, Colorado — when a lawyer friend sent in a letter to the editor questioning what was happening at his hometown newspaper. The attorney said he didn’t understand why the price of his subscription was just jacked up 20 percent when the actual paper kept showing up with fewer and fewer pages.

    Krieger knew exactly why, but at that moment it dawned on him that most citizens in Boulder didn’t know what he knew: That the newspaper’s shrinkage was the direct result of a distant Wall Street hedge fund that — through its investment vehicle with the Orwellian-like dishonest name of Digital First Media — had since 2013 been sucking money in full vampire-squid mode out of the Daily Camera’s newsroom revenue stream. Much of the cash that formerly paid reporters, editors and photojournalists instead went into the pocket of billionaire Randall Smith as Smith added to his collection of multi-million-dollar mansions around Palm Beach and the Hamptons (said at one point to be 18 — that’s not a typo — and counting).

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    “The daily paper is the community’s storyteller,” Krieger, a 60-something veteran of a half-dozen newsrooms, thought to himself, “and we’ve never told this story.” So Krieger sat down to write an editorial pleading for help, and what happened next was truly astounding. Randall Smith read it, saw the error of his ways, sold
    his mansions, and moved into a modest ranch house as he used the real-estate proceeds to hire a small army of investigative reporters that has begun exposing corporate greed and venal politicians from Key West to Kalamazoo.

    Ha ha, just kidding … everything in that last sentence was made up.

    What happened in real life is the Daily Camera refused to published the editorial about its corporate owners, and Krieger was fired a couple of days later when he published it on a blog.

    And for America’s news consumers, the reality is probably about to get even worse. Digital First Media, a sister firm called MNG and their hedge-fund parent — the Smith-led Alden Global Capital — have launched a hostile takeover bid to gain control of America’s other biggest owner of daily newspapers, Gannett. The takeover bid, which financial experts believe has a good chance of success, would implant DFM/Alden’s money-siphoning brand of vulture capitalism at 300 newspapers from coast-to-coast.

    View image on Twitter

    Hedge fund Alden attempts takeover of Gannett newspaper chain https://dfmworkers.org/hedge-fund-alden-attempts-takeover-of-gannett-newspaper-chain/ …  6:02 PM – Jan 14, 2019

    Industry experts predict a number of these local news organizations — the primary source of civic information in most of these communities — will be drained dry and die within five years, maybe less. “Consolidation (and the cost-cutting that comes with it) remains the dominant strategy in the daily newspaper industry,” wrote long-time industry watcher Ken Doctor. “If revenue continues to drop at or even near double-digit levels, the consensus thinking is that radically reducing expenses through consolidation is about as good a card as anyone has to play.”

    That’s already been a losing hand for places like Boulder — and it could be for Camden County, N.J., or Wilmington, Del., two nearby communities whose Gannett-owned newsrooms are at risk from Randall Smith’s bloody knife of “consolidation” if the hostile takeover succeeds.

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Big Plastic’s trash plan is just a drop in the polluted ocean

                                                                                 Photo:vegnews.com
Jack Kaskey reports for Bloomberg:
With all those plastic-trash haters filling the Internet with images of garbage-choked oceans and demanding bans on everything from drinking straws to grocery bags, chemical companies are beginning to get alarmed.
Their solution: A public pledge by the new Alliance to End Plastic Waste to spend $1 billion over five years to clean up marine debris, improve recycling and develop new technologies to reduce pollution. That may sound like a lot of green, but the Alliance is made up of 28 companies that make plastics, packaging and consumer products, which averages out to each company spending just over $7 million on the effort each year.
That’s pocket change for alliance members like LyondellBasell Industries NV, which sells about $20 billion a year in plastics and related chemicals, and for Procter & Gamble Co., the only consumer products company in the alliance, whose $67 billion in sales depend on disposable plastic packaging. Meanwhile, Dow Chemical, now a unit of DowDuPont Inc., is ramping up plastics production with a recently completed $6 billion U.S. investment.
The alliance represents groundbreaking collaboration to solve the pollution problem, said Lyondell Chief Executive Officer Bob Patel, one of the leaders of the project. They’re just getting started, he says, with recruiting underway for more members that would boost funding to as much as $1.5 billion, as well as plans for growing their investments.

‘Powerful’ Collaboration

“This approach is unique because it brings together and focuses the efforts and knowledge of plastics producers, consumer goods companies and retailers, as well as waste management companies,” Patel said. “Having the resources and knowledge of the entire global value chain under one umbrella with the same goal is really very powerful.”
So is even $1.5 billion over five years likely to fulfill Patel’s goal to “end plastic waste”? Not even close, according to an Ocean Conservancy report that estimated it would cost $5 billion a year for a package of initiatives to reduce the global leakage of plastics into the ocean by 45 percent in the next six years. Even that plan wouldn’t see the trash flow ending until 2035.

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Next round for historic Philly boxing arena: a micro-hotel

The historic Blue Horizon boxing venue to become hotel under Marriott’s Moxy brand
WULFF ARCHITECTS



Jacob Adelman reports for Philly.com

 The historic façade of the Blue Horizon building on North Broad Street is to become the face of a new “micro-hotel” under Marriott’s millennial-focused Moxy brand, opening a new chapter for the storied North Philadelphia boxing venue site.

Plans call for a five-story building that would rise behind the facade of the 154-year-old building at 1314-16 N. Broad St., between Thompson and Master Streets, which is listed on Philadelphia’s Register of Historic Places, according to documents posted Tuesday to the website of the Philadelphia Historical Commission.

As a micro-hotel with small rooms aimed at cost-conscious travelers who plan to spend most of their visits out and about, the Moxy would join the Pod Hotel under construction near the southeast corner of 19th and Ludlow Streets in Center City.

It would also join the hotel under Hilton’s Canopy brand that is planned in the Market East area’s Stephen Girard Building as another major hotel operator’s “lifestyle” brand set to open in a historic Philadelphia building.

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