Mose Buchele is the Austin-based broadcast reporter for StateImpact. He has been on staff at KUT 90.5 in Austin since 2009, covering local and state issues. Mose has also worked as a blogger on politics and an education reporter at his hometown paper in Western Massachusetts. He holds masters degrees in Latin American Studies and Journalism from UT Austin.
Professor Michael Mann is the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and author of the famous "hockey stick" graph.
In 2010 Dr. Michael Mann, already world-renowned (and, in some corners, infamous) for linking global warming to CO2 emissions, published an editorial in the Washington Post.
Mann had recently seen many of his emails hacked and leaked in an unsuccessful attempt to discredit his work. He was also facing a lawsuit (also, ultimately, unsuccessful) by climate change skeptic Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. The editorial Mann wrote was aimed at his critics, but it also served as a summary of his own findings and of the scientific consensus on climate change.
“Overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is heating the planet, shrinking the Arctic ice cap, melting glaciers and raising sea levels,” he wrote. “It is leading to more widespread drought, more frequent heat waves and more powerful hurricanes.”
Two years later, in the lead up to this week’s SXSW Eco Conference, we had the chance to ask Mann what, if anything, has changed.
The 3.1 earthquake that shook the Dallas area on Saturday night and the 3.4 quake near Irving were still small by any estimation. Small enough that the L.A. Times even had a little fun covering the quakes, running the headline “Not Everything is Bigger in Texas” on Sunday.
But even though the quakes were babies compared to the types that visit Los Angeles, U.S. Geological Survey records show that they were slightly more intense than most other earthquakes have been in Dallas.
A search of earthquakes within a hundred kilometer radius of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport on the USGS Circular Area Earthquake Search showed that only one quake has been stronger than the 3.4 recorded in Irving (a 3.5 quake earlier this year that happened closer to Cleburne, Texas, a known hotspot for small earthquakes).
The most powerful quake ever measured in Texas was a 4.6 on the Richter scale, near Snyder, in 1978.
Of the 50 quakes that have been recorded in the area only 8 had been of magnitude 3.0 or higher until Saturday night. The area has still not seen a quake of 4.0 or higher, the level which seismologists consider dangerous.
It remains to be seen how recent state supreme court decisions about property rights will be handled in the Texas legislature.
Today in a Beaumont courthouse, Jefferson County Judge Tom Rugg will hear yet another case concerning the Keystone XL pipeline. As we’ve reported, the Canadian company TransCanada has visited a few Texas courthouses lately. Always at issue is whether it can take private property in Texas to build the Keystone XL pipeline.
And Judge Rugg expects we’ll see more pipeline companies visiting more Texas courthouses in the future.
By all estimations, the Denbury Green ruling on eminent domain by the Texas Supreme Court means nobody is quite sure where private property rights end, and a company’s right to take property begins.
“It’s opened up a real can of worms and I’m not sure how it’s gonna get resolved,” Judge Rugg tells StateImpact Texas.
But that doesn’t mean state lawmakers won’t try in the coming legislative session.
The Texas Animal Health Commission is changing the way it tests for a trichomoniasis.
They don’t prepare you for this kind of story in journalism school, but here goes:
Texas cattle have an STD problem.
This month the Texas Animal Health Commission announced new regulations on how to test for a venereal disease among cattle called Tricomoniasis. Dr. Dee Ellis, Executive Director of the Commission, and Texas State Veterinarian estimates that between two to five percent of Texas cattle are infected by the disease.
Before you spit out that hamburger, a couple of disclaimers:
1) The disease doesn’t impact humans. It’s only spread between cattle when they mate (nearly all are still bred the old-fashioned way in Texas, not through artificial insemination).
2) Texas is actually further ahead in testing for the disease than some other parts of the world.  The state requires all cattle imported into the state to be tested. Canada and Mexico, for example, don’t test for the disease.
Photo courtesy of DiveOfficer: www.flickr.com/photos/diveofficer/
If some climate change models are correct, vampire bats might some day move in to Texas.
Halloween is more than a month away, but we’re already hearing about vampires.
Last week, reports that vampire bats bit a man in Central Texas sent shivers down more than a few spines. The attack, as first reported by KSAT in San Antonio, allegedly took place during a hunting trip in Johnson City. The man said he and his friends were set upon in their sleep by the creatures, that bite their prey and then lick the blood from the wounds.
And what reporter can resist a good vampire bat story?
I know I can’t.
So, smelling blood, I started making some phone calls. The man who said he was bitten did not return requests for comment, but I did hear from Ron Van Den Bussche.
He’s a professor of zoology at Oklahoma State University, and what he told me punched some holes in the story.
“My first reaction is … they’re not vampire bats. It’s a hoax,” Van Den Bussche said.
A hydraulic fracking operation in the Barnett Shale.
It’s nothing new to hear environmental groups raise concerns over the health dangers of hydraulic fracturing – that’s all in a days work. But a new report from Environment Texas questions one aspect of fracking that rarely comes under scrutiny: its supposed economic benefit.
“The Costs of Fracking” collects data from academic and government studies to paint a picture of an industry that may be a bigger drain on state tax money than previously thought. The report looks at things like damage to roads, increased cost for water infrastructure projects, and drilling’s impact on property values in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Continue Reading →
Cedar Photo courtesy flickr.com/79666107@N00 bullseye image edited by KUT News.
The Ashe juniper goes by several names.
When people complain about cedar trees in Texas, they’re usually talking about allergies: the dreaded “cedar fever” that makes life a nightmare for millions of sufferers throughout large swaths of the state. But at the Texas Capital last week, lawmakers were talking about cedars for other, very elemental, reasons: water and fire.
Ashe Junipers, commonly called “cedar trees” in Texas, do a good job of drinking one and spreading the other according to testimony before the House Committee on Agriculture and Livestock.
A judge hears argument in Beaumont, Texas over TransCanda's right to condemn land to build a pipeline.
When a North Texas Judge ruled in favor of TransCanda in its legal battle with landowner Julia Trigg Crawford last August, representatives for the Canadian pipeline company were, understandably, happy with the outcome.
“This ruling reaffirms that TransCanada has — and continues — to follow all state and federal laws and regulations as we move forward with the construction of the Gulf Coast Project,” TransCanada spokesman Grady Semmens told the New York Times.
Now the company is facing another legal challenge, from another Texas farmer, on similar grounds to the Crawford case.
Given all those similarities it makes sense to ask: what chance could the new challengers possibly have?
Lone Camp Volunteer Fire Department fire fighter Ted Hale fights a wildfire on September 1, 2011 in Graford, Texas.
Wildfire season across the American West is getting longer, and more destructive year by year, according to a new report from the research organization Climate Central.
Noting that the total area burned in the American West this year is 30 percent larger than average, the report blames recent ferociously destructive fire seasons on a variety of factors: fire suppression and forest growth have created more fuel for fires; and a gradual warming in global temperatures that’s creating longer and longer wildfire seasons.
“We can’t discount the importance of the broader climate context,” Dr. Heidi Cullen, Climate Central’s Chief Climatologists, said in a conference call presenting the report. Continue Reading →
Greg Creacy is responsible for prescribed burning in Texas State Parks. He believes the benefits of the program are visible in the aftermath of the Bastrop County Complex Fire. In this photo, you can see forest hit by the Bastrop wildfire. On the left side, an area that had seen prescribed burns before the fire. On the right, an area that did not have prescribed burns before the fire.
Imagine that you’re in a house in the country. There’s a frantic knock at the door. You open it to find a group of men and women wearing fireproof gear, asking permission to fight a raging wildfire on your property.
“But there’s no fire here,” you respond in confusion.
“You don’t understand,” they say, “the fire won’t be here for another few years, but we need to fight it now!”
The scenario might sound fantastic, but it makes perfect sense to Larry Joe Doherty.
“That is precisely the whole point of prescribed burning,” he said recently over a lunch of red beans and rice at his Washington County ranch. “You wait around for an emergency and it’s too late!” Continue Reading →
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