Did climate change cause Sandy?

Satellite image of Superstorm Sandy taken at 10 AM EDT Tuesday. Image NASA GSFC. Click for info at Climate Progress.

Did Sandy happen because of global climate change? Answer: It’s quite possible according to one of the world’s leading climate science experts, Dr. Michael Mann from Penn Sate University and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From The Front Lines: [Read more…]

The election all comes down to the break

If the election were held yesterday, Nate Silver is giving Team Obama roughly an 80% chance of winning with Romney about 20%. It all depends on turnout and which way things break. Turnout is the campaigns’ problem, which way it will break, or if it breaks one way or the other at all, is totally unpredictable. But good economic news doesn’t hurt the incumbant: [Read more…]

FTB reader/regular on what blood means to the Red Cross

^^DONATE TO STORM VICTIMS^^

Short at the beginning of the month? Bood donations to the Red Cross are your proxy for cash, they turn it into money to help victims of disasters like Sandy. And one FTB regular reminds us that blood means way more for some people:

About a decade ago my young daughter came down with a rare condition that could be treated with a blood product that required 6000 pints of blood… She recovered. If you’ve ever given blood, thank you. You may well have contributed to my daughter’s recovery. Before that event, I was lackadasical about donating blood regularly. I haven’t missed an opportunity since then. I’m O+. I do “double reds” every 112 days. I need to live another 910 years before I will have replaced those 6000 donations.

I’m not sure what an act of God is, but this has to be close

^^DONATE TO STORM VICTIMS, CLICK HERE^^

I just donated part of my monthly FTB pay to the link above, you’re hereby invited to join in, add 0.01 to a whole dollar ammount if you want them to know it came through a blog. … So, after all the ugly lies about how some deadly event is somehow a God-ly harbinger of whatever conservative cause the right-wing nut job du jure happens to be spewing that day, finally, mere days before a momentous election, a freak hurricane-blizzard-storm strikes that peels back the facade built to disguise the dangers of anthropogenic climate change and the unusual cruelty of a government harnessed by the ultra rich solely for widening the luxurious gap they already enjoy from us riff-raff, all in one fail swoop. You can argue about whether or not a rape is a specific, planned divine event, but I’m pretty sure a hurricane would have to be, if the terms “Act” and “God” have any literal meaning.

Do you really want to know how Smarmy Team Romney reacted to this tragedy? [Read more…]