Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Zoë Schlanger

Cell-Phone Radiation Can Cause Cancer in Rats. The Next Question: What Does it Mean For Humans?

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Sat, 03 Nov 2018 11:00:00 -0400

The U.S. government released the final conclusions Thursday, Nov. 1 of a pair of federal studies that show “clear evidence” that cell-phone radiation is linked to heart cancer in male rats.

The studies, conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program, also found “some evidence” that the radiation is linked to brain cancer and adrenal gland cancer in male rats. (The NTP uses the labels “clear evidence,” “some evidence,” “equivocal evidence” and “no evidence” when making conclusions.)

The studies, nearly two decades in the making, went through a rigorous peer-review process in March.

It is important to note that animal studies can’t perfectly replicate human cell-phone use, which includes holding a phone to your ear or carrying one in a pocket. And the levels of radiation the rodents were exposed to for these studies were higher than a human normally would be exposed to by using cell phones—the lowest exposure level used in the studies was equal to the maximum exposure allowed by U.S. regulators for cell phone users, which is a power level that “rarely occurs” with typical cell phone use, according to the NTP. The highest level of radiation the rats were exposed to was four times higher than the maximum level permitted.

“We believe that the link between radio frequency radiation and tumors in male rats is real,” John Bucher, a senior scientist at the NTP, said in a statement.

Tumors were also found in the hearts of female rats, but the researchers said they couldn’t be sure the radiation is what caused the tumors.

A new turn in the debate

As we’ve noted before, these results substantially change the debate on whether cell-phone use is a cancer risk at all. Up until this point, the federal government and phone manufacturers operated on the assumption that cell phones cannot by their very nature cause cancer, because they emit non-ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation—the kind associated with Xrays, CT scans, and nuclear-power plants, among others—definitely causes cancer at high enough doses. Non-ionizing radiation was believed to not emit enough energy to break chemical bonds. That meant it couldn’t damage DNA, and therefore couldn’t lead to mutations that cause cancer. But these conclusions upend that assumption.

The rats were exposed 2G radiation, the globally prevalent cell-phone technology when the studies were designed in the 1990s, which operates on the radio frequency of 900 megahertz. In the U.S., several service providers have turned their 2G service off. Others, like Verizon, plan to soon. Even as its use wanes in Europe and North America, 2G is still widely present in Africa and South America.

Cell phones in the U.S., Europe, and Asia operate mostly on 3G and 4G technology, with 5G likely to penetrate the market soon. Each generation employs a different frequency, many of which are higher frequencies than 2G’s 900 megahertz. Higher frequencies penetrate the bodies of humans and rats less successfully, according to research highlighted by the New York Times.

What comes next

The next scientific step will be to determine what the studies’ results mean for humans. The peer-reviewed papers will be passed onto the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for determining human risk and issuing guidelines to the public, and the Federal Communications Commission, which develops safety standards for phones. The FDA was among the federal agencies that commissioned the studies in the early 2000s.

Ronald Melnick, the NTP senior toxicologist who designed the studies (and who retired from the agency in 2009), told Quartz following the March peer-review process that it’s unlikely any future study could conclude with certainty that there is no risk to humans from cell phone use. “I can’t see proof of a negative ever arising from future studies,” Melnick said.

He believes the FDA should put out guidance based on the results of the rat studies. “I would think it would be irresponsible to not put out indications to the public,” Melnick said. “Maintain a distance from this device from your children. Don’t sleep with your phone near your head. Use wired headsets,” he said, which emit less radiation. “This would be something that the agencies could do right now.”

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Your Open Office Might Make You More Active And Less Stressed

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 11:39:57 -0400

I used to quietly disdain open offices. How does anyone get anything done? I like my colleagues, they like each other, everyone is always talking. Plus, if any one of my officemates has a cough, the contagion appears to spread through the ranks at warp speed. I keep a lot of zinc tablets at my desk. My fears are backed up by science, and I’ve written about it before: The microbiome of an office—especially the kind without windows that open—can be a festering petri dish of everyone else’s insides.

On the other hand, open offices are sort of an antidote for another health hazard that comes from devoting nine or more (always more!) hours of your day to an office job: loneliness and isolation. In an open office, if someone is laughing at something on their desktop, it can be a distraction—but it can also be a social salve in the midst of another hour spent ricocheting down the tubes of the faceless internet. You can ask what they’re laughing at. You can get up and look. You can laugh at it too.

A study published recently in the British Medical Journal concurs. University of Arizona researchers found that open office seating correlated to less stress and more physical activity compared to those working in cubicles or private offices. The study was commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration, which has a big stake in understanding the office-health nexus; the agency is responsible for more than 1 million federal employees and the 370 million square feet of office space in which they work.

The researchers monitored about 230 federal office workers across four federal office buildings. They kept track of their heart activity by way of sensors worn on their chests, monitored their physical movements using accelerometers, and prompted them via a smartphone app to take a survey documenting their stress levels once every hour over the course of three workdays.

They found that workers in open offices (where there are no partitions between desks, or the partitions are low enough to see over while seated) were over 30% more active while at the office than people working in private offices, on average. They were also over 20% more active than people who worked in cubicles. Further, open-office denizens rated their stress, on a scale of 1-7, with 7 representing the highest stress level, as significantly lower during the workday (9% lower on average). Plus, according to the heart-activity tracker, they experienced significantly less stress outside of the workday as well.

Anecdotally, my own experience backs this up; at my last job, everyone had a cubicle, and I could go a whole day without making eye contact with a soul. Sometimes, that’s just what I needed. But more often than not, I’d feel my job was made a little more unbearable by the vacuum of silence where I felt social contact ought to be.

So go ahead, embrace your open office. Just maybe use some hand sanitizer afterwards.

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We Still Don’t Know If Cell Phones Cause Cancer or Not

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 12:00:00 -0500

American scientists released two new major studies investigating whether or not there’s connection between cancer risk and cell phone use and the much-awaited answer is…*drumroll, please*…we still don’t really know anything for certain.

The U.S.’s National Toxicology Program released the final results last week of two much-anticipated studies, one on mice and one on rats, which each exposed the animals to cell phone radiation at or above the U.S.’s legal limit for two years. The studies are part of a larger $25 million effort by U.S. federal agencies to assess the health risk of using cell phones.

Mobile phones emit non-ionizing radiation, measured in radio-frequency (RF) energy. While it is widely accepted in the scientific community that exposure to high doses of ionizing radiation—the kind associated with x-rays, CT scans, and nuclear power plants, among others—causes cancer, it is unknown whether long-term exposure to non-ionizing radiation is cancer-causing. Right now, most federal policies regulating cell phones assume it does not.

Both papers are scheduled for peer review in March—but the researchers have taken the unusual route of publishing drafts of their papers, due, they say, to the enormous public health implications. “Given the extremely large number of people who use wireless communication devices, even a very small increase in the incidence of disease resulting from exposure to the cell phone RFR [radio frequency radiation] generated by those devices would translate to a large number of affected individuals, which would have broad implications for public health,” they write.

For two years, researchers exposed mice and rats to radiation replicating 2G and 3G signal strength, which were the dominant and emerging technologies, respectfully, when the trials began several years ago. (In the papers, the researchers predict 2G will still be widely used globally for voice calling, even if it is on the decline in the U.S. Their next studies will look at 4G service, and they note even newer generations of cell phones—say, 5G—will operate at higher frequencies of radiation.)

What the studies actually found

The papers found that, in male rats, this exposure increased malignant tumors called schwannomas in the connective tissues that surround nerves in the heart, raised the risk of heart conditions, and led to evidence of DNA damage. Baby rats born to mothers during the trial had lower birth weights. The scientists also found a statistically significant increase in lymphoma (cancer of the lymph nodes) among female mice and heightened rates of liver cancer in the male mice.

Animal studies can’t perfectly replicate human cell phone use; you can’t make a rat hold a tiny mobile phone, and you certainly can’t recreate a lifetime of exposure like most people on Earth are experiencing now in a trial that’s just a few years long.

Meanwhile, it has been difficult to gather reliable human data on the relatively new phenomenon of cellphone use. The biggest cell phone-radiation study to date, the INTERPHONE study published in 2011, was a coordinated effort by researchers at 16 institutions across 13 countries. INTERPHONE found an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer, among the heaviest mobile phone users. But the study authors noted various problems with their data (it was based on interviews with people who already had brain cancer, so could be subject to recall bias) leaving plenty of uncertainty.

Plus, as researchers on the two new U.S. studies point out, the INTERPHONE scientists may have published their conclusions too soon to account for cancers that developed later; the lag time for the “development of slow-growing brain tumors” can take years to decades, the U.S. researchers note.

In response to the INTERPHONE report, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer arm of the World Health Organization, classified radiation from cell phones as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” in 2011.

An earlier draft of the new U.S. study on rats, released in June 2017, agreed with that classification, noting that its findings “appear to support the [IARC] conclusions regarding the possible carcinogenic potential of RFR,” but that note does not appear in the newest draft.

Jonathan Samet, the dean of the University of Colorado-Denver School of Public Health who was lead investigator on the IARC working group that concluded that cellphone radiation was a “probable” carcinogen told Science the new U.S. studies won’t “nudge that classification in one direction or another.”

“I’m not saying there’s a public health crisis by any means,” Samet previously told the Verge, “but I’m saying here’s a very widespread exposure in our society and we should make sure we understand it.”

Some states aren’t waiting for conclusive results

In December, the California state health department released guidelines warning residents to avoid putting mobile phones up to their heads. The guidelines include a separate warning about childhood cell phone use, stating that “RF energy can reach a larger area of a child’s brain than an adult’s brain,” and the ills, if any, would “more harmful and longer lasting” in children than in adults.

Other states are proposing bills meant to address cell phone radiation, particularly in children; On February 3, Maryland introduced a bill in its state house to “develop health and safety guidelines” for “the use of digital devices in public school classrooms.” In Massachusetts, several bills have been introduced to deal with the potential dangers of radiation from wireless devices, including one to create a special commission to study exposure to electromagnetic fields; another to create best practices for managing wifi exposure wifi in schools (wifi relies on non-ionizing radiation, like cell phones); and a third, scheduled for a hearing in April, that would require prominent labels about radiation exposure on cell phone packaging.

Apple already tells you to keep your phone away from your body

As Quartz has explained before, in the manual that comes pre-installed on your iPhone, Apple explicitly tells you to use a hands-free option like speakerphone or headphones while talking in order to “reduce exposure to RF energy.” The manual also notes that cell phones are currently tested for radiation assuming the devices would be kept at least 5 mm (0.2 in) away from the body while being carried. That’s a lot more than the thickness of pocket fabric. (On an iPhone 6 and above, you can find this information by going to Settings > General > About > Legal > RF Exposure.)

Previous iPhone manuals were even more conservative: The manual for the iPhone 5 says users should carry their iPhones a full 10 millimeters (or 0.39 inches) away from their bodies at all times.

U.S. law demands that all cell phones function in such a way that they cause less than 1.6 watts of radiation to be absorbed by the human body, per gram of body tissue (known as specific absorption rate, or, in this case, SAR 1.6). The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tests all mobile phones coming onto the market for compliance. But that rule is designed only to prevent harm from excess heat that can be generated by RF waves. It doesn’t consider (pdf) other potential biological effects, like DNA damage or altered protein expression—the FCC calls these all “ambiguous and unproven.”

Further, the FCC only tests cell phones against a simulated human head in the “talking” position, and not against the body (or in a pocket) in the “carrying” position. That’s because the tests assume the user is holding the phone away from the body whenever the phone is broadcasting at full power, like the manuals say they should. But it’s safe to say most people carry their phones in their hands or their pockets while they stream videos or music, or while they talk on the phone through a headset. Even the thickest pocket fabric isn’t thick enough to meaningfully reduce RF exposure. And since RF energy exposure increases sharply when your phone is in contact with or very close to your body, and falls off rapidly at a distance, some experts and organizations like the nonprofit Environmental Working Group worry that FCC testing is missing a lot of actual exposure.

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Half of Puerto Rico Still Doesn’t Have Power—104 Days After Hurricane Maria

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 09:00:00 -0500

Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico more than three months ago. And the latest figures show 45% of electricity customers in Puerto Rico still don’t have power.

Data on the extent of the outage has been hard to come by. Puerto Rico’s electrical utility says it is operating at 69% of normal capacity—but that figure doesn’t indicate how many of the island’s residents are actually receiving power. The system that monitors the extent of distribution is not working. On Dec.29, the governor put the official estimate of those in the dark at more than 660,000 people, 45% of the island’s 1.5 million electricity customers.

So now, 104 days since Maria hit, the 660,000 figure is the first to come directly from the Puerto Rican government. A group of local engineers estimated on Dec. 11 that roughly half of the island’s total 3.4-million population still had no power, according to the Associated Press.

The US Army Corps of Engineers has said it would take until May to get power back to all of Puerto Rico, with mountainous regions likely to be the last. That means some Puerto Ricans could go a total of eight months without power.

Utilities in the US are beginning to send crews on temporary deployments to help get the grid back up. Wisconsin-based We Energies and the Wisconsin Public Service announced last week they would be sending crews for a month at a time, Duke Energy of North Carolina has pledged 220 workers, and Texas-based Oncor, Texas’ largest electrical utility, is sending 1,500. New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced in November he would send 350 utility workers to the island.

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A New Analysis of 4-Year-Old Data Shows the EPA Is Ignoring a Lot of Toxins in US Drinking Water

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 11:05:38 -0500

It takes a lot to convince the US Environmental Protection Agency to limit how much of a toxin can legally show up in America’s drinking water. The threshold for determining probable human harm is very high, and even if harm is detected, the toxin has to show up in enough public water sources with enough frequency, and at levels sufficiently high, before the EPA considers it significant enough to regulate. And even after all the exhaustive studies are done, the decision ultimately comes down to “the sole judgment of the Administrator,” the head of the agency, who may or may not be swayed by the data.

Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA is responsible for determining when a chemical needs to be regulated in the US water supply, but it hasn’t added a new toxin to its list since 1996. (Even the Government Office of Accountability thinks that’s a sign of a broken system.) In the past two decades, tens of thousands of new chemicals have come onto the market, and plenty of others that pre-date 1996 have been discovered to harm human health.

For example, newly released lab results show perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA (an ingredient in Teflon, the chemical used to make non-stick cookware) is far more prevalent in American drinking water than previously thought. Exposure to PFOA has been linked to a range of health risks including cancer, immune system issues, and developmental problems in fetuses.

The EPA’s official estimate is that PFOA is in about 1% of US water supplies. A reanalysis by the same lab that helped the EPA reach that number did a reanalysis of the underlying data and found the real number is more likely in the 20% range. And about 28% of water supplies are contaminated with some member of the perfluorinated compound family.

In 2013, as part of the effort to decide whether to regulate six perfluorochemicals, including PFOA (and perfluorooctane sulfonate or PFOS, a widely used flame retardant), the EPA required every water authority nationwide serving more than 10,000 people to test for the compounds. The EPA hired three labs to perform the tests, including California-based Eurofins Eaton Analytical, which was responsible for about a third of the 36,000 total tests done at the time. Eaton Analytical’s results showed some contamination, but it didn’t look particularly widespread.

But it turns out that was because of the threshold the EPA was using; Back then, the EPA decided only samples that tested positive for 20 parts per trillion (ppt) or higher of PFOA should be counted and only 40 ppt or higher of PFOS, after deciding that was the lowest amount of the chemicals the labs could reliably detect in samples. But Eaton Analytical told the EPA it was able to test for the chemicals at much lower levels—as low as 2.5 ppt.

According to Andrew Eaton, the technical director of Eaton Analytical, the EPA’s PFOA and PFOS thresholds were set so high because the other two labs hired to do the testing in 2013 couldn’t reliably detect the chemicals at as low levels as his lab could. Eaton says those dramatic differences should have made the agency look harder for capable labs. “That should have given the EPA pause to say ‘Hmm, why were there such big differences here?’” Eaton told the Bucks County Courier Times earlier this month. “If you’re not seeing something because you looked too high, you’re not really doing your due diligence,” he said.

The lab recently went back and re-mined its 2013 data, using lower thresholds than the EPA previously said they wanted to hear about. That’s when they found that 20% of the samples contained the toxin, which means the EPA may be vastly underestimating how widespread contamination from this class of toxins really is.

Research also suggests that the toxins harm human health at much lower levels than the EPA threshold. According to David Andrews, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, there is debate in the toxicology community as to whether, like lead, there is actually no safe level of exposure, particularly in children who can accumulate more of it than adults and where some studies have suggested an association with behavioral and developmental problems.

PFOA is not currently regulated by the EPA, so state or local governments aren’t required to test for them. The EPA does set a recommended maximum exposure level for PFOA at 70 parts per trillion. But it’s nonbinding: states can choose to comply or not. In New Jersey, the local environment department has set the “acceptable” level at 14 ppt, the most stringent in the country (there is a lot of PFOA in New Jersey’s drinking water—the Environmental Working Group calculated the EPA’s testing method would have missed 75% of the contamination in that state).

PFOA and PFOS keep turning up in drinking water supplies in US towns and cities. Both are cancer-causing toxins, and in some cases, residents may have been drinking one or the other in their water supply for decades—like in Hoosick Falls, New York, where Teflon was long manufactured, and where a resident found high levels of PFOA in the drinking water. The EPA named the area New York’s newest Superfund site last year. Before that, PFOA was found to be heavily contaminating the groundwater in a cancer-riddled town in West Virginia, home to a large factory where Dupont made Teflon.

Contamination has been so widespread in the past, Andrews says, that “everyone in the US already has these chemicals in our blood. You really don’t want to add more to that.”

After years of debate and a major scientific report connecting PFOA to two cancers and several other serious diseases, the EPA was rumored to start regulating it this year. That hasn’t happened, and the policies of the people currently running the agency don’t bode well for a rule in the future. As the New York Times reports, a scientist who worked for the chemical industry now shapes policy on hazardous chemicals at the EPA. She has moved to change how risks from chemicals are evaluated, requiring the agency to look only at hazards associated with specific “conditions of use” of a chemical, rather than at all hazards posed by all routes of exposure to the chemical regardless of what it was used for. The change makes it harder to evaluate risk—and therefore to regulate—toxins like PFOA.

Eaton told Quartz he gave a presentation about his new conclusions to EPA employees this year. He says they agreed with him that their agency might have missed something. “EPA has seen the presentations—their initial reaction was, ‘Gosh, we set the reporting limits based on what the science told us at the time, and you’re right, we probably should have looked more closely at what the science told us about reporting limits.’”

EPA spokesperson Enesta Jones defended the EPA’s approach to the study, telling the Courier Times this month that the “EPA is aware that some laboratories are able to achieve [lower] reporting limits,” but that the limits were “established so that a national array of laboratories could meet them and were based on looking at the capability of multiple commercial laboratories.”

Jones said the EPA is expected to reach a decision about the toxin in 2021.

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NASA’s Next Head Wants it to Do Less Climate Science and More Weather Science, But You Can’t Separate Them

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 12:19:43 -0400

NASA has a likely new head, and like other people the Donald Trump administration has put in top science-related jobs, he’s not a big fan of climate-change research.

Trump’s NASA nominee is Jim Bridenstine, a congressman from Oklahoma. In 2013, he told Congress that global temperatures “stopped rising 10 years ago” (not true) and that “global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with sun output and ocean cycles” (there is a small correlation, but plenty of research shows greenhouse gases play a far larger role). Two years ago he needled “climate-change alarmists” on Twitter.

But assuming the Senate confirms his nomination (a formality), Bridenstine will lead a space agency that spends nearly a tenth of its budget on “earth science,” which includes research into both weather patterns and climate change. Trump originally said he wanted to scrap the earth science program entirely in favor of space exploration, but his proposed 2018 budget took a milder approach, cutting the program by a little under 10%, to $1.8 billion. NASA’s overall budget is $19.6 billion.

Bridenstine evidently knows the importance of weather research. “People often say, ‘Why are you so involved in space issues?'” he reportedly said at a commercial space transportation conference this year. “My constituents get killed in tornadoes. I care about space.” In his 2013 speech in Congress, he chided president Barack Obama for spending “30 times as much money on global warming research as he does on weather forecasting and warning.” (That’s false too.)

From this one may infer that Bridenstine believes it’s important to, say, track and study major storms, but less important to investigate why they’re becoming more severe, even though researchers have found over and over that global warming is making phenomena like hurricanes, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires more devastating than they would have been otherwise.

The trouble is that weather research and climate research are not so simple to disentangle. NASA’s 16 earth science satellites (plus three other instruments attached to the International Space Station) make up the core of the agency’s climate science program. They don’t just collect data on climate change; they also monitor, among other things, the oceans, soil health, wildfires, air quality, and hurricanes. That makes the program useful for emergency response during major, fast-developing storms.

Hurricane #Irma is maintaining it's strength with maximum sustained winds of 185 MPH. The eye is approaching the island of Barbuda. #GOES16 pic.twitter.com/85fHMLVr5H
— NASA SPoRT (@NASA_SPoRT) September 6, 2017

Right now, Hurricane Irma, the second-strongest hurricane ever observed over the Atlantic Ocean, is barreling through the Caribbean en route to Florida—and a team from NASA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration is watching its path with the most advanced weather satellite the agencies have ever built. The GOES-16 satellite, launched last year, can take far higher resolution images of the developing storm than any of its predecessors.

Saint-Martin and Anguilla appear to have taken a direct hit by cat 5 Hurricane #Irma. #GOES16 pic.twitter.com/1CN1JL0GEC
— NASA SPoRT (@NASA_SPoRT) September 6, 2017

While Bridenstine’s climate-denying comments from 2013 are sure to come up in his Senate confirmation hearings, a former colleague told told Science magazine that Bridenstine does believe the planet is warming and that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. As for his climate change-denial comments from 2013, he’d “probably say it differently today.” In an editorial, the editor of The Tulsa World said the same thing—that Bridenstine told him he would have phrased it differently now.

But he also told the editor he had opposed the US’s involvement in the Paris climate accord, from which Trump has said the US will withdraw, and that while he does believe carbon dioxide is warming the planet, he would probably disagree “about the severity of the problem” with people who accept the scientific consensus. The editor noted that he doesn’t believe Bridenstine has “moderated much” since his 2013 speech on the House floor.

Columbia University climate law professor Michael Gerrard was more forceful, calling Bridenstine a “climate denier” on Twitter.

Trump's nominee to lead NASA: Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a climate denier like fellow Oklahomans J Inhofe & Scott Pruitt. https://t.co/zN0OyND1lA pic.twitter.com/P4WrHX3PNd
— Michael Gerrard (@MichaelGerrard) September 2, 2017

It’s not yet clear, then, what Bridenstine would do to NASA’s earth sciences program. But any large, immediate cutbacks to the mission would be difficult if not impossible. Ceasing to fly the satellites simply isn’t an option, according to a contractor Quartz spoke with earlier this year, who works as an engineer for one NASA satellite that collects climate data.

“If you stopped operations—if nobody manned the satellites—they would crash and spread space debris,” which would threaten other satellites in orbit and is a danger nobody would risk, the engineer said. Bringing the satellites back to Earth is another option, but the “deorbiting process” takes “years and years,” the engineer says. Plus, most contractors are on a five-year contract, and the sprawling infrastructure and personnel involved in ongoing missions couldn’t just be terminated or shifted to another agency without enormous expense.

Still, while ceasing the earth science program altogether might not be practical, the engineer worried about NASA simply ceasing data collection from the satellites. That would punch a hole in the data used by climate scientists worldwide and jeopardize the scientific rigor of US research.

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For the First Time Ever, U.S. Is Getting 10% of its Electricity From Wind and Solar

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 13:00:00 -0400

Renewable energy in the U.S. just hit a new benchmark: 10 percent of the electricity produced in a single month came from wind and solar power for the first time.

This March, 8 percent of U.S. electricity came from wind power, and 2 percent came from solar, totaling 10 percent of total energy generation nationally, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Data isn’t finalized for April yet, but the U.S. Energy Information Administration says it expects April wind and solar numbers to exceed 10 percent of total generation again.

Renewables—especially wind power—already make up significantly more than 10 percent of the electricity in several states. In Texas, for example, 13 percent of total energy production comes from renewables. In California, 20 percent does.

(EIA/Electric Power Monthly)

Nationally, hitting the 10 percent monthly benchmark represents a significant increase over the same period last year. The U.S. produced 65 percent more solar power and 17 percent more wind power in March 2017 than it did in March 2016, when those two sources accounted for 8.6 percent of all the electricity produced in the country.

The milestone is yet another piece of evidence for the argument that renewables can no longer be considered “alternative” energy, Christopher Clack, CEO of the power grid modeling firm Vibrant Clean Energy and a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researcher, told Climate Central.

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These Are the 158 Key Federal Science Data Sets Rogue Programmers Have Duplicated So Far

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 08:00:00 -0500

Since the weeks leading up to Donald Trump’s inauguration day, impromptu gatherings of programmers, scientists and archivists have popped up at universities across the country. They gather on weekends, laptops and thumb drives in hand, order pizza and then download and archive as much federal science data as they can get their hands on.

These “data rescue” events have managed to archive tens of thousands of government website pages they fear may be edited or removed under an administration that has expressed hostility toward climate and environmental science. Copies of those web pages now live within the Internet Archive, best known for its Wayback Machine platform.

But the Internet Archive can’t scrape more elaborate databases—so in addition to simple web pages, the groups pull down intricate and often large data sets from science agencies like NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, all three of which have been singled out by the Trump administration for budget and staffing cuts to their Earth and climate science programs.

Since January, 158 complete data sets have been downloaded, labeled and re-uploaded to DataRefuge.org, a growing repository of scraped government science.

And now, there’s a data visualization tool that lets you see exactly which data sets, from which agencies, the data rescue groups have duplicated so far. The list includes data sets from NOAA’s Earth-observing satellites, NASA’s polar-orbiting missions, pollution discharge monitoring reports from EPA, among many others.

Sarah Kolbe, a data scientist for California State University, built the data visualization after volunteering with a group of programmers in Madison, Wisconsin, who held its first “data rescue” event March 5.

“We’re planning to do another soon,” she says, so more data sets will likely be added.

A coalition of researchers called the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, or EDGI, is monitoring the government web pages for any changes under the new administration, by comparing them to the scraped copies. (They also plan to track any data sets that are removed.)

And they’ve already found several notable changes: Climate change reports have disappeared off State Department websites, and as The New York Times points out, the science and technology office of EPA has changed its mission description from creating “scientific and technological foundations to achieve clean water” to creating “economically and technologically achievable performance standards.” A description of a federal fracking rule, and another about a methane emissions rule, have also gone missing from Interior Department web pages.

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NASA Engineer Explains Why Trump’s Plan to Cut the Space Agency’s Climate Science Program Is Harder than It Sounds

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 17:00:00 -0500

Within weeks of the U.S. election, President Donald Trump said he intended to scrap NASA’s research on climate change, shifting those resources—less than $2 billion of the agency’s $19 billion budget—to its space program.

Other Republicans have echoed that goal. Oklahoma state Sen. Jim Bridenstine, who is reportedly being considered (among others) to run NASA, once called on Barack Obama to apologize to the people of Oklahoma for funding climate change research. Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House committee on Science, Space and Technology, said earlier this month NASA should be focused on space, not climate change, because “another dozen agencies” are already studying the latter.

But cutting NASA’s climate science research could prove to be an expensive, logistical nightmare, according to a contractor who works as an engineer for one NASA satellite that collects climate data. The engineer requested to remain anonymous to avoid jeopardizing their employment at the agency.

NASA currently has 16 Earth science satellites in orbit (and three other Earth science instruments attached to the International Space Station) that, in addition to climate data, collect information on the atmosphere, oceans and land-based phenomena like wildfires. The satellites make up the core of NASA’s climate science program, and the most immediate problem with eliminating climate research is what would become of them.

“If you stopped operations—if nobody manned the satellites—they would crash and spread space debris,” the engineer said. NASA currently tracks around 500,000 pieces of space debris traveling at extremely high speeds; satellite engineers must steer their spacecraft to avoid them.

If a satellite crashes into a piece of debris, the satellite would splinter, possibly sending “40,000 or 50,0000 pieces of space debris into low Earth orbit,” the engineer said. “Then you have to try to account for all those pieces of debris. That would be truly a crisis. They wouldn’t de-staff our teams just because of that danger.”

Transferring satellite operations to a different agency would be costly. NASA’s Earth science satellites are operated in large part by contractors, many with five-year agreements, who use specialized equipment at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Severing those agreements, and physically moving those machines to a different agency’s headquarters, would be a massive headache.

“All the engineers and scientists are geographically living near the center where we work,” the engineer said. “All the resources—all that stuff is geographically tied down.”

Even if the Trump administration wanted to remove those satellites from space entirely, the logistics and red tape surrounding the “deorbiting process”—delicately bringing a satellite back to Earth—can take “years and years,” said the engineer, who worries more about the administration leaving the satellites in place and simply ceasing data collection.

Budgetary waste is a common refrain among those seeking to end climate science at NASA. Because other U.S. agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration also study climate change and Earth science, critics argue, there is a degree of redundancy in NASA’s work.

But redundancy isn’t wasteful; it is a basic tenet of high-quality science. If more than one set of data point to the same trend or conclusion (especially if they were collected by entirely separate scientists at separate agencies), scientists can have more confidence the conclusion is correct.

For that very reason, climate scientists often use climate data gathered by NASA, NOAA and EPA. Eliminating any of these data sources would reduce the overall diversity of data and, by default, the scientific rigor of U.S. research. It would also consolidate data collection into the hands of fewer political appointees.

Already, grassroots efforts are underway at universities around the country to download and store federal science data. “Data rescue” groups have managed to harvest NASA’s Earth science data, as well as much of NOAA’s and EPA’s data. NASA employees have taken notice.

“We’re all pretty excited by it,” the engineer said. The data rescue initiatives have gained urgency in the wake of Scott Pruitt’s confirmation as EPA administrator, as NASA employees worry he could pull EPA’s climate data from public view.

“Censorship is my No. 1 concern,” the NASA engineer said. “Once you consolidate the sources of data, it’s easier to censor.”

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Guerrilla Archivists Developed an App to Save Science Data From the Trump Administration

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 16:00:00 -0500

On the first Saturday morning in February, scientists, programmers, professors and digital librarians met at New York University in New York City to save federal data sets they thought could be altered or disappear all together under the administration of US president Donald Trump. Around 150 people turned out for the gathering, many after hearing about it through Facebook.

Enthusiasm for guerrilla archiving is skyrocketing; the day at NYU was the latest in a ballooning list of “data rescues” across the country. All-day archiving marathons have been held at Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Boston, and Michigan, and by the time the NYU event was over, attendees from several other cities had volunteered to host their own.

“We’ve put 14 new events on the docket in the last week and a half,” says Brendan O’Brien, an independent programmer who builds tools for open-source data. O’Brien showed up to a data rescue event just before Trump’s inauguration and has, in recent weeks, devoted himself to the events full-time. “It seemed obvious that I should just stop everything and focus on this.”

Dates have been set for events at University of California-Berkeley, MIT, Georgetown, Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and at a coworking space in Austin. Structured like all-day hackathons and organized by volunteers, the events focus on downloading federal science—especially climate-change related—data sets from government websites and uploading them to a new website, datarefuge.org, which they hope can act as an alternative website for federal data during the current administration. They’re also archiving tens of thousands of government web pages and feeding them into the Internet Archive, which runs the Wayback Machine.

The data rescue movement is growing up fast: What started as a project coordinated through group spreadsheets in Google Docs now has a workflow formalized through a custom-built app designed specifically for this purpose by O’Brien and Daniel Allan, a computational scientist at a national lab (Allan preferred not to indicate a specific lab, and emphasized his participation was in his free time and not on behalf of his employer). Eventually, anyone with ten minutes to spare will be able to open the app, check what government URLs have yet to be archived, see whether those can be simply fed into the Internet Archive (or needs more technical attention to scrape and download any data), and “attack a quick data set” from their couch, O’Brien says. The archiving could be remote, and perpetual.

Meanwhile, members of the Environmental Data & Government Initiative, a group of academics and developers that has been acting informally as a liaison between the DIY events, is working on something of a starter pack for people who want to host data rescues of their own, with advice and templates gleaned from lessons learned at earlier events. “With every event we’re learning how to streamline the process,” says O’Brien. The workflow for identifying, downloading, organizing, and archiving data is becoming more seamless—so at each event, a larger volume of data gets processed than at the one before.

By the evening, the group at NYU had fed 5,000 government urls into the Internet Archive. Most came from the Department of Energy, which houses vast amounts of energy data, and the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Parks and public lands. The programmers in attendance, who spent the day writing scripts and finding ways to download raw data sets that couldn’t be easily fed into the archive in their original format, managed to upload 100 megabytes of data pulled off government servers to datarefuge.org.

All this effort is partly to preserve federal science for researchers to use in the future—the participants are going through great lengths, spurred by the librarians in the crowd, to make sure the data is handled in a way that keeps it valid enough to be used in peer-review research; they are marking who handled the data and when, and including descriptions of how the data was collected and what it describes, to avoid large sets of data becoming out-of-context jumbles of information.

But it’s also to ensure towns, cities, and counties facing environmental problems can still access data that can help make their communities healthier, says Jerome Whittington, the NYU professor who organized the event. The US Environmental Protection Agency, for example, collects data on air and water pollution, contaminated soil, toxic spills, and records when local companies violate rules like regulations against dumping harmful waste. The EPA data is key for communities trying to take action against polluters or otherwise working to gain control over their exposure to harmful toxins.

Under federal appointees with records of being hostile towards environmental health regulation, data may be harder to come by, Whittington worries. “If you don’t have the data, you’ll be told your problem doesn’t exist. It is in a way a struggle over what we consider reality.”

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Hackers Downloaded US Government Climate Data and Stored it on European Servers as Trump Was Being Inaugurated

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 07:00:00 -0500

As Donald Trump was sworn into office as the new president Jan. 20, a group of around 60 programmers and scientists were gathered in the Department of Information Studies building at the University of California-Los Angeles, harvesting government data.

A spreadsheet detailed their targets: Webpages dedicated to the Energy Department’s solar power initiative, Energy Information Administration data sets that compared fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, and fuel cell research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, to name a few out of hundreds.

Many of the programmers who showed up at UCLA for the event had day jobs as IT consultants or data managers at startups; others were undergrad computer science majors. The scientists in attendance, including ecologists, lab managers, and oceanographers, came from universities all over Southern California.

A motley crew of data enthusiasts who assemble for projects like this is becoming something of a trend at universities across the country: Volunteer “data rescue” events in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis and Michigan over the last few weeks have managed to scrape hundreds of thousands of pages off of EPA.gov, NASA.gov, DOE.gov and whitehouse.gov, uploading them to the Internet Archive. Another is planned for early February at New York University.

Hackers, librarians, scientists and archivists had been working around the clock, at these events and in the days between, to download as much federal climate and environment data off government websites as possible before Trump took office.

But suddenly, at exactly noon Friday as Trump was sworn in, and just as the UCLA event kicked off, some of their fears began to come true: The climate change-related pages on whitehouse.gov disappeared. It’s typical of incoming administrations to take down some of their predecessor’s pages, but scrubbing all mentions of climate change is a clear indication of the Trump administration’s position on climate science.

“We’re having a heart attack,” said Laurie Allen on Friday afternoon. Allen is the assistant director for digital scholarship in the University of Pennsylvania libraries and the technical lead on a recent data-rescuing event there. “In the last four days, I think we’ve been working 22 hours a day, because we were hearing that these precise changes were going to happen.”

“I wish we had been wrong about our concerns. But this is what we internally had predicted and prepared for,” added Bethany Wiggin, the director of the environmental humanities program at Penn and another organizer of the data-rescuing event.

Over the first 100 days of the new administration, a volunteer team of programmers will be scanning government websites and comparing them to the archived, pre-Trump versions, to check for changes.

“We’ll be letting people know what the changes exactly are. We hope to produce a weekly report on changes,” Wiggin says, perhaps in the form of a newsletter.

While Wiggin and Allen say the changes to whitehouse.gov are disconcerting, they also note they are small potatoes compared with what could come next: the large government data sets related to climate change and environmental health that scientists use for research.

For example, there’s a massive Environmental Protection Agency database of air quality monitoring data that might become a target of Trump-appointed EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s office, based on Pruitt’s history of suing the EPA to roll back air pollution regulations.

That’s where the data rescuing hackathons come in: The volunteer programmers at each event have been writing custom scripts to harvest the bigger, more complicated federal data sets, too. And they’re sharing the scripts with each other.

“These events build onto each other. We might use tools that were built at other events,” says Irene Pasquetto, one of the organizers of the UCLA event.

Large data sets are being organized and uploaded to datarefuge.org, a website based on a version of the open-source data portal software Ckan, customized by Allen. All the various data-rescue hackathons are using the site for data storage, and hope it will act as an alternative repository for pre-Trump federal information during the new administration.

There will, thanks to Michael Riedyk, CEO of the Canadian data-archiving company Page Freezer, also be a copy stored outside the US.

The night before the inauguration, Riedyk was reading an article online about the Penn data-rescuing event, and thought it wouldn’t hurt also host that data in a second location, and he had just the spot in mind. His company offered monthly subscriptions to companies and government agencies who wanted their web pages archived on a daily basis. Plus, it had servers in Europe.

“We built this huge archiving cloud that crawls websites to preserve them, either to comply with regulation or for legal protection,” Riedyk says. “I thought, wow, we have that complete infrastructure in place.”

So Riedyk got in touch with Wiggin, who helped organize the Philadelphia event, and offered his services for free.

“I said, ‘We can archive these for you, and figure out how to open up to the public later.’”

Wiggin sent him back 30,000 science-related government web pages and the domain names of 150 complete websites that participants in data-rescue events had identified as possibly under threat by the new administration, or of vital use to researchers.

By the next day, shortly after Trump took office, Riedyk’s team was almost done.

“We’ve captured a significant portion,” he says. “I expect we’ll have everything on that list by today or tomorrow.”

From there, his company will use web crawlers to scan each page on a weekly basis. Page Freezer’s proprietary software will allow them to see if anything changes.

“We have all kinds of really cool tools to highlight what changed—we can see exactly how people have edited or deleted.” So if the Trump administration alters a page on, say, an EPA website, Page Freezer will know.

Page Freezer has three data centers, one in the U.S., one in Europe and one in Canada; the U.S. government data will be archived on their European servers.

“That’s where we had most of our capacity available right now,” Riedyk says. But it could also put the information out of reach of the U.S. government: In a 2016, a U.S. appeals court ruled Microsoft did not have to turn over to the Justice Department a customer’s emails stored on a server in Dublin, Ireland.

The second circuit court said warrants obtained under the Stored Communications Act, which governs electronic records, are limited to searches within U.S borders. That’s not to say the law would not be challenged again, but having a copy of these key scientific datasets stored in Europe should make getting rid of them much more difficult.

Meanwhile, as more and more “data rescuing” events bubble up across the country, the work is getting easier, says Britt Paris, a Ph.D. student at UCLA and another organizer of the event there. Strategies for workflow and data-scraping best-practices are being handed down, one event to the other.

“I feel like we have a lot of support, like we’re part of a wider network,” Paris said. “There’s a sense of going forward together.”

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Getting Rid of Obamacare Will Cripple the Department Keeping Bioterrorism and Outbreaks at Bay

Zoë Schlanger, Quartz — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 18:09:54 -0500

It’s not just about doctor’s visits and medications. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, a pot of money used to prevent bioterrorism attacks and prevent disease outbreaks may go down with it.

The Prevention and Public Health Fund, part of Obamacare, allocates $890 million to the US Centers for Disease Control to create better infrastructure for identifying disease outbreaks before they happen, and addressing them before they spread, a new report from public health advocacy group Trust for America’s Health points out. For example, the Prevention Fund dedicated $210 million to the CDC’s immunization program in 2015.

For an already chronically–underfunded agency that has handled 750 outbreaks in the last two years alone, missing nearly a billion dollars will likely take its toll.The Prevention Fund represents about 12 percent of the CDC’s budget, which totaled roughly $7 billion in 2016. The Department of Agriculture’s 2016 budget, for comparison, was about $25 billion.

It’s not just the CDC that will suffer. Another $3 billion is allocated through the Prevention Fund to support state health agencies that deal in community-level disease prevention, bioterrorism prevention, pandemic response, and responding to other health emergencies, according to the Trust for America’s Health report. A quick search on an online database of its grants shows that the Prevention Fund puts money towards everything from discovering new vaccines for infectious diseases, to improving existing vaccines, like those for the common flu.

State-level Prevention Fund programs also include:

Reducing prescription overdoses
Preventing lead poisoning
Screening for breast and cervical cancer
Preventing the spread of viral hepatitis
Preventing heart disease, diabetes, and stroke

And suppressing the spread of many, many other conditions. In a world where 86% of health care costs are spent on chronic diseases, many of which can be avoided when the right measures are taken, funding prevention looks an awfully lot like the fiscally conservative route.

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