Kate Sheppard

Reporter

Kate Sheppard is a staff reporter in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She was previously the political reporter for Grist and a writing fellow at The American Prospect. She can be reached by email at ksheppard (at) motherjones (dot) com.

Full Bio | Get my RSS | Follow @kate_sheppard

Her work has also been featured in the New York Times' Room for Debate blog, the Guardian's Comment Is Free, Foreign Policy, High Country News, The Center for Public Integrity, the Washington Independent, Washington Spectator, Who Runs Gov, In These Times, and Bitch. She was raised on a vegetable farm in southern New Jersey (yes, they do exist), but has adapted well to life in the nation's capital. She misses trees and having a congressional representative with voting power, but thinks DC is pretty great anyway.

Report: IPCC Is Underestimating Climate Threat

—By Kate Sheppard

| Fri Dec. 7, 2012 4:03 AM PST

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, is a favorite punching bag for climate deniers. The panel, made up of scientists from around the world who evaluate and coalesce the best and latest science on climate change, issues new reports every five to six years; the fifth report is will begin rolling out in 2013. But while deniers love to cry that the IPCC is "alarmist," the comparison between what the panel has predicted over the last 20 years and what actually panned out in the real world shows that the IPCC has "consistently underestimated" the impacts, according to a new report highlighted by the Daily Climate.

The piece draws from new research from Naomi Oreskes, a history and science professor at University of California—San Diego, and Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist at Princeton University. Among the examples of the panel's conservative predictions:

The drastic decline of summer Arctic sea ice is one recent example: In the 2007 report, the IPCC concluded the Arctic would not lose its summer ice before 2070 at the earliest. But the ice pack has shrunk far faster than any scenario scientists felt policymakers should consider; now researchers say the region could see ice-free summers within 20 years.

Sea-level rise is another. In its 2001 report, the IPCC predicted an annual sea-level rise of less than 2 millimeters per year. But from 1993 through 2006, the oceans actually rose 3.3 millimeters per year, more than 50 percent above that projection.

Among the challenges for the panel are the fact that, as IPCC Vice-Chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele describes, the authors work to "achieve consensus" and include the "full diversity of views that are scientifically valid."

See the full piece on the report here.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Is Your Baby Sleeping in Carcinogens?

—By Kate Sheppard

| Thu Dec. 6, 2012 3:07 PM PST

UPDATE: Walmart announced Thursday evening that it will remove unlabeled items from its California stores.

The Oakland-based Center for Environmental Health announced on Thursday that it is taking legal action against a group of retailers selling products—many of them designed for infants and toddlers—that are made with a carcinogen. That includes changing pads, crib mattress pads, nap mats, and baby seats.

The chemical TDCPP, also known as chlorinated Tris, was removed from clothing for babies back in the 1970s. But it can still be found in a number of products that contain flame retardant-laced foam. Since October, California has included the chemical on its list of carcinogens and required products that carry it to bear a warning label. (California is generally the most aggressive in forcing companies to remove or at least label harmful chemicals, and since manufacturers only tend to make one model of their product, the California labels usually appear everywhere in the US.)

But despite the fact that there have been concerns about this chemical for 40 years, it's still showing up in products at major retailers in California. CEH had products purchased at Target, Babies R Us, Walmart, and Kmart tested, and found the chemical in many products that weren't labeled as containing it.

The CEH study found the chemical in products like the Sweet Beginnings Bassinet Pad, Dexbaby Safety Changing Pad, Peerless Plastics KinderMat, Baby Delight Snuggle Nest Portable Infact Sleeper, and the Nap Nanny Portable Infant Recliner (which the Consumer Product Safety Commission has already filed a complaint against, after five infants died while using the product), among others.

CEH has issued legal notices to the companies selling these products, asking them to recall products sold since the new labeling rule was put in place at the end of October, and to either remove the chemical from new products or label them appropriately if they include the chemical. If the legal notice is not addressed in 60 days, the group has signaled it will move ahead with a lawsuit.

A spokeswoman for Target told the San Francisco Chronicle that the company "is committed to abiding by state and federal laws and regulations, and we expect our vendors to do the same."

The Real War on Christmas: Climate Change

—By Kate Sheppard

| Thu Dec. 6, 2012 2:08 PM PST

Every year we hear about some new front in the "War on Christmas" that liberals are supposedly waging against this most important of all Christian holidays. But an actual war on Christmas is coming—and it's spurred by climate change. It's a liberal conspiracy!

The summer drought caused many ~~Christmas~~ holiday tree seedlings in Tennessee to die this year, The Tennessean reports:

Record heat and abnormally dry conditions conspired to cause significant losses, especially among seedlings and saplings, local growers say. That could result in higher prices in the future, when those trees would have been hitting the market.

"The drought sure made it rough this year," said Wayne Pressler, owner of Kirkwood Tree Farm in Clarksville, who estimated he lost about half of his roughly 400 trees.

Other growers reported losing up to 80 percent of trees that were planted in the past year, and as much as 20 percent of older trees, the Tennessee Department of Agriculture said.

The Department of Agriculture notes that this won't really affect the trees people are buying this Christmas, since it takes trees six to seven years to get to an average height for holiday festivity status. But it will likely have an impact in a few years, when we're all fighting over a few statuesque firs or stuffing presents under some puny Charlie Brown pine.

Rand Paul Doesn't Know Which Industries Actually Dominate His State

—By Kate Sheppard

| Thu Dec. 6, 2012 8:58 AM PST

The chatter that actress Ashley Judd might make a run for Senate in her home state of Kentucky has prompted preemptive vituperation from the state's Republican delegation. "She's way damn too liberal for our country, for our state," Rand Paul told radio station WMAL on Wednesday. "She hates our biggest industry, which is coal, so I say, good luck bringing the 'I hate coal message' to Kentucky."

Paul also threw in some digs about Judd, an eighth-generation Kentuckian, spending part of her time in her husband's home country, Scotland. And yes, Judd has been a vocal critic of mountain-top removal coal mining. But the comments indicate that Rand Paul doesn't know much about his state's top industries. Mining isn't the state's biggest industry. It's not even in the top ten, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (via James E. Carter IV). It's way down at number 13:

James E. Carter IV/Bureau of Economic Analysis

It's all the way down there after "information," oddly enough. Mining is also not the largest industry in the ranking based on the number of people it employs; on that list, it comes in 15th.

Sandy Price Tag: $50 Billion

—By Kate Sheppard

| Thu Dec. 6, 2012 4:13 AM PST

A beach house in Far Rockaway, New York destroyed by Hurricane Sandy.

A few weeks ago, my colleague Kevin Drum wrote that Congress was "about to get hit in the head with the price of climate change." Well, here it is. On Wednesday, news broke that President Obama is expected to ask for around $50 billion in disaster aid in response to Hurricane Sandy. And even that is not nearly as much money as the affected states have asked the federal government to provide.

From the New York Times:

The White House is assembling a spending request to send to Capitol Hill as early as this week, and while the final sum is still in flux, it should fall between $45 billion and $55 billion. That represents an enormous sum at a time when Mr. Obama is locked in a titanic struggle with Republicans over the federal deficit, but is significantly less than the states sought.

Unless an austerity-minded Congress adds to the president’s plan, state leaders would have to figure out other ways to finance tens of billions of dollars of storm-related expenses or do without them. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were seeking a combined $82 billion in federal help both to clean up and restore damage from Hurricane Sandy as well as to upgrade and harden infrastructure to prepare for future storms.

Climate-fueled megastorms like Sandy, droughts, wild fires—none of these are cheap. And while this is one big, expensive storm, we've also been paying for billion-plus-dollar disasters more frequently in the paset few years. For so long, all we seemed to hear from Congress about climate change were complaints that we can't afford to deal with it. Now that a giant bill is coming due, I wonder what they'll have to say.