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.

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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.

Michael Brown Should Really Just Go Away

—By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Oct. 30, 2012 2:08 PM PDT

Michael Brown, the Bush-era FEMA director who resigned in disgrace after the agency's handling of Hurricane Katrina, has a lot of nerve. "Heckuva Job Brownie" probably should have retreated to the shadows and returned to regulating horse shows. Instead, Brown has made a point of continuing to speak to the press, including going on tour last year to sell his awful book. Now he's back, and he's criticizing the Obama administration for acting too "quickly" in response to Hurricane Sandy.

As ThinkProgress notes, Brown gave an interview to a local Denver paper in which he combined criticism of Obama's response to Sandy with criticism of the president's response to the deaths in Benghazi last month:

"One thing he's gonna be asked is, why did he jump on this so quickly and go back to D.C. so quickly when in...Benghazi, he went to Las Vegas?" Brown says. "Why was this so quick?... At some point, somebody's going to ask that question.... This is like the inverse of Benghazi."

It's obviously terrible for Brown, whose failures in Katrina are at least partially responsible for 1,833 deaths and untold human suffering, to accuse the Obama administration of acting too "quickly" in response to a major storm. It's even more embarrassing that he's doing it in the service of hammering home a bogus right-wing talking point about Benghazi. One has to wonder why Brown even bothers. He would be better off if he just stayed quiet and stopped reminding everyone of his past.

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You Will Pay For Hurricane Sandy—Even If You Live Nowhere Near It

—By Kate Sheppard

| Fri Oct. 26, 2012 2:37 PM PDT

By now you've already heard about Hurricane Sandy. Or Frankenstorm. Or the Snowincane, if you prefer. As I write this, the storm is barreling toward the continental United States, promising to wreck havoc on the coastal Mid-Atlantic and New England.

It's supposed to hit coastal Virginia, where I've spent quite a bit of time in the past few months reporting about sea level rise, storm surges, and efforts to make communities safer. You'll have to wait a bit longer for that piece, but in the mean time, Sandy is a good reminder of what some regions of the country are up against.

Sure, this region does get big storms. There was Hurricane Isabel in 2003, a Nor'easter named Ernesto in 2006, Nor'Ida in 2009. In August 2011 they got Hurricane Irene. But sea level rise makes everything worse. Higher sea levels mean bigger storm surges and more damage to coastal regions.

Tide measurements have found that the sea level on Virginia's Middle Peninsula has risen 14.5 inches in the past 100 years, and scientists expect the seas here to rise another 27.2 inches by the end of the century. Overall, sea level is rising four times faster along the east coast of the US than the global average. The area along the Chesapeake Bay is particularly at risk, because the ground is sinking as the seas are rising.

In the US, we have 4,514 miles of shoreline—20 percent our total miles of coastline—that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says is highly vulnerable to sea level rise. That includes 82 percent of Virginia's coast. You can see what that means for storm surges with this great map that Climate Central created. Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology at Weather Underground, says we can expect 3 to 6 foot storm surges where Sandy makes landfall.

Climate change is already speeding up sea-level rise. But it's also making mega storms more likely. A warmer climate and more moisture in the atmosphere makes for more extreme storms, as Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research explains. As Masters put it, "I call it being on steroids kind of for the atmosphere."

Experts are already projecting that Sandy will be a billion-dollar disaster for the US. Last year, Irene alone causing $4.3 billion in losses—and that was just one of 14 storms that cost at least a billion dollars. And while damage caused by a storm like Sandy can be expensive for people who live in its path, it's also costly for everyone else: After Social Security, the National Flood Insurance Program is the second largest fiscal liability for the US government, insuring $527 billion of assets in the coastal flood plain. Private flood insurance is difficult, if not impossible, to come by.

"This is going to be bad, but if we continue along this path of carbon pollution, it's just going to be a lot worse," says Amanda Staudt, a senior scientist with the National Wildlife Federation based in Reston, Va.—which is also expected to be hit by the storm. "Every time one of these disasters starts unfolding that clearly has a signature of a climate change impact, I begin to think that maybe this will be the time people will get it, that is what climate change means for us."

Did BP Oil Kill This Whale?

—By Kate Sheppard

| Wed Oct. 24, 2012 3:03 AM PDT

Two and a half years have passed since the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but there are still open questions about the extent of the damage the gusher caused. BP and the federal government are discussing a settlement, though the exact amount of money BP will have to pay up is still unclear.

But take, for example, some information that Greenpeace recently received in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed more than two years ago seeking evidence of the spill's impact on endangered species. The latest batch of photos and documents the group received focuses on a dead sperm whale that researchers on the ship Pisces found about 77 miles from the site of the Deepwater Horizon on June 2010. (The group had previously received a batch of photos of oiled sea turtles.)

The dead whale was documented in a press release on June 16, 2010, but the Greenpeace FOIA also turned up a number of photos of the bloated, burnt whale that appeared to have been floating in the water for at least a few days before it was found.

Greenpeace

The photos are pretty grim; it's hard to even tell it's a whale until you notice the protruding jaw bone. It doesn't appear that photos of it were widely circulated at the time, though at least one National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) photo did appear online, and a school teacher aboard the research ship also posted some of her own photos of the body. Several of the emails released in the FOIA response state that people aboard the ship were told not to post photos. "I just spoke to the command center in Houma and they have asked that you all not post the photos to anyone as they are part of an official investigation," says one email sent from a NOAA staffer to others on the ship, asking that they refrain from posting until they get permission from the Joint Information Center.

What's unclear is whether they ever determined what killed the whale, which was described as "sub-adult." It was already pretty decomposed when they found it. The press release noted that it was "impossible to confirm whether exposure to oil was the cause of death," but said that they collected skin swabs, blubber, and skin samples for analysis.

But there weren't any follow-up reports on what those tests found. The official tally of animals affected by the spill on the NOAA website says that there were two dead sperm whales found in the months after the spill; it's unclear whether the whale in the photographs is included in that figure. [NOAA had not responded to questions by the time this went to press, but I have added an update below.)

Greenpeace wants to know what happened to the whale. "They never published them or made an explanation," said Kert Davies, the group's research director. "They took samples, swabs, but we never saw the lab results … What happened to it? How many times does a whale just die?"

Greenpeace

Hal Whitehead, a biologist and sperm whale expert at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told Mother Jones that most whales live a long time—as long as 80 years—and typically die of natural causes. The population of the endangered sperm whales was dense in the Gulf at last tally, but still relatively small—between 1,400 and 1,660. "They appeared to be doing well before the spill," said Whitehead.

But the sperm whale population was still vulnerable, and there was a lot of fear at the time that even a few deaths could severely impact the their long-term survival. Biologists also note that only some of the dead bodies are actually found and tallied; there are likely more that are never found.

While this is a photo of just one dead whale, it does speak to the larger questions of just how much the Gulf spill cost—in dollars, but also in things that are hard to measure, like the loss of endangered species.

UPDATE: NOAA spokesman Ben Sherman said Wednesday morning that the agency did conduct tests on the whale samples, but "because the animal was so badly decomposed the cause of death could not be determined." The whale was, however, included in the tally of bodies collected after the oil spill. He also said that in telling people on the boat not to publish photos, they were following the protocol for the federal response team on reporting new findings "so that the information could be cataloged and verified as part of the the investigation against BP."

Climate Scientist Sues Over Blog Posts Comparing Him to a Child Molester

—By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Oct. 23, 2012 3:37 PM PDT

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann announced on Tuesday that he has filed suit against the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute over blog posts that compared him to a convicted child molester.

The suit accuses the blogs of making "false and defamatory statements" about Mann and his research, which have long been the subject of attacks from climate deniers (see our previous coverage here, here, and here, just to get started). Mann was the lead author on the paper that included the "hockey stick" chart that showed the spike in global temperatures in the industrial age. He was also one of the scientists whose emails were stolen and released on the internet in the "Climategate" incident, and despite numerous exonerations, continues to be the No. 1 target of deniers. In July, NRO and CEI published posts calling Mann "the Jerry Sandusky of climate science."

From a posting announcing the suit on Mann's Facebook page:

Despite their knowledge of the results of these many investigations, the defendants have nevertheless accused Dr. Mann of academic fraud and have maliciously attacked his personal reputation with the knowingly false comparison to a child molester. The conduct of the defendants is outrageous, and Dr. Mann will be seeking judgment for both compensatory and punitive damages.

In an email to Mother Jones, Mann said that the suit is his way of "fighting back against the dishonest efforts by industry front groups and their hired guns to smear and discredit me and other climate scientists simply because of the inconvenient nature of our conclusions."

Climate Deniers To Release Rip-Off Report

—By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Oct. 23, 2012 11:36 AM PDT

Back in June 2009, the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) released a detailed 188-page report, "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States," showing how climate change would affect different regions of the country. The USGCRP is at work on its next assessment right now, which is due out in 2013. But this week a climate-change-denying think tank is trying to muddy the water by releasing what it calls an "addendum" to the USGCRP report.

The Cato Institute, a "free-market" minded think-tank based in DC, plans to release its own "Addendum: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States" report. In addition to the title, the report's cover looks like the USGCRP report:

The Daily Climate

The Daily Climate flagged the fake report on Monday, noting that the addendum "matches the layout and design of the original, published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program: Cover art, 'key message' sections, table of contents are all virtually identical, down to the chapter heads, fonts and footnotes."

While the real USGCRP report had grim predictions for many regions of the US, the Cato report claims that "observed impacts of climate change have little national significance." A draft version of the Cato report is posted online. It lists noted climate contrarian and Cato senior fellow Pat Michaels as the editor in chief.

Rick Piltz, who was a senior associate with the USGCRP for ten years before leaving amid Bush-era censorship in 2005, also covered the Cato draft on his blog, Climate Science Watch:

Because of its misleading design and layout throughout, the Cato report can be characterized as a counterfeit, having nothing to do with the USGCRP or the authors of the original report. It was not subjected to the extensive review process that characterized the 2009 report, and its key findings are neither consistent with the original assessment nor with the analysis developed by the great majority of qualified scientists.

UPDATE: Eleven members of the Federal Advisory Committee that wrote the 2009 USGCRP report have released a statement condemning the Cato report as "deceptive and misleading."