Makers of product-tracking beacons suggest using the tools to help enforce social distancing in the workplace.
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Sunday, May 17, 2020
Saturday, May 16, 2020
Melting glaciers cool the Southern Ocean
Tucked away at the very bottom of the globe surrounding Antarctica, the Southern Ocean has never been easy to study. Its challenging conditions have placed it out of reach to all but the most intrepid explorers. For climate modelers, however, the surface waters of the Southern Ocean provide a different kind of challenge: It doesn’t behave the way they predict it would. “It is colder and fresher than the models expected,” says Craig Rye, a postdoc in the group of Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography John Marshall within MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).
In recent decades, as the world warms, the Southern Ocean’s surface temperature has cooled, allowing the amount of ice that crystallizes on the surface each winter to grow. This is not what climate models anticipated, and a recent study accepted in Geophysical Research Letters attempts to disentangle that discrepancy. “This paper is motivated by a disagreement between what should be happening according to simulations and what we observe,” says Rye, the lead author of the paper who is currently working remotely from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS, in New York City.
“This is a big conundrum in the climate community,” says Marshall, a co-author on the paper along with Maxwell Kelley, Gary Russell, Gavin A. Schmidt, and Larissa S. Nazarenko of GISS; James Hansen of Columbia University’s Earth Institute; and Yavor Kostov of the University of Exeter. There are 30 or so climate models used to foresee what the world might look like as the climate changes. According to Marshall, models don’t match the recent observations of surface temperature in the Southern Ocean, leaving scientists with a question that Rye, Marshall, and their colleagues intend to answer: how can the Southern Ocean cool when the rest of the Earth is warming?
This isn’t the first time Marshall has investigated the Southern Ocean and its climate trends. In 2016, Marshall and Yavor Kostov PhD ’16 published a paper exploring two possible influences driving the observed ocean trends: greenhouse gas emissions, and westerly winds — strengthened by expansion of the Antarctic ozone hole — blowing cold water northward from the continent. Both explained some of the cooling in the Southern Ocean, but not all of it. “We ended that paper saying there must be something else,” says Marshall.
That something else could be meltwater released from thawing glaciers. Rye has probed the influence of glacial melt in the Southern Ocean before, looking at its effect on sea surface height during his PhD at the University of Southampton in the UK. “Since then, I’ve been interested in the potential for glacial melt playing a role in Southern Ocean climate trends,” says Rye.
The group’s recent paper uses a series of “perturbation” experiments carried out with the GISS global climate model where they abruptly introduce a fixed increase in melt water around Antarctica and then record how the model responds. The researchers then apply the model’s response to a previous climate state to estimate how the climate should react to the observed forcing. The results are then compared to the observational record, to see if a factor is missing. This method is called hindcasting.
Marshall likens perturbation experiments to walking into a room and being confronted with an object you don’t recognize. “You might give it a gentle whack to see what it’s made of,” says Marshall. Perturbation experiments, he explains, are like whacking the model with inputs, such as glacial melt, greenhouse gas emissions, and wind, to uncover the relative importance of these factors on observed climate trends.
In their hindcasting, they estimate what would have happened to a pre-industrial Southern Ocean (before anthropogenic climate change) if up to 750 gigatons of meltwater were added each year. That quantity of 750 gigatons of meltwater is estimated from observations of both floating ice shelves and the ice sheet that lies over land above sea level. A single gigaton of water is very large — it can fill 400,000 Olympic swimming pools, meaning 750 gigatons of meltwater is equivalent to pouring water from 300 million Olympic swimming pools into the ocean every year.
When this increase in glacial melt was added to the model, it led to sea surface cooling, decreases in salinity, and expansion of sea ice coverage that are consistent with observed trends in the Southern Ocean during the last few decades. Their model results suggest that meltwater may account for the majority of previously misunderstood Southern Ocean cooling.
The model shows that a warming climate may be driving, in a counterintuitive way, more sea ice by increasing the rate of melting of Antarctica’s glaciers. According to Marshall, the paper may solve the disconnect between what was expected and what was observed in the Southern Ocean, and answers the conundrum he and Kostov pointed to in 2016. “The missing process could be glacial melt.”
Research like Rye’s and Marshall’s help project the future state of Earth’s climate and guide society’s decisions on how to prepare for that future. By hindcasting the Southern Ocean’s climate trends, they and their colleagues have identified another process, which must be incorporated into climate models. “What we’ve tried to do is ground this model in the historical record,” says Marshall. Now the group can probe the GISS model response with further “what if?” glacial melt scenarios to explore what might be in store for the Southern Ocean.
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Questlove and Black Thought Ink First-Look Deal With Universal Television
The production company founded by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Tarik “Black Thought” Trotter of the hip-hop collective The Roots signed a first-look deal with Universal Television Alternative Studio and Universal Television.
Under the three-year deal, Thompson and Trotter’s production company, Two One Five Entertainment, will develop scripted, unscripted, and special programming across NBC’s television and digital content platforms.
“This deal is very important to us as we’ve been content producers and storytellers for our entire career,” said Thompson in a statement sent to BLACK ENTERPRISE. “A significant investment from Universal Television Alternative Studio and Universal Television in our vision allows us to share these stories on a much larger scale. Tarik and I see this as the next chapter to our careers, and we are very involved in the entire process. I’m directing, Tarik is writing and we both are producing.”
The Roots’ have worked with NBC for over a decade. The Grammy award-winning group has been the official house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon since the show premiered in 2014. The Roots also served in the same role on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from 2009 to 2014. Meanwhile, Thompson currently serves as the show’s musical director.
“Many of our initial projects have been music-centric content, and one of our goals is to become the premiere hub for music storytelling – a safe space for these stories to be shared across a variety of platforms,” added Trotter. “Eventually we will expand outside of music with our stories. However, as we all know, every story has a rhythm and Two One Five Entertainment will harness that rhythm and create well-produced, compelling content.”
Previously, Two One Five Entertainment produced the AMC docuseries, Hip Hop Songs that Shook America, along with Black Woodstock, a documentary that explored the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. The company also worked on the Broadway productions Soul Train the Musical and Black No More in partnership with Oscar winnerJohn Ridley and.
“The Roots are innovators and cultural tastemakers whose breadth of musical knowledge is unparalleled,” said Meredith Ahr, President, of NBC Alternative and Reality Group. “The band has been a cornerstone of NBC’s late-night programming for over a decade, and we are excited to extend our collaboration across a diverse slate of projects to bring even more compelling storytelling to our audience.”
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This Black Coffee Retailer Saw A 350% Spike in Sales After Being Forced to Close Its Doors
It is difficult to start a business but it is arguably even harder to maintain an existing business. With the arrival of the COVID-19, or novel coronavirus, pandemic, small business owners have had to face even more hurdles to keep their doors open with mandatory stay-at-home orders in effect in addition to massive job losses. For one coffee retailer, the pandemic has brought the opposite effect and increased sales tremendously.
Keba Konte, the founder and CEO of Red Bay Coffee, is no stranger to business challenges. He opened his coffee shop as a way to combine his love for photojournalism to be displayed. When COVID-19 came to San Francisco, the news of the shop’s temporary shutdown brought a huge drop in sales. Forbes reported that the coffee retailer has seen an 85% decline in overall sales forcing Konte to drastically reduce his workforce.
As of right now, the coffee retailer has reopened some of its retail locations with a 40% decline in customer traffic. However, their flagship location in Oakland has seen a huge spike in sales since its reopening with an astonishing 350% increase in e-commerce sales due to stay-at-home restrictions forcing loyal customers to stay indoors.
“Then there’s another group who were drinking our coffee at our cafés, and we had to close most of them. They too have turned to having their coffee beans shipped,” Konte told Forbes. “We did 250 events last year, all have been forced to close because of social distancing rules due to the pandemic crisis,” Konte said.
Due to the new restrictions brought on by the public health crisis, Konte has begun work on a mobile van for customers to order and stay connected to the brand. “It’s been a lifeline and great brand exposure, we sold it through six-foot distances and cashless transactions on the van,” Konte said. The mobile van sells the brand’s coffee, tea, and oat milk cartons.
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‘Trump Death Clock’ In Times Square Grim Reminder Of Preventable Coronavirus Deaths
A digital billboard in Times Square showing the number of deaths related to President Donald Trump’s slow coronavirus response, reached a grave milestone on Wednesday, as it ticked over to an estimated 50,000 preventable deaths.
According to Yahoo Finance, the “Trump Death Clock” projects the number of deaths that could have been prevented had social distancing measures been implemented earlier.
Eugene Jarecki, the sign’s creator, said the counter was created with the same “symbolic spirit” as the National Debt Clock, which already hangs in New York City. The Death Clock measures “the cost in human lives of President Trump and his team’s reckless handling of the coronavirus pandemic,” Jarecki told Yahoo.
Science and health experts began warning the Trump Administration of the coronavirus pandemic in January. The warnings fell on deaf ears, however, as Trump called the coronavirus a Democratic hoax.
Trump continued to downplay the coronavirus at the end of February, and even into March he compared it to “the common flu.”
As U.S. coronavirus deaths reached 85,00 Wednesday, the death clock showed more than 57,000 deaths could’ve been prevented. Jarecki said instead of saving lives, the president played politics and the counter reflects that.
“Reports show that as early as January, the president was advised by both his own experts and the intelligence services of the need for urgent measures against the spread of the virus,” Jarecki wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post. “Instead, he engaged in pretty political feuds and pollyannish predictions minimizing its significance. Finally, on March 16, he reversed his previously dismissive stance and announced ‘new guidelines for every American to follow.'”
By March 16, the U.S. was leading the world in the infection rate, major sports had been cancelled for almost a week and the stock market was falling fast.
Jarecki told Yahoo, he hopes “the lives already unnecessarily lost demand we seek more responsible crisis leadership.
“Just as the names of fallen soldiers are etched on memorials to remind us of the cost of war, quantifying the lives lost to the president’s delayed coronavirus response would serve a vital public function,” he added.
In addition to almost 100,000 deaths, the coronavirus pandemic has killed ten years of job growth in one month and put many minorities and low-income Americans at risk of losing their lives.
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Virginia Legislative Black Caucus Says Reopening State Would Treat Black and Brown People Like Guinea Pigs
The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus has sent a letter to Gov. Ralph Northam saying the move to reopen Virginia would be treating black and brown people like “guinea pigs for our economy.”
According to NewsOne, Virginia is slowly reopening the state with the first phase occurring on Friday. However, the black caucus believes the state doesn’t have the necessary testing capacity and infrastructure to safely reopen without putting minorities at an unfair risk.
“Throughout our country’s history, Black and Brown people have been experimented on and used as unwilling test subjects before — we cannot allow that to be repeated here,” the letter states.
In many states across the country including Virginia, African Americans and minorities are dying at a faster rate than white Americans.
Minorities are at a higher risk of being infected and dying of coronavirus due to low-wage jobs that don’t allow them to telecommute. Additionally, low-wage workers have to interact with strangers as part of their job.
Northam said his decision to open the state is based on positive trends in key metrics related to the virus’ spread, like testing capacity and hospital readiness. At a press conference on Wednesday, Northam downplayed the state’s reopening saying, “Phase one represents a small step forward.”
After two weeks of debate by state lawmakers, Northam’s plan will reopen retail businesses with limited capacity. Barbershops and hair salons will be by appointment only and both customers and employees have to wear face masks. Restaurants will continue to allow delivery orders and bowling alleys, theme parks, gyms, and beaches in the state will remain closed.
Northam’s spokesperson, Alena Yarmosky, told reporters the governor is “absolutely committed to moving forward in a gradual manner that protects all Virginians, particularly low-income individuals, essential workers, and communities of color.”
However, Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has asked Northam to create a task force to track racial disparities in coronavirus pandemic in the state.
Some African American business owners have decided to stay closed, even as their states begin to open. Rapper Killer Mike, who owns several barbershops in Atlanta, said in April that even though Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Atlanta businesses could reopen, he would keep his shops closed.
“As a citizen in the community where people look like me, I’m choosing to stay closed because I don’t want to endanger [anybody],” he said in April. “And a lot of times, politicians have different views of things. I think governors and mayors should all get on the phone together because as your constituents, we need you to do that.”
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